I have probably gone beyond my office in making these remarks, but the temptation provided by the biography of William Morris proved so strong that I could not forego them. Here is a man of whom we cannot know too much. An artist who gave his life for art—what shall we say of him?
Mr. Brock has told a little of the man, sometimes in an interesting way, but he does not make us intimate with him. However, as he tells us in his preface, he had no pretensions. He is lucid and thoughtful, he is excellent in his criticism of Morris’s poetry, and on the whole gives us a book well worthy of an hour’s quietude. The facts given are good by way of an introduction—sufficient to send one in quest for greater knowledge of the man.
One of Nature’s henchmen, fresh, bold, Viking in the marrow, with a spirit of steel, a man for whom the sea would smile, poet, painter, stainer of glass, weaver of carpets, spinning a world with the strains of his song, socialist and revolutionist, Morris comes as a teasing wind through the dank atmosphere of nineteenth-century commercialism, daring conventions and going his way a body all soul, a majesty supreme to the last.
We get a little of the air of the man when we read these lines from the Sigurd. I quote from the biography:
There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old,
Dukes were the door wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed the doors;
Earls’ wives were the weaving women, queens’ daughters strewed the floor.
And the masters of its song craft were the mightiest men that cast
The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.