When I was a child I often heard my elders talking of an old turreted
house where an old great-uncle of mine lived, and of its gardens and its
long pond where there was an island with tame eagles; and one day
somebody read me some verses and said they made him think of that old
house where he had been very happy. The verses ran in my head for years
and became to me the best description of happiness in the world, and I am
not certain that I know a better even now. They were those first dozen
verses of _Golden Wings_ that begin--
'Midways of a walled garden
In the happy poplar land
Did an ancient castle stand,
With an old knight for a warden.
Many scarlet bricks there were
In its walls, and old grey stone;
Over which red apples shone
At the right time of the year.
On the bricks the green moss grew,
Yellow lichen on the stone,
Over which red apples shone;
Little war that castle knew.'
When William Morris describes a house of any kind, and makes his
description poetical, it is always, I think, some house that he would
have liked to have lived in, and I remember him saying about the time when
he was writing of that great house of the Wolfings, 'I decorate modern
houses for people, but the house that would please me would be some great
room where one talked to one's friends in one corner and eat in another
and slept in another and worked in another.' Indeed all he writes seems to
me like the make-believe of a child who is remaking the world, not always
in the same way, but always after its own heart; and so unlike all other
modern writers he makes his poetry out of unending pictures of a happiness
that is often what a child might imagine, and always a happiness that sets
mind and body at ease. Now it is a picture of some great room full of
merriment, now of the wine-press, now of the golden threshing-floor, now
of an old mill among apple-trees, now of cool water after the heat of the
sun, now of some well-sheltered, well-tilled place among woods or
mountains, where men and women live happily, knowing of nothing that is
too far off or too great for the affections. He has but one story to tell
us, how some man or woman lost and found again the happiness that is
always half of the body; and even when they are wandering from it, leaves
must fall over them, and flowers make fragrances about them, and warm
winds fan them, and birds sing to them, for being of Habundia's kin they
must not forget the shadow of her Green Tree even for a moment, and the
waters of her Well must be always wet upon their sandals. His poetry often
wearies us as the unbroken green of July wearies us, for there is
something in us, some bitterness because of the Fall it may be, that takes
a little from the sweetness of Eve's apple after the first mouthful; but
he who did all things gladly and easily, who never knew the curse of
labour, found it always as sweet as it was in Eve's mouth. All kinds of
associations have gathered about the pleasant things of the world and half
taken the pleasure out of them for the greater number of men, but he saw
them as when they came from the Divine Hand. I often see him in my mind as
I saw him once at Hammersmith holding up a glass of claret towards the
light and saying, 'Why do people say it is prosaic to get inspiration out
of wine? Is it not the sunlight and the sap in the leaves? Are not grapes
made by the sunlight and the sap?'
V
In one of his little socialist pamphlets he tells how he sat under an
elm-tree and watched the starlings and thought of an old horse and an old
labourer that had passed him by, and of the men and women he had seen in
towns; and he wondered how all these had come to be as they were. He saw
that the starlings were beautiful and merry and that men and the old
horse they had subdued to their service were ugly and miserable, and yet
the starlings, he thought, were of one kind whether there or in the south
of England, and the ugly men and women were of one kind with those whose
nobility and beauty had moved the ancient sculptors and poets to imagine
the gods and the heroes after the images of men. Then he began, he tells
us, to meditate how this great difference might be ended and a new life,
which would permit men to have beauty in common among them as the
starlings have, be built on the wrecks of the old life. In other words,
his mind was illuminated from within and lifted into prophecy in the full
right sense of the word, and he saw the natural things he was alone gifted
to see in their perfect form; and having that faith which is alone worth
having, for it includes all others, a sure knowledge established in the
constitution of his mind that perfect things are final things, he
announced that all he had seen would come to pass. I do not think he
troubled to understand books of economics, and Mr. Mackail says, I think,
that they vexed him and wearied him. He found it enough to hold up, as it
were, life as it is to-day beside his visions, and to show how faded its
colours were and how sapless it was. And if we had not enough artistic
feeling, enough feeling for the perfect that is, to admit the authority of
the vision; or enough faith to understand that all that is imperfect
passes away, he would not, as I think, have argued with us in a serious
spirit. Though I think that he never used the kinds of words I use in
writing of him, though I think he would even have disliked a word like
faith with its theological associations, I am certain that he understood
thoroughly, as all artists understand a little, that the important things,
the things we must believe in or perish, are beyond argument. We can no
more reason about them than can the pigeon, come but lately from the egg,
about the hawk whose shadow makes it cower among the grass. His vision is
true because it is poetical, because we are a little happier when we are
looking at it; and he knew as Shelley knew by an act of faith that the
economists should take their measurements not from life as it is, but from
the vision of men like him, from the vision of the world made perfect that
is buried under all minds. The early Christians were of the kin of the
Wilderness and of the Dry Tree, and they saw an unearthly Paradise, but he
was of the kin of the Well and of the Green Tree and he saw an Earthly
Paradise.
He obeyed his vision when he tried to make first his own house, for he was
in this matter also like a child playing with the world, and then houses
of other people, places where one could live happily; and he obeyed it
when he wrote essays about the nature of happy work, and when he spoke at
street corners about the coming changes.
He knew clearly what he was doing towards the end, for he lived at a time
when poets and artists have begun again to carry the burdens that priests
and theologians took from them angrily some few hundred years ago. His art
was not more essentially religious than Rossetti's art, but it was
different, for Rossetti, drunken with natural beauty, saw the supernatural
beauty, the impossible beauty, in his frenzy, while he being less intense
and more tranquil would show us a beauty that would wither if it did not
set us at peace with natural things, and if we did not believe that it
existed always a little, and would some day exist in its fulness. He may
not have been, indeed he was not, among the very greatest of the poets,
but he was among the greatest of those who prepare the last reconciliation
when the Cross shall blossom with roses.
1902.