On the day following our first forgathering at the "c.o.c.k," 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 pa.s.sionate 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 a.s.sociate 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 pa.s.sages in Charles d.i.c.kens"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 cla.s.s of poets are impelled to give full expression to themselves in every poem they write. It is to the former cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 a.s.sured that he is a critic born-may rest a.s.sured that had he lived in the days of the Elizabethans he would have joined the author of "The Returne from Parna.s.sus" 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 G.o.ds; 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.ses into ratiocination or rhetoric, never pa.s.ses 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 _naf_ 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 _naf_ 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 ma.n.u.scripts, his "anti-sc.r.a.pe" 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 _naf_ 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 t.i.tania 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 compet.i.tion 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.
Compet.i.tion, that evolved Shakespeare from an ascidian, may be a mistake of Nature"s-M. a.r.s.ene 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 aesthetic 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-sc.r.a.pe" philippics and the tapestry weaving, it is in entire harmony with them. Out of a n.o.ble 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 cla.s.ses 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 a.s.sured 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 surpa.s.s 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 doc.u.ments. 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 doc.u.ments, 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.