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 hand of Ulysses. The simplicity of Morris's art is yet
compact of the profound and inscrutable mystery. It is not wholly
true to say that all great or good art is simple. 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 _The Life and Death of Jason_, the
tenderness and architectural strength of _The Earthly Paradise_ and
the fiery triumph of _Sigurd the Volsung_ 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 outline 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
A great God's angel standing, _with such dyes
Not known on earth, on his great wings_
and
he sat alone
_With raiment half blood-red, half white as snow._
and
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,
_The blue owls on my father's hood_
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-book,
Wherein, whenever we 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 sword
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 for 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 be 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 Caitiff's 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,'