"Enough," said the pupil of the wise Imlac, "you have convinced me that no man can be a poet." The study of Mr. William Morris's poems, in the new collected edition, has convinced me that no man, or, at least, no middle-aged man, can be a critic. I read Mr.
Morris's poems (thanks to the knightly honours conferred on the Bard of Penrhyn, there is now no ambiguity as to 'Mr. Morris'), but it is not the book only that I read. The scroll of my youth is unfolded. I see the dear place where first I perused "The Blue Closet"; the old faces of old friends flock around me; old chaff, old laughter, old happiness re-echo and revive. St. Andrews, Oxford, come before the mind's eye, with "Many a place That's in sad case Where joy was wont afore, oh!"as Minstrel Burne sings. These voices, faces, landscapes mingle with the music and blur the pictures of the poet who enchanted for us certain hours passed in the paradise of youth. A reviewer who finds himself in this case may as well frankly confess that he can no more criticise Mr. Morris dispassionately than he could criticise his old self and the friends whom he shall never see again, till he meets them "Beyond the sphere of time, And sin, and grief's control, Serene in changeless prime Of body and of soul."To write of one's own "adventures among books" may be to provide anecdotage more or less trivial, more or less futile, but, at least, it is to write historically. We know how books have affected, and do affect ourselves, our bundle of prejudices and tastes, of old impressions and revived sensations. To judge books dispassionately and impersonally, is much more difficult--indeed, it is practically impossible, for our own tastes and experiences must, more or less, modify our verdicts, do what we will. However, the effort must be made, for to say that, at a certain age, in certain circumstances, an individual took much pleasure in "The Life and Death of Jason," the present of a college friend, is certainly not to criticise "The Life and Death of Jason."There have been three blossoming times in the English poetry of the nineteenth century. The first dates from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and, later, from Shelley, Byron, Keats. By 1822 the blossoming time was over, and the second blossoming time began in 1830-1833, with young Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Browning. It broke forth again, in 1842 and did not practically cease till England's greatest laureate sang of the "Crossing of the Bar." But while Tennyson put out his full strength in 1842, and Mr. Browning rather later, in "Bells and Pomegranates" ("Men and Women"), the third spring came in 1858, with Mr. Morris's "Defence of Guenevere," and flowered till Mr. Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon" appeared in 1865, followed by his poems of 1866. Mr. Rossetti's book of 1870belonged, in date of composition, mainly to this period.
In 1858, when "The Defence of Guenevere" came out, Mr. Morris must have been but a year or two from his undergraduateship. Every one has heard enough about his companions, Mr. Burne Jones, Mr.
Rossetti, Canon Dixon, and the others of the old Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, where Mr. Morris's wonderful prose fantasies are buried. Why should they not be revived, these strangely coloured and magical dreams? As literature, I prefer them vastly above Mr. Morris's later romances in prose--"The Hollow Land" above "News from Nowhere!" Mr. Morris and his friends were active in the fresh dawn of a new romanticism, a mediaeval and Catholic revival, with very little Catholicism in it for the most part. This revival is more "innerly," as the Scotch say, more intimate, more "earnest"than the larger and more genial, if more superficial, restoration by Scott. The painful doubt, the scepticism of the Ages of Faith, the dark hours of that epoch, its fantasy, cruelty, luxury, no less than its colour and passion, inform Mr. Morris's first poems. The fourteenth and the early fifteenth century is his "period." In "The Defence of Guenevere" he is not under the influence of Chaucer, whose narrative manner, without one grain of his humour, inspires "The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise."In the early book the rugged style of Mr. Browning has left a mark.
There are cockney rhymes, too, such as "short" rhyming to "thought." But, on the whole, Mr. Morris's early manner was all his own, nor has he ever returned to it. In the first poem, "The Queen's Apology," is this passage:-"Listen: suppose your time were come to die, And you were quite alone and very weak;Yea, laid a-dying, while very mightily "The wind was ruffling up the narrow streak Of river through your broad lands running well:
Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak:
"'One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell, Now choose one cloth for ever, which they be, I will not tell you, you must somehow tell "'Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!'
Yea, yea, my lord, and you to ope your eyes, At foot of your familiar bed to see "A great God's angel standing, with such dyes, Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands, Held out two ways, light from the inner skies "Showing him well, and making his commands Seem to be God's commands, moreover, too, Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;"And one of these strange choosing-cloths was blue, Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;No man could tell the better of the two.
"After a shivering half-hour you said, 'God help! heaven's colour, the blue;' and he said, 'Hell.'
Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed, "And cry to all good men that loved you well, 'Ah, Christ! if only I had known, known, known.'"There was nothing like that before in English poetry; it has the bizarrerie of a new thing in beauty. How far it is really beautiful how can I tell? How can I discount the "personal bias"?