The volume, if it were to be measured by the poems already mentioned, would have the first great quality of being unforgettable. A note is struck which is not necessarily beyond the compass but certainly outside the temperament of anyone but Morris. There is at present no trace of the discipleship to Chaucer, but a suggestion here and there of kinship with the Coleridge of "Kubla Khan" and the Keats of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." The method of the later poems is already clearly suggested, but the feeling and expression are marked by the natural limitations and splendid excesses of youth. Morris places his figures on a background which is not unrelated to life but unrelated to the inessential circumstances of life. Through a changing year of daffodil tufts and roses, cornfields and autumn woods and the frozen twigs of winter, passes a pageant of knights in armour of silver and blue steel, with bright devices on their tabards and shields strewn with stars or flashing back gold to the sunlight, and queens and ladies passionate and beautiful. But they move on an earth that is the real earth of Morris's own experience; he has a definite meaning when he says
Why were you more fairThan aspens in the autumn at their best?
and the enchantment of his forests is that of the hornbeam twilight of his Essex homeland. And they themselves are people of flesh and blood, stirred by the common emotions of humanity. The passion, the glamour, and the poignancy of love and life all find mature expression in these pages, but we have to wait untilJasonandThe Earthly Paradisefor the presence of the innate nobility of love and life behind these things. There is at present none of the fine austerity that is a quality essential to the highest poetry, but that is but to say that Morris in his youth was writing as a young man should and must write. The growth of the prophet in the poet is not to be looked for in the first fervour of song. The most that we can ask justly at this season is witness to the presence of the poet, and this we have here in abundance.
The most memorable achievement of the volume is, however,Sir Peter Harpdon's End, which stands by itself, or, perhaps, with one other poem,The Haystack in the Floods. The historian of English drama during the second half of the nineteenth century might, if he were unwary, omit William Morris from his reckonings. If he were astute enough to remember him it would probably be as the author ofLove is Enough. And yet at a time when some curious spell seems to have fallen on the poets whenever they turned their thoughts to the stage,Sir Peter Harpdon's Endreminds us of one, at least, to whom the union of drama and poetry was not impossible. Morris himself would seem to have been unconscious of the fact, for not only was he careless in this instance when a little care would have made his success strikingly complete, but henceforth he neglected this side of his faculty, exercising it on but one other occasion, and then in a more or less experimental mood, of which something will be said later. It will be well to examine this short play in detail, for its importance is apt to be under-estimated. In writing it Morris realized, as did no poet of his time and scarcely any poet since the close of the great epoch of poetic drama in England, the exact value of action in drama. The complete subordination of character and idea to action is a brief epitome of that degeneration of the modern theatre from which we are now witnessing the dawn of a deliverance. The supreme, though not necessarily the only, function of the drama is to show the development of character and the progress of idea through the medium of action, and until to-day the stage has been surrendered for a century, if not for a longer period, to work that is wholly unconcerned with this condition. The event has been everything. The poets from Shelley to Swinburne have realized this error and revolted, but in their eagerness to correct an abuse that was threatening the highest manifestation of their art, they have with amazing regularity overlooked another condition which, if not of equal importance, cannot be disregarded without lamentable results. Determined to dispossess action of its usurped authority, they have neglected its lawful and indispensable service. Their opponents in asserting action at the cost of all other things, and having, in consequence, nothing to say beyond the bare statement of events, have failed to produce either good literature or good drama, whilst they themselves, in turning to ideas alone, have had much to say and have so produced good and often noble literature, but in neglecting to preserve the right balance between ideas and action they too have failed to produce good drama. They have, unfortunately, no just answer to the charge that they constantly allow the play of character and idea to be unrelated to the action which they have chosen as their framework. Their failure in dramatic result, though free of the deplorable poverty and baseness of the method against which they were a reaction, is no less complete. Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, all wrote fine dramatic poetry, but they cannot show between them a poetic play that achieves with any precision the fundamental purpose of drama.
Morris's instinct in this matter was perfectly poised. The mechanical part of the technique inSir Peter Harpdon's Endis as crude as it well could be, chiefly, as I have suggested, on account of the poet's indifference. Short scenes follow each other in rapid succession, and in the middle of the play there is a hiatus which is intelligible enough but destroys the dramatic continuity. These defects make it difficult, though not impossible, for stage presentation, but otherwise it would, I believe, survive the ordeal triumphantly. The opening of the play is admirably contrived. In a few deft strokes the character of Peter Harpdon is outlined, and we know that he has humour and understanding of men, and a tenderness coloured by a certain roughness of temper. All this is shown strictly by his relation to the action in which he is involved—there is not a line but helps the development of this. Then in perfectly natural sequence the action enables him in a speech of little more than twenty lines to define the circumstances from which it has sprung, and thus we have set before us at the outset the nature of the protagonist and the situation in relation to which we are to look for that nature's manifestation; and already it is clear, in the character of John Curzon, that the people among whom Harpdon is to move will be no less sharply stated and proved than himself. The construction of this opening could not well be more skilful or instinctively right. Then follows what at first seems to be a momentary lapse into the dramatic error of which I have spoken. In a long soliloquy Peter reveals directly his spiritual and mental attitude towards this action in which he is involved and indirectly the commentary of the poet himself upon that attitude. This in itself is perfectly legitimate, and supported, of course, by all the poets of whom Shakespeare is the spring, indeed by all the great dramatic poets of literature. The Greek chorus realizes this end as one of its essential functions no less clearly than do the soliloquies of Hamlet; and until the poets see once again the significance of this fact and adapt it to modern needs, refusing to have their authority usurped by theatrical showmen and their stage carpenters, they will continue to fail in bringing back their art to the theatre. But it must always be remembered that this choric element of the drama justifies itself only as long as it limits itself to the presentation of idea growing directly out of the action. When it allows digression and elaboration for their own sake, or the sake of some altogether extraneous idea, in short for any reason other than intensifying the fundamental idea which the progress of the action creates, it becomes undramatic and ceases to fulfil its only right purpose. It is at this point that the poets since the close of the Elizabethan age have misunderstood the necessities of drama, and in Peter Harpdon's soliloquy we suspect Morris for a moment of the same error. But careful examination of the speech itself proves the suspicion to be almost if not wholly unfounded. We find that there is nothing that is not the immediate result of his position, and the worst that can be said of it is that there are turns of thought which, although not dramatically irrelevant, are a little superfluous and do not heighten our perception. It is curious that in this speech there is evidence of external contemporary influence in manner such as is scarcely to be found elsewhere in the book. There is at least a suggestion of Browning in such lines as—
Now this is hard: a month ago,And a few minutes' talk had set things right'Twixt me and Alice;—if she had a doubt.As (may Heaven bless her!) I scarce think she had,'Twas but their hammer, hammer in her ears,Of 'how Sir Peter fail'd at Lusac bridge:'And 'how Sir Lambert' (think now!) 'his dear friend,His sweet, dear cousin, could not but confessThat Peter's talk tended towards the French,Which he' (for instance Lambert) 'was glad of,Being' (Lambert, you see) 'on the French side.'
The first scene closes with a swift turn of action carried on correspondingly swift dramatic speech. Peter Harpdon is defending an English castle in Poictou. His antagonist is his cousin Lambert, who has misrepresented a circumstance of war to impugn Peter's loyalty to his cause, careful for his own purposes that the rumour shall reach the ears of Peter's lady, Alice. Peter has had no means of defending himself, and his soliloquy is the outcome of the suffering that he experiences at the thought of his wife's possible mistrust of him. As he finishes, his servant, Clisson, comes in again, saying that a herald has come from Lambert—
What says the herald of our cousin, sir?
CURZON. So please you, sir, concerning your estate,He has good will to talk with you.
SIR PETER. Outside,I'll talk with him, close by the gate St. Ives.Is he unarm'd?
CURZON. Yea, sir, in a long gown.
SIR PETER. Then bid them bring me hither my furr'd gown,With the long sleeves, and under it I'll wear,By Lambert's leave, a secret coat of mail.
He will also take an axe, one—as we should expect of Morris—'with Paul wrought on the blade'—
CURZON. How, sir! Will you attack him unawares,And slay him unarm'd?
SIR PETER. Trust me, John, I knowThe reason why he comes here with sleeved gownFit to hide axes up. So, let us go.
Peter Harpdon is a Gascon knight, and in the next scene Lambert urges that this fact combined with expedience, for the French are in the ascendancy, should induce him to leave the English. Peter answers him at length but finishes in an aside—
Talk, and talk, and talk—I know this man has come to murder me,And yet I talk still.
Lambert accuses him then directly—
If I said'You are a traitor, being, as you areBorn Frenchman.'
They flash out at each other and Lambert 'takes hold of something in his sleeve,' strikes at Peter with a dagger, and is taken. He is brought before Harpdon in the castle and sentenced—
Let the hangman shave his head quite clean,And cut his ears off close up to the head,
Again we have the clear-cut delineation of character thrown up on a framework of simple and logical action which all the while is interesting as a means but not as an end. The blend of nobility and savagery in Peter's nature stands sharply contrasted with the meanness and merely dull cruelty of Lambert's. At this point the hiatus occurs. The next scene is in the French camp, and Sir Peter Harpdon is a prisoner before Guesclin and his officers, Lambert being one of them. The dramatic opposition of the situation to that which has immediately preceded it is admirable, but we need some explanation that is not made. Apart from this defect, however, Morris continues to build up his play with flawless instinct. Defeat had turned Lambert's cruelty into pitiful and cringing terror, whilst Peter at the moment of his power over his rival, although he had not spared him, had shown some mercy, as to one whom he despised. Now, with the shifting circumstance, the two prove themselves with unerring completeness. Defeat purges Peter Harpdon's nature of all its grosser parts, and he responds perfectly to the demands of tragic chance; whilst Lambert in his triumph reveals himself in all the degradation of a mean and wholly unheroic villainy. In both cases the development is logical, indeed inevitable, and yet it depends strictly upon the course of the action for its being. Already we know the natures of the men, and, given the event, can foresee their attitude with some certainty, but it needs the event itself to complete our understanding. Peter is not a coward nor lacking in nobility, yet when he hears that Lambert has come to him 'in a long gown' he knows what that means, and he makes no foolish boast of fearlessness, but frankly prepares himself with mail and axe. Now, before his judges, the same temper is evident. Quite simply, and with no blind defiance or pretence at indifference, he pleads for his life, not, as the squire says of him afterwards—
Sullenly brave as many a thief will die,Nor yet as one that plays at japes with God.
He states his case clearly, with dignity, yet earnestly. Clisson intercedes for him in a passage that outlines with precision yet another character, and Guesclin is sorry but obdurate; he must die. Then Lambert taunts him. He exults in the downfall of his enemy with a cruelty that is bestial yet calculated in every stroke, until his victim blenches. Then—
I think you'll faint,Your lips are grey so; yes, you will, unlessYou let it out and weep like a hurt child;Hurrah! you do now. Do not go just yet,For I am Alice, am right like her now;Will you not kiss me on the lips, my love?
and Clisson breaks in—
You filthy beast, stand back and let him go,Or by God's eyes I'll choke you.
This second speech of Clisson's is his last, and yet the tenderness and strength of the man are shown so definitely as to make him complete and living. He continues, asking Peter to forgive him for his share in his death—
I would,If it were possible, give up my lifeUpon this grass for yours; fair knight, although,He knowing all things knows this thing too, well,Yet when you see His face some short time hence,Tell Him I tried to serve you.
and Peter makes his last utterance, full of passionate realization of the moment, yet chiming to his character consistently to the end—
Oh! my lord,I cannot say this is as good as life,But yet it makes me feel far happier now,And if at all, after a thousand years,I see God's face, I will speak loud and bold,And tell Him you were kind, and like Himself;Sir, may God bless you!
He would not have them think that when he wept he did so because of Lambert's taunts. He was
Deep in thoughtOf all things that have happened since I wasA little child; and so at last I thoughtOf my true lady: truly, sir, it seem'dNo longer gone than yesterday, that thisWas the sole reason God let me be bornTwenty-five years ago, that I might loveHer, my sweet lady, and be loved by her;
and so up to the close, which has all the awe and terror but also the pity and exaltation of authentic tragedy—
I only wept becauseThere was no beautiful lady to kiss meBefore I died....... O for some lady, thoughI saw her ne'er before; Alice, my love,I do not ask for; Clisson was right kind,If he had been a woman, I should dieWithout this sickness.
The last scene, as just in dramatic instinct as the rest of the play, tells of the bearing of the news of Peter's death to the Lady Alice.
I have examined this play in some detail, and with a good many quotations, for two reasons. One, already stated, to show that Morris had an understanding of the nature of drama which is generally overlooked, and secondly, because it is a common thing to hear people to whom poetry is a matter of real importance say that they find Morris—for all his beauty—languid and lacking in power of concentration. IfSir Peter Harpdon's Endbe languid or anything but tense with concentrated emotion from beginning to end, then I confess my sense of values to be much awry. And, although he left the dramatic form, he did not lose this quality in his later work. He employed, for reasons which will be discussed later, a certain easy and decorative elaboration in much of his writing, but at the right moment inJason, in the tales ofThe Earthly Paradiseand inSigurd the Volsung, he was master of the direct vitality and vibrating force that he first used inSir Peter Harpdon's Endand elsewhere when he needed them in this earliest volume, as inThe Haystack in the Floods, with unquestionable control and vividness.
The few poems that have not been mentioned are the lyrical expressions of moods, snatches of song and swift little pictures in many colours that give their own peculiar pleasure as do all the fragmentary strokes of a great artist. They are exquisitely done, but they must be read, not described.
Several of the poems published inThe Defence of Gueneverevolume had already appeared, as has been said, in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine." In the same magazine Morris had also printed his first essays in prose romance. A comparison of these with the poems shows very clearly the value of that exaltation apart from the discovery, which finds, as I have suggested, its expression in the music or rhythmical pattern of verse. In more than one of these prose stories Morris uses a subject that differs in no fundamental quality from those used in many of the poems. The treatment shows the same tenderness, the same love of the earth, the same power of direct and vivid presentation of passion when it is needed, as in passages ofGertha's Lovers, and the same delight in colour and all beautiful things. And Morris uses his medium skilfully, and with a curiously personal touch; his prose has the same freshness and light as his verse. In short, we have here two groups of work from the same man, alike in temper, substance and treatment, and in control, the only difference being that of form. And that difference is everything, for in the form lies the visible evidence of the spiritual pressure at the moment of conception. There is no more stupid error than to censure one work of art because it lacks the qualities of another with which it has no point of contact. No sane person thinks less of, say, "Wuthering Heights," because it has not the poetic perfection of "Adonais." But the case of Morris's early prose romances is different. They are delightful to read, they are in themselves the treasurable expression of a fine spirit, yet they have in them nothing that is not to be found in the poems. That being so, it is inevitable that a close acquaintance with the poems should make us a little careless of these prose tales, for in the poems we have all the excellences that we find in the others, and we have added the rhythmic exaltation which is the light on the wings of poetry. Morris's fund of inventiveness was inexhaustible, but in his early prose it discovered no quality that peculiarly fitted itself to the medium; the inventiveness in the prose tales and the poems is the same, and there is, in consequence, no compensation in the one for the absence of the higher faculty of utterance that is found in the other. Morris realized this himself, and for the next thirty years created in verse. Nothing is further from my mind than to suggest thatThe Story of the Unknown ChurchandLindenborg Pool,Gertha's LoversandThe Hollow LandandSvend and his Brethren, are other than beautiful expressions of a rare creative intelligence, but no clearer evidence of the essential difference between that which is poetry and that which is not could well be found than by setting side by side things so closely related in many ways, indeed in every way save one, as these stories andThe Defence of GuenevereandKing Arthur's Tomb,RapunzelandThe Wind,Sir Peter Harpdon's EndandShameful Death. Nor could anything be advanced more unanswerably supporting the contention that verse is the one unassailable medium for poetry.
Nine years were to pass before Morris published his next book,The Life and Death of Jason. The course of his life and the nature of his development in the meantime are discussed briefly in the following chapter.
In 1859 Morris married Miss Jane Burden, of Oxford. To a man of his profound tenderness for all the simple and rational things of life, home was a symbol of the deepest significance. Homestead and homeland are words used constantly and lovingly in his writing. A man's home was, as he understood it, not merely a refuge from the serious business of life or a comfortable and convenient means of satisfying social requirements, but the temple of his daily worship. It should be at once a centre of his labours and an expression of himself. The application of the artist's understanding to daily conduct is not always possible, or of first importance, for it is the artist's function to persuade, not to compel; but such application is the logical outcome of true development that is not hindered by circumstance. We do not impugn Browning's sincerity either as a man or an artist because he mercilessly exposed the evils of Society and yet was a great diner-out. We feel, indeed, that he was of sounder judgment and a finer charity than Shelley, who not only exposed the evils, but also left society gasping whilst he went naked to his dinner or made his house the asylum for anybody incapable of managing his own affairs. But it is, on the other hand, an everlasting vindication of Byron's strange personality that the man who wrote 'The Isles of Greece' gave his life in the service of the cause that he sang. Morris's unchanging gospel was that man should have joy in his work, which meant that the results of his work would in themselves be beautiful. To accept anything that was unlovely on any terms short of compulsion would, in consequence, have been to proclaim the truth without insisting upon it by example. Had he done so his art might have lost none of its vitality, but by steadily refusing to do so he made the common charge of aloofness even less intelligible than it would otherwise have been. Being a customer in the world's market he was determined not to degrade the men by whom the market was supplied. If he could find no other solution, he would supply it himself.
He bought a piece of land at Upton in Kent, careful that it should include an orchard. Here, with Philip Webb as architect, he built the Red House, which was to be his home for five years—until circumstances made it necessary for him to live again in London. Immediately, the difficulty that had confronted him in his Red Lion Square rooms grew into one that was not to be met by the friendly co-operation of a jobbing carpenter. There was a large house to be furnished and fitted, and beautiful things had to be found for the purpose. He came away from the market empty-handed, but carrying in his mind the idea of Morris and Company. He would not only supply his own needs decently; he would remove a reproach.
The original prospectus of the firm announced the names of Rossetti, Madox Brown, Burne-Jones, Morris himself, and three others as partners. The history of the enterprise has been told by Mr. Mackail and others, and need not be discussed here in any detail. Its influence upon the lesser arts in England has been enormous, and its activities are, fortunately, still growing. When Morris died he had for some years been sole director of the venture, and its work embraced carpets, chintzes, wallpapers, stained glass, tapestries, tiles, furniture, wall-decoration—in short, everything by which a building might gain or lose in beauty. The first premises were in Red Lion Square, near to the poet's old rooms, and the earliest achievement of the firm was to help in making the Red House at Upton, in the words of Burne-Jones, "the beautifullest place on earth." Webb having designed the house—with Morris at his elbow—the firm furnished it and the painters of the group proceeded to decorate the inside surfaces. The house was made to fit the orchard, so that, as Mr. Mackail tells us in a beautiful sentence, "the apples fell in at the windows as they stood open on hot autumn nights." Gardening was one of the things of which Morris seems to have been born with knowledge, and he knew the uses of hollyhocks and sunflowers. Here, then, was a home, fashioned, as far as might be, into an earthly paradise. The story of these five years is a very charming one; open house was kept, and a good cellar and a bowling-green and tobacco jars were not wanting. Here the poet's two daughters were born, and we get a delightful picture of the house at a christening, with Rossetti refusing to wait until dessert for the raisins, and beds strewn about the drawing-room, Swinburne contenting himself with a sofa. These things, however, are to the biographer, and are set down with fitting grace in the book to which I have referred more than once.
Morris went up to London daily to conduct the business at Red Lion Square. The value of the work that he had undertaken is even yet imperfectly realized. Most people whose artistic intelligence is awake contrive to have in their houses many beautiful things, but it is only when we have been into a house where everything is beautiful that we can understand the precise aim that caused Morris to become a manufacturer. There is an enchantment about such a dwelling-place that cannot be described, an atmosphere of health and completeness that must be experienced to be understood. A beautiful house was no more a luxury to Morris than sound meat on his table. But we have laws for our butchers, whilst we have none for our upholsterers. Some one once referred to Morris as the "upholsterer-poet," which pleased him greatly. That such a term should be meant as a reproach he could not understand. He asked for nothing better than to convince people that an upholsterer had a soul, and to make them determined not to deal with him until he showed it in his chairs and sofas.
The five years at Upton were a time of many energies and a steady establishment of the poet's attitude towards life. The London business was a serious and permanent undertaking, and demanded, by the nature of its being, Morris's constant personal attention. This, together with the daily journeys and the claims and responsibilities—of no ordinary kind, as we have seen—of his new home, left little time on his hands, and his work as poet was of necessity put aside for the moment. But this fresh undertaking was of peculiar value to his development, and came at precisely the right moment. In his first volume of poems there had been the shadow of that new world that had already shaped itself in his consciousness. It had been beautiful, full of significance and promise, but still a shadow. It is not fanciful to suppose that had his mind not found some practical means of proving itself, of, so to speak, checking its progress step by step, his poetry would have retained this intangible quality to the end. This is not to suggest that the poetry of theGueneverevolume is in any sense unreal, but to remember its atmosphere of uncertainty, or to say, precisely, that it is but the shadow of the world that was in the poet's mind. In the workshop of Morris and Company, it seems to me, this proving ground was happily discovered. No better illustration, by contrast, of my meaning could be found than in that remarkable book, Mr. Gordon Craig's "Art of the Theatre." We have here, in some ways, the profoundest piece of writing on the theatre that has appeared in England. Many elementary truths that have been forgotten for centuries, if indeed they have even been realized since the days which are commonly supposed to belong to an era before dramatic history had begun, are here made to stand out with startling clearness. But the radical defect of the book is a vagueness, an uncertainty of statement, an indiscipline of theory. We are constantly regretting the fact that Mr. Craig, as these beautiful and strangely suggestive thoughts went through his mind, had no stage and equipment ready to his hand to test them and bring them to perfect articulation—that he had no proving ground. Morris was more fortunate. He carried in his imagination a world of which I attempt to set down the conditions elsewhere. At first he could grasp only its beauty and wonderful hope; its perfect realization eluded him. It was remote not from reality but from his understanding. But now, working in Red Lion Square, delighting in the labour of his hands and inspiring the same delight in others: building a home that should bring daily joy to himself and his friends: investing the offices of husband and father and host with their normal and simple dignity and stripping them of every vestige of insincerity, he brought his dream to the crucible of experience. The result is that when next he attempts to shape his world into poetry there is nothing left of the indefinite. All the beauty and colour are retained, all the tenderness and poignancy, but the poet has come up to his vision and the outlines are no longer in doubt. The shadows ofGuineverehave become the vibrant men and women ofJason. The paradise has been brought to earth.
The only poetry that Morris wrote during these five years was part of a cycle of poems on the Troy war. The plan included twelve poems, six of which were written, two begun, and four untouched. Those that were written were never published, but Mr. Mackail describes them for us in some detail, and it is clear that Morris followed a just instinct in laying them aside. They are dramatic in form, and if finished they would doubtless have made interesting reading afterSir Peter Harpdon's End. But the eager unrest of the early volume is here moving towards turbulence. It is as much a mistake to suppose that turbulence is a quality peculiar to weakness as that it is necessarily a token of strength. Webster as a poet was turbulent and strong: Bulwer Lytton turbulent and weak. On the other hand, the noblest strength may be quiet, but so may the most insipid weakness. The opening of "Paradise Lost" is at once one of the quietest and one of the most powerful passages in poetry; but the quiet ease of the good Mr. Akenside is mere tediousness. The point is that this new temper that showed itself in the Troy poems was not in itself one incapable of fine issues, but that it was at variance with the essential inclination of the poet's development, and that Morris himself felt this to be so. A curious myth has grown up about Morris's methods of work, to the effect that he threw this or that undertaking aside as it were by whim, forgetting all about it unless another whim sent him to it again. Were it not for this myth it would be unnecessary to say that great artists never work in this fashion. If we can but discover it, there is a perfectly hard and logical reason in all they do. When he was writing the Troy poems Morris had thirty years of vigour in front of him. He broke off the work in the middle, and never returned to it. We cannot suppose that he did this other than deliberately and with carefully considered reason. That reason was, it is clear, the conviction that he was labouring in a direction along which his genius did not lead him.
In 1865 Morris moved with his family to Bloomsbury. To leave Red House was a great trouble to his mind, but the daily journeys became increasingly irksome, and some fluctuation in his private money matters made it more than ever imperative that nothing should be left undone to make the business prosper. An able business manager was found, and Morris was able to devote more of his time to actual designing and craftsmanship. The hours saved each day in travelling meant fresh opportunities for his highest creative work, and the scheme ofThe Earthly Paradisebegan to take definite shape.
The Life and Death of Jasonwas originally planned as one of the stories forThe Earthly Paradise, which appeared in 1868-70. It developed to a length too great, however, for this purpose, and was published separately in 1867. It won for Morris an immediate popularity, and it marks his realization of a matured and fully rounded manner in poetry. TheGueneverevolume had announced with certainty the presence of a new poet, but it had said nothing at all conclusively as to the nature of his future development, nothing to prepare us for a narrative poet who should reach out to Chaucer in achievement and surpass all save his master in a form strangely neglected in English verse. The answer to the criticism that holds narrative poetry to be the humblest order of the art is to be made in two words—Chaucer, Morris. It is true that our narrative poetry when set beside our dramatic and lyric wealth is, relatively, but a little store of great worth. But in the hands of these two men the form attains a distinction that proves for ever that when employed with mastery it is capable of the noblest ends. Narrative poetry is, in fundamental intention, closely related to poetic drama, and its failure in most hands springs from the misunderstanding that has already been analysed in connection withSir Peter Harpdon's End. It may be perfectly true to say that by his actions shall a man be known, but there is in the statement the implied qualification that such actions shall be normal and habitual; whilst the actions which narrative poetry usually relates are extraordinary and irregular, exciting the interest momentarily only, and revealing nothing of the characters of the actors. Marlowe wrote a great narrative poem, and Marlowe was a great dramatist. One of the greatlacunæof literature is the play that Chaucer never wrote. Keats in at least two notable successes, small in compass but complete, Byron in work avowedly narrative in intention but largely lyrical in effect, and Scott in admirable stories that lacked something of the finer atmosphere of poetry, all made contributions of value to narrative poetry; Spenser moves with Milton across the boundary line into the region of epic. But until the publication ofJasonthere had been no poet since Chaucer who had produced a considerable volume of work at once frankly narrative in form and of indisputable greatness in design and achievement. The instinct that had guided Morris safely, or nearly so, through his dramatic experiment in his first volume did not forsake him when he turned to the creation of a great narrative poem, and it was precisely the instinct that was essential to success. For narrative is drama without the stage.
The first requirement that we make of the poet in narrative, after the paramount demand that he shall recognize this essential canon of all art as to the subservience of incident to idea, is that he shall be perfectly lucid. Whilst in lyric verse we are content to be forced at times to pause for thought and comprehension, in narrative verse we insist that we shall instantly perceive. With this condition Morris complies triumphantly. InJason, as in the tales ofThe Earthly Paradise, there is no necessity to pause at a single line. We read with absolute ease from beginning to end, and our interest is almost as absolute. Very occasionally the poet errs by introducing incidents merely for their own sake without intensifying our conception of character, but, with one or two possible exceptions, the tales move swiftly and develop on every page. That Morris should ever fail in this swiftness of narration is, indeed, difficult to believe when we call to mind the innumerable instances where he conducts his story at an almost breathless speed. This is not to say that he is ever indistinct, either through bad craftsmanship or undue compression, but to emphasize his extreme reluctance to allow unnecessary events to distract our attention. An excellent instance is afforded inThe Ring Given to Venus. Lawrence is told by Palumbus that he must leave him, fast and pray for six days, and return to him on the seventh, when he shall learn how to accomplish his end—the recovery of his bridal ring. The danger at such a juncture is obvious. We dread that the poet shall tell us at length of the passing of those six days, of Lawrence's impatience and distress, and so forth. That is to say, we should dread it of most poets, but, knowing Morris's methods, we feel that he will work more wisely, and we are not deceived. Palumbus' directions being given, Lawrence and his guide depart—
So homeward doubtful went the twain,And Lawrence spent in fear and painThe six long days, and so at last,When the seventh sun was well-nigh past,Came to that dark man's fair abode;
and we are immediately on the full tide of the narrative again.
Morris further achieves that supreme distinction in narrative of indicating clearly at the outset what the issue is to be, and yet retaining our interest easily and completely. One of the most distinguished of living critics[1] has drawn attention to this power in Shakespeare; there is no vulgar endeavour to startle us by any surprising turns of character; what surprise there is to be will be found in the event. So deftly does the greatest of poets embody his characters at the moment when he brings them before us that we know instinctively how they will act in the events presented to us. In the case of Morris this power is, perhaps, even more strongly marked, for the reason that the web of circumstance that he folds round his people is of a far less subtle texture. It may be said, with but little exaggeration, that the sole emotions with which he is concerned are the love of man for woman, physical heroism, and the worship of external beauty. Again, it must be remembered that the simplicity implied by this statement is coloured and invested with the mystery of life itself by the temperament through which it is presented, but with this vital qualification the fact may be so set down. Nearly all his stories are cast in the same general outline: the desire of the lover, consummated or defeated only after long physical struggle and sacrifice; the inscrutable shadow of death looming behind attainment and failure alike; the progress of the narrative fashioned on a background where nature and art combine to please and soothe with an endless pageant of loveliness.The Life and Death of Jasonmay, perhaps, be advanced as an instance disproving this contention, but a moment's reflection shows that the central interest of the poem, the interest by the side of which all else recedes into the position of that pageantry, is the love of Jason and Medea. The quest of the Golden Fleece, the adventures of the heroes, the treachery of Pelias, these things, exquisitely handled as they are, are but the canvas upon which is thrown a sublime and elemental love story. The finest book of the poem, the last, wherein is told nothing but the triumph and withering of that love, is not only on a level with Morris's own highest achievement, but among the supreme things in poetry. The hopeless yet unutterably poignant figure of Medea; the tenderness and the untutored simplicity of Glance, the child who is the tragic plaything of the deeper and more world-beaten natures against whom she is thrown; the desperate self-deception of Jason and the terrible degradation of his essential nobility—these are drawn with an intensity, at once fierce and restrained, that bears witness to the height that narrative poetry may attain in the hands of a master.
Not only is the substance of these poems of this transparently simple texture, but the form of expression created by Morris is so specially fitted for the purpose that the structures as a whole stand almost without parallel for precision of outline and clearness of detail. He appears to have determined that neither overloading of diction and imagery nor intricacy of metrical effect should interfere with the conduct of his narrative. Having no superficially subtle or complex statement to make, and keeping always before him the purpose to produce a memorable cumulative effect without striving at all for isolated felicities of phrasing, he is never forced to pause for the fitting word. The words that go to the making of a line flow as naturally and certainly from his pen as the letters that fashion a word from the pen of another. Nowhere are there any signs of labour; nowhere the tumultuous glory of language that rushes at times from the lips of more variable if not greater poets; and yet, with the rarest exceptions, he nowhere descends from his own high level. For sheer consistency of excellence he probably has no rival. The supremacy of his narrative poems lies in the fact that Morris achieved what he attempted completely and with perfect ease. As in his life, so in his poetry do we feel that we are in the presence of a titanic strength that is never exerting itself to the utmost; and we are constantly being led, in consequence, to that exercise of the imagination which creates the most potent sympathy between the artist and his audience.
I have spoken of a certain easy decorative elaboration that Morris uses in these stories, and it is this quality that has led many people into a misunderstanding of his poetry. To say that a poet is swift in narration does not necessarily mean that his sole purpose is to get the story finished in the least possible time, but that the narrative is unimpeded at the moments when most we demand its progress. To say that this is the only right method would involve enquiry into notable instances where it is not employed, which would be to digress unduly, but most of Scott's novels might be advanced as examples. There we are constantly brought to a standstill at vital points in the conduct of the story whilst some thread that has been laid aside is again taken up, again to be dropped when it has been drawn to a point in common with the rest of the development. This Morris never does; the sequence of his narrative is always direct, and the crises of his story are always carried through at a stroke. But in observing this condition of emphasizing his most momentous periods in a perfectly logical continuity and boldness of statement, he does not deny himself the right to fill in the spaces between those periods with the large ease and contemplative calm which have their corresponding manifestations in life. Hannibal was not momentarily adding leaves to his laurels. And Jason journeying from Thessaly to Colchis finds many adventures, and Morris records them with vigour and intensity and the sound of swords; but he finds, too, pleasant days of even enjoyment and companionship with his fellows, when they move delightedly about a new countryside or see for the first time some storied place or gather together to talk of their homeland. And these are days that Morris is not at all content to leave unsung, and his instinct is perfectly sound. It is strange that these lovely interludes that lie between adventure and adventure should ever be, as they often are, called "languid." They denote, on the contrary, a spiritual activity astonishing in its range and sanity. For they imply a recognition on the part of the poet that to pass down a river on a golden afternoon, or to lie beneath the stars at night, or to move beneath the walls of an unknown city whilst memories of home and kin crowd on the mind, is an experience as adventurous as the riding of a storm or the winning of a Golden Fleece. To be languid is to be indifferent, and indifference in the presence of anything not wholly alienated from nature and simple humanity was the last thing of which Morris was capable. So that when Medea has to go from her home to the wood, the poet is not forgetful of the path by which she has to go. His eyes are always open.
... a blind pathway leadsBetwixt the yellow corn and whispering reeds,The home of many a shy quick-diving bird;Thereby they passed, and as they went they heardSplashing of fish, and ripple of the stream;And once they saw across the water's gleamThe black boat of some fisher of the night....
To travel in the company of one whose senses are so vitally responsive to every sound and sight of beauty, to every tremor of emotion that may show itself in the people whom we meet on the wayside, demands no small spiritual alertness in ourselves. But if we fail to keep pace with his glorious and inexhaustible curiosity, if our joy is not sane and unjaded as his, it will not mend our case to call him languid. It is we who lack energy, not he. Every man is quick-witted in the ranks of battle or the sack of cities; the true test of his vitality is to see whether he remains so under the orchard boughs or in the walk from his doorstep to the market-place. Our position in this matter is but the logical issue of a social condition against which the whole of Morris's life and art were a revolt. Most of us have made the working hours of the day a burden to be borne merely for the sake of the wage that follows; the work itself is to us no more than a weariness. It is not necessary to examine here the economic causes of this result, but the result itself is obvious enough. And in consequence we call for the intervals between work and work to be filled either by strange excitement or sleep. And so we pass from lethargy through more or less violent sensations to forgetfulness. Morris would have none of this. Work meant for him, as it must mean for us all once more before we regain our sanity and wholesomeness, a constant sense of joy in self-expression, heightened now and again, as it were, by the salt and sting of great adventures. Into this scheme of life are admitted seasons of quiet contemplation, of responsiveness to such common things as the beauty of the clouds or the soft sound of earth breaking to the plough, hours when all the simple and recurrent bounties of the day are accepted joyfully and without question. Into his poetry Morris translated all these; the great adventures, the deep sense of the satisfaction of labour, and the quiet moods. Our faculties may be so weakened that they are stirred by the great adventures alone; but it is no fault of the poet's if we confuse his calm and reflective exaltation with our own lethargy.
In speaking of theGueneverevolume it was necessary to examine the poems more or less in detail and separately, for they were the changing expressions of a creative mind not yet sure of itself, of a temperament that had not yet found its philosophic moorings. ThroughoutThe Life and Death of JasonandThe Earthly Paradise, however, we have a unity of vision, a gathering up of all things into the terms of one personal reading of life, that make it possible to speak of them more generally and with less qualification from word to word. Having defined the nature of the form that Morris was using in these poems and his particular manner of handling it, we may try to realize the view of the world that he was seeking to present. We may pass from the announcement to the discovery itself. Morris in his poetry simplified his aim enormously by steadily eliminating two things—enquiry into the unknown, and all endeavour to 'set the crooked straight.' When he called himself 'Dreamer of dreams born out of my due time' and asked 'Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?' he was not, again let it be said, refusing to face the world about him, but announcing that as poet his concern was not to destroy but to create. And whatever good results might attend the speculation of others as to death and the secret purposes of God, he felt that for him, at least, it was unprofitable employment. The issue of this purpose is that we have a world wherein all the simple but positive things stand out shining in the light of a highly-organized creative temperament, undimmed by questioning doubt on the one hand or a cloud of superficial intricacies of circumstance on the other. In his later socialist teaching Morris sought in some means to show how these intricacies might be cleared away in practice, but in his poetry he presupposes a life where the natural impulses of men are unfettered by all save eternal circumstance. His philosophy becomes one of extraordinary directness and simplicity, and yet it retains everything by which the spirit and body of man really have their being. To love, and if needs be to battle for love, to labour and find labour the one unchanging delight, to be intimate with all the moods and seasons of earth, to be generous alike in triumph and defeat, to fear death and yet to be heroic in the fear, to be the heirs of sin and sorrow in so far as these things were the outcome of events that were permanent and not ephemeral in their nature—of such did he conceive the state of men to be in the earthly paradise that he was tying to create in his art. We are yet far from realizing the state. The din of the thousand claims of the crooked to be set straight is loud in our ears, and the cleansing of the moment must be done. But not until we can accustom ourselves to the thought that this state is, if not yet realized, at least realizable, can we hope to work out any salvation for ourselves or the world. We suffer daily from a neglect of the positive and creative for the negative and destructive. In England the symbols of our national thought are curiously expressive of this fact. We decorate and honour our soldiers whose business, be it to destroy or to be destroyed, is, in any case, connected with destruction; those of our lawyers who are chiefly concerned with restraint and punishment; our politicians who spend their time protecting us from assaults of neighbours and communities as commercially rapacious as ourselves, or, in their more enlightened moments, in adjusting wrongs that are the dregs in the cup of civilization. The functions of these men may be necessities of society, but they nevertheless apply to the small negative aspect of our state and not the great normal life. It is that which is, rightly, the concern of our creative artists; but our creative artists are not decorated and honoured by the nation as such. Occasionally when Europe has insisted long enough on the presence of a great artist among us, we make some belated recognition of the fact, and occasionally we become sentimental and throw a few pounds a year to a poet whom we refuse to pay proper wages for his work. This of course does not injure the artist, but it is all very eloquent as to the frame of our national mind. However many noble individual exceptions there may be, the fact remains that nationally we acclaim the negative and neglect the positive manifestations of man. Morris's art was, implicitly, a challenge to this temper and a means of escape from it. For, despite all the clamour that the good and evil voices of the destroyers make, we are ultimately forced back to the admission that they fill only a very small corner of our lives. The daily charities and heroisms, the discipline of fellowship and love, the worship of beauty and the pride of shaping with hand and brain, are all independent of them, and they are the justification of life. If we have crowded them out of our daily courses, then it is for the poets to lead us back to them. This they do most certainly, not by denouncing us for our folly or reviling the evil to which we have fallen, but by showing us, in being, our lost estate. This Morris did, and to understand this is to understand the root and flower of his philosophy as poet.
It is not to be supposed that the world of Morris's poetry is a world purged of error. He did not imagine an ideal humanity, but a humanity drawn from all the finer phases of experience, its vision free of the veils of a highly artificial social state. It is a common thing to hear people express surprise that men who behave towards each other with bitter animosity in business or official or political life are on generous and friendly terms in their homes or in what is called private life, and the solution is generally offered that whilst they differ fiercely on profoundly vital subjects, they can afford to be tolerant and even generous to each other in less important matters. The solution is, of course, as far astray from facts as it could be. The truth is that in the conduct of the things that are of permanent significance these men behave to each other generally with the innate nobility of humanity, and at times with humanity's natural imperfection. There is among them a deep sense of comradeship and common delight, broken only at times by the reaction of emotions not yet wholly chastened, expressing itself in a violation of conflicting interests. But when these same men are brought into contact in surroundings compact of that artificiality of which I have spoken, those surroundings create a hundred new and shifting standards, and with them as many strange little jealousies and rancours which are stifled immediately simple humanity is once again allowed its proper dominion. The sin and the sorrow that are the issue of this imperfection in humanity Morris uses at their full and tragic values in his poetry, but to the nervous irritation which is as some new disease which we have invented for ourselves unaided by the gods he paid no heed. This is why his poetry, all its vitality and strength notwithstanding, is so peaceful. His people may suffer great troubles and deal hard blows, love passionately and lose fiercely, but at no time do they move with the confused unrest of men who are never sure of themselves, having between their vision and the world a thousand petty accidents of will. They are deep-lunged, but they never babble and chatter; they have enormous energy but are never restless.
As though to emphasize the singleness of his aim in these poems, Morris uses the simplest verse-forms.Jasonis written in heroic couplets, the prologue and seven tales ofThe Earthly Paradisein the same measure, seven tales in octosyllabic couplets and ten in seven-lined Chaucerian stanzas. Metrical experiments occasionally make some definite addition to poetry, but they more often result in mere formlessness. The wide acceptance of certain forms by the poets through centuries of practice does not point to any lack of invention or weak servility on the part of the poets, but to some inherent fitness in the forms. Tradition is a fetter only to the weak; it is the privilege of the sovereign poet to invest it with his own personality and make it distinctively his own. From Marlowe down to Mr. Yeats the heroic couplet has been a new vehicle in the hands of new poets, and its vigour is unimpaired. Morris in accepting proved forms merely accepted the responsibility of proving himself. The result is never for a moment in doubt—his use of the ten and eight syllable line and the stanza that he took from his master is as clearly pervaded by his own temperament as is his vision itself. It is one of the subtlest faculties of genius, this shaping of a manner which shall chime exactly with mood and emotional outlook. Just as Shakespeare's expression is prodigal in strength and variety, and Milton's full of weight and dignity, and Pope's marked at all points by precision, and Shelley's by a wild and fluctuating speed, so Morris's is everywhere animated by a pure and virile loveliness and an all-suffusing sense of pity. His utterance is in perfect harmony with his spiritual temper. We have seen that whilst he accepts the tragedy of the world at its full value as something fundamental and inseparable from humanity, he rejects the mere ugliness of the world as being an artificial product of an abnormal state. And so, when he has to write of a dead woman lying in a peasant's hut in all the circumstances of extreme poverty, he does so with tragic intensity whilst eliminating all the inessential ugliness. Poverty as we know it in our civilization makes an unlovely bedfellow for death, yet Morris shows it to us with a precision almost fierce in its fidelity to truth, yet beautiful because concerned with the simple and essential only—
On straw the poor dead woman lay;The door alone let in the day,Showing the trodden earthen floor,A board on trestles weak and poor,Three stumps of tree for stool or chair,A half-glazed pipkin, nothing fair,A bowl of porridge by the wife,Untouched by lips that lacked for life,A platter and a bowl of wood;And in the further corner stoodA bow cut from the wych-elm tree,A holly club and arrows threeIll pointed, heavy, spliced with thread.
This passage is a typical example of Morris's manner. It shows the occasional hastiness of composition that is found at intervals throughout his work; 'door' and 'board' in the second and fourth lines strike unpleasingly on the ear that is carrying the rhyme 'floor—poor.' But it also shows the individuality with which Morris handles at all times a well-tried measure; it shows, too, the ease with which he conveys a certain atmospheric significance apart from his actual statement, and, finally, it shows his exquisite sense of word-values and his extraordinary power of visualization. No poet has given more beautiful expression to the sensuous delight of the eye than Morris, and even here, where the mood is one of profound sorrow, the thing seen is described with a sweetness and naturalness that makes it bearable; indeed, more than bearable, something that we gladly remember. In this matter Morris, as we should expect, worked always in the greatest tradition of art; his most terrible and tragic moments are never moments that we wish to forget.
In a paper calledChurches of Northern Francethat Morris contributed to "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine," he talks about Amiens Cathedral. He imagines it first as it would look from one of the steeples of the town. 'It rises up from the ground, grey from the paving of the street, the cavernous porches of the west front opening wide, and marvellous with the shadows of the carving you can only guess at; and above stand the kings, and above that you would see the twined mystery of the great flamboyant rose window with its thousand openings, and the shadows of the flower-work carved round it; then the grey towers and gable, grey against the blue of the August sky; and behind them all, rising high into the quivering air, the tall spire over the crossing.' And then again, as you approach, 'the great apse rises over you with its belt of eastern chapel; first the long slim windows of these chapels, which are each of them little apses, the Lady Chapel projecting a good way beyond the rest; and then, running under the cornice of the chapels and outer aisles all round the church, a cornice of great noble leaves; then the parapets in changing flamboyant patterns; then the conical roofs of the chapels hiding the exterior tracery of the triforium; then the great clerestory windows, very long, of four lights, and stilted, the tracery beginning a long way below the springing of their arches. And the buttresses are so thick, and their arms spread so here, that each of the clerestory windows looks down its own space between them as if between walls. Above the windows rise their canopies running through the parapet; and above all the great mountainous roof, and all below it and around the windows and walls of the choir and apse stands the mighty army of the buttresses, holding up the weight of the stone roof within with their strong arms for ever.' Then, having set down the cumulative effect of the great Gothic structure in these few strokes, he goes on to examine the beauties of its detail, the carving on the screens and doors, the figures on the tombs, the mouldings and little stories in stone, all of them the vital expressions of the joy of some nameless craftsman in his work. Apart from the side light that these descriptions throw on Morris's view of art, we are reminded as we read them of the architectural design ofThe Earthly Paradise. It has precisely the qualities of a Gothic cathedral. The whole scheme of the poem, which contrives the alternate narration of stories drawn from classic and romantic sources, carrying the process along the months of the year and setting the whole in a purely lyrical framework, results in a massive general effect which must be once seen before we can wholly realize the beauty of the stories by themselves. But once seen it is never forgotten, and afterwards we are content to return again and again to the detail, as certain of finding satisfaction in any of the single stories on which we may chance as we are in the tracery of the cloisters or the devices on the stalls of a Gothic church. It is, of course, the peculiar glory of Gothic—or romantic—art, that while the parts combine to make a whole more wonderful than themselves, they yet have an independent beauty and completeness of their own. Morris in writing his tales was careful never to sacrifice his general outline for the sake of momentary effects, but each story is complete in itself and separable from the rest.
Although it is to be accounted as a virtue to Morris that he never sought to decorate his verse with jewels that should distract attention from the whole texture, it must always be remembered that he was absolved from the necessity of doing this because the texture itself was of extraordinary richness and shot with a hundred colours. The first and most obvious danger in a long narrative poem is that many passages which are concerned with the mere statement of fact necessary to the progress of the story will not be poetry at all. But moving always, as it were, in the open country of the world, away from everything that is not intimately related to that simplicity of life that has been discussed, Morris is never forced to conduct his people over moments that are fundamentally incapable of poetic treatment. Their most commonplace actions are still carried through with the vividness that comes of a constant joy in labour and direct contact with the earth. A journey means the building of a boat and shaping of oars, and a loaf of bread is the direct witness of corn harvested and ground, and wood gathered for the fire. An instance may be taken almost at random: Jason and his warriors find that their progress is stopped, and that their ship must be borne across the land. It is just such a moment as might, in the hands of a poet who was only anxious to get the matter done to comply with the necessities of his narrative, sink from poetry altogether. This is how Morris manages it:—
And there all,Half deafened by the noises of the fallAnd bickering rapids, left the ashen oar,And spreading over the well-wooded shoreCut rollers, laying on full many a stroke,And made a capstan of a mighty oak,And so drew Argo up, with hale and how,On to the grass, turned half to mire now.Thence did they toil their best, in drawing herBeyond the falls, whereto being come anear,They trembled when they saw them; for from sightThe rocks were hidden by the spray-clouds white,Cold, wretched, chilling, and the mighty soundTheir heavy-laden hearts did sore confound;For parted from all men they seemed, and farFrom all the world, shut out by that great bar.Moreover, when with toil and pain, at lastUnto the torrent's head they now had passed,They sent forth swift Ætalides to seeWhat farther up the river there might be.Who, going twenty leagues, another fallFound, with great cliffs on each side, like a wall;But 'twixt the two, another unbarred streamJoined the main river; therefore did they deem,When this they heard, that they perforce must tryThis smoother branch; so somewhat heavilyArgo they launched again, and got them forthStill onward toward the winter and the north.
This is writing on a level below which Morris never falls, and it is yet on the side of poetry. It is possible for the artist's temperament to throw beauty on to an object in itself unlovely, and the result is often some confusion of mind as to the real source of the beauty. Mr. Brangwyn can draw men stripped to the waist toiling in the inferno of a black-country iron-works, and his creation is beautiful. Emile Verhaeren can strike a song out of the utter degradation of humanity: but the essential poetry in each case is in the soul of the artist and not in the subject of his contemplation. If our knowledge of the ironworks rested wholly on Mr. Brangwyn's report we might well believe that it really was strangely and strongly beautiful. But if we really know the iron works itself, we know that it is hideously ugly, using men half as beasts, half as machines, choking the air and wounding the earth, a thing definitely unpoetic because definitely a denial of life. Morris worked in quite another manner. Instead of lending ugliness the undeserved beauty and colour of his own temperament, he stripped all things that came into his vision of all that was inessential, all the excrescences of accident and will, and then allowed them in their renewed simplicity to find natural and direct expression. The result is that although it may be true to say that Morris has fewer single lines which are memorable if detached from their context than any other poet at all comparable to him in achievement, it is equally true to say that he stands alone in the creation of a great body of work that moves consistently and surely on the plane of poetry from first to last with scarcely a single lapse. No poet has ever had a more infallible instinct as to what was and what was not of the stuff of poetry.
WithJasonandThe Earthly Paradise, Morris establishes his claim to greatness. The height of his power is not yet reached, but here already we have a breadth of design, an intensity of perception, and a sureness of utterance about which there can be no question. Not only does he prove himself to be a narrative poet of the first rank, but in the songs and interludes he attains a sweetness and tenderness which if not matchless are certainly not surpassed. Things like—
I know a little garden closeSet thick with lily and red rose,—
and
Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing—
and
O June, O June, that we desired so,Wilt thou not make us happy on this day?—
—it is, indeed, unnecessary to add example to example—are of the highest order of lyric poetry. The lusty strength and naked passion ofSigurd the Volsungare as yet unattempted at any sustained pressure, but in all other respects the achievement ofJasonandThe Earthly Paradiseis complete and representative. Remembering Pope's "awful Aristarch"—
Thy mighty Scholiast, whose unweary'd painsMade Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains.Turn what they will to Verse, their toil is vain,Critics like me shall make it Prose again—
I have refrained from any attempt to re-tell the stories that must be read as Morris told them or not at all. It has been my purpose rather to hold for a moment in trembling hands the spirit that is in them and that went to their creation.
At the time of publication of the last volume ofThe Earthly Paradise, Morris had begun the study of Icelandic story that was to find its splendid culmination six years later inSigurd the Volsung. The history of these beginnings will be told more fitly later in connection with the consideration of that poem. The completion of his great cycle of tales left him momentarily with a sense of purposelessness. 'I feel rather lost at having done my book,' he writes. 'I must try to get something serious to do as soon as may be ... perhaps something else of importance will turn up soon.' He turned again to painting, and occupied some of his time in book-illumination, an art in which he attained a perfection no less memorable than that of the mediæval masters. The business of Morris and Company was developing rapidly, and in 1871 he found a new interest in Kelmscott House, the old manor in Oxfordshire that was to be his country home until his death. The abiding pleasure that his retreat afforded him has been beautifully pictured for us in Mr. Mackail's "Life." In the same year he made his first journey to Iceland, and on his return he wrote the poem, which is next to be considered,Love is Enough.
[1] Mr. Stopford Brooke.