Chapter 15

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.