If I said
'You are a traitor, being, as you are
Born Frenchman.'
They flash out at each other and Lambert 'takes hold of something in
his sleeve,' strikes at Peter with a dagger, and is taken. He is
brought before Harpdon in the castle and sentenced--
Let the hangman shave his head quite clean,
And cut his ears off close up to the head,
Again we have the clear-cut delineation of character thrown up on a
framework of simple and logical action which all the while is
interesting as a means but not as an end. The blend of nobility and
savagery in Peter's nature stands sharply contrasted with the
meanness and merely dull cruelty of Lambert's. At this point the
hiatus occurs. The next scene is in the French camp, and Sir Peter
Harpdon is a prisoner before Guesclin and his officers, Lambert being
one of them. The dramatic opposition of the situation to that which
has immediately preceded it is admirable, but we need some
explanation that is not made. Apart from this defect, however,
Morris continues to build up his play with flawless instinct. Defeat
had turned Lambert's cruelty into pitiful and cringing terror, whilst
Peter at the moment of his power over his rival, although he had not
spared him, had shown some mercy, as to one whom he despised. Now,
with the shifting circumstance, the two prove themselves with
unerring completeness. Defeat purges Peter Harpdon's nature of all
its grosser parts, and he responds perfectly to the demands of tragic
chance; whilst Lambert in his triumph reveals himself in all the
degradation of a mean and wholly unheroic villainy. In both cases
the development is logical, indeed inevitable, and yet it depends
strictly upon the course of the action for its being. Already we
know the natures of the men, and, given the event, can foresee their
attitude with some certainty, but it needs the event itself to
complete our understanding. Peter is not a coward nor lacking in
nobility, yet when he hears that Lambert has come to him 'in a long
gown' he knows what that means, and he makes no foolish boast of
fearlessness, but frankly prepares himself with mail and axe. Now,
before his judges, the same temper is evident. Quite simply, and
with no blind defiance or pretence at indifference, he pleads for his
life, not, as the squire says of him afterwards--
Sullenly brave as many a thief will die,
Nor yet as one that plays at japes with God.
He states his case clearly, with dignity, yet earnestly. Clisson
intercedes for him in a passage that outlines with precision yet
another character, and Guesclin is sorry but obdurate; he must die.
Then Lambert taunts him. He exults in the downfall of his enemy with
a cruelty that is bestial yet calculated in every stroke, until his
victim blenches. Then--
I think you'll faint,
Your lips are grey so; yes, you will, unless
You let it out and weep like a hurt child;
Hurrah! you do now. Do not go just yet,
For I am Alice, am right like her now;
Will you not kiss me on the lips, my love?
and Clisson breaks in--
You filthy beast, stand back and let him go,
Or by God's eyes I'll choke you.
This second speech of Clisson's is his last, and yet the tenderness
and strength of the man are shown so definitely as to make him
complete and living. He continues, asking Peter to forgive him for
his share in his death--
I would,
If it were possible, give up my life
Upon this grass for yours; fair knight, although,
He knowing all things knows this thing too, well,
Yet when you see His face some short time hence,
Tell Him I tried to serve you.
and Peter makes his last utterance, full of passionate realization of
the moment, yet chiming to his character consistently to the end--
Oh! my lord,
I cannot say this is as good as life,
But yet it makes me feel far happier now,
And if at all, after a thousand years,
I see God's face, I will speak loud and bold,
And tell Him you were kind, and like Himself;
Sir, may God bless you!
He would not have them think that when he wept he did so because of
Lambert's taunts. He was
Deep in thought
Of all things that have happened since I was
A little child; and so at last I thought
Of my true lady: truly, sir, it seem'd
No longer gone than yesterday, that this
Was the sole reason God let me be born
Twenty-five years ago, that I might love
Her, my sweet lady, and be loved by her;
and so up to the close, which has all the awe and terror but also the
pity and exaltation of authentic tragedy--
I only wept because
There was no beautiful lady to kiss me
Before I died....
... O for some lady, though
I saw her ne'er before; Alice, my love,
I do not ask for; Clisson was right kind,
If he had been a woman, I should die
Without this sickness.
The last scene, as just in dramatic instinct as the rest of the play,
tells of the bearing of the news of Peter's death to the Lady Alice.
I have examined this play in some detail, and with a good many
quotations, for two reasons. One, already stated, to show that
Morris had an understanding of the nature of drama which is generally
overlooked, and secondly, because it is a common thing to hear people
to whom poetry is a matter of real importance say that they find
Morris--for all his beauty--languid and lacking in power of
concentration. If _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_ be languid or anything
but tense with concentrated emotion from beginning to end, then I
confess my sense of values to be much awry. And, although he left
the dramatic form, he did not lose this quality in his later work.
He employed, for reasons which will be discussed later, a certain
easy and decorative elaboration in much of his writing, but at the
right moment in _Jason_, in the tales of _The Earthly Paradise_ and
in _Sigurd the Volsung_, he was master of the direct vitality and
vibrating force that he first used in _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_ and
elsewhere when he needed them in this earliest volume, as in _The
Haystack in the Floods_, with unquestionable control and vividness.
The few poems that have not been mentioned are the lyrical
expressions of moods, snatches of song and swift little pictures in
many colours that give their own peculiar pleasure as do all the
fragmentary strokes of a great artist. They are exquisitely done,
but they must be read, not described.
Several of the poems published in _The Defence of Guenevere_ volume
had already appeared, as has been said, in "The Oxford and Cambridge
Magazine." In the same magazine Morris had also printed his first
essays in prose romance. A comparison of these with the poems shows
very clearly the value of that exaltation apart from the discovery,
which finds, as I have suggested, its expression in the music or
rhythmical pattern of verse. In more than one of these prose stories
Morris uses a subject that differs in no fundamental quality from
those used in many of the poems. The treatment shows the same
tenderness, the same love of the earth, the same power of direct and
vivid presentation of passion when it is needed, as in passages of
_Gertha's Lovers_, and the same delight in colour and all beautiful
things. And Morris uses his medium skilfully, and with a curiously
personal touch; his prose has the same freshness and light as his
verse. In short, we have here two groups of work from the same man,
alike in temper, substance and treatment, and in control, the only
difference being that of form. And that difference is everything,
for in the form lies the visible evidence of the spiritual pressure
at the moment of conception. There is no more stupid error than to
censure one work of art because it lacks the qualities of another
with which it has no point of contact. No sane person thinks less
of, say, "Wuthering Heights," because it has not the poetic
perfection of "Adonais." But the case of Morris's early prose
romances is different. They are delightful to read, they are in
themselves the treasurable expression of a fine spirit, yet they have
in them nothing that is not to be found in the poems. That being so,
it is inevitable that a close acquaintance with the poems should make
us a little careless of these prose tales, for in the poems we have
all the excellences that we find in the others, and we have added the
rhythmic exaltation which is the light on the wings of poetry.
Morris's fund of inventiveness was inexhaustible, but in his early
prose it discovered no quality that peculiarly fitted itself to the
medium; the inventiveness in the prose tales and the poems is the
same, and there is, in consequence, no compensation in the one for
the absence of the higher faculty of utterance that is found in the
other. Morris realized this himself, and for the next thirty years
created in verse. Nothing is further from my mind than to suggest
that _The Story of the Unknown Church_ and _Lindenborg Pool_,
_Gertha's Lovers_ and _The Hollow Land_ and _Svend and his Brethren_,
are other than beautiful expressions of a rare creative intelligence,
but no clearer evidence of the essential difference between that
which is poetry and that which is not could well be found than by
setting side by side things so closely related in many ways, indeed
in every way save one, as these stories and _The Defence of
Guenevere_ and _King Arthur's Tomb_, _Rapunzel_ and _The Wind_, _Sir
Peter Harpdon's End_ and _Shameful Death_. Nor could anything be
advanced more unanswerably supporting the contention that verse is
the one unassailable medium for poetry.
Nine years were to pass before Morris published his next book, _The
Life and Death of Jason_. The course of his life and the nature of
his development in the meantime are discussed briefly in the
following chapter.