William Morris: A Critical Study

by John Drinkwater

and we are immediately on the full tide of the narrative again.

Morris further achieves that supreme distinction in narrative of indicating clearly at the outset what the issue is to be, and yet retaining our interest easily and completely. One of the most distinguished of living critics[[1]] has drawn attention to this power in Shakespeare; there is no vulgar endeavour to startle us by any surprising turns of character; what surprise there is to be will be found in the event. So deftly does the greatest of poets embody his characters at the moment when he brings them before us that we know instinctively how they will act in the events presented to us. In the case of Morris this power is, perhaps, even more strongly marked, for the reason that the web of circumstance that he folds round his people is of a far less subtle texture. It may be said, with but little exaggeration, that the sole emotions with which he is concerned are the love of man for woman, physical heroism, and the worship of external beauty. Again, it must be remembered that the simplicity implied by this statement is coloured and invested with the mystery of life itself by the temperament through which it is presented, but with this vital qualification the fact may be so set down. Nearly all his stories are cast in the same general outline: the desire of the lover, consummated or defeated only after long physical struggle and sacrifice; the inscrutable shadow of death looming behind attainment and failure alike; the progress of the narrative fashioned on a background where nature and art combine to please and soothe with an endless pageant of loveliness. The Life and Death of Jason may, perhaps, be advanced as an instance disproving this contention, but a moment's reflection shows that the central interest of the poem, the interest by the side of which all else recedes into the position of that pageantry, is the love of Jason and Medea. The quest of the Golden Fleece, the adventures of the heroes, the treachery of Pelias, these things, exquisitely handled as they are, are but the canvas upon which is thrown a sublime and elemental love story. The finest book of the poem, the last, wherein is told nothing but the triumph and withering of that love, is not only on a level with Morris's own highest achievement, but among the supreme things in poetry. The hopeless yet unutterably poignant figure of Medea; the tenderness and the untutored simplicity of Glance, the child who is the tragic plaything of the deeper and more world-beaten natures against whom she is thrown; the desperate self-deception of Jason and the terrible degradation of his essential nobility—these are drawn with an intensity, at once fierce and restrained, that bears witness to the height that narrative poetry may attain in the hands of a master.

Not only is the substance of these poems of this transparently simple texture, but the form of expression created by Morris is so specially fitted for the purpose that the structures as a whole stand almost without parallel for precision of outline and clearness of detail. He appears to have determined that neither overloading of diction and imagery nor intricacy of metrical effect should interfere with the conduct of his narrative. Having no superficially subtle or complex statement to make, and keeping always before him the purpose to produce a memorable cumulative effect without striving at all for isolated felicities of phrasing, he is never forced to pause for the fitting word. The words that go to the making of a line flow as naturally and certainly from his pen as the letters that fashion a word from the pen of another. Nowhere are there any signs of labour; nowhere the tumultuous glory of language that rushes at times from the lips of more variable if not greater poets; and yet, with the rarest exceptions, he nowhere descends from his own high level. For sheer consistency of excellence he probably has no rival. The supremacy of his narrative poems lies in the fact that Morris achieved what he attempted completely and with perfect ease. As in his life, so in his poetry do we feel that we are in the presence of a titanic strength that is never exerting itself to the utmost; and we are constantly being led, in consequence, to that exercise of the imagination which creates the most potent sympathy between the artist and his audience.

I have spoken of a certain easy decorative elaboration that Morris uses in these stories, and it is this quality that has led many people into a misunderstanding of his poetry. To say that a poet is swift in narration does not necessarily mean that his sole purpose is to get the story finished in the least possible time, but that the narrative is unimpeded at the moments when most we demand its progress. To say that this is the only right method would involve enquiry into notable instances where it is not employed, which would be to digress unduly, but most of Scott's novels might be advanced as examples. There we are constantly brought to a standstill at vital points in the conduct of the story whilst some thread that has been laid aside is again taken up, again to be dropped when it has been drawn to a point in common with the rest of the development. This Morris never does; the sequence of his narrative is always direct, and the crises of his story are always carried through at a stroke. But in observing this condition of emphasizing his most momentous periods in a perfectly logical continuity and boldness of statement, he does not deny himself the right to fill in the spaces between those periods with the large ease and contemplative calm which have their corresponding manifestations in life. Hannibal was not momentarily adding leaves to his laurels. And Jason journeying from Thessaly to Colchis finds many adventures, and Morris records them with vigour and intensity and the sound of swords; but he finds, too, pleasant days of even enjoyment and companionship with his fellows, when they move delightedly about a new countryside or see for the first time some storied place or gather together to talk of their homeland. And these are days that Morris is not at all content to leave unsung, and his instinct is perfectly sound. It is strange that these lovely interludes that lie between adventure and adventure should ever be, as they often are, called "languid." They denote, on the contrary, a spiritual activity astonishing in its range and sanity. For they imply a recognition on the part of the poet that to pass down a river on a golden afternoon, or to lie beneath the stars at night, or to move beneath the walls of an unknown city whilst memories of home and kin crowd on the mind, is an experience as adventurous as the riding of a storm or the winning of a Golden Fleece. To be languid is to be indifferent, and indifference in the presence of anything not wholly alienated from nature and simple humanity was the last thing of which Morris was capable. So that when Medea has to go from her home to the wood, the poet is not forgetful of the path by which she has to go. His eyes are always open.

... a blind pathway leads
Betwixt the yellow corn and whispering reeds,
The home of many a shy quick-diving bird;
Thereby they passed, and as they went they heard
Splashing of fish, and ripple of the stream;
And once they saw across the water's gleam
The black boat of some fisher of the night....

To travel in the company of one whose senses are so vitally responsive to every sound and sight of beauty, to every tremor of emotion that may show itself in the people whom we meet on the wayside, demands no small spiritual alertness in ourselves. But if we fail to keep pace with his glorious and inexhaustible curiosity, if our joy is not sane and unjaded as his, it will not mend our case to call him languid. It is we who lack energy, not he. Every man is quick-witted in the ranks of battle or the sack of cities; the true test of his vitality is to see whether he remains so under the orchard boughs or in the walk from his doorstep to the market-place. Our position in this matter is but the logical issue of a social condition against which the whole of Morris's life and art were a revolt. Most of us have made the working hours of the day a burden to be borne merely for the sake of the wage that follows; the work itself is to us no more than a weariness. It is not necessary to examine here the economic causes of this result, but the result itself is obvious enough. And in consequence we call for the intervals between work and work to be filled either by strange excitement or sleep. And so we pass from lethargy through more or less violent sensations to forgetfulness. Morris would have none of this. Work meant for him, as it must mean for us all once more before we regain our sanity and wholesomeness, a constant sense of joy in self-expression, heightened now and again, as it were, by the salt and sting of great adventures. Into this scheme of life are admitted seasons of quiet contemplation, of responsiveness to such common things as the beauty of the clouds or the soft sound of earth breaking to the plough, hours when all the simple and recurrent bounties of the day are accepted joyfully and without question. Into his poetry Morris translated all these; the great adventures, the deep sense of the satisfaction of labour, and the quiet moods. Our faculties may be so weakened that they are stirred by the great adventures alone; but it is no fault of the poet's if we confuse his calm and reflective exaltation with our own lethargy.

In speaking of the Guenevere volume it was necessary to examine the poems more or less in detail and separately, for they were the changing expressions of a creative mind not yet sure of itself, of a temperament that had not yet found its philosophic moorings. Throughout The Life and Death of Jason and The Earthly Paradise, however, we have a unity of vision, a gathering up of all things into the terms of one personal reading of life, that make it possible to speak of them more generally and with less qualification from word to word. Having defined the nature of the form that Morris was using in these poems and his particular manner of handling it, we may try to realize the view of the world that he was seeking to present. We may pass from the announcement to the discovery itself. Morris in his poetry simplified his aim enormously by steadily eliminating two things—enquiry into the unknown, and all endeavour to 'set the crooked straight.' When he called himself 'Dreamer of dreams born out of my due time' and asked 'Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?' he was not, again let it be said, refusing to face the world about him, but announcing that as poet his concern was not to destroy but to create. And whatever good results might attend the speculation of others as to death and the secret purposes of God, he felt that for him, at least, it was unprofitable employment. The issue of this purpose is that we have a world wherein all the simple but positive things stand out shining in the light of a highly-organized creative temperament, undimmed by questioning doubt on the one hand or a cloud of superficial intricacies of circumstance on the other. In his later socialist teaching Morris sought in some means to show how these intricacies might be cleared away in practice, but in his poetry he presupposes a life where the natural impulses of men are unfettered by all save eternal circumstance. His philosophy becomes one of extraordinary directness and simplicity, and yet it retains everything by which the spirit and body of man really have their being. To love, and if needs be to battle for love, to labour and find labour the one unchanging delight, to be intimate with all the moods and seasons of earth, to be generous alike in triumph and defeat, to fear death and yet to be heroic in the fear, to be the heirs of sin and sorrow in so far as these things were the outcome of events that were permanent and not ephemeral in their nature—of such did he conceive the state of men to be in the earthly paradise that he was tying to create in his art. We are yet far from realizing the state. The din of the thousand claims of the crooked to be set straight is loud in our ears, and the cleansing of the moment must be done. But not until we can accustom ourselves to the thought that this state is, if not yet realized, at least realizable, can we hope to work out any salvation for ourselves or the world. We suffer daily from a neglect of the positive and creative for the negative and destructive. In England the symbols of our national thought are curiously expressive of this fact. We decorate and honour our soldiers whose business, be it to destroy or to be destroyed, is, in any case, connected with destruction; those of our lawyers who are chiefly concerned with restraint and punishment; our politicians who spend their time protecting us from assaults of neighbours and communities as commercially rapacious as ourselves, or, in their more enlightened moments, in adjusting wrongs that are the dregs in the cup of civilization. The functions of these men may be necessities of society, but they nevertheless apply to the small negative aspect of our state and not the great normal life. It is that which is, rightly, the concern of our creative artists; but our creative artists are not decorated and honoured by the nation as such. Occasionally when Europe has insisted long enough on the presence of a great artist among us, we make some belated recognition of the fact, and occasionally we become sentimental and throw a few pounds a year to a poet whom we refuse to pay proper wages for his work. This of course does not injure the artist, but it is all very eloquent as to the frame of our national mind. However many noble individual exceptions there may be, the fact remains that nationally we acclaim the negative and neglect the positive manifestations of man. Morris's art was, implicitly, a challenge to this temper and a means of escape from it. For, despite all the clamour that the good and evil voices of the destroyers make, we are ultimately forced back to the admission that they fill only a very small corner of our lives. The daily charities and heroisms, the discipline of fellowship and love, the worship of beauty and the pride of shaping with hand and brain, are all independent of them, and they are the justification of life. If we have crowded them out of our daily courses, then it is for the poets to lead us back to them. This they do most certainly, not by denouncing us for our folly or reviling the evil to which we have fallen, but by showing us, in being, our lost estate. This Morris did, and to understand this is to understand the root and flower of his philosophy as poet.

It is not to be supposed that the world of Morris's poetry is a world purged of error. He did not imagine an ideal humanity, but a humanity drawn from all the finer phases of experience, its vision free of the veils of a highly artificial social state. It is a common thing to hear people express surprise that men who behave towards each other with bitter animosity in business or official or political life are on generous and friendly terms in their homes or in what is called private life, and the solution is generally offered that whilst they differ fiercely on profoundly vital subjects, they can afford to be tolerant and even generous to each other in less important matters. The solution is, of course, as far astray from facts as it could be. The truth is that in the conduct of the things that are of permanent significance these men behave to each other generally with the innate nobility of humanity, and at times with humanity's natural imperfection. There is among them a deep sense of comradeship and common delight, broken only at times by the reaction of emotions not yet wholly chastened, expressing itself in a violation of conflicting interests. But when these same men are brought into contact in surroundings compact of that artificiality of which I have spoken, those surroundings create a hundred new and shifting standards, and with them as many strange little jealousies and rancours which are stifled immediately simple humanity is once again allowed its proper dominion. The sin and the sorrow that are the issue of this imperfection in humanity Morris uses at their full and tragic values in his poetry, but to the nervous irritation which is as some new disease which we have invented for ourselves unaided by the gods he paid no heed. This is why his poetry, all its vitality and strength notwithstanding, is so peaceful. His people may suffer great troubles and deal hard blows, love passionately and lose fiercely, but at no time do they move with the confused unrest of men who are never sure of themselves, having between their vision and the world a thousand petty accidents of will. They are deep-lunged, but they never babble and chatter; they have enormous energy but are never restless.

As though to emphasize the singleness of his aim in these poems, Morris uses the simplest verse-forms. Jason is written in heroic couplets, the prologue and seven tales of The Earthly Paradise in the same measure, seven tales in octosyllabic couplets and ten in seven-lined Chaucerian stanzas. Metrical experiments occasionally make some definite addition to poetry, but they more often result in mere formlessness. The wide acceptance of certain forms by the poets through centuries of practice does not point to any lack of invention or weak servility on the part of the poets, but to some inherent fitness in the forms. Tradition is a fetter only to the weak; it is the privilege of the sovereign poet to invest it with his own personality and make it distinctively his own. From Marlowe down to Mr. Yeats the heroic couplet has been a new vehicle in the hands of new poets, and its vigour is unimpaired. Morris in accepting proved forms merely accepted the responsibility of proving himself. The result is never for a moment in doubt—his use of the ten and eight syllable line and the stanza that he took from his master is as clearly pervaded by his own temperament as is his vision itself. It is one of the subtlest faculties of genius, this shaping of a manner which shall chime exactly with mood and emotional outlook. Just as Shakespeare's expression is prodigal in strength and variety, and Milton's full of weight and dignity, and Pope's marked at all points by precision, and Shelley's by a wild and fluctuating speed, so Morris's is everywhere animated by a pure and virile loveliness and an all-suffusing sense of pity. His utterance is in perfect harmony with his spiritual temper. We have seen that whilst he accepts the tragedy of the world at its full value as something fundamental and inseparable from humanity, he rejects the mere ugliness of the world as being an artificial product of an abnormal state. And so, when he has to write of a dead woman lying in a peasant's hut in all the circumstances of extreme poverty, he does so with tragic intensity whilst eliminating all the inessential ugliness. Poverty as we know it in our civilization makes an unlovely bedfellow for death, yet Morris shows it to us with a precision almost fierce in its fidelity to truth, yet beautiful because concerned with the simple and essential only—

On straw the poor dead woman lay;
The door alone let in the day,
Showing the trodden earthen floor,
A board on trestles weak and poor,
Three stumps of tree for stool or chair,
A half-glazed pipkin, nothing fair,
A bowl of porridge by the wife,
Untouched by lips that lacked for life,
A platter and a bowl of wood;
And in the further corner stood
A bow cut from the wych-elm tree,
A holly club and arrows three
Ill pointed, heavy, spliced with thread.