William Morris, a critical study

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NARRATIVE POEMS « 93 LOVE IS ENOUGH AND SIGURD THE VOLSUNG 121

PROSE ROMANCES AND POEMS BY THE WAY l69

II

In insisting upon the simplicity of Morris's artistic ideal it is well to examine a little closely the precise meaning of simplicity. Spiritual adventure is the supremely momentous thing in a man's life, but it is also the most intangible. Art being the most perfect expression of spiritual adventure, its function is to impart to the recipient some measure of that exaltation experienced by its creator at the moment of conception. But to attain this end the art must have that instinctive rightness which cannot be achieved by taking thought but only by a rarity of perception which lends essential truth to the common phrase that the artist is born, not made. If you give a potter a lump of clay he may shape it into a vessel ugly or beautiful. If our artistic intelligence or our spiritual intelligence is awake, we shall instantly determine the result ; if ugly it will revolt us, or at best leave us indifferent ; if beautiful it will give us joy. But the difference, which is evident enough to our consciousness, does not enable us to define the distinction between the ugly and the beautiful, the dead and the quick. We only know that in the one there is an obscure and wonderful vitality and satisfying completeness that is lacking in the other. The beautiful thing may be perfectly simple, but it nevertheless has in it something strange and indefinable, something as elusive as life itself. The simple must not be confused with the easy. When Morris read his first poem to the acclamation of his friends, and announced that if this was poetry it was very easy to write, it must be remembered that he meant that it was easy for the rare creative organisation that was William Morris. No doubt it was just as easy for Shelley in the moment of creation to set down an image of desolation as perfect as

Blue thistles bloomed in cities,

as it is for the veriest poetaster to produce his commonplaces, and the result is certainly as simple, but the one is touched into life by the god-like thing which we call imagination, whilst the other is nerveless. The bow that was as iron to the suitors bent as a willow wand to the hdnd of Ulysses. Th e, simplicity of Mo rris's art is yet cnmpant of the profound and inscrutable mystery. I t is not, wholly true to say that all great or gogi_a£Lis-sinaple. From Donne to Browning and Meredith there have been poets whose art is complex and yet memorable. It is not my present purpose to discuss the precise value of simplicity in art, but to point out that simplicity does not imply either superficiality or the worthless kind of ease.

Richard Watson Dixon said that in his opinion Morris never excelled his early poems in achievement, and his judgment in the matter has been echoed a good many times with far less excuse than Dixon himself could plead. To him they represented the first impassioned expression of a life which he had shared, and enthusiasms which he had helped to kindle, and by which in turn he had been fostered. He was the man to whom Morris first read his first poem, and there was naturally a fragrance in the memory which nothing could ever quite replace. But the echoes have no such justification, and are generally the result of incomplete knowledge. The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems is quite good enough to make it safe to avow a preference for it, without reading the later work. A reputation for taste may be preserved here, with the least possible labour. But there is nothing in the volume which helps to make the position really tenable. There is, indeed, scarcely any poet who can point to a first volume of such high excellence, so completely individual, so certain in intention, as could Morris. But to set it above the freedom and poignancy of 7%e Life and Death of Jason, the tenderness and architectural strength of Tlie Earthly Paradise and the fiery triumph of Sigurd the Vokung is a critical absurdity. It is a remarkable book, one which in itself would have assured Morris of his place in the history of poetry, but it remains no more than the exquisite prelude of a man whose complete achievement in poetry was to stand with the noblest of the modern world.

The chief evidence of immaturity which is found in Morris's first book is a certain vagueness of outhne in some of the poems. The wealth of decorative colour of which he was never to be dispossessed is already here, and on the whole it is used fitly and with restraint. Effects such as and and

A great God's angel standing, with such dyes Not known on earth, on his great wings

he sat alone With raiment half blood-red, half white as snow.

Also her hands have lost that way Of clinging that they used to have ;

They look'd quite easy, as they lay Upon the silken cushions brave

With broidery of apples green.

And again,

Were a little dimm'd as I turn'd away,

and whole passages in such poems as The Wind, and even poems in their entirety such as The Gilliflower of Gold depend as much upon their colour as if actually done with a brush ; and they depend safely, whilst the use of one art by another can scarcely be more triumphantly vindicated than by the lines in A Good Knight in Prison, where Sir Guy says : —

For these vile beasts that hem me in These Pagan beasts who live in sin

Why, all these things I hold them just Like dragons in a missal-hook, Wherein, wheTiever me may look, We see no horror, yea delight.

We have, the colours are so bright.

There are moments, however, in this volume when the poet's power of visualizing, as with the eyes of the painter, lead him into a weakness from which his later work is entirely free. When Guenevere says : —

This is true, the kiss Wherewith we kissed in meeting that spring day I scarce dare talk of the remember'd bliss.

When both our mouths went wandering in one way. And aching sorely, met among the leaves ; Our hands being left behind strained far away.

we feel that a certain sacrifice of emotional directness of speech is being made to a sense that intrudes on the poetry without intensifying it. And we have the same feeling when Galahad says : —

No maid will talk Of sitting on my tomb until the leaves

Grow big upon the bushes of the walk. East of the Palace-pleasaunce, make it hard

To see the minster therefrom.

The elaboration in these places blurs rather than quickens our vision, as it does again in Rapunzel's song : —

Send me a true knight.

Lord Christ, with a steel sword, bright, Broad and trenchant ; yea, and seven Spans from hilt to point, O Lord ! And let the handle of his smord Be gold on silver.

We may almost forgive a young poet flaws which are in themselves lovely and are but excesses of a method which he commonly uses to wholly admirable ends ; but they are flaws none the less. The sense of values is not yet consistently true. But the indistinctness of outline of which I have spoken is a more serious weakness than this occasional indiscretion in the use of colour.

The poems in the volume may, somewhat arbitrarily, but fitly fpr the present purpose, be considered as four or five groups. The poems in the first, headed by The Defence of Guenevere, King Arthur's Tomb and Sir Galahad, have love for their central theme and aim at conducting a more or less simple love story to its successful or disastrous issue with directness and clarity. The obscurity that alone threatens their complete success is not due to subtlety on the one hand nor to vagueness of conception on the other, but merely to a power of expression that was not yet sure of itself. Psychological subtlety was not, as is sometimes supposed, outside Morris's range ; on the contrary, he gives constant and varied evidence of a depth of perception in human affairs quite remarkable, as will be shown. But the subtlety was never confused and blurred by the sophistry that tempts so many poets on making a really pregnant psychological discovery into all kinds of unintelligible elaboration. When he saw clearly into the workings of the mind he recorded his vision in a few sharp and clearly defined strokes, and left it. Subtlety and obscurity are never synonymous in his work. And although, at twenty-four, his understanding of man's love for woman was naturally not very profound or wide in its range, it was passionate and quite sure of itself within its own imaginative experience. His failure in places to give his understanding clear utterance is the failure of a man not yet wholly used to his medium. When Guenevere says : —

While I was dizzied thus, old thoughts would crowd,

Belonging to the time ere I was bought By Arthur's great name and his little love ; Must I give up for ever then, I thought,

That which I deemed would ever round me move Glorifying all things ; for a little word. Scarce ever meant at all, must I now prove

Stone-cold for ever ?

the thought is neither close nor difficult, nor, on the other hand, is it loose, but the statement is not lucid. It is, however, intelligible after we have sifted it a little carefully, but in such a passage as —

A little thing just then had made me mad ; I dared not think, as I was wont to do. Sometimes, upon my beauty ; if I had

Held out my long hand up against the blue. And, looking on the tenderly darken'd fingers. Thought that by rights one ought to see quite through.

There, see you, where the soft still light yet lingers, Round by the edges ; what should I have done. If this had joined with yellow spotted singers,

And startling green drawn upward by the sun ?

the thought is hidden in an utterance so tangled and involved as to make it almost impossible to straighten it out, and in any case poetry so enigmatic ceases to he poetry at all. Such extreme instances are, however, very rare even in this first volume, and scarcely ever to be found in his later work. The title-poem throughout is uncertain in its expression. There are passages of fine directness and precision as~

And fast leapt CaitifTs sword, until my knight Sudden threw up his sword to his left hand. Caught it, and swung it ; that was all the fight,

and the picture of Guenevere at the close, listening for Launcelot, ' turn'd sideways,'

Like a man who hears

His brother's trumpet sounding through the wood Of his foe's lances.

but in spite of these and the unquestionable beauty of the poem's cumulative effect, there is a troubling lack of firmness in many places that makes the achievement incomplete. I think that the use of tcrza rima in itself has something to do with this. In a poem like Shelley's " Ode to the West Wind " we are prepared to follow the poet in any imaginative flight that he may attempt from moment to moment, and his adventurousness finds all the time some turn of thought that wiU perfectly fit the exacting demands of the form that he is using. But in Morris's poem the process of the narrative to be convincing can only be conducted in one way, and that way the poet frequently finds obstructed by the necessity of a verse-form particularly difficult in English. However this may be, King Arthur's Tomb is certainly less open to this charge of obscurity in utterance, and the thought has more imaginative force in it. There are passages here that suggest the presence of a poet to whom the highest things in poetry may yet be possible. Guenevere's cry —

Unless you pardon, what shall I do. Lord, But go to hell ? and there see day by day

Foul deed on deed, hear foulest word on word. For ever and for ever, such as on the way

To Camelot I heard once from a churl,

That curled me up upon my jennet's neck

With bitter shame ; how then. Lord, should I curl For ages and for ages ? dost thou reck

That I am beautiful, Lord, even as you And your dear mother ? why did I forget

You were so beautiful, and good, and true. That you loved me so, Guenevere ? O yet

If even I go to hell, / cannot choose

But love you, Christ, yea, though I cannot keep From loving Launceht.

has a poignancy and a curious understanding of the action of a mind in spiritual anguish that were to be so nobly employed in things like the close of Jason. The dramatic opposition of Guenevere's love, which is all the while troubled by the half-consciousness of sin, to Launcelot's, which is its own sole cause and justification, is, further, a first indication of the poet's power to set the elemental passions in action at once simple and convincing. When the Queen finds her lover lying on the dead king's tomb, she schools her tongue to a cold absurdity, not daring to trust herself, — ' Well done ! to pray for Arthur,' and Launcelot cries out : —

Guenevere ! Guenevere !

Do you not know me, are you gone mad ? fling

Your arms and hair about me, lest I fear You are not Guenevere, but some other thing.

and the queen's answer falls with the tragic intensity of spiritual self-betrayal —

Pray you forgive me, fair lord Launcelot ! I am not madj but I am sick ; they cling, God's curses, unto such as I am ; not

Ever again shall we twine arms and lips.

There is in this, and in the whole of the poem from this point a true and incisive sense of conflict, continually heightened by such perfectly balanced turns of the imagination as when Launcelot says : —

lo you her thin hand, That on the carven stone can not keep still Because she loves me against God's command.

culminating in the confused feelings of terror and appeased destiny at the end of Guenevere's speaking.

Sir Galahad : A Christmas Mystery is, it may 60 be said, entirely free of the obscurity, and shows, if not a profounder, yet a more acute power of perception. The beauty and tenderness of love-sorrow are themes common enough in poetry, but Morris by making Galahad's experience of them spring from his thought of other men's love presents them with a pecuUarly fresh poignancy. Galahad on his quest, ' dismal, unfriended,' thinks of the other knights.

And what if Palomydes also ride.

And over many a mountain and bare heath

Follow the questing beast with none beside ? Is he not able still to hold his breath

With thoughts of Iseult ? doth he not grow pale With weary striving, to seem best of all

To her, ' as she is best,' he saith ? to fail Is nothing to him, he can never fall.

For unto such a man love-sorrow is

So dear a thing unto his constant heart.

That even if he never win one kiss.

Or touch from Iseult, it will never part.

And Launcelot can think of Guenevere, 'next month I kiss you, or next week. And still you think of me,' but Galahad himself

Some carle shall find Dead in my arms in the half-melted snow,

and people will but say that he ' If he had lived, had been a right good knight ' and that very evening wUl be glad when 'in their scarlet sleeves the gay-dress'd minstrels sing.' The force of the poet's thought about a particular phase of love is intensified in an unmistakable way by placing the utterance on the lips of a man who is not speaking of his own experience, which would have been beautiful but a little sentimental, but of his hunger for the experience, sorrowful though it may be, which is emotionally tragic. And we find another stroke of memorable subtlety when the voice of the vision says to the knight, speaking of Launcelot's love for Guenevere : —

He is just what you know, O Galahad, This love is happy even as you say.

But would you for a little time be glad. To make me sorry long day after day ?

Her warm arms round his neck half throttle me The hot love-tears burn deep like spots of lead.

The thought here, with wonderful instinct on the part of the poet, is precisely Galahad's own. It shapes the compensation to his spirit for its hunger and loneliness. We feel, in passages such as these, that here is a poet exultant in the exercise of a rare faculty of statement. The spiritual discovery and the announcement are in perfect correspondence. A Good Knight in Prison, Old Love, The Sailing of the Sword and Welland River are the other poems that may be included in this first group. They attempt a smaller psychological range than the poems already considered, but they have the same emotional intention and achieve it with clarity and precision. These poems already show the pervasive passion for the earth that has been discussed ; the landscape is everywhere informed by intimacy and tenderness. Another aspect i of the poet's temper too finds expression — an extraordinarily vivid sense of natural change and death. With speculation as to the unknown Morris was never concerned in his poetry. Death was to him neither a fearful thing nor yet a deliverance or a promise. It was simply the severing of a beautiful thing that he loved — ^life ; the end of a journey that no labours could make wearisome. He did not question it, nor did he seek to evade its reality, but the thought of it was always coloured with a profound if perfectly brave melancholy. Without ever disputing with his reason the possibility of death's beneficence, it was not the beneficence of death that he perceived emotionally, but the pity of it. It was a fading away, and as such it filled him with a regretful tenderness, just as did the fading of the full year. The close of The Ode to the West Wind crystallizes a mental attitude of which Morris was temperamentally incapable. But it is, of course, a mistake to suppose that the beauty of his poetry suffers in consequence. It is not the nature of the mood that matters, but its personal intensity.

The poems of the second group, of which The Chapel in Lyoness is the most notable example, have a central point in common with those of the first, but there is a mysticism in them which is quite unrelated to the obscurity which has been examined. It is not a mysticism that has any definite scheme or purpose underlying it; indeed I am not sure that mysteriousness would not be a fitter word to use. It is just the mysteriousness of artistic youth, proud of the faculty of which it finds itself possessed and a little prodigal in its use. There is still the efibrt to keep the lines of the story clear, but they are deliberately the lines of a soft brush rather than a steel point. To read The Chapel in Lyoness, Concerning Geffray Teste Noire and The Judgment of God is to receive an impression which is clear enough as long as we refrain from seeking to define it too precisely. The central thought and incidents of these poems are set out perfectly plainly, but there is superimposed a mysticism to which, happily, there is no key. We may never be quite sure of its meaning, but we know at least that it does not mean something which would be clear if once we divined some elusive secret of its nature. It is like the soft scent of an orchard, and we accept it as gratefully and with as little question.

In poems such as Rapionzel and The Wind, however, the quality that in those other poems was but an incident is adopted as a definite manner. What was before merely atmosphere is here employed as the substance. These two poems scarcely make any direct statement at all, and yet they succeed in an extraordinary way in conveying a precise intellectual impression. Through a wealth of imagery and verbal colour run thin threads of suggestion that, fragile as they are, yet stand out as clearly as the veins in dark marble and have the same values. It is remarkable that the coloured clouds in which these poems are, as it were, wrapped, are never stifling. The flowers of Morris's poetry are never of the hot-house. At the moments when he is most freely putting language to decorative use, he preserves a freshness as of windy moorlands or the green stalks of lUies. At times the threads of suggestion disappear altogether, and in the third group we find poems which are frankly essays in colour without any attempt at concrete significance. The Tune of Seven Towers, Two Red Roses Across the Moon, The Blue Closet, are examples. It is wrong to say that these poems have no meaning. They mean exactly the colours that they themselves create. It would be as wise to say that a sunset or a blue distance of mountains is meaningless. Somewhere between poems like The Wind and The Tune of Seven Towers may be placed T'he GiUi/iower of Gold, Spell Bound, Golden Wings, and two or three others.

The volume, if it were to be measured by the poems already mentioned, would have the first great quality of being unforgettable. A note is struck which is not necessarily beyond the compass but certainly outside the temperament of anyone but Mo'rris. There is at present no trace of the discipleship to Chaucer, but a suggestion here and there of kinship with the Coleridge of " Kubla Khan " and the Keats of " La Belle Dame Sans Merci." The method of the later poems is already clearly suggested, but the feeling and expression are marked by the natural limitations and splendid excesses of youth. Morris places his figures on a background which is not unrelated to life but unrelated to the inessential circumstances of life. Through a changing year of daffodil tufts and roses, cornfields and autumn woods and the frozen twigs of winter, passes a pageant of knights in armour of silver and blue steel, with bright devices on their tabards and shields strewn with stars or flashing back gold to the sunlight, and queens and ladies passionate and beautiful. But they move on an earth that is the real earth of Morris's own experience; he has a definite meaning when he says

Why were you more fair Than aspens in the autumn at their best?

and the enchantment of his forests is that of the hornbeam twilight of his Essex homeland. And they themselves are people of flesh and blood, stirred by the common emotions of humanity. The passion, the glamour, and the poignancy of love and life all find mature expression in these pages, but we have to wait until Jason and The Earthly Paradise for the presence of the innate nobility of love and life behind these things. There is at present none of the fine austerity that is a quality essential to the highest poetry, but that is but to say that Morris in his youth was writing as a young man should and must write. The growth of the prophet in the poet is not to be looked for in the first fervour of song. The most that we can ask justly at this season is witness to the presence of the poet, and this we have here in abundance.

The most memorable achievement of the volume is, however. Sir Peter HarpdorCs End, which stands by itself, or, perhaps, with one other poem, The Haystack in the Floods. The historian of English drama during the second half of the nineteenth century might, if he were unwary, omit William Morris from his reckonings. If he were astute enough to remember him it would probably be as the author of Love is Enough. And yet at a time when some curious spell seems to have fallen on the poets whenever they turned their thoughts to the stage, Sir Peter Harpdons End reminds us of one, at least, to whom the union of drama and poetry was not impossible. Morris himself would seem to have been unconscious of the fact, for not only was he careless in this instance when a little care would have made his success strikingly complete, but henceforth he neglected this side of his faculty, exercising it on but one other occasion, and then in a more or less experimental mood, of which something will be said later. It will be well to examine this short play in detail, for its importance is apt to be under-estimated. In writing it Morris realized, as did no poet of his time and scarcely any poet since the close of the great epoch of poetic drama in England, the exact value of action in drama. The complete subordination of character and idea to action is a brief epitome of that degeneration of the modern theatre from which we are now witnessing the dawn of a deliverance. The supreme, though not necessarily the only, function of the drama is to show the development of character and the progress of idea through the medium of action, and until to-day the stage has been surrendered for a century, if not for a longer period, to work that is wholly unconcerned with this condition.

The event has been everything. The poets from Shelley to Swinburne have realized this error and revolted, but in their eagerness to correct an abuse that was threatening the highest manifestation of their art, they have with amazing regularity overlooked another condition which, if not of equal importance, cannot be disregarded without lamentable results. Determined to dispossess action of its usurped authority, they have neglected its lawful and indispensable service. Their opponents in asserting action at the cost of all other things, and having, in consequence, nothing to say beyond the bare statement of events, have failed to produce either good literature or good drama, whilst they themselves, in turning to ideas alone, have had much to say and have so produced good and often noble literature, but in neglecting to preserve the right balance between ideas and action they too have failed to produce good drama. They have, unfortunately, no just answer to the charge that they constantly allow the play of character and idea to be unrelated to the action which they have chosen as their framework. Their failure in dramatic result, though free of the deplorable poverty and baseness of the method against which they were a reaction, is no less complete. Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, all wrote fine dramatic poetry, but they cannot show between them a poetic play that achieves with any precision the fundamental purpose of drama.

Morris's instinct in this matter was perfectly poised. The mechanical part of the technique in Sir Peter Harpdon's End is as crude as it well could be, chiefly, as I have suggested, on account of the poet's indifference. Short scenes follow each other in rapid succession, and in the middle of the play there is a hiatus which is intelligible enough but destroys the dramatic continuity. These defects make it difficult, though not impossible, for stage presentation, but otherwise it would, I beUeve, survive the ordeal triumphantly. The opening of the play is admirably contrived. In a few deft strokes the character of Peter Harpdon is outlined, and we know that he has humour and understanding of men, and a tenderness coloured by a certain roughness of temper. All this is shown strictly by his relation to the action in which he is involved — there is not a line but helps the development of this. Then in perfectly natural sequence the action enables him in a speech of little more than twenty lines to define the circumstances from which it has sprung, and thus we have set before us at the outset the nature of the protagonist and the situation in relation to which we are to look for that nature's manifestation; and already it is clear, in the character of John Curzon, that the people among whom Harpdon is to move will be no less sharply stated and proved than himself. The construction of this opening could not well be more skilful or instinctively right. Then follows what at first seems to be a momentary lapse into the dramatic error of which I have spoken.

In a long soliloquy Peter reveals directly his spiritual and mental attitude towards this action in which he is involved and indirectly the commentary of the poet himself upon that attitude. This in itself is perfectly legitimate, and supported, of course, by all the poets of whom Shakespeare is the spring, indeed by all the great dramatic poets of literature. The Greek chorus realizes this end as one of its essential functions no less clearly than do the soliloquies of Hamlet ; and until the poets see once again the significance of this fact and adapt it to modern needs, refusing to have their authority usurped by theatrical showmen and their stage carpenters, they will continue to fail in bringing back their art to the theatre. But it must always be remembered that this choric element of the drama justifies itself only as long as it limits itself to the presentation of idea growing directly out of the action. When it allows digression and elaboration for their own sake, or the sake of some altogether extraneous idea, in short for any reason other than intensifying the fundamental idea which the progress of the action creates, it becomes undramatic and ceases to fulfil its only right purpose. It is at this point that the poets since the close of the Elizabethan age have misunderstood the necessities of drama, and in Peter Harpdon's soliloquy we suspect Morris for a moment of the same error. But careful examination of the speech itself proves the suspicion to be almost if not wholly unfounded. We find that there is nothing that is not the immediate result of his position, and the worst that can be said of it is that there are turns of thought which, although not dramatically irrelevant, are a little superfluous and do not heighten our perception. It is curious that in this speech there is evidence of external contemporary influence in manner such as is scarcely to be found elsewhere in the book. There is at least a suggestion of Browning in such lines as —