Morris was profoundly influenced by Rossetti in his art, and there was a close personal sympathy between them, and yet two poets could not well be more unlike each other in natural temperament. Rossetti’s heavy-lidded indolence, his exotic preference for odd beasts in the garden, his savour of the apothecary’s shop, were far removed from the robust worldliness of Morris, who loved Socialist meetings, and Cotswold winds, and the dye-vats in a Staffordshire mill, and fishing for pike in the Thames, and even a row in a police-court. But the instinct for definite outline and exact detail that made him whole-hearted in his sympathy with the Pre-Raphaelite painters in their revolt from what they considered to be a smudgy and lazy impressionism, made him also very susceptible to the luminous and graphic quality of Rossetti’s diction, and, in that measure, guided him to his own development of the “florid and flowing” Tennysonian idiom. But once the impulse was working, it sent Morris along his own way of discovery, one upon which he had no company of importance. As he progressed in his art from The Lady of Shalott and The Blessed Damozel, from the lovely exercise of—
Green holly in Alicia’s hand,
When the Sword went out to sea,
With sere oak-leaves did Ursula stand;
O! yet alas for me!
I did but bear a peel’d white wand,
When the Sword went out to sea....
the world of mediæval and classic story became less and less mere material for his poetry and more and more the actual place of his habitation. No poet has ever so utterly projected himself into another age as did Morris. Much has been written to show that Morris of The Earthly Paradise and Morris of the political platform were one and the same person, and the doctrine cannot be lightly dismissed. But in a sense Sigurd and Jason and Gudrun and Atalanta were more vividly and intimately his fellows than the chairman and committee and the men and women of his audience. Though he did not tell them so exactly in so many words, his real ambition in going on to the political platform at all was to persuade these men and women that the Sigurds and the Atalantas were really the best company in all the world, and there willingly for their delight if they would but know them. And in moving among these people of a golden age (these people, that is to say, as recorded by the old poets, Chaucer and the troubadours and trouvères) Morris not only steeped himself in their physical and spiritual life, he very largely caught and re-created the very manner of their expression. He did something in the diction of his poetry that had never before and is never likely again to be attempted successfully, he made an archaic idiom a living, personal, and original thing. The complaint about “Wardour Street” diction that has sometimes been made against Morris is stupid and indefensible. His poetic style may not please us in all moods, but when we are prepared for it we see that, unlikely as was his method to bring about such an event by the light of experience, it is as purely and individually a style as any poet’s, and that he has borrowed nothing without transmuting it to the strict degree of his obligation. When he follows Chaucer’s example and speaks of the brown bird, or the grey sky, or the bright flowers, and leaves it at that, we find ourselves accepting the image as complete, so naturally does he adopt the accent of a fourteenth-century poet and so far do we seem from the nineteenth century merely imitating the fourteenth. And the whole of his diction is radically modified by this circumstance, thus—
Ah! let me turn the page, nor chronicle
In many words the death of faith, or tell