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 _terza 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 will 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, _I cannot choose
But love you, Christ, yea, though I cannot keep
From loving Launcelot._
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 mad, 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 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 peculiarly 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 will 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 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 effort 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 _Rapunzel_ 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
lilies. 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 _The Gilliflower 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 Morris. 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
Harpdon's 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 Harpdon's 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 believe, 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--
Now this is hard: a month ago,
And a few minutes' talk had set things right
'Twixt me and Alice;--if she had a doubt.
As (may Heaven bless her!) I scarce think she had,
'Twas but their hammer, hammer in her ears,
Of 'how Sir Peter fail'd at Lusac bridge:'
And 'how Sir Lambert' (think now!) 'his dear friend,
His sweet, dear cousin, could not but confess
That Peter's talk tended towards the French,
Which he' (for instance Lambert) 'was glad of,
Being' (Lambert, you see) 'on the French side.'
The first scene closes with a swift turn of action carried on
correspondingly swift dramatic speech. Peter Harpdon is defending an
English castle in Poictou. His antagonist is his cousin Lambert, who
has misrepresented a circumstance of war to impugn Peter's loyalty to
his cause, careful for his own purposes that the rumour shall reach
the ears of Peter's lady, Alice. Peter has had no means of defending
himself, and his soliloquy is the outcome of the suffering that he
experiences at the thought of his wife's possible mistrust of him.
As he finishes, his servant, Clisson, comes in again, saying that a
herald has come from Lambert--
What says the herald of our cousin, sir?
CURZON. So please you, sir, concerning your estate,
He has good will to talk with you.
SIR PETER. Outside,
I'll talk with him, close by the gate St. Ives.
Is he unarm'd?
CURZON. Yea, sir, in a long gown.
SIR PETER. Then bid them bring me hither my furr'd gown,
With the long sleeves, and under it I'll wear,
By Lambert's leave, a secret coat of mail.
He will also take an axe, one--as we should expect of Morris--'with
Paul wrought on the blade'--
CURZON. How, sir! Will you attack him unawares,
And slay him unarm'd?
SIR PETER. Trust me, John, I know
The reason why he comes here with sleeved gown
Fit to hide axes up. So, let us go.
Peter Harpdon is a Gascon knight, and in the next scene Lambert urges
that this fact combined with expedience, for the French are in the
ascendancy, should induce him to leave the English. Peter answers
him at length but finishes in an aside--
Talk, and talk, and talk--
I know this man has come to murder me,
And yet I talk still.