The news of the grave turn suddenly taken by William Morris’s illness prepared the public for the still worse news that was to follow.

The certificate of the immediate cause of death affirms it to have been phthisis, but one would suppose that almost every vital organ had become exhausted. Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my inquiries, that he suffered no pain whatever. And a comforting thought this is to us all—that Morris suffered no pain. To Death himself we may easily be reconciled—nay, we might even look upon him as Nature’s final beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel means he so often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission. The thought that Morris’s life had ended in the tragedy of pain—the thought that he to whom work was sport and generosity the highest form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the mortal coil—would have been intolerable almost. For among the thousand and one charms of the man, this, perhaps, was the chief, that Nature had endowed him with an enormous capacity of enjoyment, and that Circumstance, conspiring with Nature, said to him, “Enjoy.”

William Morris

Born in easy circumstances, though not to the degrading trouble of wealth—cherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two daughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as to understand a genius such as his—surrounded by friends, some of whom were among the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the very salt of the earth—it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she touched him at all, never struck home. If it is true, as MÉrimÉe affirms, that men are hastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted Morris to be mature? Who wanted him to be other than the radiant boy of genius that he remained till the years had silvered his hair and carved wrinkles on his brow, but left his blue-grey eyes as bright as when they first opened on the world? Enough for us to think that the man must, indeed, be specially beloved by the gods who in his sixty-third year dies young. Old age Morris could not have borne with patience. Pain would not have developed him into a hero. This beloved man, who must have died some day, died when his marvellous powers were at their best—and died without pain. The scheme of life and death does not seem so much awry, after all.

At the last interview but one that ever I had with him—it was in the little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned out—he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a subject he rarely chose to talk about—the mystery of life and death. The conversation ended with these words of his: “I have enjoyed my life—few men more so—and death in any case is sure.”

It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death was excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the imaginative faculty. When I talked to him, as I often did, of the peril of such a life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea. “Look at Gladstone,” he would say; “look at those wise owls your chancellors and your judges. Don’t they live all the longer for work? It is rust that kills men, not work.” No doubt he was right in contending that in intellectual efforts such as those he alluded to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the “dry light of intelligence,” a prodigious amount of work may be achieved without any sapping of the sources of life. But is this so where that fusion of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed? I doubt it. In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey pointed out many years ago, a movement not of “the thinking machine” only, but of the whole man—the whole “genial” nature of the worker—his imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of lightning velocity from the whole of the work to the part, from the part to the whole, together with every emotion of the soul. Hence when, as in the case of Walter Scott, of Charles Dickens, and presumably of Shakespeare too, the emotional nature of Man is overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries out in vain for its share of that nervous fluid which is the true vis vitÆ.

We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced and its amount to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand such a strain. Many are of opinion that ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is his finest poem; he worked at it from four o’clock in the morning till four in the afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had produced 750 lines! Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like ‘Sigurd.’ Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of the collaborating of the ‘VÖlsunga Saga’ with the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ the choosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the nineteenth century. Was there not work enough here for a considerable portion of a poet’s life? And yet so great is the entire mass of his work that ‘Sigurd’ is positively overlooked in many of the notices of his writings which have appeared since his death in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three words, and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt with fills up all the available space of a newspaper.

Then, again, take his translation of the Odyssey. Some competent critics are dissatisfied with this; yet in a certain sense it is a triumph. The two specially Homeric qualities—those, indeed, which set Homer apart from all other poets—are eagerness and dignity. Never again can they be fully combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek hexameters and by a Homer. That Tennyson could have given us the Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the Iliad shows. Chapman’s translations show that the eagerness also can be caught. Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the eagerness as completely as Chapman’s free-and-easy paraphrase, and in a rendering as literal as Buckley’s prose crib, which lay frankly by Morris’s side as he wrote.

This, with his much less satisfactory translation of Virgil, where he gives us an almost word-for-word translation, and yet throws over the poem a glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet. But these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original poems, such as ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ ‘Jason,’ ‘The Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ &c. And then come his translations from the Icelandic. Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the “Saga Library.” Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. MagnÚsson, what a work this is! Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so concrete as to make each Saga an English poem, for poem each one is, if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative substance and not metre is the first requisite of a poem.

And this brings me to those poems without metre which he invented for himself in the latter portion of his career. There is in these delightful stories, leaving out of consideration the exquisite lyrics interspersed, enough poetic wealth adequately to endow a dozen poets. The last of all of them—the one of which the last two chapters, when he could no longer hold a pen, he dictated to his friend Mr. Cockerell, in the determination, as he said to me, that he would finish it before he died—will be found to be finer than any hitherto published. It is called ‘The Sundering Flood,’ and was written after the story ‘The Water of the Wondrous Isles.’ It (‘The Sundering Flood’) is as long as ‘The Wood beyond the World,’ but has lyrics interspersed.

But evidently it is as an inventor in the fine arts that he is chiefly known to the general public. “Had he written no poetry at all, he would have been as famous,” we are told, “as he is now.” Anyhow, there is no household of any culture among the English-speaking races in which the name of William Morris does not at once call up that great revival in decorative art for which the latter part of the nineteenth century will be famous. In his designs for tapestry and other textures, in his designs for wall-papers and furniture, there is an expenditure of imaginative force which alone might make the fame of an artist. Then his artistic printing, in which he invented his own decorations, his own type, and his own paper—think of the energy he put into all that! The moment that this new interest seized him he made a more thorough study of the various specimens of black-letter printing than had ever been made before save by specialists. But even this could not “fatigue an appetite” for the joy of work “which was insatiable.” He started as an apostle of Socialism. He edited The Commonweal, and wrote largely in it, sank money in it week by week with the greatest glee, stumped the country as a Socialist orator, and into that cause alone put the energy of three men. Is it any wonder, then, that those who loved him were appalled at this prodigious output? Often and often have I tried to bring this matter before him. It was all of no use. “For me to rest from work,” he would say, “means to die.”

When not absorbed in some occupation that he loved—and in no other would he move—his restlessness was that of a young animal. In conversation he could rarely sit still for ten consecutive minutes, but must needs spring from his seat and walk round the room, as if every limb were eager to take part in the talk. His boisterous restlessness was the first thing that struck strangers. During the period when the famous partnership of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was being dissolved I saw him very frequently at Queen’s Square, for I took a very active part in the arrangement of that matter, and after our interviews at Queen Square he and I used often to lunch together at the “Cock” in Fleet Street. He liked a sanded floor and quaint old-fashioned settles. Moreover, the chops were the finest to be had in London.

On the day following our first forgathering at the “Cock,” I was lunching there with another poet—a friend of his—when the waiter, who knew me well, said, “That was a loudish gent a-lunching with you yesterday, sir. I thought once you was a-coming to blows.” Morris had merely been declaiming against the Elizabethan dramatists, especially Cyril Tourneur. He shouted out, “You ought to know better than to claim any merit for such work as ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’”; and wound up with the generalization that “the use of blank verse as a poetic medium ought to be stopped by Act of Parliament for at least two generations.” On another occasion, when Middleton (another fine spirit, who “should have died hereafter”) and I were staying with him at Kelmscott Manor, the passionate emphasis with which he declared that the curse of mankind was civilization, and that Australia ought to have been left to the blacks, New Zealand to the Maoris, and South Africa to the Kaffirs, startled even Middleton, who knew him so well.

It was this boisterous energy and infinite enjoyment of life which made it so difficult for people on meeting him for the first time to associate him with the sweet sadness of ‘The Earthly Paradise.’ How could a man of such exuberant animal spirits as Morris—so hearty, so noisy often, and often so humorous—have written those lovely poems, whose only fault was an occasional languor and a lack of humour often commented on when the critic compares him with Chaucer? This subject of Chaucer’s humour and Morris’s lack of it demands, however, a special word even in so brief a notice as this. No man of our time—not even Rossetti—had a finer appreciation of humour than Morris, as is well known to those who heard him read aloud the famous “Rainbow Scene” in ‘Silas Marner’ and certain passages in Charles Dickens’s novels. These readings were as fine as Rossetti’s recitations of ‘Jim Bludso’ and other specimens of Yankee humour. And yet it is a common remark, and one that cannot be gainsaid, that there is no spark of humour in the published poems of either of these two friends. Did it never occur to any critic to ask whether the anomaly was not explicable by some theory of poetic art that they held in common? It is no disparagement to say of Morris that when he began to write poetry the influence of Rossetti’s canons of criticism upon him was enormous, notwithstanding the influence upon him of Browning’s dramatic methods. But while Rossetti’s admiration of Browning was very strong, it was a canon of his criticism that humour was, if not out of place in poetry, a disturbing element of it.

What makes me think that Morris was greatly influenced by this canon is the fact that Morris could and did write humorous poetry, and then withheld it from publication. For the splendid poem of ‘Sir Peter Harpdon’s End,’ printed in his first volume, Morris wrote a humorous scene of the highest order, in which the hero said to his faithful fellow captive and follower John Curzon that as their deaths were so near he felt a sudden interest in what had never interested him before—the story of John’s life before they had been brought so close to each other. The heroic but dull-witted soldier acceded to his master’s request, and the incoherent, muddle-headed way in which he gave his autobiography was full of a dramatic and subtle humour—was almost worthy of him who in three or four words created the foolish fat scullion in ‘Tristram Shandy.’ This he refused to print, in deference, I suspect, to a theory of poetic art.

In criticizing Morris, however, the critic is apt to forget that among poets there are those who, treating poetry simply as an art, do not press into their work any more of their own individual forces than the work artistically demands, while another class of poets are impelled to give full expression to themselves in every poem they write. It is to the former class of poets that Morris belongs.

Whatever chanced to be Morris’s goal of the moment was pursued by him with as much intensity as though the universe contained no other possible goal, and then, when the moment was passed, another goal received all his attention. I was never more struck with this than on the memorable day when I first met him, and was blessed with a friendship that lasted without interruption for nearly a quarter of a century. It was shortly after he and Rossetti entered upon the joint occupancy of Kelmscott Manor on the Thames, where I was staying as Rossetti’s guest. On a certain morning when we were walking in the fields Rossetti told me that Morris was coming down for a day’s fishing with George Hake, and that “Mouse,” the Icelandic pony, was to be sent to the Lechlade railway station to meet them. “You are now going to be introduced to my fellow partner,” Rossetti said. At that time I only knew of the famous firm by name, and I asked Rossetti for an explanation, which he gave in his usual incisive way.

“Well,” said he, “one evening a lot of us were together, and we got talking about the way in which artists did all kinds of things in olden times, designed every kind of decoration and most kinds of furniture, and some one suggested—as a joke more than anything else—that we should each put down five pounds and form a company. Fivers were blossoms of a rare growth among us in those days, and I won’t swear that the table bristled with fivers. Anyhow, the firm was formed, but of course there was no deed, or anything of that kind. In fact, it was a mere playing at business, and Morris was elected manager, not because we ever dreamed he would turn out a man of business, but because he was the only one among us who had both time and money to spare. We had no idea whatever of commercial success, but it succeeded almost in our own despite. Here comes the manager. You must mind your p’s and q’s with him; he is a wonderfully stand-off chap, and generally manages to take against people.”

“What is he like?” I said.

“You know the portraits of Francis I. Well, take that portrait as the basis of what you would call in your metaphysical jargon your ‘mental image’ of the manager’s face, soften down the nose a bit, and give him the rose-bloom colour of an English farmer, and there you have him.”

“What about Francis’s eyes?” I said.

“Well, they are not quite so small, but not big—blue-grey, but full of genius.”

And then I saw, coming towards us on a rough pony so diminutive that he well deserved the name of “Mouse,” the figure of a man in a wideawake—a figure so broad and square that the breeze at his back, soft and balmy as it was, seemed to be using him as a sail, and blowing both him and the pony towards us.

When Rossetti introduced me, the manager greeted him with a “H’m! I thought you were alone.” This did not seem promising. Morris at that time was as proverbial for his exclusiveness as he afterwards became for his expansiveness.

Rossetti, however, was irresistible to everybody, and especially to Morris, who saw that he was expected to be agreeable to me, and most agreeable he was, though for at least an hour I could still see the shy look in the corner of his eyes. He invited me to join the fishing, which I did. Finding every faculty of Morris’s mind and every nerve in his body occupied with one subject, fishing, I (coached by Rossetti, who warned me not to talk about ‘The Defence of Guenevere’) talked about nothing but the bream, roach, dace, and gudgeon I used to catch as a boy in the Ouse, and the baits that used to tempt the victims to their doom. Not one word passed Morris’s lips, as far as I remember at this distance of time, which had not some relation to fish and baits. He had come from London for a few hours’ fishing, and all the other interests which as soon as he got back to Queen’s Square would be absorbing him were forgotten. Instead of watching my float, I could not help watching his face with an amused interest at its absorbed expression, which after a while he began to notice, and the following little dialogue ensued, which I remember as though it took place yesterday:—

“How old were you when you used to fish in the Ouse?”

“Oh, all sorts of ages; it was at all sorts of times, you know.”

“Well, how young then?”

“Say ten or twelve.”

“When you got a bite at ten or twelve, did you get as interested, as excited, as I get when I see my float bob?”

“No.”

The way in which he said, “I thought not,” conveyed a world of disparagement of me as a man who could care to gaze upon a brother angler instead of upon his own float.

II.

In whatsoever William Morris does or says the hand or the voice of the poet is seen or heard: in his house decorations no less than in his epics, in his illuminated manuscripts no less than in his tapestries, in his philippics against “restoration” no less than in his sage-greens, in his socialism no less than in his samplers. And first a word as to his poetry. Any critic who, having for contemporaries such writers as Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and William Morris, fails to see that he lives in a period of great poets may rest assured that he is a critic born—may rest assured that had he lived in the days of the Elizabethans he would have joined the author of ‘The Returne from Parnassus’ in despising the unacademic author of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Lear.’ Among this band of great contemporary poets what is the special position held by him who, having set his triumphant hand to everything from the sampler up to the epic, has now, by way of recreation, or rather by way of opening a necessary safety-valve to ease his restless energies, invented a system of poetic socialism and expounded it in a brand-new kind of prose fiction?

A special and peculiar position Morris holds among his peers—on that we are all agreed; but what is that position? We must not talk too familiarly about the Olympian gods; but is it that, without being the greatest where all are great, Morris is the one who on all occasions produces pure poetry and nothing else? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question. If other poets of our time show more intellectual strength than he, are they, perchance, given sometimes to adulterating their poetry with ratiocination and didactic preachments such as were better left to the proseman? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question. If other poets of our time can reach a finer frenzy than he and give it voice with a more melodious throat, are they, perchance, apt to forget that “eloquence is heard while poetry is overheard”? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question. If others, again, are more picturesque than he (though these it might be difficult to find), are they, perchance, a little too self-conscious in their word-pictures, and are they, perchance, apt to pass into those flowery but uncertain ways that were first discovered by Euphues? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question.

But supposing that we really had to affirm all these things about the other Olympians, where then would be the position of him about whose work such questions could not even be asked? Where would then be the place of him who never passes into ratiocination or rhetoric, never passes into excessive word-painting or into euphuism, never speaks so loud as to be heard rather than overheard, but, on the contrary, gives us always clear and simple pictures, and always in musical language? Where would then be the place of him who is the very ideal, if not of the poet as vates, yet of the poet as “maker”—the poet who always looks out upon life through a poetic atmosphere which, if sometimes more attenuated than suits some readers, is as simple and as clear as the air of a May morning? A question which would be variously answered according to the various temperaments of those who answer—of those who define poetry to be “making,” or those who define it to be “prophesying,” or those who define it to be “singing.”

Exception has, no doubt, been taken to certain archaisms in which Morris indulges not only in the epic of ‘Sigurd,’ but also, and in a greater degree, in his translations, especially in that rendering of the Odyssey. It is not our business here to examine into the merits and demerits of Morris as a translator; but if it were, this is what we should say on his behalf. While admitting that now and again his diction is a little too Scandinavian to be in colour, we should point to Matthew Arnold’s dictum that in a versified translation a poet is no longer recognizable, and then we should ask whether it is given to any man in any kind of diction to translate Homer. One Homeric quality only can any one translator secure, it seems; and if he can secure one, is not his partial failure better than success in less ambitious efforts? To Chapman it was given to secure in the Iliad a measure of the Homeric eagerness—but what else? To Tennyson (in one wonderful fragment) it was given to secure a measure of the Homeric dignity and also a measure of the Homeric picture—but what else? There was still left one of the three supreme Homeric qualities—the very quality which no one ever supposed could be secured for our literature, or, indeed, for any other—Homer’s quality of naÏf wonder. There is no witchery of Homer so fascinating as this; and did any one suppose that it could ever be caught by any translator? And could it ever have been caught had not Nature in one of her happiest moods bethought herself of evolving, in a late and empty day, the industrious tapestry weaver of Merton and idle singer of ‘Sigurd,’ ‘The Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ and ten thousand delightful verses besides?

But can a writer be called naÏf who works in a diction belonging rather to a past age than to his own? Morris has proved that he could. Imagination is the basis upon which all other human faculties rest. In the deep sense, indeed, one possession only have we “fools of nature,” our imagination. What we fondly take for substance is the very shadow; what we fondly take for shadow is the very substance. And day by day is Science herself endorsing more emphatically than ever Hamlet’s dictum, that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” By the aid of imagination our souls confront the present, and, as a rule, the present only. But Morris is an instance, and not a solitary one, of a modern writer’s inhaling so naturally the atmosphere of the particular past period his imagination delights in as to belong spiritually to that period rather than his own. To deny sincerity of accent to Morris because of his love of the simple old Scandinavian note—the note which to him represents every other kind of primitive simplicity—would be as uncritical as to deny sincerity of accent to Charles Lamb because of his sympathy with Elizabethan and Jacobean times, or to Dante Rossetti because of his sympathy with the period of his great Italian namesake.

So much for the poetry of our many-handed poet. As to his house decorations, his illuminated manuscripts, his “anti-scrape” philippics, his sage-greens, his tapestries, his socialism, and his samplers: to deal with the infinite is far beyond the scope of an article so very finite as this, or we could easily show that in them all there is seen the same naÏf genius of the poet, the same rare instinct for beautiful expression, the same originality as in the epics and the translations. Let him who is rash enough to suppose that even the socialism of a great poet is like the socialism of common folk read ‘John Ball.’ Let him observe how like Titania floating and dancing and playing among the Athenian clowns seems the Morrisian genius floating and dancing and playing among the surroundings in which at present it pleases him to disport. What makes the ordinary socialistic literature to many people unreadable is its sourness. What the Socialists say may be true, but their way of saying it sets one’s teeth on edge. They contrive to state their case with so much bitterness, with so much unfairness—so much lack of logic—that the listener says at once, “For me, any galley but this! Things are bad; but, for Heaven’s sake, let us go on as we are!”

By the clever competition of organisms did Nature, long before socialism was thought of, contrive to build up a world—this makeshift world. By the teeth of her very cats did she evolve her succulent clover. But whether the Socialists are therefore wrong in their views of society and its ultimate goal is not a question we need discuss. What they want is more knowledge and less zeal. It is possible to see, and see clearly, that the social organism is far from being what it ought to be, and at the same time to remember that man is a creature of slow growth, and that even in reaching his present modest stage of development the time he required was long—long indeed unless we consider his history in relation to the history of the earth, and then he appears to have been very commendably expeditious. If there is any truth in what the geologists tell us of the vast age of the earth, it seems only a few years ago that man succeeded, after much heroic sitting down, in wearing off an appendage which had done him good service in his early tree-climbing days, but which, with new environments and with trousers in prospect, had ceased to be useful or ornamental. An anthropoid Socialist would have advised him to “cut it off,” and had he done so he would have bled to death.

That among all her children Man is really Nature’s prime favourite seems pretty evident, though no one can say why. It is to him that the Great Mother is ever pointing and saying, “A poor creature, but mine own. I shall do something with him some day, but I must not try to force him.” Here, indeed, is the mistake of the Socialists. They think they can force the very creature who above all others cannot be forced. They think they can turn him into something rich and strange—turn him in a single generation—even as certain ingenious experimentalists turned what Nature meant for a land-salamander into a water-salamander, with new rudder-tail and gills instead of lungs and feet suppressed, by feeding him with water animals in oxygenated water and cajoling his functions. Competition, that evolved Shakespeare from an ascidian, may be a mistake of Nature’s—M. ArsÈne Houssaye declares that she never was so wise and artistically perfect as we take her to be—but her mistakes are too old to be rectified in a single generation. A little more knowledge, we say, and a little less zeal would save the Socialist from being considered by the advanced thinker—who, studying the present by the light of the past, sees that all civilization is provisional—as the most serious obstructive whom he has to encounter.

As to Morris, we have always felt that, take him all round, he is the richest and most varied in artistic endowments of any man of our time. On whichsoever of the fine arts he had chanced to concentrate his gifts and energies the result would have been the same as in poetry. In the front rank he would always have been. But it is not until we come to deal with his socialism that we see how entirely aestheticism is the primal source from which all his energies spring. That he has a great and generous heart—a heart that must needs sympathize with every form of distress—no one can doubt who reads these two books, [263] and yet his socialism comes from an entirely Æsthetic impulse. It is the vulgarities of civilization, it is the ugliness of contemporary life—so unlike that Earthly Paradise of the poetic dream—that have driven him from his natural and proper work. He cannot take offence at our saying this, for he has said it himself in ‘Signs of Change’:—

“As I strove to stir up people to this reform, I found that the causes of the vulgarities of civilization lay deeper than I had thought, and little by little I was driven to the conclusion that all these uglinesses are but the outward expression of the innate moral baseness into which we are forced by our present form of society, and that it is futile to attempt to deal with them from the outside. Whatever I have written, or spoken on the platform, on these social subjects is the result of the truths of socialism meeting my earlier impulse, and giving it a definite and much more serious aim; and I can only hope, in conclusion, that any of my readers who have found themselves hard-pressed by the sordidness of civilization, and have not known where to turn to for encouragement, may receive the same enlightenment as I have, and that even the rough pieces in this book may help them to that end.”

With these eloquent words no one can more fully agree than we do, so far as they relate to the unloveliness of Philistine rule. But though the bad features of the present time [264] are peculiar to itself, when were those paradisal days of which Morris dreams? when did that merry England exist in which the general sum of human happiness and human misery was more equally distributed than now?

Those “dark ages” beloved of the author of ‘John Ball’ may not have been quite so dark as Swinburne declares them to have been; but in this matter of the equalization of human happiness were they so very far in advance of the present time? Those who have watched the progress of Morris’s socialism know that, so far from being out of keeping with the “anti-scrape” philippics and the tapestry weaving, it is in entire harmony with them. Out of a noble anger against the “jerry builder” and his detestable doings sprang this the last of the Morrisian epics, as out of the wrath of Achilles sprang the Iliad. That the picturesqueness of the John Ball period should lead captive the imagination of Morris was, of course, inevitable. Society is at least picturesque wheresoever the classes are so sharply demarcated as they were in the dark ages, when the difference as to quality of flesh and blood between the lord and the thrall was greater than the difference between the thrall and the swine he tended. But what about the condition of this same picturesque thrall who (as the law books have it) “clothed the soil”—whose every chance of happiness, whose every chance of comfort, depended upon the arbitrary will of some more or less brutal lord? What was the condition of the English lower orders—the orders for whom many bitter social tears are now being shed? What about the condition of the thralls in dark ages so dark that even an apostle of Wyclif’s (this same John Ball, Morris’s hero) preached the doctrine—unless he has been belied—that no child had a soul that could be saved who had been born out of wedlock? The Persian aphorism that warns us to beware of poets, princes, and women must have had a satirical reference to the fact that their governance of the world is by means of picturesqueness. Always it has been the picturesqueness of tyranny that has kept it up. It was the picturesqueness of the auto de fe that kept up the Spanish Inquisition, but we may rest assured that the most picturesque actors in that striking tableau would have preferred a colourless time of jerry builders to a picturesqueness like that. To find a fourteenth-century pothouse parlour painted by a modern Socialist with a hand more loving than Walter Scott’s own is indeed touching:—

“I entered the door and started at first with my old astonishment, with which I had woke up, so strange and beautiful did this interior seem to me, though it was but a pothouse parlour. A quaintly carved sideboard held an array of bright pewter pots and dishes and wooden and earthen bowls; a stout oak table went up and down the room, and a carved oak chair stood by the chimney-corner, now filled by a very old man dim-eyed and white-bearded. That, except the rough stools and benches on which the company sat, was all the furniture. The walls were panelled roughly enough with oak boards to about six feet from the floor, and about three feet of plaster above that was wrought in a pattern of a rose stem running all round the room, freely and roughly done, but with (as it seemed to my unused eyes) wonderful skill and spirit. On the hood of the great chimney a huge rose was wrought in the plaster and brightly painted in its proper colours. There were a dozen or more of the men I had seen coming along the street sitting there, some eating and all drinking; their cased bows leaned against the wall, their quivers hung on pegs in the panelling, and in a corner of the room I saw half a dozen bill-hooks that looked made more for war than for hedge-shearing, with ashen handles some seven foot long. Three or four children were running about among the legs of the men, heeding them mighty little in their bold play, and the men seemed little troubled by it, although they were talking earnestly and seriously too. A well-made comely girl leaned up against the chimney close to the gaffer’s chair, and seemed to be in waiting on the company: she was clad in a close-fitting gown of bright blue cloth, with a broad silver girdle, daintily wrought, round her loins, a rose wreath was on her head, and her hair hung down unbound; the gaffer grumbled a few words to her from time to time, so that I judged he was her grandfather.”

“Morris’s ‘Earthly Paradise’!” the reader will exclaim. Yes; and here we come upon that feature of originality which, as has been before said, distinguishes Morris’s socialism from the socialism of the prosaic reformer.

Political opinions almost always spring from temperament. The conservative temper of such a poet as Sir Walter Scott leads him to idealize the past, and to concern himself but little about the future. The rebellious temperament of such a poet as Shelley leads him to idealize the future, and concern himself but little about the past. But by contriving to idealize both the past and the future, and mixing the two idealizations into one delicious amalgam, the poet of the ‘Earthly Paradise’ gives us the Morrisian socialism, the most charming, and in many respects the most marvellous product of “the poet’s mind” that has ever yet been presented to an admiring world.

The plan of ‘John Ball’ is simplicity itself. The poet in a dream becomes a spectator of the insurrection of the Kentish men at the time when Wat Tyler rebelled against the powers that were; and the hero, John Ball, who is mainly famous as having preached a sermon from the text

Wan Adam dalf and Eve span
Wo was thanne a gentilman?

is made to listen to the poet-dreamer’s prophecy of the days of bourgeois rule and the jerry builder.

If we take into account the perfect truth and beauty of the literary form in which the story is presented, we do not believe that anything to surpass it could be found in historic fiction; indeed, we do not know that anything could be found to equal it. The difficulty of the imaginative writer who attempts, whether in prose or verse, to vivify the past seems to be increasing, as we have before said, every day with the growth of the scientific temper and the reverence of the sacredness of mere documents. The old-fashioned theory—the theory which obtained from Shakespeare’s time down to Scott’s and even down to Kingsley’s—that the facts of history could be manipulated for artistic purposes with the same freedom that the artist’s own inventions can be handled, gave the artist power to produce vital and flexible work at the expense of the historic conscience—a power which is being curtailed day by day. The instinct for vivifying by imaginative treatment the records of the past is too universal and too deeply inwoven in the very texture of the human mind to be other than a true and healthy instinct. But so oppressive has become the tyranny of documents, so fettered by what a humourist has called “factology” have become the wings of the romancer’s imagination, that one wonders at his courage in dealing with historic subjects at all.

A bold writer would he be who in the present day should make Shakespeare figure among the Kenilworth festivities as a famous player (after the manner of Scott), or who should (after the manner of Kingsley) give Elizabeth credit for Winter’s device of using the fire-ships before Calais. Even the poet—he who, dealing as he does with essential and elemental qualities only, is not so hampered as the proseman in these matters—is beginning also to feel the tyranny of documents, as we see notably in Swinburne’s ‘Bothwell,’ which consists very largely of documents transfigured into splendid verse. But more than even this: the mere literary form has now to be as true to the time depicted as circumstances will allow. If Scott’s romances have a fault it is that, as he had no command over, and perhaps but little sympathy with, the beautiful old English of which Morris is such a master, his stories lack one important element of dramatic illusion. But it is in the literary form of his story that Morris is especially successful. Where time has dealt most cruelly with our beloved language is in robbing it of that beautiful cadence which fell from our forefathers’ lips as sweetly and as unconsciously as melody falls from the throat of the mavis. One of the many advantages that Morris has reaped from his peculiar line of study is that he can write like this—he, and he alone among living men:—

“‘Surely thou goest to thy death.’ He smiled very sweetly, yet proudly, as he said: ‘Yea, the road is long, but the end cometh at last. Friend, many a day have I been dying; for my sister, with whom I have played and been merry in the autumntide about the edges of the stubble-fields; and we gathered the nuts and bramble-berries there, and started thence the missel-thrush, and wondered at his voice and thought him big; and the sparrow-hawk wheeled and turned over the hedges, and the weasel ran across the path, and the sound of the sheep-bells came to us from the downs as we sat happy on the grass; and she is dead and gone from the earth, for she pined from famine after the years of the great sickness; and my brother was slain in the French wars, and none thanked him for dying save he that stripped him of his gear; and my unwedded wife with whom I dwelt in love after I had taken the tonsure, and all men said she was good and fair, and true she was and lovely; she also is dead and gone from the earth; and why should I abide save for the deeds of the flesh which must be done? Truly, friend, this is but an old tale that men must die; and I will tell thee another, to wit, that they live: and I live now and shall live. Tell me then what shall befall.”

Note the music of the cadence here—a music that plays about the heart more sweetly than any verse, save the very highest. And here we touch upon an extremely interesting subject.

Always in reading a prose story by a writer whose energies have been exercised in other departments of letters there is for the critic a special interest. If this exercise has been in fields outside imaginative literature—in those fields of philosophical speculation where a logical method and a scientific modulation of sentences are required—the novelist, instead of presenting us with those concrete pictures of human life demanded in all imaginative art, is apt to give us disquisitions “about and about” human life. Forgetting that it is not the function of any art to prove, he is apt to concern himself deeply in showing why his actors did and said this or that—apt to busy himself about proving his story either by subtle analyses or else by purely scientific generalizations, instead of attending to the true method of convincement that belongs to his art—the convincement that is effected by actual pictorial and dramatic illustration of how his actors really did the things and said the things vouched for by his own imagination. That the quest of a scientific, or supposed scientific, basis for a novelist’s imaginative structure is fatal to true art is seen not only in George Eliot and the accomplished author of ‘Elsie Venner,’ but also in writers of another kind—writers whose hands cannot possibly have been stiffened by their knowledge of science.

Among the many instances that occur to us we need point to only one, that of a story recently published by one of our most successful living novelists, in which the writer endeavours to prove that animal magnetism is the acting cause of spiritualistic manifestations so called. Setting out to show that a medium is nothing more than a powerful mesmerist, to whose manipulations all but two in a certain household are unconsciously succumbing, he soon ignores for plot purposes the nature of the dramatic situation by making those very two sceptics at a sÉance hear the same music, see the same spiritually conveyed newspaper, as the others hear and see. That the writer should mistake, as he seems to do, the merely directive force of magnetism for a motive force does not concern the literary critic. But when two sceptics, who are to expose a charlatan’s tricks by watching how the believers are succumbing to mesmeric hallucinations, are found succumbing to the same hallucinations themselves—succumbing because the story-teller needs them as witnesses of the phenomena—then the literary critic grows pensive, for he sees what havoc the scientific method will work in the flower-garden of art.

On the other hand, should the story-teller be a poet—one who, like the writer of ‘John Ball,’ has been accustomed to write under the conditions of a form of literary art where the diction is always and necessarily concrete, figurative, and quintessential, and where the movement is metrical—his danger lies in a very different direction. The critic’s interest then lies in watching how the poet will comport himself in another field of imaginative literature—a field where no such conditions as these exist—a field where quintessential and concrete diction, though meritorious, may yet be carried too far, and where those regular and expected bars of the metricist which are the first requisites of verse are not only without function, but are in the way—are fatal, indeed, to that kind of convincement which, and which alone, is the proper quest of prose art. No doubt it is true, as we have before said, that literature being nothing but the reflex of the life of man, or else of the life of nature, the final quest of every form of literature is that special kind of convincement which is inherently suitable to the special form. For the analogy between nature and true art is not a fanciful one, and the relation of function to organism is the same in both. But what is the difference between the convincement achieved by poetic and the convincement achieved by prose art? Is it that the convincement of him who works in poetic forms is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectly achieved by a faithful record of the emotion aroused in his own soul by the impact upon his senses of the external world, while the convincement of the proseman is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectly achieved by a faithful record and picture of the external world itself?

All such generalizations as this are, no doubt, to be taken with many and great qualifications; but, roughly speaking, would not this seem to be the fundamental difference between that kind of imaginative literature which expresses itself in metrical forms and that kind of imaginative literature in which metrical form is replaced by other qualities and other functions? Not but that these two methods may meet in the same work, not but that they may meet and strengthen each other, as we have before said when glancing at the interesting question, How much, or how little, of realism can poetry capture from the world of prose and weave into her magic woof, and how much of music can prose steal from poetry? But in order to do all that can be done in the way of enriching poetry with prose material without missing the convincement of poetic art, the poet must be Homer himself; in order to do all that can be done in the way of vivifying prose fiction with poetic fire without missing the convincement of prose art, the story-teller must be Charlotte BrontË or Emily, her sister, in whose work we find for once the quintessential strength and the concrete and figurative diction of the poet—indeed, all the poetical requisites save metre alone. Had ‘Jane Eyre,’ ‘Villette,’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ existed in Coleridge’s time he would, we may be sure, have taken these three prose poems as illustrations of the truth of his axiom that the true antithesis of poetry is not prose, but science.

What the prose poet has to avoid is metrical movement on the one side and scientific modulation of sentences on the other. And perhaps in no case can it be achieved save in the autobiographic form of fiction, where and where alone the work is so subjective that it may bear even the poetic glow of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Villette.’ What makes us think this to be so is the fact that in ‘Shirley’—a story written in the epic method—the only passages of the poetic kind which really convince are those uttered by the characters in their own persons. And as to ‘Wuthering Heights,’ a story which could not, of course, be told in one autobiography, the method of telling it by means of a group of autobiographies, though clumsy enough from the constructor’s point, was yet just as effective as a more artistic method. And it was true instinct of genius that led Emily BrontË to adopt the autobiographic method even under these heavy conditions.

Still the general truth remains that the primary function of the poet is to tell his story steeped in his own emotion, while the primary function of the prose fictionist is to tell his story in an objective way. Hence it is that in a general way the difficulty of the poet who turns to prose fiction lies, like that of philosophical or scientific writers, in suppressing certain intellectual functions which he has been in the habit of exercising. And the case of Scott, which at first sight might seem to show against this theory, may be adduced in support of it. For Scott’s versified diction, though concrete, is never more quintessential than that of prose; and his method being always objective rather than subjective, when he turned to prose fiction he seemed at once to be writing with his right hand where formerly he had been writing with his left.