Part 3

In the Long Vacation of 1875 Rossetti conceived the ill-fated scheme of mural paintings for the new hall of the Oxford Union. The story need not be told here in any detail. Morris and Burne-Jones were pressed unto the service with some six or seven others, and each painted one picture, Morris in addition designing and carrying out the decoration of the ceiling. No proper preparations were made for the work, and the paintings have perished. The undertaking is interesting to us here as throwing sidelights on certain aspects of Morris's temperament. He had begun and finished his picture long before any of the others, and while they were still engaged on their appointed shares he had voluntarily set himself to the ceiling design. His capacity for work, of which this is the first striking example, was always enormous, and it is not surprising to hear that a distinguished doctor, speaking of his comparatively early death at the age of sixty-three, said, 'I consider the case is this: the disease is simply being William Morris and having done more work than most ten men.' It was on this occasion, too, that his strange store of assimilated knowledge was put to practical use. The paintings were all taken from the "Mort d'Arthur," and models were required for arms and armour. They were not to be found, and Morris, unaided by books of reference, designed them, and they were made by a jobbing smith under his supervision. When the Union work was finished he took rooms in Oxford instead of returning to London, and among the new friends that he made was Swinburne, then an undergraduate at Balliol. He continued his apprenticeship as a painter with enthusiasm but lessening conviction, but poetry was already becoming a first consideration with him. He had already published a few poems, as we have seen, in the "Oxford and Cambridge Magazine," and several others were written during his temporary residence in Oxford.

He was a man of fine physique and a remarkable vehemence of temper. Burne-Jones tells us that when they were painting the Union walls and needed models they sat for each other, and that Morris 'had a head always fit for Lancelot or Tristram.' To think a thing was generally to say it. His intolerance of everything vulgar and mean and disloyal in art and life found immediate and forceful expression. A friend who knew him well tells me of an occasion when he went with Burne-Jones to the theatre. They were sitting in the pit, and one of the actresses was incurring Morris's particular displeasure by reason of her misuse of her mother-tongue. At a moment of tension she had to enter and announce that her father was dead. She did so, but to the effect that her 'father was dad.' Morris could bear it no longer, and standing up with his hands clenched he roared across the theatre, 'What the devil do you mean by dad?' to the utter discomfiture of his companion. Insincerity--and incompetence he took to be a form of insincerity--at all times exhausted his patience, and he was never careful to conceal his feelings.

The time of preparation was now passing into the time of achievement. Morris's nature had been spared much of the shock and stress to which it might have been subjected in its growth by the vulgarity and violent uncertainty of his age, by the fortunate contact with men who were in revolt. The movement that they represented and of which he was a part was large and strong enough to make a positive and progressive life of its own instead of being merely an isolated expression of turbulent disagreement. It was one of those rare manifestations, a revolt the first purpose of which was not to destroy but to create. To this influence had been added that of a countryside gravely beautiful, one full of the shadows and colour of romance, or, more precisely, of the northern romance to which he was always to lend his most faithful service. It must not be supposed that this implies any coldness in his nature, which was at all times finely passionate. But it was, always, also simple, and simplicity of passion is the ultimate distinction of the North. The luxuriance of the South, with all its beauty, tends to obscurity. Nothing is further from wisdom than to suppose that the passion of the North is cold; it is merely naked. His characteristic simplicity of outlook was not yet impressing itself with its final certainty on his work, but it was already in being, as is clear from the records of his personality as it appeared to his friends at the beginning of his career.

Such was the nature of the man, who, fostered to articulate expression in a spiritual atmosphere which it has been my purpose to describe, was about to make his first appeal as poet to the public. Early in 1858, Messrs. Bell and Daldy published _The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems_.

[1] The chronological irregularity in this passage is deliberate, and I am aware, of course, that certain of the names mentioned cannot strictly be credited to mediævalism. But a nice distinction of epochs is not necessary for the present purpose. There was, in Morris's view of art, a kinship between Giotto and Holbein which was unaffected by the fact that the former died in 1336, whilst Holbein saw the full day of the northern renaissance two hundred years later.

II

EARLY POEMS AND PROSE

In insisting upon the simplicity of Morris's artistic ideal it is well to examine a little closely the precise meaning of simplicity. Spiritual adventure is the supremely momentous thing in a man's life, but it is also the most intangible. Art being the most perfect expression of spiritual adventure, its function is to impart to the recipient some measure of that exaltation experienced by its creator at the moment of conception. But to attain this end the art must have that instinctive rightness which cannot be achieved by taking thought but only by a rarity of perception which lends essential truth to the common phrase that the artist is born, not made. If you give a potter a lump of clay he may shape it into a vessel ugly or beautiful. If our artistic intelligence or our spiritual intelligence is awake, we shall instantly determine the result; if ugly it will revolt us, or at best leave us indifferent; if beautiful it will give us joy. But the difference, which is evident enough to our consciousness, does not enable us to define the distinction between the ugly and the beautiful, the dead and the quick. We only know that in the one there is an obscure and wonderful vitality and satisfying completeness that is lacking in the other. The beautiful thing may be perfectly simple, but it nevertheless has in it something strange and indefinable, something as elusive as life itself. The simple must not be confused with the easy. When Morris read his first poem to the acclamation of his friends, and announced that if this was poetry it was very easy to write, it must be remembered that he meant that it was easy for the rare creative organisation that was William Morris. No doubt it was just as easy for Shelley in the moment of creation to set down an image of desolation as perfect as

Blue thistles bloomed in cities,

as it is for the veriest poetaster to produce his commonplaces, and the result is certainly as simple, but the one is touched into life by the god-like thing which we call imagination, whilst the other is nerveless. The bow that was as iron to the suitors bent as a willow wand to the hand of Ulysses. The simplicity of Morris's art is yet compact of the profound and inscrutable mystery. It is not wholly true to say that all great or good art is simple. From Donne to Browning and Meredith there have been poets whose art is complex and yet memorable. It is not my present purpose to discuss the precise value of simplicity in art, but to point out that simplicity does not imply either superficiality or the worthless kind of ease.

Richard Watson Dixon said that in his opinion Morris never excelled his early poems in achievement, and his judgment in the matter has been echoed a good many times with far less excuse than Dixon himself could plead. To him they represented the first impassioned expression of a life which he had shared, and enthusiasms which he had helped to kindle, and by which in turn he had been fostered. He was the man to whom Morris first read his first poem, and there was naturally a fragrance in the memory which nothing could ever quite replace. But the echoes have no such justification, and are generally the result of incomplete knowledge. _The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems_ is quite good enough to make it safe to avow a preference for it, without reading the later work. A reputation for taste may be preserved here, with the least possible labour. But there is nothing in the volume which helps to make the position really tenable. There is, indeed, scarcely any poet who can point to a first volume of such high excellence, so completely individual, so certain in intention, as could Morris. But to set it above the freedom and poignancy of _The Life and Death of Jason_, the tenderness and architectural strength of _The Earthly Paradise_ and the fiery triumph of _Sigurd the Volsung_ is a critical absurdity. It is a remarkable book, one which in itself would have assured Morris of his place in the history of poetry, but it remains no more than the exquisite prelude of a man whose complete achievement in poetry was to stand with the noblest of the modern world.

The chief evidence of immaturity which is found in Morris's first book is a certain vagueness of outline in some of the poems. The wealth of decorative colour of which he was never to be dispossessed is already here, and on the whole it is used fitly and with restraint. Effects such as

A great God's angel standing, _with such dyes Not known on earth, on his great wings_

and

he sat alone _With raiment half blood-red, half white as snow._

and

Also her hands have lost that way Of clinging that they used to have; They look'd quite easy, _as they lay Upon the silken cushions brave With broidery of apples green._

And again,

_The blue owls on my father's hood_ Were a little dimm'd as I turn'd away,

and whole passages in such poems as _The Wind_, and even poems in their entirety such as _The Gilliflower of Gold_ depend as much upon their colour as if actually done with a brush; and they depend safely, whilst the use of one art by another can scarcely be more triumphantly vindicated than by the lines in _A Good Knight in Prison_, where Sir Guy says:--

For these vile beasts that hem me in These Pagan beasts who live in sin * * * * * Why, all these things I hold them just _Like dragons in a missal-book, Wherein, whenever we may look, We see no horror, yea delight, We have, the colours are so bright._

There are moments, however, in this volume when the poet's power of visualizing, as with the eyes of the painter, lead him into a weakness from which his later work is entirely free. When Guenevere says:--

This is true, the kiss Wherewith we kissed in meeting that spring day I scarce dare talk of the remember'd bliss,

When both our mouths went wandering in one way, And aching sorely, met among the leaves; Our hands being left behind strained far away.

we feel that a certain sacrifice of emotional directness of speech is being made to a sense that intrudes on the poetry without intensifying it. And we have the same feeling when Galahad says:--

No maid will talk Of sitting on my tomb until the leaves Grow big upon the bushes of the walk, East of the Palace-pleasaunce, _make it hard To see the minster therefrom._

The elaboration in these places blurs rather than quickens our vision, as it does again in Rapunzel's song:--

Send me a true knight, Lord Christ, with a steel sword, bright, Broad and trenchant; yea, _and seven Spans from hilt to point, O Lord! And let the handle of his sword Be gold on silver._

We may almost forgive a young poet flaws which are in themselves lovely and are but excesses of a method which he commonly uses to wholly admirable ends; but they are flaws none the less. The sense of values is not yet consistently true. But the indistinctness of outline of which I have spoken is a more serious weakness than this occasional indiscretion in the use of colour.

The poems in the volume may, somewhat arbitrarily, but fitly for the present purpose, be considered as four or five groups. The poems in the first, headed by _The Defence of Guenevere_, _King Arthur's Tomb_ and _Sir Galahad_, have love for their central theme and aim at conducting a more or less simple love story to its successful or disastrous issue with directness and clarity. The obscurity that alone threatens their complete success is not due to subtlety on the one hand nor to vagueness of conception on the other, but merely to a power of expression that was not yet sure of itself. Psychological subtlety was not, as is sometimes supposed, outside Morris's range; on the contrary, he gives constant and varied evidence of a depth of perception in human affairs quite remarkable, as will be shown. But the subtlety was never confused and blurred by the sophistry that tempts so many poets on making a really pregnant psychological discovery into all kinds of unintelligible elaboration. When he saw clearly into the workings of the mind he recorded his vision in a few sharp and clearly defined strokes, and left it. Subtlety and obscurity are never synonymous in his work. And although, at twenty-four, his understanding of man's love for woman was naturally not very profound or wide in its range, it was passionate and quite sure of itself within its own imaginative experience. His failure in places to give his understanding clear utterance is the failure of a man not yet wholly used to his medium. When Guenevere says:--

While I was dizzied thus, old thoughts would crowd,

Belonging to the time ere I was bought By Arthur's great name and his little love; Must I give up for ever then, I thought,

That which I deemed would ever round me move Glorifying all things; for a little word, Scarce ever meant at all, must I now prove

Stone-cold for ever?

the thought is neither close nor difficult, nor, on the other hand, is it loose, but the statement is not lucid. It is, however, intelligible after we have sifted it a little carefully, but in such a passage as--

A little thing just then had made me mad; I dared not think, as I was wont to do, Sometimes, upon my beauty; if I had

Held out my long hand up against the blue, And, looking on the tenderly darken'd fingers, Thought that by rights one ought to see quite through,

There, see you, where the soft still light yet lingers, Round by the edges; what should I have done, If this had joined with yellow spotted singers,

And startling green drawn upward by the sun?

the thought is hidden in an utterance so tangled and involved as to make it almost impossible to straighten it out, and in any case poetry so enigmatic ceases to be poetry at all. Such extreme instances are, however, very rare even in this first volume, and scarcely ever to be found in his later work. The title-poem throughout is uncertain in its expression. There are passages of fine directness and precision as--

And fast leapt Caitiff's sword, until my knight Sudden threw up his sword to his left hand, Caught it, and swung it; that was all the fight,

and the picture of Guenevere at the close, listening for Launcelot, 'turn'd sideways,'

Like a man who hears

His brother's trumpet sounding through the wood Of his foe's lances.'

but in spite of these and the unquestionable beauty of the poem's cumulative effect, there is a troubling lack of firmness in many places that makes the achievement incomplete. I think that the use of _terza rima_ in itself has something to do with this. In a poem like Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" we are prepared to follow the poet in any imaginative flight that he may attempt from moment to moment, and his adventurousness finds all the time some turn of thought that will perfectly fit the exacting demands of the form that he is using. But in Morris's poem the process of the narrative to be convincing can only be conducted in one way, and that way the poet frequently finds obstructed by the necessity of a verse-form particularly difficult in English. However this may be, _King Arthur's Tomb_ is certainly less open to this charge of obscurity in utterance, and the thought has more imaginative force in it. There are passages here that suggest the presence of a poet to whom the highest things in poetry may yet be possible. Guenevere's cry--

Unless you pardon, what shall I do, Lord, But go to hell? and there see day by day Foul deed on deed, hear foulest word on word, For ever and for ever, such as on the way

To Camelot I heard once from a churl, That curled me up upon my jennet's neck With bitter shame; how then, Lord, should I curl For ages and for ages? _dost thou reck_

_That I am beautiful, Lord, even as you_ And your dear mother? why did I forget You were so beautiful, and good, and true, That you loved me so, Guenevere? O yet

If even I go to hell, _I cannot choose But love you, Christ, yea, though I cannot keep From loving Launcelot._

has a poignancy and a curious understanding of the action of a mind in spiritual anguish that were to be so nobly employed in things like the close of _Jason_. The dramatic opposition of Guenevere's love, which is all the while troubled by the half-consciousness of sin, to Launcelot's, which is its own sole cause and justification, is, further, a first indication of the poet's power to set the elemental passions in action at once simple and convincing. When the Queen finds her lover lying on the dead king's tomb, she schools her tongue to a cold absurdity, not daring to trust herself,--'Well done! to pray for Arthur,' and Launcelot cries out:--

Guenevere! Guenevere! Do you not know me, are you gone mad? fling Your arms and hair about me, lest I fear You are not Guenevere, but some other thing.

and the queen's answer falls with the tragic intensity of spiritual self-betrayal--

Pray you forgive me, fair lord Launcelot! I am not mad, but I am sick; they cling, God's curses, unto such as I am; not

Ever again shall we twine arms and lips.

There is in this, and in the whole of the poem from this point a true and incisive sense of conflict, continually heightened by such perfectly balanced turns of the imagination as when Launcelot says:--

lo you her thin hand, That on the carven stone can not keep still Because she loves me against God's command.

culminating in the confused feelings of terror and appeased destiny at the end of Guenevere's speaking.

_Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery_ is, it may be said, entirely free of the obscurity, and shows, if not a profounder, yet a more acute power of perception. The beauty and tenderness of love-sorrow are themes common enough in poetry, but Morris by making Galahad's experience of them spring from his thought of other men's love presents them with a peculiarly fresh poignancy. Galahad on his quest, 'dismal, unfriended,' thinks of the other knights.

And what if Palomydes also ride, And over many a mountain and bare heath Follow the questing beast with none beside? Is he not able still to hold his breath

With thoughts of Iseult? doth he not grow pale With weary striving, to seem best of all To her, 'as she is best,' he saith? to fail Is nothing to him, he can never fall.

For unto such a man love-sorrow is So dear a thing unto his constant heart, That even if he never win one kiss, Or touch from Iseult, it will never part.

And Launcelot can think of Guenevere, 'next month I kiss you, or next week, And still you think of me,' but Galahad himself

Some carle shall find Dead in my arms in the half-melted snow,

and people will but say that he 'If he had lived, had been a right good knight' and that very evening will be glad when 'in their scarlet sleeves the gay-dress'd minstrels sing.' The force of the poet's thought about a particular phase of love is intensified in an unmistakable way by placing the utterance on the lips of a man who is not speaking of his own experience, which would have been beautiful but a little sentimental, but of his hunger for the experience, sorrowful though it may be, which is emotionally tragic. And we find another stroke of memorable subtlety when the voice of the vision says to the knight, speaking of Launcelot's love for Guenevere:--

He is just what you know, O Galahad, This love is happy even as you say, But would you for a little time be glad, To make ME sorry long day after day?

Her warm arms round his neck half throttle me The hot love-tears burn deep like spots of lead.

The thought here, with wonderful instinct on the part of the poet, is precisely Galahad's own. It shapes the compensation to his spirit for its hunger and loneliness. We feel, in passages such as these, that here is a poet exultant in the exercise of a rare faculty of statement. The spiritual discovery and the announcement are in perfect correspondence. _A Good Knight in Prison_, _Old Love_, _The Sailing of the Sword_ and _Welland River_ are the other poems that may be included in this first group. They attempt a smaller psychological range than the poems already considered, but they have the same emotional intention and achieve it with clarity and precision. These poems already show the pervasive passion for the earth that has been discussed; the landscape is everywhere informed by intimacy and tenderness. Another aspect of the poet's temper too finds expression--an extraordinarily vivid sense of natural change and death. With speculation as to the unknown Morris was never concerned in his poetry. Death was to him neither a fearful thing nor yet a deliverance or a promise. It was simply the severing of a beautiful thing that he loved--life; the end of a journey that no labours could make wearisome. He did not question it, nor did he seek to evade its reality, but the thought of it was always coloured with a profound if perfectly brave melancholy. Without ever disputing with his reason the possibility of death's beneficence, it was not the beneficence of death that he perceived emotionally, but the pity of it. It was a fading away, and as such it filled him with a regretful tenderness, just as did the fading of the full year. The close of _The Ode to the West Wind_ crystallizes a mental attitude of which Morris was temperamentally incapable. But it is, of course, a mistake to suppose that the beauty of his poetry suffers in consequence. It is not the nature of the mood that matters, but its personal intensity.