But it was not Mr. Swinburne who first awakened in me a spirit of reaction against the elder masters of our generation. Before I read Atalanta in Calydon my imagination had been deeply stirred by that first volume of Mr. William Morris’s verse, entitled The Defence of Guinevere. I had found there, though in a form perhaps deliberately archaic, that deeper note of passion which Tennyson’s poetry, even at its best, confessedly lacks; and its appeal
WILLIAM MORRIS
From the painting by G. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.
Hollyer
To face page 209.
was the more urgent because Morris too was attracted by the charm of mediæval romance—romance which in Tennyson’s hands had lost something of its primitive dramatic quality, and became, as he developed the Arthurian story, more and more material for setting forth a systematised body of ethical teaching.
Morris at a single stroke seemed to restore the legend to its historical place, and to recapture a part of its passionate significance. I confess that no later work of his has ever affected me to the same degree, though there runs in them all that exquisite and ineffable charm of the born story-teller. In poetry as in fiction there are, and have always been, two competing schools of thought, the one moved by the love of the story to be told, and the other primarily attracted to the story by the opportunities it may offer for the presentment of an ethical idea, or the interpretation of individual character.
They may both reach the same goal, but there remains that contrast in the quality of the workmanship which is born of its different origin.