Said the old man rather severely: 'Friend, I expect that you have been reading some rotten collection of lies, and have been taken in by it too easily.'
The book has been described, quite aptly, as insular. In its atmosphere and colour it is essentially English. The accounts of a reconstructed London and a cleansed countryside, of the great Thames reaches and the stone buildings of the Cotswolds, of the happy and generous but rather silent folk, of their traditions and customs and their characteristics, are all written by an Englishman of Englishmen and their country. Their natures have not been fundamentally changed, but stripped of the excrescences of an effete and degraded society, and they are still drawn in their proper relation to their native landscape. They are the clearly wrought ideal of our race, but they have left in them nothing of those products of our race who consistently confuse expediency with ethical fitness, sentimentalism with passion, and celebrate the planting of the British flag in all sorts of places where it is not in the least wanted by calling themselves God's Englishmen.
VII
PROSE ROMANCES AND POEMS BY THE WAY
During the later years of his life, when he was distracted by the many claims of his active socialism and constantly harassed by details of organization and the efforts to reconcile people who, having the same interests, persisted in misunderstanding each other, Morris wrote a series of prose romances that hold a distinctive place in his art. His long poems show us a life conceived on lines that I have sought to trace, approached in a mood of austere responsibility and defined with all the completeness that he could bring to work. In these prose romances the life is unchanged, but it is seen through a different mood. It is as though he turned aside from the stress of his daily work to the world that his imagination had already created as the only sane one for men, and saw it with a kind of new leisureliness and wholesome irresponsibility. It was impossible for him to allow fancy to intrude upon the life that he desired to the exclusion of any of its vital qualities, but, as far as was possible without such offence to his artistic conscience, in these romances he indulged his faculty for story-telling without curb. The people and their adventures and characters are still, as in the poems, related continuously to Morris's radical conception of life, but they are no longer related to any central purpose contained in the work of art itself. The waywardness and profuseness of romanticism are here carried to their extreme limits, and yet we never feel that the narratives are formless, so powerful and fixed is the vision through which Morris draws them into unity. The justification of his indifference to the ordinary demands of construction in a book like The Roots of the Mountains, is that we do not feel that the work would gain in any way were he scrupulously careful in this matter. Morris had created a world in his imagination, just and beautiful as it seemed to him. From that world he drew the substance of his great poems, reducing it to the essential and symbolic terms of art. Jason and The Earthly Paradise and Sigurd are all perfectly constructed results of the submission of this world to the severe process of artistic selection. But in the later prose romances we are led into the very world itself from which these things were drawn, and given leave to wander through it as we will. We find that it is cosmic as life is cosmic, but it is not yet wrought into the stricter proportions of art. If we can think of Morris writing through another generation, it is impossible to believe that he would have turned again, say, to the Volsung story; that he had shaped finally in Sigurd the Volsung; but we feel that he might have found material in these romances for poem after poem, that, indeed, they are, as it were, a panoramic expression of the world from which his poems must inevitably be imagined. There is in them nothing of inconsistency, but there is a prodigal diffuseness that belongs rather to nature than to art. They are the storehouse from which Morris's own art was drawn, and poets to come may yet turn to them as they do to Malory or as Morris himself did to the Sagas.
The choice of prose for these romances was, for this reason, not in any way arbitrary but the result of sound artistic deliberation. Where Morris used the same material and crystallized it through his finest imaginative impulse, verse was the natural and inevitable medium; but he is here showing us the material before it had been subjected to this highest creative energy, and there is not the spiritual fusion that makes verse necessary to complete expression. The prose that he uses is stamped always with his personality, and so justifies itself even where most open to criticism. It is commonly of extraordinary beauty, full of the gravity and high manners that belong to the heroic atmosphere of the stories themselves; and even where the adaptation of an archaic method of speech is most pronounced it is not self-conscious. All language is dependent largely on convention, and that Morris used a convention that was not generally accepted was a virtue in workmanship rather than a vice. The important thing is that he was consistent in the use, or, in other words, that his convention was never a mannerism but definitely a corporate part of his style.
These stories are but another instance of the remarkable range of Morris's artistic power. They do not, of course, rank with his own most splendid work, but in a particular kind of prose romance they attain an excellence that had not been known in England for several centuries. And in the ease with which they hold our interest in the story and at the same time maintain a perfect consistency of character, they show that, had he chosen, Morris might have added yet another to his many achievements, and challenged comparison with the best of Fielding's successors. The Bride and the Sunbeam, Face-of-God and Walter and Folk-Might, and, above all, Dallach, are drawn with that certainty and depth of understanding of the individual that are perhaps the chief distinction of the youngest of the literary arts in England.
In 1891 Morris's last book of poems, Poems By The Way, was published by the Kelmscott Press. In it the poet gathered together some fifty of his shorter poems written at intervals during the thirty years since the publication of The Defence of Guenevere, and there are naturally in the volume a wide range of subjects and much diversity of manner. Fragments from rejected or unfinished tales intended for The Earthly Paradise, fine echoes and memories of his Icelandic studies and travel, lyrical expressions of this mood or that, translations from the Flemish and Danish and his beloved saga-tongue, fairy tales, chants that grew out of his socialism, and a few poems that show that when he chose to apply his poetic vision to modern conditions he could do so with profound penetration, are brought together almost at haphazard. If, as Mr. Arthur Symons says, a pageant is a shining disorder, then this book is truly a pageant. And yet behind all these expressions of many times and moods is to be seen the central impulse of Morris's life knitting them together into a clear spiritual unity. It seems a far cry from the delicate tenderness of 'From the Upland to the Sea' to the passion of 'Mother and Son,' from the sombre brooding of 'To the Muse of the North' to the airy romance of 'Goldilocks and Goldilocks,' yet they are all unmistakably begotten of the same temperament. The high reverence for naked life, the insistence on labour being joyful if it was not to be abominable, the fierce worship of beauty and the courageous acceptance of its passing, these were the things by which Morris had his being, and they are woven into all the pages of his last book. He was a man who took literally no thought as to the relation of the work in hand to that of years passed. A story is told of him that when a friend who was helping him to collect the material for Poems By The Way brought a poem to him he could not remember having written a line of it. The perfect consistency of his aim and temper from first to last is the more remarkable in consequence, and the kinship between two fragmentary expressions of his life, divided perhaps by thirty years, is fine to see. His understanding of the ideal towards which he strove became clearer as he passed through his strenuous existence, and his powers of realizing it in his art matured steadily to the end, but the ideal itself was unchanged. That in an artist is a splendid thing: a thing that perhaps of all others is the token of his divinity. For it is that central certainty of purpose that is immortal in him, austerely set above the change of circumstance. The form of his art may pass from its first imitative and awkward groping slowly to its perfection or it may prove itself at the beginning, but it is the great guiding purpose that he cannot gain by seeking, and that lends truth to the common phrase.
Of certain of the poems no more than a word need be said, whilst others need to be considered more fully. The northern poems, such as 'Gunnar's Howe' and 'Of the Wooing of Hallbiorn' and those belonging to the Earthly Paradise period are beautiful strays from phases of the poet's work that have already been discussed. Here and there we find a deliberate return to an earlier manner, as in 'The Hall and the Wood,' written in 1890, where many of the devices used in the Guenevere volume are again employed and with even greater success. Here, for example, is a beautiful reminiscence of lines already quoted—
She stood before him face to face,
With the sun-beam thwart her hand,
As on the gold of the Holy Place
The painted angels stand.