In whatsoever William Morris does or says the hand or the voice of the
poet is seen or heard: in his house decorations no less than in his
epics, in his illuminated manuscripts no less than in his tapestries, in
his philippics against “restoration” no less than in his sage-greens, in
his socialism no less than in his samplers. And first a word as to his
poetry. Any critic who, having for contemporaries such writers as
Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and William Morris, fails to see that he
lives in a period of great poets may rest assured that he is a critic
born—may rest assured that had he lived in the days of the Elizabethans
he would have joined the author of ‘The Returne from Parnassus’ in
despising the unacademic author of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Lear.’ Among this band
of great contemporary poets what is the special position held by him who,
having set his triumphant hand to everything from the sampler up to the
epic, has now, by way of recreation, or rather by way of opening a
necessary safety-valve to ease his restless energies, invented a system
of poetic socialism and expounded it in a brand-new kind of prose
fiction?
A special and peculiar position Morris holds among his peers—on that we
are all agreed; but what is that position? We must not talk too
familiarly about the Olympian gods; but is it that, without being the
greatest where all are great, Morris is the one who on all occasions
produces pure poetry and nothing else? Without affirming that it is so,
we may at least ask the question. If other poets of our time show more
intellectual strength than he, are they, perchance, given sometimes to
adulterating their poetry with ratiocination and didactic preachments
such as were better left to the proseman? Without affirming that it is
so, we may at least ask the question. If other poets of our time can
reach a finer frenzy than he and give it voice with a more melodious
throat, are they, perchance, apt to forget that “eloquence is heard while
poetry is overheard”? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least
ask the question. If others, again, are more picturesque than he (though
these it might be difficult to find), are they, perchance, a little too
self-conscious in their word-pictures, and are they, perchance, apt to
pass into those flowery but uncertain ways that were first discovered by
Euphues? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the
question.
But supposing that we really had to affirm all these things about the
other Olympians, where then would be the position of him about whose work
such questions could not even be asked? Where would then be the place of
him who never passes into ratiocination or rhetoric, never passes into
excessive word-painting or into euphuism, never speaks so loud as to be
heard rather than overheard, but, on the contrary, gives us always clear
and simple pictures, and always in musical language? Where would then be
the place of him who is the very ideal, if not of the poet as _vates_,
yet of the poet as “maker”—the poet who always looks out upon life
through a poetic atmosphere which, if sometimes more attenuated than
suits some readers, is as simple and as clear as the air of a May
morning? A question which would be variously answered according to the
various temperaments of those who answer—of those who define poetry to be
“making,” or those who define it to be “prophesying,” or those who define
it to be “singing.”
Exception has, no doubt, been taken to certain archaisms in which Morris
indulges not only in the epic of ‘Sigurd,’ but also, and in a greater
degree, in his translations, especially in that rendering of the Odyssey.
It is not our business here to examine into the merits and demerits of
Morris as a translator; but if it were, this is what we should say on his
behalf. While admitting that now and again his diction is a little too
Scandinavian to be in colour, we should point to Matthew Arnold’s dictum
that in a versified translation a poet is no longer recognizable, and
then we should ask whether it is given to any man in any kind of diction
to translate Homer. One Homeric quality only can any one translator
secure, it seems; and if he can secure one, is not his partial failure
better than success in less ambitious efforts? To Chapman it was given
to secure in the Iliad a measure of the Homeric eagerness—but what else?
To Tennyson (in one wonderful fragment) it was given to secure a measure
of the Homeric dignity and also a measure of the Homeric picture—but what
else? There was still left one of the three supreme Homeric
qualities—the very quality which no one ever supposed could be secured
for our literature, or, indeed, for any other—Homer’s quality of _naïf_
wonder. There is no witchery of Homer so fascinating as this; and did
any one suppose that it could ever be caught by any translator? And
could it ever have been caught had not Nature in one of her happiest
moods bethought herself of evolving, in a late and empty day, the
industrious tapestry weaver of Merton and idle singer of ‘Sigurd,’ ‘The
Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ and ten thousand delightful verses
besides?
But can a writer be called _naïf_ who works in a diction belonging rather
to a past age than to his own? Morris has proved that he could.
Imagination is the basis upon which all other human faculties rest. In
the deep sense, indeed, one possession only have we “fools of nature,”
our imagination. What we fondly take for substance is the very shadow;
what we fondly take for shadow is the very substance. And day by day is
Science herself endorsing more emphatically than ever Hamlet’s dictum,
that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” By
the aid of imagination our souls confront the present, and, as a rule,
the present only. But Morris is an instance, and not a solitary one, of
a modern writer’s inhaling so naturally the atmosphere of the particular
past period his imagination delights in as to belong spiritually to that
period rather than his own. To deny sincerity of accent to Morris
because of his love of the simple old Scandinavian note—the note which to
him represents every other kind of primitive simplicity—would be as
uncritical as to deny sincerity of accent to Charles Lamb because of his
sympathy with Elizabethan and Jacobean times, or to Dante Rossetti
because of his sympathy with the period of his great Italian namesake.
So much for the poetry of our many-handed poet. As to his house
decorations, his illuminated manuscripts, his “anti-scrape” philippics,
his sage-greens, his tapestries, his socialism, and his samplers: to deal
with the infinite is far beyond the scope of an article so very finite as
this, or we could easily show that in them all there is seen the same
_naïf_ genius of the poet, the same rare instinct for beautiful
expression, the same originality as in the epics and the translations.
Let him who is rash enough to suppose that even the socialism of a great
poet is like the socialism of common folk read ‘John Ball.’ Let him
observe how like Titania floating and dancing and playing among the
Athenian clowns seems the Morrisian genius floating and dancing and
playing among the surroundings in which at present it pleases him to
disport. What makes the ordinary socialistic literature to many people
unreadable is its sourness. What the Socialists say may be true, but
their way of saying it sets one’s teeth on edge. They contrive to state
their case with so much bitterness, with so much unfairness—so much lack
of logic—that the listener says at once, “For me, _any_ galley but this!
Things _are_ bad; but, for Heaven’s sake, let us go on as we are!”
By the clever competition of organisms did Nature, long before socialism
was thought of, contrive to build up a world—this makeshift world. By
the teeth of her very cats did she evolve her succulent clover. But
whether the Socialists are therefore wrong in their views of society and
its ultimate goal is not a question we need discuss. What they want is
more knowledge and less zeal. It is possible to see, and see clearly,
that the social organism is far from being what it ought to be, and at
the same time to remember that man is a creature of slow growth, and that
even in reaching his present modest stage of development the time he
required was long—long indeed unless we consider his history in relation
to the history of the earth, and then he appears to have been very
commendably expeditious. If there is any truth in what the geologists
tell us of the vast age of the earth, it seems only a few years ago that
man succeeded, after much heroic sitting down, in wearing off an
appendage which had done him good service in his early tree-climbing
days, but which, with new environments and with trousers in prospect, had
ceased to be useful or ornamental. An anthropoid Socialist would have
advised him to “cut it off,” and had he done so he would have bled to
death.
That among all her children Man is really Nature’s prime favourite seems
pretty evident, though no one can say why. It is to him that the Great
Mother is ever pointing and saying, “A poor creature, but mine own. I
shall do something with him some day, but I must not try to force him.”
Here, indeed, is the mistake of the Socialists. They think they can
force the very creature who above all others cannot be forced. They
think they can turn him into something rich and strange—turn him in a
single generation—even as certain ingenious experimentalists turned what
Nature meant for a land-salamander into a water-salamander, with new
rudder-tail and gills instead of lungs and feet suppressed, by feeding
him with water animals in oxygenated water and cajoling his functions.
Competition, that evolved Shakespeare from an ascidian, may be a mistake
of Nature’s—M. Arsène Houssaye declares that she never was so wise and
artistically perfect as we take her to be—but her mistakes are too old to
be rectified in a single generation. A little more knowledge, we say,
and a little less zeal would save the Socialist from being considered by
the advanced thinker—who, studying the present by the light of the past,
sees that all civilization is provisional—as the most serious obstructive
whom he has to encounter.
As to Morris, we have always felt that, take him all round, he is the
richest and most varied in artistic endowments of any man of our time.
On whichsoever of the fine arts he had chanced to concentrate his gifts
and energies the result would have been the same as in poetry. In the
front rank he would always have been. But it is not until we come to
deal with his socialism that we see how entirely aestheticism is the
primal source from which all his energies spring. That he has a great
and generous heart—a heart that must needs sympathize with every form of
distress—no one can doubt who reads these two books, {263} and yet his
socialism comes from an entirely æsthetic impulse. It is the vulgarities
of civilization, it is the ugliness of contemporary life—so unlike that
Earthly Paradise of the poetic dream—that have driven him from his
natural and proper work. He cannot take offence at our saying this, for
he has said it himself in ‘Signs of Change’:—
“As I strove to stir up people to this reform, I found that the
causes of the vulgarities of civilization lay deeper than I had
thought, and little by little I was driven to the conclusion that all
these uglinesses are but the outward expression of the innate moral
baseness into which we are forced by our present form of society, and
that it is futile to attempt to deal with them from the outside.
Whatever I have written, or spoken on the platform, on these social
subjects is the result of the truths of socialism meeting my earlier
impulse, and giving it a definite and much more serious aim; and I
can only hope, in conclusion, that any of my readers who have found
themselves hard-pressed by the sordidness of civilization, and have
not known where to turn to for encouragement, may receive the same
enlightenment as I have, and that even the rough pieces in this book
may help them to that end.”
With these eloquent words no one can more fully agree than we do, so far
as they relate to the unloveliness of Philistine rule. But though the
bad features of the present time {264} are peculiar to itself, when were
those paradisal days of which Morris dreams? when did that merry England
exist in which the general sum of human happiness and human misery was
more equally distributed than now?
Those “dark ages” beloved of the author of ‘John Ball’ may not have been
quite so dark as Swinburne declares them to have been; but in this matter
of the equalization of human happiness were they so very far in advance
of the present time? Those who have watched the progress of Morris’s
socialism know that, so far from being out of keeping with the
“anti-scrape” philippics and the tapestry weaving, it is in entire
harmony with them. Out of a noble anger against the “jerry builder” and
his detestable doings sprang this the last of the Morrisian epics, as out
of the wrath of Achilles sprang the Iliad. That the picturesqueness of
the John Ball period should lead captive the imagination of Morris was,
of course, inevitable. Society is at least picturesque wheresoever the
classes are so sharply demarcated as they were in the dark ages, when the
difference as to quality of flesh and blood between the lord and the
thrall was greater than the difference between the thrall and the swine
he tended. But what about the condition of this same picturesque thrall
who (as the law books have it) “clothed the soil”—whose every chance of
happiness, whose every chance of comfort, depended upon the arbitrary
will of some more or less brutal lord? What was the condition of the
English lower orders—the orders for whom many bitter social tears are now
being shed? What about the condition of the thralls in dark ages so dark
that even an apostle of Wyclif’s (this same John Ball, Morris’s hero)
preached the doctrine—unless he has been belied—that no child had a soul
that could be saved who had been born out of wedlock? The Persian
aphorism that warns us to beware of poets, princes, and women must have
had a satirical reference to the fact that their governance of the world
is by means of picturesqueness. Always it has been the picturesqueness
of tyranny that has kept it up. It was the picturesqueness of the _auto
de fe_ that kept up the Spanish Inquisition, but we may rest assured that
the most picturesque actors in that striking tableau would have preferred
a colourless time of jerry builders to a picturesqueness like that. To
find a fourteenth-century pothouse parlour painted by a modern Socialist
with a hand more loving than Walter Scott’s own is indeed touching:—
“I entered the door and started at first with my old astonishment,
with which I had woke up, so strange and beautiful did this interior
seem to me, though it was but a pothouse parlour. A quaintly carved
sideboard held an array of bright pewter pots and dishes and wooden
and earthen bowls; a stout oak table went up and down the room, and a
carved oak chair stood by the chimney-corner, now filled by a very
old man dim-eyed and white-bearded. That, except the rough stools
and benches on which the company sat, was all the furniture. The
walls were panelled roughly enough with oak boards to about six feet
from the floor, and about three feet of plaster above that was
wrought in a pattern of a rose stem running all round the room,
freely and roughly done, but with (as it seemed to my unused eyes)
wonderful skill and spirit. On the hood of the great chimney a huge
rose was wrought in the plaster and brightly painted in its proper
colours. There were a dozen or more of the men I had seen coming
along the street sitting there, some eating and all drinking; their
cased bows leaned against the wall, their quivers hung on pegs in the
panelling, and in a corner of the room I saw half a dozen bill-hooks
that looked made more for war than for hedge-shearing, with ashen
handles some seven foot long. Three or four children were running
about among the legs of the men, heeding them mighty little in their
bold play, and the men seemed little troubled by it, although they
were talking earnestly and seriously too. A well-made comely girl
leaned up against the chimney close to the gaffer’s chair, and seemed
to be in waiting on the company: she was clad in a close-fitting gown
of bright blue cloth, with a broad silver girdle, daintily wrought,
round her loins, a rose wreath was on her head, and her hair hung
down unbound; the gaffer grumbled a few words to her from time to
time, so that I judged he was her grandfather.”
“Morris’s ‘Earthly Paradise’!” the reader will exclaim. Yes; and here we
come upon that feature of originality which, as has been before said,
distinguishes Morris’s socialism from the socialism of the prosaic
reformer.
Political opinions almost always spring from temperament. The
conservative temper of such a poet as Sir Walter Scott leads him to
idealize the past, and to concern himself but little about the future.
The rebellious temperament of such a poet as Shelley leads him to
idealize the future, and concern himself but little about the past. But
by contriving to idealize both the past and the future, and mixing the
two idealizations into one delicious amalgam, the poet of the ‘Earthly
Paradise’ gives us the Morrisian socialism, the most charming, and in
many respects the most marvellous product of “the poet’s mind” that has
ever yet been presented to an admiring world.
The plan of ‘John Ball’ is simplicity itself. The poet in a dream
becomes a spectator of the insurrection of the Kentish men at the time
when Wat Tyler rebelled against the powers that were; and the hero, John
Ball, who is mainly famous as having preached a sermon from the text
Wan Adam dalf and Eve span
Wo was thanne a gentilman?
is made to listen to the poet-dreamer’s prophecy of the days of
_bourgeois_ rule and the jerry builder.
If we take into account the perfect truth and beauty of the literary form
in which the story is presented, we do not believe that anything to
surpass it could be found in historic fiction; indeed, we do not know
that anything could be found to equal it. The difficulty of the
imaginative writer who attempts, whether in prose or verse, to vivify the
past seems to be increasing, as we have before said, every day with the
growth of the scientific temper and the reverence of the sacredness of
mere documents. The old-fashioned theory—the theory which obtained from
Shakespeare’s time down to Scott’s and even down to Kingsley’s—that the
facts of history could be manipulated for artistic purposes with the same
freedom that the artist’s own inventions can be handled, gave the artist
power to produce vital and flexible work at the expense of the historic
conscience—a power which is being curtailed day by day. The instinct for
vivifying by imaginative treatment the records of the past is too
universal and too deeply inwoven in the very texture of the human mind to
be other than a true and healthy instinct. But so oppressive has become
the tyranny of documents, so fettered by what a humourist has called
“factology” have become the wings of the romancer’s imagination, that one
wonders at his courage in dealing with historic subjects at all.
A bold writer would he be who in the present day should make Shakespeare
figure among the Kenilworth festivities as a famous player (after the
manner of Scott), or who should (after the manner of Kingsley) give
Elizabeth credit for Winter’s device of using the fire-ships before
Calais. Even the poet—he who, dealing as he does with essential and
elemental qualities only, is not so hampered as the proseman in these
matters—is beginning also to feel the tyranny of documents, as we see
notably in Swinburne’s ‘Bothwell,’ which consists very largely of
documents transfigured into splendid verse. But more than even this: the
mere literary form has now to be as true to the time depicted as
circumstances will allow. If Scott’s romances have a fault it is that,
as he had no command over, and perhaps but little sympathy with, the
beautiful old English of which Morris is such a master, his stories lack
one important element of dramatic illusion. But it is in the literary
form of his story that Morris is especially successful. Where time has
dealt most cruelly with our beloved language is in robbing it of that
beautiful cadence which fell from our forefathers’ lips as sweetly and as
unconsciously as melody falls from the throat of the mavis. One of the
many advantages that Morris has reaped from his peculiar line of study is
that he can write like this—he, and he alone among living men:—
“‘Surely thou goest to thy death.’ He smiled very sweetly, yet
proudly, as he said: ‘Yea, the road is long, but the end cometh at
last. Friend, many a day have I been dying; for my sister, with whom
I have played and been merry in the autumntide about the edges of the
stubble-fields; and we gathered the nuts and bramble-berries there,
and started thence the missel-thrush, and wondered at his voice and
thought him big; and the sparrow-hawk wheeled and turned over the
hedges, and the weasel ran across the path, and the sound of the
sheep-bells came to us from the downs as we sat happy on the grass;
and she is dead and gone from the earth, for she pined from famine
after the years of the great sickness; and my brother was slain in
the French wars, and none thanked him for dying save he that stripped
him of his gear; and my unwedded wife with whom I dwelt in love after
I had taken the tonsure, and all men said she was good and fair, and
true she was and lovely; she also is dead and gone from the earth;
and why should I abide save for the deeds of the flesh which must be
done? Truly, friend, this is but an old tale that men must die; and
I will tell thee another, to wit, that they live: and I live now and
shall live. Tell me then what shall befall.”
Note the music of the cadence here—a music that plays about the heart
more sweetly than any verse, save the very highest. And here we touch
upon an extremely interesting subject.
Always in reading a prose story by a writer whose energies have been
exercised in other departments of letters there is for the critic a
special interest. If this exercise has been in fields outside
imaginative literature—in those fields of philosophical speculation where
a logical method and a scientific modulation of sentences are
required—the novelist, instead of presenting us with those concrete
pictures of human life demanded in all imaginative art, is apt to give us
disquisitions “about and about” human life. Forgetting that it is not
the function of any art to prove, he is apt to concern himself deeply in
showing why his actors did and said this or that—apt to busy himself
about proving his story either by subtle analyses or else by purely
scientific generalizations, instead of attending to the true method of
convincement that belongs to his art—the convincement that is effected by
actual pictorial and dramatic illustration of how his actors really did
the things and said the things vouched for by his own imagination. That
the quest of a scientific, or supposed scientific, basis for a novelist’s
imaginative structure is fatal to true art is seen not only in George
Eliot and the accomplished author of ‘Elsie Venner,’ but also in writers
of another kind—writers whose hands cannot possibly have been stiffened
by their knowledge of science.
Among the many instances that occur to us we need point to only one, that
of a story recently published by one of our most successful living
novelists, in which the writer endeavours to prove that animal magnetism
is the acting cause of spiritualistic manifestations so called. Setting
out to show that a medium is nothing more than a powerful mesmerist, to
whose manipulations all but two in a certain household are unconsciously
succumbing, he soon ignores for plot purposes the nature of the dramatic
situation by making those very two sceptics at a séance hear the same
music, see the same spiritually conveyed newspaper, as the others hear
and see. That the writer should mistake, as he seems to do, the merely
directive force of magnetism for a motive force does not concern the
literary critic. But when two sceptics, who are to expose a charlatan’s
tricks by watching how the believers are succumbing to mesmeric
hallucinations, are found succumbing to the same hallucinations
themselves—succumbing because the story-teller needs them as witnesses of
the phenomena—then the literary critic grows pensive, for he sees what
havoc the scientific method will work in the flower-garden of art.
On the other hand, should the story-teller be a poet—one who, like the
writer of ‘John Ball,’ has been accustomed to write under the conditions
of a form of literary art where the diction is always and necessarily
concrete, figurative, and quintessential, and where the movement is
metrical—his danger lies in a very different direction. The critic’s
interest then lies in watching how the poet will comport himself in
another field of imaginative literature—a field where no such conditions
as these exist—a field where quintessential and concrete diction, though
meritorious, may yet be carried too far, and where those regular and
expected bars of the metricist which are the first requisites of verse
are not only without function, but are in the way—are fatal, indeed, to
that kind of convincement which, and which alone, is the proper quest of
prose art. No doubt it is true, as we have before said, that literature
being nothing but the reflex of the life of man, or else of the life of
nature, the final quest of every form of literature is that special kind
of convincement which is inherently suitable to the special form. For
the analogy between nature and true art is not a fanciful one, and the
relation of function to organism is the same in both. But what is the
difference between the convincement achieved by poetic and the
convincement achieved by prose art? Is it that the convincement of him
who works in poetic forms is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectly
achieved by a faithful record of the emotion aroused in his own soul by
the impact upon his senses of the external world, while the convincement
of the proseman is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectly achieved
by a faithful record and picture of the external world itself?
All such generalizations as this are, no doubt, to be taken with many and
great qualifications; but, roughly speaking, would not this seem to be
the fundamental difference between that kind of imaginative literature
which expresses itself in metrical forms and that kind of imaginative
literature in which metrical form is replaced by other qualities and
other functions? Not but that these two methods may meet in the same
work, not but that they may meet and strengthen each other, as we have
before said when glancing at the interesting question, How much, or how
little, of realism can poetry capture from the world of prose and weave
into her magic woof, and how much of music can prose steal from poetry?
But in order to do all that can be done in the way of enriching poetry
with prose material without missing the convincement of poetic art, the
poet must be Homer himself; in order to do all that can be done in the
way of vivifying prose fiction with poetic fire without missing the
convincement of prose art, the story-teller must be Charlotte Brontë or
Emily, her sister, in whose work we find for once the quintessential
strength and the concrete and figurative diction of the poet—indeed, all
the poetical requisites save metre alone. Had ‘Jane Eyre,’ ‘Villette,’
and ‘Wuthering Heights’ existed in Coleridge’s time he would, we may be
sure, have taken these three prose poems as illustrations of the truth of
his axiom that the true antithesis of poetry is not prose, but science.
What the prose poet has to avoid is metrical movement on the one side and
scientific modulation of sentences on the other. And perhaps in no case
can it be achieved save in the autobiographic form of fiction, where and
where alone the work is so subjective that it may bear even the poetic
glow of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Villette.’ What makes us think this to be so is
the fact that in ‘Shirley’—a story written in the epic method—the only
passages of the poetic kind which really convince are those uttered by
the characters in their own persons. And as to ‘Wuthering Heights,’ a
story which could not, of course, be told in one autobiography, the
method of telling it by means of a group of autobiographies, though
clumsy enough from the constructor’s point, was yet just as effective as
a more artistic method. And it was true instinct of genius that led
Emily Brontë to adopt the autobiographic method even under these heavy
conditions.
Still the general truth remains that the primary function of the poet is
to tell his story steeped in his own emotion, while the primary function
of the prose fictionist is to tell his story in an objective way. Hence
it is that in a general way the difficulty of the poet who turns to prose
fiction lies, like that of philosophical or scientific writers, in
suppressing certain intellectual functions which he has been in the habit
of exercising. And the case of Scott, which at first sight might seem to
show against this theory, may be adduced in support of it. For Scott’s
versified diction, though concrete, is never more quintessential than
that of prose; and his method being always objective rather than
subjective, when he turned to prose fiction he seemed at once to be
writing with his right hand where formerly he had been writing with his
left.
VIII. FRANCIS HINDES GROOME.
(THE TARNO RYE.)
1851–1902.