A few paragraphs in this book are reprinted, by permission of Messrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., from introductions written for The Muses' Library; others, by permission of the Editor, from articles contributed to The Nation.
My thanks are due to William Morris's Trustees for permission to use such quotations from his works as I wished, and to Miss May Morris for her generous assistance in this and other matters. My indebtedness to Mr. Mackail I have acknowledged in more than one place in the body of this volume, but I should like here to emphasize my appreciation of the service that he has done to all who reverence Morris and his work.
I would also thank my friend, Mr. Oliver W. F. Lodge, for the many delightful hours that I have spent with him in talking of a poet whom we both love. What understanding I may have of Morris has been deepened and quickened by his enthusiasm and fine judgment. No thanks that I might offer to another friend could be in any way adequate; in inscribing this book to him I can but make slight acknowledgment of one of those whole-hearted services that stand for so much in the craft of letters.
J. D.
Birmingham, 1912.
CONTENTS
[INTRODUCTORY]
[EARLY POEMS AND PROSE]
[INTERLUDE]
[NARRATIVE POEMS]
[LOVE IS ENOUGH AND SIGURD THE VOLSUNG]
[TRANSLATIONS AND SOCIALISM]
[PROSE ROMANCES AND POEMS BY THE WAY]
[CONCLUSION]
I
INTRODUCTORY
To the isolation, the loneliness, of the poet, criticism is apt to give far less than due heed. At a time when literature is daily becoming more responsive to the new spirit which we call Democracy, such a complaint may seem to be reactionary in temper, and some explanation may be made by way of defence against any such possible charge. Nothing is more disastrous to a poet than that he should dissociate his art from the life of the world; until the conflict and destiny of humanity have become the subjects of his contemplation he cannot hope to bring to his creation that vitality which alone makes for permanence. Ultimately it is the great normal life of mankind which is immortal, and the perishable things are the grotesque, the odd, the experiences which are incomplete because they are unrelated to the general experience. But whilst the insistence that the poet should be swiftly responsive to the life about him is perfectly just, indeed inevitable in any right understanding of art, it is equally necessary to remember always that the poet's vision itself is turned upon life from places remote and untrodden, that the seasons of his contemplation are seasons of seclusion. To say that the poet is the product of his age is to be deceived by one of the most dangerous of critical half-truths. The poet is the product of his own temperament and personality, or he is nothing. Clearly, if the age in which the poet lived were in any wide sense his creator, the poets of an age would bear unmistakable tokens of their relationship. The perfectly obvious fact that they do not do so is, however, no obstacle to the criticism that wishes to satisfy its own primary assumption that with the age does remain this supreme function of making its own poets. Recognizing that its theory demands the presence of such affinity in its support, this criticism proceeds, in violation of the most direct evidence, to discover the necessary likeness. Perhaps the crowning achievement of this ineptitude is the constant coupling of the names of Tennyson and Browning. If ever two poets were wholly unrelated to each other in their reading of life and spiritual temper, they were the poets of "In Memoriam" and "Pippa Passes," of "Crossing the Bar" and "Prospice." But the accident of their being contemporaries is taken as sufficient reason for endless comparisons and complacent decisions as to their relative greatness, leading nowhere and establishing nothing. And parallel cases are common enough: Gray and Collins, Shelley and Keats, and, in daily practice, any one poet and any other whose books happen to be on the table at the same moment.