I only wept because
There was no beautiful lady to kiss me
Before I died....
... O for some lady, though
I saw her ne'er before; Alice, my love,
I do not ask for; Clisson was right kind,
If he had been a woman, I should die
Without this sickness.
The last scene, as just in dramatic instinct as the rest of the play, tells of the bearing of the news of Peter's death to the Lady Alice.
I have examined this play in some detail, and with a good many quotations, for two reasons. One, already stated, to show that Morris had an understanding of the nature of drama which is generally overlooked, and secondly, because it is a common thing to hear people to whom poetry is a matter of real importance say that they find Morris—for all his beauty—languid and lacking in power of concentration. If Sir Peter Harpdon's End be languid or anything but tense with concentrated emotion from beginning to end, then I confess my sense of values to be much awry. And, although he left the dramatic form, he did not lose this quality in his later work. He employed, for reasons which will be discussed later, a certain easy and decorative elaboration in much of his writing, but at the right moment in Jason, in the tales of The Earthly Paradise and in Sigurd the Volsung, he was master of the direct vitality and vibrating force that he first used in Sir Peter Harpdon's End and elsewhere when he needed them in this earliest volume, as in The Haystack in the Floods, with unquestionable control and vividness.
The few poems that have not been mentioned are the lyrical expressions of moods, snatches of song and swift little pictures in many colours that give their own peculiar pleasure as do all the fragmentary strokes of a great artist. They are exquisitely done, but they must be read, not described.
Several of the poems published in The Defence of Guenevere volume had already appeared, as has been said, in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine." In the same magazine Morris had also printed his first essays in prose romance. A comparison of these with the poems shows very clearly the value of that exaltation apart from the discovery, which finds, as I have suggested, its expression in the music or rhythmical pattern of verse. In more than one of these prose stories Morris uses a subject that differs in no fundamental quality from those used in many of the poems. The treatment shows the same tenderness, the same love of the earth, the same power of direct and vivid presentation of passion when it is needed, as in passages of Gertha's Lovers, and the same delight in colour and all beautiful things. And Morris uses his medium skilfully, and with a curiously personal touch; his prose has the same freshness and light as his verse. In short, we have here two groups of work from the same man, alike in temper, substance and treatment, and in control, the only difference being that of form. And that difference is everything, for in the form lies the visible evidence of the spiritual pressure at the moment of conception. There is no more stupid error than to censure one work of art because it lacks the qualities of another with which it has no point of contact. No sane person thinks less of, say, "Wuthering Heights," because it has not the poetic perfection of "Adonais." But the case of Morris's early prose romances is different. They are delightful to read, they are in themselves the treasurable expression of a fine spirit, yet they have in them nothing that is not to be found in the poems. That being so, it is inevitable that a close acquaintance with the poems should make us a little careless of these prose tales, for in the poems we have all the excellences that we find in the others, and we have added the rhythmic exaltation which is the light on the wings of poetry. Morris's fund of inventiveness was inexhaustible, but in his early prose it discovered no quality that peculiarly fitted itself to the medium; the inventiveness in the prose tales and the poems is the same, and there is, in consequence, no compensation in the one for the absence of the higher faculty of utterance that is found in the other. Morris realized this himself, and for the next thirty years created in verse. Nothing is further from my mind than to suggest that The Story of the Unknown Church and Lindenborg Pool, Gertha's Lovers and The Hollow Land and Svend and his Brethren, are other than beautiful expressions of a rare creative intelligence, but no clearer evidence of the essential difference between that which is poetry and that which is not could well be found than by setting side by side things so closely related in many ways, indeed in every way save one, as these stories and The Defence of Guenevere and King Arthur's Tomb, Rapunzel and The Wind, Sir Peter Harpdon's End and Shameful Death. Nor could anything be advanced more unanswerably supporting the contention that verse is the one unassailable medium for poetry.
Nine years were to pass before Morris published his next book, The Life and Death of Jason. The course of his life and the nature of his development in the meantime are discussed briefly in the following chapter.
III
INTERLUDE
In 1859 Morris married Miss Jane Burden, of Oxford. To a man of his profound tenderness for all the simple and rational things of life, home was a symbol of the deepest significance. Homestead and homeland are words used constantly and lovingly in his writing. A man's home was, as he understood it, not merely a refuge from the serious business of life or a comfortable and convenient means of satisfying social requirements, but the temple of his daily worship. It should be at once a centre of his labours and an expression of himself. The application of the artist's understanding to daily conduct is not always possible, or of first importance, for it is the artist's function to persuade, not to compel; but such application is the logical outcome of true development that is not hindered by circumstance. We do not impugn Browning's sincerity either as a man or an artist because he mercilessly exposed the evils of Society and yet was a great diner-out. We feel, indeed, that he was of sounder judgment and a finer charity than Shelley, who not only exposed the evils, but also left society gasping whilst he went naked to his dinner or made his house the asylum for anybody incapable of managing his own affairs. But it is, on the other hand, an everlasting vindication of Byron's strange personality that the man who wrote 'The Isles of Greece' gave his life in the service of the cause that he sang. Morris's unchanging gospel was that man should have joy in his work, which meant that the results of his work would in themselves be beautiful. To accept anything that was unlovely on any terms short of compulsion would, in consequence, have been to proclaim the truth without insisting upon it by example. Had he done so his art might have lost none of its vitality, but by steadily refusing to do so he made the common charge of aloofness even less intelligible than it would otherwise have been. Being a customer in the world's market he was determined not to degrade the men by whom the market was supplied. If he could find no other solution, he would supply it himself.
He bought a piece of land at Upton in Kent, careful that it should include an orchard. Here, with Philip Webb as architect, he built the Red House, which was to be his home for five years—until circumstances made it necessary for him to live again in London. Immediately, the difficulty that had confronted him in his Red Lion Square rooms grew into one that was not to be met by the friendly co-operation of a jobbing carpenter. There was a large house to be furnished and fitted, and beautiful things had to be found for the purpose. He came away from the market empty-handed, but carrying in his mind the idea of Morris and Company. He would not only supply his own needs decently; he would remove a reproach.