This new volume of Mr. Morris is, we think, a book for all time; but it
is especially a book for these ripening summer days. To sit in the open
shade, inhaling the heated air, and, while you read these perfect fairy
tales, these rich and pathetic human traditions to glance up from your
page at the clouds and the trees, is to do as pleasant a thing as the
heart of man can desire. Mr. Morris's book abounds in all the sounds and
sights and sensations of nature, in the warmth of the sunshine, the
murmur of forests, and the breath of ocean-scented breezes. The fullness
of physical existence which belongs to climates where life is spent in
the open air, is largely diffused through its pages:
... "Hot July was drawing to an end,
And August came the fainting year to mend
With fruit and grain; so 'neath the trellises,
Nigh blossomless, did they lie well at ease,
And watched the poppies burn across the grass,
And o'er the bindweed's bells the brown bee pass,
Still murmuring of his gains: windless and bright
The morn had been, to help their dear delight.
... Then a light wind arose
That shook the light stems of that flowery close,
And made men sigh for pleasure."
This is a random specimen. As you read, the fictitious universe of the
poem seems to expand and advance out of its remoteness, to surge
musically about your senses, and merge itself utterly in the universe
which surrounds you. The summer brightness of the real world goes
halfway to meet it; and the beautiful figures which throb with life in
Mr. Morris's stories pass lightly to and fro between the realm of poetry
and the mild atmosphere of fact. This quality was half the charm of the
author's former poem, _The Life and Death of Jason_, published last
summer. We seemed really to follow, beneath the changing sky, the
fantastic boatload of wanderers in their circuit of the ancient world.
For people compelled to stay at home, the perusal of the book in a
couple of mornings was very nearly as good as a fortnight's holiday. The
poem appeared to reflect so clearly and forcibly the poet's natural
sympathies with the external world, and his joy in personal contact with
it, that the reader obtained something very like a sense of physical
transposition, without either physical or intellectual weariness.
This ample and direct presentment of the joys of action and locomotion
seems to us to impart to these two works a truly national and English
tone. They taste not perhaps of the English soil, but of those strong
English sensibilities which the great insular race carry with them
through their wanderings, which they preserve and apply with such energy
in every terrestrial clime, and which make them such incomparable
travellers. We heartily recommend such persons as have a desire to
accommodate their reading to the season--as are vexed with a delicate
longing to place themselves intellectually in relation with the genius
of the summer--to take this _Earthly Paradise_ with them to the country.
The book is a collection of tales in verse--found, without exception, we
take it, rather than imagined, and linked together, somewhat loosely, by
a narrative prologue. The following is the "argument" of the
prologue--already often enough quoted, but pretty enough, in its
ingenious prose, to quote again:--
"Certain gentlemen and mariners of Norway, having considered all that
they had heard of the Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it, and, after
many troubles and the lapse of many years, came old men to some western
land, of which they had never before heard: there they died, when they
had dwelt there certain years, much honoured of the strange people."
The adventures of these wanderers, told by one of their number, Rolf the
Norseman, born at Byzantium--a happy origin for the teller of a heroic
tale, as the author doubtless felt--make, to begin with, a poem of
considerable length, and of a beauty superior perhaps to that of the
succeeding tales. An admirable romance of adventure has Mr. Morris
unfolded in the melodious energy of this half-hurrying, half-lingering
narrative--a romance to make old hearts beat again with the boyish
longing for transmarine mysteries, and to plunge boys themselves into a
delicious agony of unrest.
The story is a tragedy, or very near it--as what story of the search for
an Earthly Paradise could fail to be? Fate reserves for the poor
storm-tossed adventurers a sort of fantastic compromise between their
actual misery and their ideal bliss, whereby a kindly warmth is infused
into the autumn of their days, and to the reader, at least, a very
tolerable Earthly Paradise is laid open. The elders and civic worthies
of the western land which finally sheltered them summon them every month
to a feast, where, when all grosser desires have been duly pacified,
the company sit at their ease and listen to the recital of stories. Mr.
Morris gives in this volume the stories of the six midmonths of the
year, two tales being allotted to each month--one from the Greek
Mythology, and one, to express it broadly, of a Gothic quality. He
announces a second series in which, we infer, he will in the same manner
give us the stories rehearsed at the winter fireside.
The Greek stories are the various histories of Atalanta, of Perseus, of
Cupid and Psyche, of Alcestis, of Atys, the hapless son of Croesus,
and of Pygmalion. The companion pieces, which always serve excellently
well to place in relief the perfect pagan character of their elder
mates, deal of course with elements less generally known.
"Atalanta's Race," the first of Mr. Morris's Greek legends, is to our
mind almost the best. There is something wonderfully simple and
childlike in the story, and the author has given it ample dignity, at
the same time that he has preserved this quality.
Most vividly does he present the mild invincibility of his fleet-footed
heroine and the half-boyish simplicity of her demeanour--a perfect model
of a _belle inhumaine_. But the most beautiful passage in the poem is
the description of the vigil of the love-sick Milanion in the lonely
sea-side temple of Venus. The author has conveyed with exquisite art
the sense of devout stillness and of pagan sanctity which invests this
remote and prayerful spot. The yellow torch-light,
"Wherein with fluttering gown and half-bared limb
The temple damsels sung their evening hymn;"
the sound of the shallow flowing sea without, the young man's restless
sleep on the pavement, besprinkled with the ocean spray, the apparition
of the goddess with the early dawn, bearing the golden apple--all these
delicate points are presented in the light of true poetry.
The narrative of the adventures of Danae and of Perseus and Andromeda
is, with the exception of the tale of Cupid and Psyche which follows it,
the longest piece in the volume. Of the two, we think we prefer the
latter. Unutterably touching is the career of the tender and helpless
Psyche, and most impressive the terrible hostility of Venus. The author,
we think, throughout manages this lady extremely well. She appears to us
in a sort of rosy dimness, through which she looms as formidable as she
is beautiful, and gazing with "gentle eyes and unmoved smiles,"
"Such as in Cyprus, the fair blossomed isle,
When on the altar in the summer night
They pile the roses up for her delight,
Men see within their hearts."
"The Love of Alcestis" is the beautiful story of the excellent wife who,
when her husband was ill, gave up her life, so that he might recover and
live for ever. Half the interest here, however, lies in the servitude of
Apollo in disguise, and in the touching picture of the radiant god doing
in perfection the homely work of his office, and yet from time to time
emitting flashes, as it were, of genius and deity, while the good
Admetus observes him half in kindness and half in awe.
The story of the "Son of Croesus," the poor young man who is slain by
his best friend because the gods had foredoomed it, is simple, pathetic,
and brief. The finest and sweetest poem in the volume, to our taste, is
the tale of "Pygmalion and the Image." The merit of execution is perhaps
not appreciably greater here than in the other pieces, but the legend is
so unutterably charming that it claims precedence of its companions. As
beautiful as anything in all our later poetry, we think, is the
description of the growth and dominance in the poor sculptor's heart of
his marvellous passion for the stony daughter of his hands. Borne along
on the steady, changing flow of his large and limpid verse, the author
glides into the situation with an ease and grace and fullness of
sympathy worthy of a great master. Here, as elsewhere, there is no sign
of effort or of strain. In spite of the studied and _recherche_
character of his diction, there is not a symptom of affectation in
thought or speech. We seem in this tale of "Pygmalion" truly to inhabit
the bright and silent workroom of a great Greek artist, and, standing
among shapes and forms of perfect beauty, to breathe the incense-tainted
air in which lovely statues were conceived and shining stones chiselled
into immortality.
Mr. Morris is indubitably a sensuous poet, to his credit be it said; his
senses are constantly proffering their testimony and crying out their
delight. But while they take their freedom, they employ it in no degree
to their own debasement. Just as there is modesty of temperament we
conceive there is modesty of imagination, and Mr. Morris possesses the
latter distinction. The total absence of it is, doubtless, the long and
short of Mr. Swinburne's various troubles. We may imagine Mr. Swinburne
making a very clever poem of this story of "Pygmalion," but we cannot
fancy him making it anything less than utterly disagreeable. The
thoroughly agreeable way in which Mr. Morris tells it is what especially
strikes us. We feel that his imagination is equally fearless and
irreproachable, and that while he tells us what we may call a sensuous
story in all its breadth, he likewise tells it in all its purity. It
has, doubtless, an impure side; but of the two he prefers the other.
While Pygmalion is all aglow with his unanswered passion, he one day
sits down before his image:
"And at the last drew forth a book of rhymes,
Wherein were writ the tales of many climes,
And read aloud the sweetness hid therein
Of lovers' sorrows and their tangled sin."
He reads aloud to his marble torment: would Mr. Swinburne have touched
that note?
We have left ourselves no space to describe in detail the other series
of tales--"The Man born to be King," "The Proud King," "The Writing on
the Image," "The Lady of the Land," "The Watching of the Falcon," and
"Ogier the Dane."
The author in his _Jason_ identified himself with the successful
treatment of Greek subjects to such a degree as to make it easy to
suppose that these matters were the specialty of his genius. But in
these romantic modern stories the same easy power is revealed, the same
admirable union of natural gifts and cultivated perceptions. Mr. Morris
is evidently a poet in the broad sense of the word--a singer of human
joys and sorrows, whenever and wherever found. His somewhat artificial
diction, which would seem to militate against our claim that his genius
is of the general and comprehensive order, is, we imagine, simply an
achievement of his own. It is not imposed from without, but developed
from within. Whatever may be said of it, it certainly will not be
accused of being unpoetical; and except this charge, what serious one
can be made?
The author's style--according to our impression--is neither Chaucerian,
Spenserian, nor imitative; it is literary, indeed, but it has a freedom
and irregularity, an adaptability to the movements of the author's mind,
which make it an ample vehicle of poetical utterance. He says in this
language of his own the most various and the most truthful things; he
moves, melts, and delights. Such at least, is our own experience. Other
persons, we know, find it difficult to take him entirely _au serieux_.
But we, taking him--and our critical duties too--in the most serious
manner our mind permits of, feel strongly impelled, both by gratitude
and by reflection, to pronounce him a noble and delightful poet. To call
a man healthy nowadays is almost an insult--invalids learn so many
secrets. But the health of the intellect is often promoted by physical
disability. We say therefore, finally, that however the faculty may have
been promoted--with the minimum of suffering, we certainly hope--Mr.
Morris is a supremely healthy writer. This poem is marked by all that is
broad and deep in nature, and all that is elevating, profitable, and
curious in art.