dictum that in a versified translation a poet is no longer recognizable, and then we should ask whether it is given to any man in any kind of diction to translate Homer. One Homeric quality only can any one translator secure, it seems; and if he can secure one, is not his partial failure better than success in less ambitious efforts? To Chapman it was given to secure in the Iliad a measure of the Homeric eagerness—but what else? To Tennyson (in one wonderful fragment) it was given to secure a measure of the Homeric dignity and also a measure of the Homeric picture—but what else? There was still left one of the three supreme Homeric qualities—the very quality which no one ever supposed could be secured for our literature, or, indeed, for any other—Homer’s quality of naïf wonder. There is no witchery of Homer so fascinating as this; and did any one suppose that it could ever be caught by any translator? And could it ever have been caught had not Nature in one of her happiest moods bethought herself of evolving, in a late and empty day, the industrious tapestry weaver of Merton and idle singer of ‘Sigurd,’ ‘The Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ and ten thousand delightful verses besides?
But can a writer be called naïf who works in a diction belonging rather to a past age than to his own? Morris has proved that he could. Imagination is the basis upon which all other
human faculties rest. In the deep sense, indeed, one possession only have we “fools of nature,” our imagination. What we fondly take for substance is the very shadow; what we fondly take for shadow is the very substance. And day by day is Science herself endorsing more emphatically than ever Hamlet’s dictum, that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” By the aid of imagination our souls confront the present, and, as a rule, the present only. But Morris is an instance, and not a solitary one, of a modern writer’s inhaling so naturally the atmosphere of the particular past period his imagination delights in as to belong spiritually to that period rather than his own. To deny sincerity of accent to Morris because of his love of the simple old Scandinavian note—the note which to him represents every other kind of primitive simplicity—would be as uncritical as to deny sincerity of accent to Charles Lamb because of his sympathy with Elizabethan and Jacobean times, or to Dante Rossetti because of his sympathy with the period of his great Italian namesake.
So much for the poetry of our many-handed poet. As to his house decorations, his illuminated manuscripts, his “anti-scrape” philippics, his sage-greens, his tapestries, his socialism, and his samplers: to deal with the infinite is far beyond the scope of an article so
very finite as this, or we could easily show that in them all there is seen the same naïf genius of the poet, the same rare instinct for beautiful expression, the same originality as in the epics and the translations. Let him who is rash enough to suppose that even the socialism of a great poet is like the socialism of common folk read ‘John Ball.’ Let him observe how like Titania floating and dancing and playing among the Athenian clowns seems the Morrisian genius floating and dancing and playing among the surroundings in which at present it pleases him to disport. What makes the ordinary socialistic literature to many people unreadable is its sourness. What the Socialists say may be true, but their way of saying it sets one’s teeth on edge. They contrive to state their case with so much bitterness, with so much unfairness—so much lack of logic—that the listener says at once, “For me, any galley but this! Things are bad; but, for Heaven’s sake, let us go on as we are!”
By the clever competition of organisms did Nature, long before socialism was thought of, contrive to build up a world—this makeshift world. By the teeth of her very cats did she evolve her succulent clover. But whether the Socialists are therefore wrong in their views of society and its ultimate goal is not a question we need discuss. What they want is more knowledge and less zeal. It is
possible to see, and see clearly, that the social organism is far from being what it ought to be, and at the same time to remember that man is a creature of slow growth, and that even in reaching his present modest stage of development the time he required was long—long indeed unless we consider his history in relation to the history of the earth, and then he appears to have been very commendably expeditious. If there is any truth in what the geologists tell us of the vast age of the earth, it seems only a few years ago that man succeeded, after much heroic sitting down, in wearing off an appendage which had done him good service in his early tree-climbing days, but which, with new environments and with trousers in prospect, had ceased to be useful or ornamental. An anthropoid Socialist would have advised him to “cut it off,” and had he done so he would have bled to death.
That among all her children Man is really Nature’s prime favourite seems pretty evident, though no one can say why. It is to him that the Great Mother is ever pointing and saying, “A poor creature, but mine own. I shall do something with him some day, but I must not try to force him.” Here, indeed, is the mistake of the Socialists. They think they can force the very creature who above all others cannot be forced. They think they can turn him into something rich and strange—turn him in a
single generation—even as certain ingenious experimentalists turned what Nature meant for a land-salamander into a water-salamander, with new rudder-tail and gills instead of lungs and feet suppressed, by feeding him with water animals in oxygenated water and cajoling his functions. Competition, that evolved Shakespeare from an ascidian, may be a mistake of Nature’s—M. Arsène Houssaye declares that she never was so wise and artistically perfect as we take her to be—but her mistakes are too old to be rectified in a single generation. A little more knowledge, we say, and a little less zeal would save the Socialist from being considered by the advanced thinker—who, studying the present by the light of the past, sees that all civilization is provisional—as the most serious obstructive whom he has to encounter.
As to Morris, we have always felt that, take him all round, he is the richest and most varied in artistic endowments of any man of our time. On whichsoever of the fine arts he had chanced to concentrate his gifts and energies the result would have been the same as in poetry. In the front rank he would always have been. But it is not until we come to deal with his socialism that we see how entirely aestheticism is the primal source from which all his energies spring. That he has a great and generous heart—a heart that must needs sympathize with every form of distress—no one can doubt who