[In the following essay, Clutton-Brock discusses Morris as a Romantic poet, contending that of “all the Romantic poets Morris, in his early poetry was the most romantic; for he was more consciously discontented with the circumstances of his own time than any of them.”]

The word Romantic, as applied to a certain movement in art, has been used vaguely and in different senses. We know better who the Romantic poets are than why we call them Romantic. But if we examine their works, and especially those which any one would choose as being peculiarly romantic, we shall find that they have this in common—namely, that they interest us through their unlikeness, rather than through their likeness, to our own experience. In poems like Keats's “Eve of St. Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” or like Coleridge's “Christabel” and “The Ancient Mariner,” there is a continual insistence upon the strangeness of the circumstances. It is not merely that the story belongs to the past; most stories told by poets do. But Homer and Chaucer do not incessantly remind us that their stories belong to the past, whereas Keats and Coleridge do. Homer and Chaucer tell a story because they think it a good one; but Coleridge in “Christabel” and Keats in the “Eve of St. Agnes” have very little story to tell. The aim of these poems is to carry us into a strange world and its strangeness is more important than what happens in it. Wordsworth, again, in his poems about peasants, though he does not carry us into the past, does carry us into a world different from our own, and he is always insisting upon the difference. Indeed, many of his incidents are chosen to illustrate the difference between his peasants and the people for whom he writes. In fact, the Romantic movement expressed a general dissatisfaction with the circumstances and surroundings of the life of the Romantic poets. It was not merely an attempt to enrich the subject-matter of poetry or to deliver it from the prosaic methods of the eighteenth century. It was rather a revolt against the whole urban civilization of that century; and the Romantic poets ranged the past because they were sick of the present. Some of them were liberal in their politics, others were conservative; but Scott, the most conservative of them all, did not like the urban civilization of his time well enough to write about it. He, too, not only found his stories in the past, but enjoyed it because it was unlike the present; and whenever he draws a character well from life it is a countryman sharply distinguished from the run of educated and well-to-do townspeople of the day. Shakespeare took Hamlet from a primitive Danish story and turned him into a gentleman of his own time. A Romantic poet would have made him even more primitive than he was in the original story; for he would have chosen that story as a way of escape from the present, and would have peopled it with strange, not with familiar, characters.

Now of all the Romantic poets Morris, in his early poetry was the most romantic; for he was more consciously discontented with the circumstances of his own time than any of them. At the very beginning of the Romantic movement the Middle Ages had been discovered; that is to say, they had become interesting instead of being merely dull and barbarous. Horace Walpole built himself what he took to be a Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill, and wrote what he thought was a mediæval romance in the “Castle of Otranto.” At first this interest in the Middle Ages was merely a new fashion, like the earlier fashion which produced Pastoral poetry, and it had results just as absurd. But it was a fashion that lasted, and people went on being interested in the Middle Ages without quite knowing why. To Keats and Coleridge they were full of a strange inexplicable beauty, well expressed in these lines from “Christabel”—

The moon shines dim in the open air,
And not a moonbeam enters here.
But they without its light can see
The chamber carved so curiously,
Carved with figures strange and sweet,
All made out of the carver's brain,
For a lady's chamber meet:
The lamp with twofold silver chain
Is fastened to an angel's feet.

Then came Ruskin, who explained the causes and conditions of this beauty and why it could not be imitated now; and for Morris, who had learnt from Ruskin, and who studied the Middle Ages with the passion of an artist and of a man of science, their beauty was no longer fantastic or inexplicable. For him their art was as normal and rational as classical art seemed to the masters of the High Renaissance in Italy. It was the art of his own people and his own country, which had been for a time ousted by a foreign art, just as the southern art of Italy was for a time ousted by the Gothic.

But still it was not the art which he saw being produced about him. The tradition of it had been lost and would have to be recovered; and that could not be done by mere imitation. Meanwhile, however, he felt himself, as he said in the Introduction to The Earthly Paradise, to be born out of his due time. This feeling was not the result of a vague dislike of reality, but of a very clear liking for a reality different from that in which he found himself. And in his first volume of poems we see him trying to throw himself back into that reality, and describing it as if it were something he remembered from his own childhood. The detail of poems such as “The Defence of Guenevere” or “King Arthur's Tomb” is not the vague detail of earlier poets. It is all precise, and described as if the poet were telling of what he had seen with his own eyes. But he insists continually on it because he wishes, not only to tell a story or express a passion, but also to describe a world different from that in which he lives. He is not entirely occupied with strange circumstance; for Guenevere and Lancelot and all the people of the “Morte d'Arthur” were real people to him; but they were more real than the people he met in the street just because he thought of them as living in this world of his desires. So he could not bring them to life without also bringing that world to life; and “The Defence of Guenevere” and “King Arthur's Tomb” are troubled and confused with this twofold task. Morris has too much to say in them; he is like a child trying to tell a story and at the same time to express its own delighted interest in every detail of the story; and he becomes both breathless and rambling in the effort. He is full of strange news about wonderful people in a wonderful world of his own discovery; and he tells it all as news, making no distinction of emphasis between one fact and another. Tennyson writes of the Court of King Arthur as if it were an old tale worth exploiting by a modern civilized poet. For him it is a story of no time or place; but for Morris it is a story of a time better than his own, not, of course, the real legendary time of King Arthur, but the Middle Ages still familiar to Mallory. And whereas Tennyson's treatment of circumstance is like the vague treatment of some idealist eighteenth-century painter, Morris reminds us of Mantegna in his mixture of living passion and detail drawn from the past. For Mantegna looked back to the Roman past just as Morris looked back to the past of the Middle Ages, and he too expressed his desire for another state of being in his art with a passion that freed his detail from pedantry.¹

The Defence of Guenevere contains one or two of Morris's earliest poems, such as the beautiful “Summer Dawn,” in which he seems to dream without energy. In the later and mediæval poems he is still dreaming, but with an energy too fierce for a pure dreamer such as he still took himself to be. And it is this dreaming energy which makes those poems unlike other romantic poetry. The romantic game had been played in verse often enough, but here it is played in deadly earnest. Morris does not make use of the Middle Ages for artistic purposes; he writes about them as a poet writes of love when he is in love himself. In poems like “The Haystack in the Floods” we can see that he has taken his method from Browning. He tells a great deal of his story by means of allusion, and by the same means manages to introduce detail without labour or digression. But whereas Browning used this method to express his curiosity about many past ages, Morris used it to express his passion for one. He writes not like a curious traveller through all the past, but like one who has travelled to find what he wants and has found it. No one, perhaps, could see at the time that there was more than dreaming in those poems, but we can see now that they were written by a man who would try to make his dreams come true.

In The Defence of Guenevere volume there is one poem, “Sir Peter Harpdon's End,” in blank verse and dramatic in form. After the publication of that volume Morris started to write a series of “Scenes from the Fall of Troy,” also dramatic and in blank verse. He never finished them, partly because at the time he was too busy with the firm and partly because his mind was being drawn more and more to narrative. It was contrary to his practical nature to write drama that was not completely a play and that was not meant to be acted. He showed in these experiments that he had more dramatic power than most modern poets, both in his invention and in the style of his blank verse, which is poetry yet sounds like natural speech; but he never developed this dramatic power for want of a theatre and actors. The tale of Troy, like the tale of King Arthur, was to him a story of the Middle Ages, but one which the Middle Ages had got from a past already far remote. He saw it, whereas most modern writers only think of it; but he saw it faint in an infinite distance and through a transforming mist. He always felt the sadness “of old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago”; but this sadness is heavier in the Troy scenes than in any other work of his. The people all seem like ghosts, acting their past faintly over again with a fore-knowledge of its futile end. It is as if he had evoked them and then soon dismissed them out of pity; but in these fragments, there is a real evocation and, however pale the ghosts may be, we believe at least that they are ghosts.

After this Morris wrote little verse for six or seven years, and when he began again in London he made no more experiments. Then he set to work upon narrative poetry, knowing exactly what he meant to do and well able to do it. He was lucky in that he had a great natural talent for a kind of poetry that has not often been written well in England. Since the Canterbury Tales most of our narrative poems that have been poetical have not told a story well; and most of those which have told a story well have been either prosaic or poetic only by artifice. Morris told his stories naturally in verse because he could conceive them as poems; and at this time he was content to be a poetic teller of old stories. Chaucer was his master in this art and from him he seems to have learnt, without practice on his own account, all that can be learnt of it; and in particular how to make the poetry issue naturally out of the story instead of using the story as a pretext for irrelevant poetry. And, like Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, Morris in his Earthly Paradise devises circumstances that provide a plausible reason for storytelling. But, whereas Chaucer's pilgrims tell stories fitted to their own individual characters, the narrators of The Earthly Paradise tell each a story of his own race or country. Since, then, his stories were half Greek and half from other sources, he had to contrive a setting in which Greeks surviving from the ancient world meet with men of the Middle Ages and of many different countries. Hence the Prologue, a fine story in itself, in which, in the time of Edward III, a crew of sailors set out to find the Earthly Paradise, and after many adventures and disappointments come to an island where there are Greeks still keeping their old way of life unknown to the rest of mankind. Thus this great exchange of tales is made possible.

But Morris, for all his love of a story, could not tell one as Chaucer could. Chaucer often thought he was relating history and, like a good historian, put all his knowledge of living men into it. Morris knew that he was simply telling stories; and in The Earthly Paradise he tells most of them as if he knew they were mere stories and as if he were passing them on as best he could. He set himself a task and performed it at a great pace. But no man who ever lived could tell all these diverse stories so as to express his own experience through them. Morris when he wrote The Earthly Paradise had still the romantic conception of poetry, namely, that it should interest by its unlikeness rather than by its likeness to our experience. Therefore he lays his stress upon the wonderful events in his tales and upon their strangeness of circumstance rather than upon those passions and characters that are constant to men. It is events and circumstances that we remember rather than people. The poetry of The Earthly Paradise has been rather foolishly compared to the design of his wall-papers and chintzes; but it is true that Morris often gives as faint an image of reality in a story as in a pattern, and that he relies on the story, as on the pattern, to justify the faintness. No modern English poet had written a long poem of any kind so easy to read. Begin one of the tales of The Earthly Paradise and you find that it draws you along with its own current. Begin Swinburne's “Tristram,” and you find that after each splendid lyrical passage you have to set yourself to the story with an effort. All the best of it is digression; but there are no digressions in “The Man born to be King,” and, as it is all poetry, this is high praise. But I, for one, can never feel quite satisfied with The Earthly Paradise, and I even feel that its popularity has injured Morris's fame. A great deal of it is merely pleasure-giving poetry, and if he had written nothing else he would indeed have been the idle singer of an empty day. Perhaps, being at this time a little bewildered by life and the state of the world, seeing that things were wrong and not having got any clear determination to right them, he set himself a task and tried to satisfy his enormous energy with that. He liked to think of poetry as a craft; and he had mastered the craft of story-telling so that it was almost too easy to him, and so that he could practise it without giving the whole of his mind to it. Indeed, one feels a kind of absence of mind in many of these stories, as if the writer knew them so well that he could think of something else while he was telling them; and for that reason he often seems to be telling us something to amuse us rather than because he must tell it.

He had meant The Life and Death of Jason to be part of The Earthly Paradise; but as he wrote it, it grew too large to take its place there. It is a poem of pure romance, told for its wonder and very well told; until near the end when Medea, from having been only a wonderful enchantress, becomes a mother, and has to subdue the tenderness common to all mothers before she can slay her children. Then Morris surprises us with a power like Chaucer's of expressing passion in the simplest words. There is the same power in “The Lovers of Gudrun,” which comes at the end of the third part of The Earthly Paradise. Two years before it was published Morris had begun to learn Icelandic, and he soon read through most of the sagas. He enjoyed all good stories; but these were to him among the stories of the world what Gothic was among all the different kinds of architecture; and he put the whole force of his mind into “The Lovers of Gudrun,” telling it not merely for its strangeness, but because he loved the men and women in it. But of this change in his poetry [Clutton-Brock speaks in a later chapter not reproduced here]. Two years after The Earthly Paradise was finished he made another dramatic experiment. “Love is Enough” is more remote from reality than any of his poems. Mr. Mackail has given a lucid account of its peculiar form with its receding planes of action, five in all; the aim of which is, starting from a representation of the outer world and particular persons, to reach in the furthest plane an expression, almost in pure music, of that passion which possesses the chief character of the play. For success in such a design, a very sharp contrast would be needed between the nearer and the more distant planes; and the contrast in the poem is not sharp. The rustics in the nearest plane are as faint as any persons in The Earthly Paradise and all the other characters are shadows; so that the lyrics of the furthest plane seem nearer to us than anything else in the poem. “Love is Enough” seems a shadowy romance; but it is really a religious play, a confession of faith made almost unconsciously. The love of which the lyrics tell is not the love of one human being for another, though that may be a preparation for it. It is rather a state of mind which, to those who know it, is better than happiness, indeed the best that man can attain to in this life.

But Morris can express it better than I can explain it—

Ye know not how void is your hope and your living:
          Depart with your helping lest yet ye undo me.
          Ye know not that at nightfall she draweth near to me,
There is soft speech between us and words of forgiving,
          Till in dead of the midnight her kisses thrill through me.
          Pass by me, and hearken, and waken me not.

The language of that is recognized at once by any one who has an ear for it. It is the language of religious ecstasy, expressing a desire so strong that it can use the terms of earthly love, and so sweet to those who feel it that it has in it also the delight of earthly love. Morris, like all great men of his kind, was unworldly, not so much from contempt of the world, certainly not from contempt of the earth, as because there was something desired by his soul compared with which things of the world seemed to him of little account. As a rule he acted upon this desire more than he thought about it. He was not by nature speculative, and shared the scepticism of his time about all supernatural things. He set himself so many tasks that he was more concerned with performing them than with asking himself why he did so. But sometimes that high passion, which was the motive force of his life, expressed itself suddenly in his poetry so that it seems to tell a secret of which he was hardly aware himself, a secret only to be understood by those who know it already. In ordinary speech Morris, though very frank, told no secrets about himself; and all his friends knew that there was a part of him which he shared with no one. Here he reveals it in his art, telling all the world that there is a source outside him from which he gets his strength and purpose; and then he turns proudly on the world as if he had told it too much—

Wherewith will ye buy it, ye rich who behold me?
          Draw out from your coffers your rest and your laughter,
          And the fair gilded hope of the dawn coming after.
         
Nay, this I sell not—though ye bought me and sold me—
          For your house stored with such things from threshold to rafter,
          Pass by me. I hearken, and think of you not.

When he wrote this he was still, like an eremite, half afraid of the world, and withdrawing from it to listen to the whispers of his familiar. But these very whispers were to send him into the world again so that he might labour to change what he hated.

“Love is Enough” is half a failure as a romantic poem because Morris could no longer soothe his disgust of reality by writing of strange things. The romantic part of it persists from mere habit and has become as faint as a fading memory. Indeed, the music of the lyrics makes us forget it altogether, and they break through it as if the poet himself had forgotten it. In them we hear no longer the idle singer of an empty day but one whose music is making itself out of his own experience.

Note

1. See Mr. Borenson's interesting essay on Mantegna.