LATER WRITINGS.
The writings of Morris's later years consist, as we have seen, chiefly of
prose romances. The little group beginning with _The House of the
Wolfings_ and ending with _The Sundering Flood_ were written with no
polemical or proselytising intention, with merely his old delight in
storytelling and in depicting the beauty of the external world and the
kindness of men and maids. Curiosity had never played any great part in
his mental equipment; he cared little to know or speculate further than
the visible and tangible surface of life. "The skin of the world" was
sufficient for him, and in these later romances all that is beautiful and
winning has chiefly to do with the skin of the world presented in its
spring-time freshness. The background of nature is always exquisite. With
the landscape of the North, which had made its indelible impression upon
him, he mingled the scenes--"the dear scenes" he would have called
them--of his childhood and the fairer portions of the Thames shore as he
had long and intimately known them; and in his books, as in his familiar
letters, he constantly speaks of the weather and the seasons as matters of
keen importance in the sum of daily happiness. Thus, whatever we miss from
his romances, we gain, what is missing from the majority of modern books,
familiarity with the true aspect of the outdoor world. We have the
constant sense of ample sky and pleasant air, and green woods and cool
waters. The mountains are near us, and often the ocean, and the freedom of
a genuine wildwood that is no enchanted forest or ideal vision.
Inexpressibly charming are such pictures as those of Elfhild (in _The
Sundering Flood_) piping to her sheep and dancing on the bank of the
river, on the bright mid-April day, whose sun dazzles her eyes with its
brilliant shining; and of Birdalone (in _The Water of the Wondrous Isles_)
embroidering her gown and smock in the wood of Evilshaw. What could be
more expressive of lovely open-air peace than this description? "Who was
glad now but Birdalone; she grew red with new pleasure, and knelt down and
kissed the witch's hand, and then went her way to the wood with her
precious lading, and wrought there under her oak-tree day after day, and
all days, either there, or in the house when the weather was foul. That
was in the middle of March, when all birds were singing, and the young
leaves showing on the hawthorns, so that there were pale green clouds, as
it were, betwixt the great grey boles of oak and sweet-chestnut; and by
the lake the meadow-saffron new-thrust-up was opening its blossom; and
March wore and April, and still she was at work happily when now it was
later May, and the harebells were in full bloom down the bent before her
... and still she wrought on at her gown and her smock, and it was
well-nigh done. She had broidered the said gown with roses and lilies, and
a tall tree springing up from amidmost the hem of the skirt, and a hart on
either side thereof, face to face of each other. And the smock she had
sewn daintily at the hems and the bosom with fair knots and buds. It was
now past the middle of June hot and bright weather."
And only less delightful than these glimpses of the natural world are the
recurring portraits of half-grown boys and girls, all different and all
lovable. The sweetness of adolescent beauty had for Morris an irresistible
appeal, and while his characters have little of the psychological charm
inseparable in real life from dawning qualities and undeveloped
potentialities, they are as lovely as the morning in the brightness of
hair, the slimness of form, the freedom of gesture with which he endows
them. The shapely brown hands and feet of Ursula, her ruddy colour, her
slender sturdiness, and brave young laugh are attractions as potent as the
more delicate charm of Birdalone's serious eyes and thin face, or
Elfhild's flower-like head and tender playfulness; and all these heroines
are alike in a fine capability for useful toil and pride in it. When the
old carle says to Birdalone, "It will be no such hard life for thee, for I
have still some work in me, and thou mayst do something in spite of thy
slender and delicate fashion," she replies with merry laughter, "Forsooth,
good sire, I might do somewhat more than something; for I am deft in all
such work as here ye need; so fear not but I should earn my livelihood,
and that with joy." Ursula also knows all the craft of needlework, and all
the manners of the fields, and finds nothing in work to weary her; and
even in the Maid of _The Wood beyond the World_, with her magic power to
revive flowers by the touch of her fingers, is felt the preferable human
power to make comfort and pleasantness by the right performance of plain
tasks.
Nearly if not quite equal to Morris's expression of love for the beauty of
nature and of fair humanity is his expression of the love for beautiful
handicraft, to which his whole life and all his writings alike testify.
Whatever is omitted from his stories of love and adventure, he never omits
to familiarise his readers with the ornament lavished upon buildings and
garments and countless accessories; hardly a dozen pages of any one of the
romances may be turned before the description of some piece of artistic
workmanship is met. Osberne's knife in _The Sundering Flood_ is early
introduced to the reader as "a goodly weapon, carven with quaintnesses
about the heft, the blade inlaid with runes done in gold and the sheath
of silver," and the gifts he sends to Elfhild across the flood are "an
ouch or chain or arm-ring" fashioned "quaintly and finely," or "fair
windowed shoon, and broidered hosen and dainty smocks, and silken
kerchiefs"; much is made of his holiday raiment of scarlet and gold, of
his flowered green coat, and of the fine gear of gold and green for which
Elfhild changes her grey cloak. In _The Story of the Glittering Plain_,
filled as it is with the sterner spirit of the sagas, there is still room
for much detail concerning the carven panelling of the shut-bed, in which
was pictured "fair groves and gardens, with flowery grass and fruited
trees all about," and "fair women abiding therein, and lovely young men
and warriors, and strange beasts and many marvels, and the ending of wrath
and beginning of pleasure, and the crowning of love," and for the account
of the painted book, "covered outside with gold and gems" and painted
within with woods and castles, "and burning mountains, and the wall of the
world, and kings upon their thrones, and fair women and warriors, all most
lovely to behold." As for the fair Birdalone, her pleasure in fine stuffs
and rich embroideries is unsurpassed in the annals of womankind. The
wood-wife with canny knowledge of her tastes brings her the fairy web,
declaring that if she dare wear it she shall presently be clad as goodly
as she can wish. Birdalone can be trusted to don any attire that meets her
fancy (and to doff it as willingly, for she has a startling habit not
uncommon with Morris's heroines of stripping off her garments to let the
winds of heaven play upon her unimpeded). The wood-wife places the raiment
she has brought on Birdalone's outstretched arms, "and it was as if the
sunbeam had thrust through the close leafage of the oak, and made its
shadow nought a space about Birdalone, so gleamed and glowed in shifty
brightness the broidery of the gown; and Birdalone let it fall to earth,
and passed over her hands and arms the fine smock sewed in yellow and
white silk, so that the web thereof seemed of mingled cream and curd; and
she looked on the shoon that lay beside the gown, that were done so nicely
and finely that the work was as the feather-robe of a beauteous bird,
whereof one scarce can say whether it be bright or grey, thousand-hued or
all simple of colour. Birdalone quivered for joy of all the fair things,
and crowed in her speech as she knelt before Habundia to thank her." Thus
Morris carried into his "pleasure-work of books" the "bread-and-butter
work" of which he was hardly less fond.
But in the deeper realities of life with which even romantic fiction may
deal, and must deal if it is to lay hold of the modern imagination, these
romances are poor. Not one of his characters is developed by circumstance
into a fully equipped human being thoroughly alive to the intellectual and
moral as to the physical and emotional world. His men and women are
eternally young and, with the physical freshness of youth, have also the
crude, unrounded, unfinished, unmoulded character of youth. They have all
drunk of the Well at the World's End, and the scars of experience have
disappeared, leaving a blank surface. The range of their emotions and
passions is as simple and narrow as with children, and life as the great
story-tellers understand it is not shown by the chronicle of their days.
In many of the romances, it is true, the introduction of legendary and
unreal persons and incidents relieves the writer from all obligation to
make his account more lifelike than a fairy-tale; but Morris is never
content to make a fairy-tale pure and simple. Marvellous adventures told
directly as to a child are not within his method. One of his critics has
described _The Water of the Wondrous Isles_ as a three-volume novel in the
environment of a fairy-tale, and the phrase perfectly characterises it. A
sentimental atmosphere surrounds his figures, and suggests languor and
soft moods not to be tolerated by the writer of true fairy-tales, for
while love is certainly not alien to even the purest type of the latter,
with its witch and its princess and its cruel step-mother and rescuing
prince, it is not love as Morris depicts it any more than it is love as
Dante or Shakespeare depicts it. In Morris's stories the lovers are
neither frankly symbolic creatures of the imagination whose loves are
secondary to their heroic or miraculous achievements, and who apparently
exist only to give a reason for the machinery of witchcraft, nor are
they, like the lovers of the great novels, endowed with thoughtful minds
and spiritual qualities. They are too sophisticated not to be more
complex. The modern taste is unsympathetic to their endless kissing and
"fawning" and "clipping," nor would ancient taste have welcomed their
refinements of kindness toward each other or the lack of zest in their
adventures. Morris seems to have tried somewhat, as in the case of his
handicrafts, to start with the traditions of the Middle Ages and to infuse
into them a modern spirit that should make them legitimate successors and
not mere imitations of the well-beloved mediaeval types. That he did not
entirely succeed was the fault not so much of his method as of his
deficient insight into human nature. He could not create what he had never
closely investigated.
When we read his prose romances, their framework gives many a clue to
their ancestry, but it is an ancestry so remote from the interest of the
general reader as to puzzle more than charm in its influence upon the
modern product. In _The House of the Wolfings_, _The Roots of the
Mountains_, and especially _The Glittering Plain_, we have more or less
modernised sagas, obviously derived from the Icelandic literature of which
he had been drinking deep. The hero of _The Glittering Plain_ is as
valorous a youth and as given to brave adventures as the great Sigurd, the
environment is Norse, and so are the names of the characters--Sea-eagle,
Long-hoary, Grey Goose of the Ravagers, and Puny Fox. Other words and
phrases also drawn from the "word-hoard" of the Icelandic tongue are
sprinkled over the pages. We find "nithing-stake" and byrny, and bight,
spoke-shave and ness and watchet, sley and ashlar and ghyll, used as
expressions of familiar parlance. The characters give each other "the sele
of the day," retire to shut-beds at night, and look "sorry and sad and
fell" when fortune goes against them. They wander in garths and call each
other faring-fellow and they yea-say and nay-say and wot and wend. It is
not altogether surprising to find some of Morris's most loyal followers
admitting that they can make nothing of books written in this archaic
prose.
In the subsequent romances the comparative sturdiness imparted by the
writings of the North gives place to a mildness and grace suggestive of
those early French romances the charm of which Morris had always keenly
felt. We still have much the same vocabulary and more or less use of the
same magic arts, "skin-changing" holding its own as a favourite method of
overcoming otherwise insuperable difficulties; but we have more of the
love motive and a clearer endeavour to portray the relations of the
characters to each other. In all, however, the French and Scandinavian
influences are so mingled with each other and with the element provided by
Morris alone, and so fused by his fluent prolix style, as to produce a
result somewhat different from anything else in literature, with a
character and interest personal to itself, and difficult to imitate in
essence, although wofully lending itself to parody. The subject never
seems important. There is no sense that the writer was spurred to
expression by the pressure of an irresistible message or sentiment. We
feel that anything may have started this copious flow of words, and that
there is no logical end to them. The title of _The Well at the World's
End_ was taken from an old Scottish ballad called by that name which
Morris had never read, but the title of which struck his fancy, and the
book reads as though it had grown without plan from the fanciful,
meaningless title.
Of these later romances, _The Glittering Plain_ is the most saga-like, and
_The Water of the Wondrous Isles_ is most permeated by the romantic spirit
of the Arthurian legends and their kin. Despite all defects, the latter
has a bright bejewelled aspect that pleases the fancy although it does not
deeply enlist the imagination. The story is leisurely and wandering. The
heroine, Birdalone, some of whose characteristics have already been
mentioned, is stolen in her infancy from her home near a town called
Utterhay, by a witch-wife who brings her up on the edge of a wood called
Evilshaw and teaches her to milk and plough and sow and reap and bake and
shoot deer in the forest. When she is seventeen years of age she meets in
the forest Habundia, a fairy woman, who gives her a magic ring by which
she may make herself invisible and a lock of hair by burning a bit of
which she may summon her in time of need. Birdalone soon after escapes
from the witch-wife in a magic boat, and passes through fabulous scenes to
enchanted islands, where she finds friends and enemies. Three maidens,
Atra, Viridis, and Aurea, save her from the latter, and send her forth to
find for them their lovers. While on her quest she travels to various
isles,--the Isle of the Young and the Old, the Isle of the Queens, the
Isle of the Kings, and the Isle of Nothing,--which afford opportunity for
strange pictures and quaint conceits but have nothing to do with the
narrative. When Birdalone finds the lovers of her friends, the Golden
Knight, the Green Knight, and Arthur the Black Squire, called the Three
Champions, they are charmed by her beauty and friendliness, and she
immediately falls in love with the Black Squire, betrothed of Atra.[3] The
Black Squire returns her prompt affection, but has grace to show himself
moody and downcast at the thought of breaking faith with his lady.
Presently the Three Champions go their ways to find the three maidens who
were kind to Birdalone and who are kept on the Isle of Increase Unsought
by a witch, sister to Birdalone's early guardian, and Birdalone, weary of
waiting for their return, fares forth to meet adventures and lovers in
plenty. To all the brave knights and youths who take their turn at wooing
her she is pitiful and gentle after her fashion, and thanks them kindly,
and praises them and suffers them to kiss her for their comfort, and deems
them "fair and lovely and sweet," but keeps her preference for the Black
Squire. Now, when the Three Champions come back with their ladies and find
Birdalone fled there is much distress among them, and the knights set
forth to find her. Meeting with her, they are set upon by the bad Red
Knight, into whose custody she has recently been thrown, and Baudoin, the
Golden Knight, is killed. Returning with this bad news to the three
ladies, the two remaining knights, who have rescued Birdalone and killed
the Red Knight, decide to ride back into the latter's domain and make war
upon his followers. In the meantime Atra has learned that the Black Squire
has transferred his affections from her to Birdalone, and does not attempt
to dissemble her grief thereat, none of Morris's characters being gifted
in the art of dissimulation, particularly where love is concerned.
Birdalone, departing from the course which Morris elsewhere is most
inclined to sanction, decides to renounce in Atra's favour, and betakes
herself to the town of Greenford, where she is received into the
broiderers' guild and works with a woman who turns out to be her own
mother, from whom she was stolen by the witch. With her she lives for five
years, when sickness slays Audrey, the mother, and Birdalone can no
longer resist the temptation to seek her love, the Black Squire, again. So
she makes her way once more through marvellous adventures into the old
forest of Evilshaw, where she comes again upon her fairy friend Habundia,
by whose aid she finds the Black Squire. The latter has met with
misfortunes and is lost in the forest, where he falls ill. Birdalone
nurses him back to health, and they decide that whether Atra be dead or
alive they will have no more parting from one another. They are soon to be
put to the test, as in the wood they come upon Atra and their other
friends, who have set out to seek them, being anxious for their welfare,
and who have been overcome by caitiffs and bound and held prisoners.
Arthur and Birdalone rescue them, and all these friends make up their
minds to go together and dwell in Utterhay for the rest of their lives.
Aurea finds another lover in place of the Golden Knight she has lost, but
Atra is faithful in heart to the Black Squire, though able to bear with
philosophy his union with Birdalone. Thus they live happily ever after.
Upon this skeleton of mingled reality and dream Morris built his general
idea of happy love. The tale might easily be twisted into an allegory,
since all the creatures of his imagination stand for either the
satisfactions or dissatisfactions of the visible world, but nothing is
more certain than that he meant no such interpretations to be put upon it.
When one of his critics assumed an allegorical intention in the story
called _The Wood Beyond the World_, he was moved to public refutation,
writing to the _Spectator_: "It is meant to be a tale pure and simple,
with nothing didactic about it. If I have to write or speak on social
problems, I always try to be as direct as I possibly can." The truth of
this is best known by those who most faithfully have followed his
writings, and it is entirely vain to try to squeeze from his "tales" any
ethical virtue beyond their frank expression of his singularly simple
temperament. Nevertheless, like the rest of his work, they reveal in some
degree his way of regarding the moral world. As we have seen, Birdalone
has her impulse toward renunciation, and for a brief interval one feels
that the story possibly may be allowed to run along the conventional lines
laid down by the civilised human race for the greatest good of the
greatest number. This, however, would have been wholly alien to the
writer's temper, and there is no shock to those familiar with this temper
in finding that in the end the hero and heroine eat their cake and have
it. Renunciation on the side of the unbeloved is effected with grace and
nobility, but it is made clear that it is a question of accepting the
inevitable in as lofty a spirit as possible. It is perhaps the most
obvious moral characteristic of Morris's types in general, that they are
no more prone than children to do what they dislike unless circumstance
forces them to it. If we were to argue from his romances alone we could
almost imagine him contending that what one dislikes in conduct is wrong,
just as he did contend that what one dislikes in art is bad. But if his
men and women do not willingly renounce, at least they do not exult. The
sight of unhappiness pains them. For stern self-denial he substitutes the
softer virtues of amiability and sweetness of temper. A high level of
kindliness and tenderness takes the place of more compelling and
formidable emotions. "Kind," indeed, is one of the adjectives of which one
soonest wearies when confined to his vocabulary, and "dear," is another.
We read of "dear feet and legs," of dear and kind kisses, of kind
wheedling looks, of kind and dear maidens, and dear and kind lads, and
everyone is kind and dear who is not evil and cruel. What Morris's
romances preach, if they preach anything, is: that we should get from life
all the enjoyment possible, hurting others as little as may be consistent
with our own happiness, but claiming the satisfaction of all honest
desires; that, in thus satisfying ourselves, we should keep toward those
about us a kind and pleasant countenance and a consideration for their
pain even when our duty toward ourselves forces us to inflict it. It is a
narrow and exclusive teaching, and ill adapted to foster freedom of mind
and spirit. It is a teaching that provides no breastplate for the buffets
of fortune, and sets before one no ideal of intellectual or spiritual life
the attainment of which would bring pleasure austere and exquisite. There
is no stimulus and no sting in the love depicted. Even its ardour is
checked and wasted by its dallying with the external charms that seem to
veil rather than to reveal the spirit within the flesh. It is the essence
of immaturity. But while we gain from the observation of Morris's
childlike characters, playing in a world that knows no conventions and
consequently no shame, a foreboding of the weariness that would attend
such a life as he plans for them, we are conscious also that he is trying
characteristically, to go back to the beginning, and to start humanity
aright and afresh; to show us fine and healthy sons of Adam and daughters
of Eve, "living," to use his own words, "in the enjoyment of animal life
at least, happy therefore, and beautiful according to the beauty of their
race." He sets them among the surroundings he loves, gives them the
education he values, and leaves them with us--the blithe children of a new
world, whose maturity he is content not to forecast. With such health of
body, he seems to say, and such innocence of heart, what noble
commonwealth may not arise, what glory may not enter into civilisation?