In ordinary life a thousand considerations prohibit for most of us any complete working out of our responses: . . . but in the ‘imaginative experiences’ these obstacles are removed.
I. A. RICHARDS, Principles of Literary Criticism, ch. xxxi
It has been said that if you tell ten people you are reading Thomas Aquinas, nine will reply with something about angels dancing on the point of a needle. The saw is already out of date and Thomism in the ascendant; but it is worth remembering as a reminder of the misleading labels which great writers bear during the periods of their obscurity, and also of the sudden changes of fashion which strip those labels off. In spite of some excellent critics, William Morris is still commonly among the labelled. A mention of him in many literary circles still produces a torrent of objections which have been learned by heart—he wrote Wardour Street, he was a victim to false medievalism, his poetry is the poetry of escape, his stories are mere tapestries. It is true that these charges have never had any effect on his persistent admirers. But these are a company ill fitted to defend their favourite. They are few—though perhaps not so few as each in his solitude supposes—and they read humbly for the sake of pleasure, a pleasure so inexhaustible that after twenty or fifty years of reading they find it worked so deeply into all their emotions as to defy analysis. I knew one who could come no nearer to an explanation of Morris’s charm than to repeat ‘It’s the Northernness—the Northernness’; and though I knew very well what he meant, I felt it was not war. Yet as the lovers of Morris now are, the lovers of Donne once were, and not so very long ago. It is possible that a critical revolution may yet embarrass these scattered and inoffensive readers with the discovery that what they regard as a private, perhaps a shamefaced, indulgence has all along been a gratifying proof of their penetration and ‘contemporaneity’. The thing is feasible because even the sternest theories of literature cannot permanently suppress an author who is so obstinately pleasurable. It is certain that the common cries against Morris, where they are not mere ignorance, are based on a priori dogmatisms that will go down at a touch; and it is arguable that of all the romantics he lies least open to the usual attacks of what we may now,* perhaps, begin to call Georgian anti-romanticism.
The objection to his language is largely a hangover from the old Wordsworthian theory of diction. It is, of course, perfectly true that Morris invented for his poems and perfected in his prose-romances a language which has never at any period been spoken in England; but I suppose that most instructed people are now aware (as Wordsworth was not aware) that what we call ‘ordinary’ or ‘straight-forward’ English prose, as we have all tried to write it since Dryden’s time, is almost equally an artificial speech—a literary or ‘hypothetical’ language based on a French conception of elegance and a highly unphilological ideal of ‘correctness’. When we begin to teach boys ‘essay-writing’ at school we are teaching them to translate into this language, and if they continue to write as they talk we plough them in School Certificate. The question about Morris’s style is not whether it is an artificial language—all endurable language in longer works must be that—but whether it is a good one. And it is here that sheer ignorance begins to play its part. I cannot help suspecting that most of the detractors when they talk of Morris’s style are really thinking of his printing: they expect the florid and the crowded, and imagine something like Sidney’s Arcadia. In fact, however, this style consistently departs from that of modern prose in the direction of simplicity. Except for a few archaic words—and since the appearance of the S.O.E.D. it is a pleasure to be sent to the dictionary—it is incomparably easier and clearer than any ‘natural’ style could possibly be, and the ‘dull finish’, the careful avoidance of rhetoric, gloss, and decoration, is of its very essence. Those who are really repelled by it after a fair trial are being repelled not by its romanticism but by its classicism, for in one sense Morris is as classical as Johnson. Long ago, Mr Alfred Noyes noticed the self-imposed limitation under which Morris describes nature whether in prose or verse—the birds that are merely ‘brown’, the sea that is never anything more remarkable than ‘blue’ or ‘green’.1 Morris, in fact, obeys the doctrine of generality; he does not number the streaks on the tulip but ‘exhibits in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features as recall the original to every mind’. That such ‘just representations of general nature’ can, as Johnson claims, ‘please many and please long’, his own writing, and that of Morris, will equally prove.
I sat down on a bank, such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign. I had, indeed, no trees to whisper over my head, but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day was calm, the air was soft, and all was rudeness, silence and solitude.2
The road was rough that day, and they went not above a foot-pace the more part of the time; and daylong they were going up and up, and it grew cold as the sun got low, though it was yet summer.3
The first sentence is from Johnson and the second from Morris. There are a dozen differences between them, but there are two important similarities; both are content with recording obvious facts in very general language, and both succeed so that we really taste the mountain air. It is, indeed, this matter-of-factness, as Clutton-Brock pointed out, which lends to all Morris’s stories their sober air of conviction.4 Other stories have only scenery: his have geography. He is not concerned with ‘painting’ landscapes; he tells you the lie of the land, and then you paint the landscapes for yourself. To a reader long fed on the almost botanical and entomological niceties of much modern fiction—where, indeed, we mostly skip if the characters go through a jungle—the effect is at first very pale and cold, but also very fresh and spacious. We begin to relish what my friend called the ‘Northernness’. No mountains in literature are as far away as distant mountains in Morris. The world of his imagining is as windy, as tangible, as resonant and three-dimensional, as that of Scott or Homer.
He treats the passions, for the most part, in the same way. A lover’s night of anxiety for his mistress who is a captive is thus described. ‘He could not choose but make stories of her meeting of the tyrant, and her fear and grief and shame, and the despair of her heart.’5 Morris does not particularize the imagery that passed through the young man’s mind; ‘he could not choose but make stories’, that is all. Later in the same book Morris has to describe the lover’s behaviour when alone with his mistress for some weeks in the wilderness. It is a situation about which almost any other author, sentimental, sensual, or cynical, would have made what Locke calls a ‘pudder’. Morris gives the fact—‘All this while he durst not kiss or caress her, save very measurely’—and the reason ‘for he deemed that she would not suffer it’.6 What could be more sensible? And this brings us to the whole question of Morris’s treatment of love; it is in this that he differs most remarkably from the majority of romantics and is most immune from anti-romantic criticism. On the one hand, it is no use invoking modern psychology to reveal the concealed eroticism in his imagination, because the eroticism is not concealed: it is patent, ubiquitous, and unabashed. On the other hand, Morris, except in his first volume and in such an anomalous poem as Love is Enough, makes no attempt to paint Passion as understood by the Romantics. Havelock Ellis’s definition of love (‘lust plus friendship’), monstrously inadequate if applied to the love expressed by Dante or Coventry Patmore or Meredith, is a perfectly good definition of love in Morris’s stories—unless, indeed, ‘lust’ is too heavy and breathless a name for anything so bright and youthful and functional as his kind of sensuality. The experience of his lovers is at the opposite extreme from the dizzying or swooning states described in common romantic poetry. The beauty of Keats’s Madeline made Porphyro ‘faint’.7 But when the young man in the Roots of the Mountains thought of the young woman’s body ‘it stirred him up to go swiftlier as he strode on, the day brightening behind him’.8 Morris, in fact, describes the sort of love that is a function of health; it quickens a man’s pace. It is not surprising that the hero of the Roots of the Mountains should soon after be in love with a different woman. Morris does not deal much in world-without-end fidelities, and his heroes are seldom so enamoured of one damsel that they are quite indifferent to the beauty of others. When infidelities occur they are, of course, regrettable, as any other breach of faith, because they wound the social health and harmony of the tribe; they are not felt as apostasies from any god of love. Morris’s Jason is felt to be a treacherous and ungrateful man for deserting Medea; but the poet does not share Chaucer’s feeling about the mere change of love considered in itself. Still less does he understand the Christian and sacramental view of such things. He is the most irreligious of all our poets—anima naturaliter pagana.
To see this is, of course, to see that his medievalism is a kind of accident. The real interests of the Middle Ages—Christian mysticism, Aristotelian philosophy, Courtly Love—mean nothing to him. The world of the sagas, at once homely and heroic, is in some ways more congenial to him than that of the romances, just as their hard-bitten style with its almost excessive use of litotes is of all influences upon his language the most fruitful. That is another aspect of the ‘Northernness’. But it would be a misunderstanding to inquire into the date and place of the society he depicts: you might as well apply historical criticism to Chaucer’s Troy or Sidney’s Arcadia or the plays of Lord Dunsany. Morris chose to build up his imaginary world on hints furnished by the Middle and the Dark Ages as these existed in the imagination of his own time and his own circle in particular. With that circle he doubtless shared many historical errors. But his choice was poetically right simply because that misconception of the Middle Ages (for reasons which go far back into the time of Percy and the Wartons) already existed, and existed poetically, in the public imagination. It was, and to some extent still is, part of our mythology.
This is only to repeat that his stories in verse and prose represent an imaginary world. It is a recognition of this fact which has earned them such epithets as ‘faint’, ‘shadowy’, ‘decorative’, and the like. Nineteenth-century criticism was unconsciously dominated by the novel, and could praise only with reservations work which does not present analysed characters (‘living men and women’ as they called them) in a naturalistic setting. Modern Shakespearian criticism dates from the abandonment of the attempt to treat Shakespeare’s plays as if they were novels. The change perhaps began with Raleigh’s unemphasized observation that for Shakespeare plot comes first and character has to be fitted into it.9 Since then such critics as Miss Spurgeon,10 Stoll,11 and Wilson Knight12 have all, in their several directions, moved away from the old conception. We are free to recognize that in the Winter’s Tale the Pygmalion myth or resurrection myth in the last act is the substance and the characters, motives, and half-hearted attempts at explanation which surround it are the shadow. We may even regret that the convention in which Shakespeare worked did not allow him to make Paulina frankly a fairy or an angel and thus be rid of his ‘improbable possibilities’. It will soon, we may hope, be impossible to relegate Morris to the shades because his whole world is an invention. All we need demand is that this invented world should have some intellectual or emotional relevance to the world we live in.
And it has. The travels of the Argonauts or of those more ambitious wanderers in the Earthly Paradise, the quest for the well at the world’s end or the wood beyond the world, the politics of Mirkwood and the sorrow of Odin the Goth—all these are attached in a dozen ways first to Morris’s life and then to the lives of us all. They express the author’s deepest sense of reality, which is much subtler and more sensitive than we expect—a mass of ‘tensions’ as von Hügel would have said. It is a pity that so many readers begin with the Earthly Paradise, not only because it contains much of his dullest work but also because it can hardly be understood in isolation. The opening stanzas state the theme of mutability and mortality, which seems at first a romantic commonplace, and the author seems himself to invite that very estimate of his work which I am rejecting, calling himself an idle singer, whose
murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate.13
It is only when we have read the Prologue and all the ‘links’ that we perceive this complaint of mortality as the recoil from a positive and violent passion for immortality. The Prologue, in fact, is the breaking of a wave: the whole of the rest of the book is the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’,14 and into it Morris has put all that negative and compensatory poetry which has earned him his reputation. The scheme could hardly have escaped monotony and he never tried it again. But even here the first ‘tension’ becomes visible and redeems the whole thing from mere fin de siècle pessimism. On the one hand we have the passion for immortality, which in Morris is as wild, as piercing, as orgiastic and heart-breaking as his presentations of sexual love are simple, sensuous, and unimpassioned; and this in itself is something very different from mere melancholy. But it is balanced by an opposite feeling which no one has expressed quite so forcibly as Morris—the feeling that such desire is not wholly innocent, that the world of mortality is more than enough for our allegiance, and that the traitor and apostate who follows a wilder possibility will look back too late on the
land that might have been to me
A kindly giver of wife, child and friend,
And happy life, or at the worser end
A quiet grave till doomsday rend the earth.15
This poise between two moods must not be mistaken for a debate about two doctrines. Morris, like a true Pagan, does not tell us (because he does not think he knows) the ultimate significance of those moments in which we cannot help reaching out for something beyond the visible world and so discovering ‘at what unmeasured price Man sets his life’.16 He neither seeks to justify them like a Christian nor to repress them like a materialist. He simply presents the tension. And it is one that cannot be resolved: for that same impression of the goodness of mere living which corrects our desire for some Acre of the Undying must also aggravate the sting of mortality. As Byron had said, there is no sterner moralist than pleasure; and so for Morris it is not unhappiness but happiness which is the real fountain of misgiving, making us ‘more mindful that the sweet days die’.17 The idyllic, which admittedly fills so large a place in his work, is not simply an escape; its temporary exclusion of ill luck, disease, and injustice serves to disengage the real and unalterable trouble about temporal existence as such. It is as if Morris said to the ordinary pessimists, ‘Yes, yes, I know all about the slums, and Tess, and Jude. Perhaps we can abolish them in a rational society; but it is then that the real problem appears.’
No doubt many will be tempted to reply that this ‘is going far to seek disquietude’ in a world where scarce one per cent. of the population have ever been so fortunate as to have leisure for those delicate distresses. But Morris has not left himself open to this reply. No one could be less of ‘a cui bono man’; no one more concerned, both in practice and imagination, with ‘the people’s praise’ and the ‘good of the folk’. This second tension, between the fundamental unsatisfactoriness of mortal life and a conviction that the vigorous enjoyment and improvement of such life is infinitely worth while, now begins to appear. Already in The Life and Death of Jason the haunting desire for immortality is opposed—and, again, I do not mean doctrinally opposed—not so much to ordinary happiness as to heroic exploit. The Argonauts are teased and solicited over and over again by paradises, gardens, and islands, ‘not made for men that die’, and every pause of the action is but a silence to make audible the
Formless and wailing thoughts, that press
About our hour of happiness.18
But the answer to these is simply to get on with the job—to mend the sails, or launch the boat, or gather firewood. This admirable solution—at times almost as surprising as that in the Bhagavad-Gita, ‘Defeat and victory are the same: therefore fight’—becomes more and more characteristic of Morris as he proceeds. In Sigurd it amounts almost to a complete trampling underfoot of the whole ideal of happiness in any shape or form. It is contemptible to ask ‘a little longer, and a little longer to live’.19 The gods have not made the world for happiness but to be ‘a tale’, and it is good, when they ask us for one deed, to give them two. We find even a hint that there may be some ultimate justification of all things which will explain
Why the brave man’s spear is broken, and his war-shield fails at need.20
But Morris soon withdraws from these supposals. For one so enamoured of ‘the Northernness’ these doomed Eddaic gods—the very type of Stoical Romanticism—had a strong appeal. But Morris cannot forget that he does not really know whether anything like them exists, and he feels that the whole thing is getting too like a philosophy or a theology. He will not hammer his world into any simplified shape. Hence in the great prose romances, which are the real crown of his work, we come back to something much more actual. The answer to the ‘formless and wailing thoughts’ is found in the daily life, health, and preservation of the community. The ‘kindreds’, ‘houses’, or ‘little lands’ of the romances are the points where Morris’s career as a socialist touches his career as a poet. For Morris—let there be no mistake about it—is in one sense as good a ‘totalitarian’ as ever came out of Moscow or Berlin; his romantic socialism, if it be romantic, is at the opposite pole from the individualism of Shelley or Tom Payne. He immerses the individual completely in the society. ‘If thou diest to-day, where then shall our love be?’ asks the heroine in the House of the Wolfings. ‘It shall abide with the soul of the Wolfing[s],’21 comes the answer. The good tribesman cannot ‘see’ the ‘grave-night’, but rather the ‘tale of the Wolfings through the coming days’ and himself ‘amidst it ever reborn and yet reborn’.22 The opposite state of mind is an enchantment of the dwarfs, when a man becomes separated in soul from the kindred—‘I loved them not, and was not of them, and outside myself there was nothing: within me was the world.’23 The last words, which I have ventured to italicize, are Morris’s penetrating analysis of the poison inherent in one type of romanticism: its dandyism, and subjectivity, and its pitiful war-cry au moins je suis autre. Morris has nothing here to learn from our own century. Rather he has something to teach. Many sociological writers are dull because while they talk of a just distribution of goods they give us no assurance that they know what Good means: we remain in doubt lest the gold they would distribute so equitably may be but fairy gold which will turn by daylight into ballot papers or soup tickets. The great use of the idyllic in literature is to find and illustrate the good—to give a real value to the x about which political algebra can then work. The tribal communities which Morris paints in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains are such attempts, perhaps the most successful attempts ever made, to give x a value. Morris knows as concretely as Burke or Tolstoy what he wants. A modern poet of the Left, praising that same solidarity with the group which Morris praises, invites a man to be ‘one cog in the singing golden hive’. Morris, on the other hand, paints the actual going on of the communal life, the sowing, planting, begetting, building, ditching, eating, and conversation. And for this reason, where the modern poet (squeezing two of the commonest journalistic metaphors together, whether inadvertently or in the vain hope of a lively oxymoron) goes no deeper than the excitement of a political meeting, Morris, from remote Mirkwood and unhistoric Burgstead, brings back a sentiment that a man could really live by. He may seem, in one way, to be as ideal as Shelley, but in another he is as earthly, as rooted, as Aristotle or Dr Johnson. He is everywhere concrete. Comte’s ‘subjective immortality’ and Godwin’s ‘benevolence’ are mere philosophemes: Morris’s life beyond life with the soul of the Wolfings, because we know them and indeed are bone of their bone, is something solid. He tells of what he has tried and found good.
I spoke just now of the enchantment which separated one of Morris’s heroes from this unity. Significantly, it came from a ‘dwarf-wrought hauberk’24 which offered him immunity from death. His temptation to use it and his final rejection of it are the main theme of The House of the Wolfings: the conflict between the love of the tribe and the fear of death is here explicit. And if Morris were mainly concerned with the fear of death, this romance would have resolved the tension, for on this level life and death with the kindred has only to be seen to be preferred to anything else in the world or out of the world. But the fear of death was never one of Morris’s chief concerns: it is only an aspect of something very different, and much harder to extinguish—the positive and passionate thirst for immortality. And so the solution is only momentary: in the romances that follow, the rebel passion breaks out again, never more impressive than when it is thus expressed by an old, unwearied poet. In the later romances the claims of the tribe are not forgotten, and the young hero who goes to the end of the world to drink of the well of life carries thither with him, and carries back, the determination to settle down and be a good king in his own small country. No wanderings are allowed to obliterate our love for ‘the little platoon we belong to’. The tension is felt not now between the love of mortal life and the longing for immortality; it is rather discovered within the longing itself. We cannot help wishing that human life and youth should last for ever: yet is it really to be wished? Long ago in Jason Morris had hinted that life owes all its sweets to that same death whence rise all its bitters. He had stumbled unawares on the real dialectic of natural desire which cannot help wanting (as philosophers would say) ‘the bad infinite’, though that infinite is a horror and a torment. In The Story of the Glittering Plain the land of the ever-living is reached, but it turns out to be only a gorgeous prison. The hero finds ‘the falseness of this unchanging land’:25 among its ‘soft and merry folk’ he ‘long[s] for the house of his fathers and the men of the spear and the plough’.26 So in The Well at the World’s End the Innocent folk, whose name is significant, say that ‘the Gods [have] given us the gift of death lest we weary of life’.27
If we were dealing with any author but Morris we should say that this is the conclusion of the whole matter. But in Morris there are no conclusions. The opposed desires change into their opposites and are lulled asleep and reawake; balance is attained and immediately lost; everything is always beginning over again: it is a dance, not a diagram. It can no more be seized in an epigram, summed up and docketed, than experience itself. One feeling alone never alters, and attains something of the stability of a doctrine. He is always sure that we must labour for the kindred and ‘love . . . the earth and the world with all [our] souls’.28 This is the central altar: the dance moves round it. Love of the world and earth must tempt desire to sail beyond the frontier of that earth and world. Those who sail must look back from shoreless seas to find that they have abandoned their sole happiness. Those who return must find that happiness once more embittered by its mortality, must long again. Even if we found what we wanted it might be the ruin, not the consummation, of desire. But we cannot therefore cease to desire it. This hithering and thithering is too irregular and shot too full of colours to be compared to the sad Buddhist wheel, the circle too beautiful to be called a vicious circle; the conclusion drawn, wherever a mere luxury of pessimism threatens, is always practical, heroic, and commonsensible. And as the world of Morris cannot be summed up, so Morris himself escapes definition. What shall we call him? An imaginative Positivist—an animal man flawed by the longing for a coloured cloud—a potential mystic inhibited by a too-convinced love of the material world—all these err by representing as fixed something which is really always in solution. It is better to say simply that he is a good story-teller who has presented perhaps more faithfully than any other writer the whole scene of life as it must appear on the natural level.
The old indetermine, half-Christian, half-Pantheistic, piety of the last century is gone. The modern literary world is increasingly divided into two camps, that of the positive and militant Christians and that of the convinced materialists. It is here that Morris may be of incalculable value in saving us from ‘dissociation’; for both camps can find in him something that they need. The appeal of his Pagan poet to the Christian reader is obvious. No one else states quite so clearly that dilemma in the natural virtues and the natural desires from which all philosophical religion must start—the question which all theologies claim to answer. And Morris is the more precious because he is content simply to state the question. His work is the fresh fruit of naïve experience, uncontaminated by theorizing. When William Allingham in 1882 talked to him ‘among other things, of believing or not believing in a God’ he replied, ‘It’s so unimportant’ and ‘went on to say that all we can get to, do what we will, is a form of words’.29 This scepticism—a true scepticism with no unacknowledged bias to the negative—leaves his statement of Pagan experience chemically pure. If he had started from the concept of Eternity we might suspect his exposure of the dialectic of time to be tendentious: as it is, the exposure is forced upon him by mere obedience to desire and he remains quite unaware of the doctrines which he is supporting. He thus becomes one of the greatest Pagan witnesses—a prophet as unconscious, and therefore as far beyond suspicion, as Balaam’s ass. As for the readers of the Left, I do not say that they will find him directly useful in politics. His conception of public good is too deeply rooted in agriculture, handicrafts, and the family to be applied to any modern Utopia. What will interest the Left will be those very same qualities that interest the Christians. The Left agrees with Morris that it is an absolute duty to labour for human happiness in this world. But the Left is deceiving itself if it thinks that any zeal for this object can permanently silence the reflection that every moment of this happiness must be lost as soon as gained, that all who enjoy it will die, that the race and the planet themselves must one day follow the individual into a state of being which has no significance—a universe of inorganic homogeneous matter moving at uniform speed in a low temperature. Hitherto the Left has been content, as far as I know, to pretend that this does not matter. It has perhaps been afraid of the ‘formless and wailing thoughts’ because these seem to lead inevitably into the paralysing kind of pessimism—‘There be many that say, Who will shew us any good?’30 At the same time, modern psychology does not encourage us to base a single life, much less a civilization, on so gigantic a repression. It is here, surely, that Morris can come to their assistance. In Morris they will find a political creed which is, in principle, the same as their own, combined with an absolute refusal to paint out ‘the great bar of black that runs across the shield of man’. Morris will show them how to acknowledge what they are tempted to camouflage and yet not to draw from it the conclusion they rightly fear. Nay, he will show them how this thirst for immortality, tinglingly alive in the perpetual motion of its dialectic, will but add a more urgent motive to their endeavours, an honourable firmness in defeat, and a keener edge to victory.
For Morris has ‘faced the facts’. This is the paradox of him. He seems to retire far from the real world and to build a world out of his wishes; but when he has finished the result stands out as a picture of experience ineluctably true. No full-grown mind wants optimism or pessimism—philosophies of the nursery where they are not philosophies of the clinic; but to have presented in one vision the ravishing sweetness and the heart-breaking melancholy of our experience, to have shown how the one continually passes over into the other, and to have combined all this with a stirring practical creed, this is to have presented the datum which all our adventures, worldly and otherworldly alike, must take into account. There are many writers greater than Morris. You can go on from him to all sorts of subtleties, delicacies, and sublimities which he lacks. But you can hardly go behind him.31