I. Scenes from the Fall of Troy
WHEN Morris joined the Democratic Federation in 1883, he signed his membership card, “William Morris, Designer”. But his comrades in the Federation and the Socialist League, when advertising his lectures or pamphlets, preferred to identify him as “The Author of The Earthly Paradise”. In doing this, they echoed the opinion of Morris’s importance which was held by the Victorian middle-class public. With the publication of The Earthly Paradise in 1868-70, and of its forerunner, The Life and Death of Jason, in 1867, Morris’s reputation as a major poet and notable personality of the age first became established.
To-day it is rare to find readers who have read all, or most, of the twenty-four poetic narratives which make up The Earthly Paradise. Few of the works of the Victorian Age have been brushed aside in this century so conclusively as the poem which was once acclaimed as Morris’s masterpiece. Only one line (from the “Apology” at the opening of the poem) remains in common currency—“the idle singer of an empty day”—and around this line there have gathered vague associations of sweetness and languorous melody. And from these associations there has been built, in turn, the common picture of Morris: of a bluff, straightforward extrovert, part designer, part sweet singer, with wide interests but with a shallow response to life, who in some miraculous way is supposed to have by-passed the acute mental conflicts and emotional stresses which racked and wasted even the greatest of his contemporaries. This supposed absence of arduous intellectual or spiritual struggle in Morris’s life has given rise to an air of condescension in the treatment of him by contemporary scholars.
But a careful reading of The Earthly Paradise must lead us to quite different conclusions. Alongside our picture of “William Morris, Designer”, with his great capacity for application and his constructive confrontation of life, we must set another picture—of Morris, the late romantic poet, over whom flowed those waves of objectless yearning, nostalgia for the past and dissatisfaction with the present, which dragged him backwards towards despair. The middle years of Morris’s life were years of conflict: and only when “hope” was reborn within him in the 1880s do the “poet” and the “designer” become one, with integrated aim and outlook. Only when Morris became a Communist did he become (as W.B. Yeats was to describe him) the “Happiest of the Poets”.
The evidence of this conflict may be found in Morris’s poetry, and some of the causes of it in the climate of his times and in his personal life. First, let us turn to the poems.
Nine years of silence passed between the publication of The Defence of Guenevere and Jason. During a part of this time, at least, Morris continued writing. In the months after he returned from his honeymoon and had moved into Red House he was working on a poem in dramatic form, Scenes from the Fall of Troy,1 which he left unfinished, and whose parts were not published in his lifetime. The manner of writing, the stress of feeling, in these fragments is closely related to the earlier poems, especially to “Sir Peter Harpdon’s End”. The pervasive sense of inevitable failure in the face of overwhelming odds, already present in the earlier poem, is deepened. Continually the note recurs of the passing of the old heroic values—Helen’s beauty, Hector’s courage, the heroic story of the siege itself becoming, in its later stages in the description of Paris, a tale of brutality, cunning and fraud:
“… here we are, glaring across the walls
Across the tents, with such hate in our eyes
As only damned souls have, and uselessly
We make a vain pretence to carry on
This fight about the siege which will not change
However many ages we stay here.
But now—alas! my honour is all gone
And all the joy to fight that I had once
Gone mouldy like the bravery of arms
That lie six feet under the Trojan turf.
Ah when I think of that same windy morn
When the Greeks landed with the push of spears:
The strange new look of those our enemies,
The joyous clatter, hurry to and fro,
And if a man fell it was scarce so sad—
‘God pity him’ we said and ‘God bless him,
He died well fighting in the open day’—
Yea such an one was happy I may think,
Now all has come to stabbing in the dark.”
Contrast with these passages the final stanza of “The Death of Paris”, one of the tales of The Earthly Paradise, and something of the very marked change between these two phases of Morris’s poetry will become evident. In this verse the narrator is made to reflect, in conventional late romantic manner, upon the oblivion of time:
“I cannot tell what crop may clothe the hills,
The merry hills Troy whitened long ago—
Belike the sheaves, wherewith the reaper fills
His yellow wain, no whit the weaker grow
For that past harvest-tide of wrong and woe;
Belike the tale, wept over otherwhere,
Of those old days, is clean forgotten there.”
We pass, in this contrast, from poetry which (for all its unfinished effect and occasional cliches) lays a constant claim upon the reader’s intellect and perception, to poetry of imprecise dreamlike moods, soothing and relaxing to the mind. In the Scenes from the Fall of Troy, the great legend is used, not—as in Morris’s later manner—as an antique picture-land with decorative figures but as the setting within which the heroic values lost to the nineteenth century can be evoked with freshness and conviction. It is true that the sense of failure is ever-present. But the forces, human and natural, making for failure are evoked with a sense of active conflict, rather than recorded with passive nostalgia. Courage, beauty, endurance, wisdom—all are overthrown but their value is never denied. Rather, the dramatic method of narration, the occasional sharp realistic details, the meaningful irregularities of rhythm—all work together to evoke the feeling of real struggle and life. As in the earlier poems, Morris lays brutality side by side with beauty and melancholy: the scenes of battle are treated with realism and care, as in Aeneas’ account of the encounter between Troilus and Diomed:
“Into the press came Diomed softly
And like a cunning fighter, on each side
He put the strokes that met him: traversing
With little labour till his turn might chance.
Then came my lord King Priam’s youngest son,
With no hair on his face, Sirs, as you see,
Who all day long had struck the greatest strokes
And bent his knees and stiffened up his back;
But when his eye caught Diomedes’ eye
He cried and leapt—crur, how the handles jarred!”
There is no slackness here in rhythmic control. We are made to share in the aspirations of the heroes and when Hector is trapped by Achilles, his death, like that of Sir Peter Harpdon, strikes a note of affimation rather than defeat, and the concluding line of the whole poem evokes not disaster alone, but a boundless vista of further endeavour and experience:
“To the ships!
Aeneas and Antenor—to the ships!—”
There are failures and immaturities enough in the Scenes from the Fall of Troy to account for Morris’s abandoning the work uncompleted. But even so, many problems remain. At some time between leaving off work on the Scenes and the full adoption of his plans for The Earthly Paradise, Morris took a conscious decision to alter the whole manner of his writing. Moreover, in this alteration he turned his back upon much of what is strong and moving in his earlier work, while maintaining—in a more sophisticated and self-conscious form—the weakness and immaturities. This decision is an important one. An understanding of it provides a key to the poetry of his middle period. It reveals much of the change of attitude from revolt to disillusion in his personal outlook during these years. And it marks a stage in the degeneration of the English Romantic movement.
II. The Earthly Paradise
The Earthly Paradise is a collection of twenty-four poetic narratives, of greatly varying lengths, and from many sources, classical, Eastern, medieval, and Norse. They are grouped in pairs for each month of the year, prefaced by verses for the months. As in The Canterbury Tales, the poems are bound together by a slender narrative. In the long Prologue, “The Wanderers”, a group of Northern warriors in the Middle Ages set sail in quest for a land of eternal life and youth, and after many adventures and much disillusionment, they reach in their old age a friendly and fertile land where Greek traditions still linger. They are welcomed, entertained, and the stories are those with which the Wanderers and their hosts entertain each other. The resemblance to the method and plan of The Canterbury Tales, however—despite Morris’s invocation of his “master”, Geoffrey Chaucer—is only superficial, and the comparison much to Morris’s disadvantage. While Chaucer’s plan is dynamic the framework of The Earthly Paradise is entirely static. It is the pretext, not the occasion for the stories. Neither among the Wanderers nor the hosts is there any differentiation of character: the stories whether intended as tragic or felicitous, express similar attitudes to life throughout which are always felt to be those adopted by Morris the poet, rather than those held by the narrators he has shadowed forth. In this way, the framework, so far from giving added vigour and interest to the narrations, acts to dull the immediacy of their impact, to remove them even further from the region of everyday belief. We are reading not stories, but a story about people telling stories; and these stories were told very long ago about events which took place in an even further distant and fabulous past.
Moreover, Morris adopts, as the prime narrator, the character of the careless folk-bard, beguiling, saddening, or sweetening the lives of his listeners by his tales, but always avoiding any full treatment of their implications. Since he speaks not in his real voice but in a self-consciously assumed character, this is a further means by which the impact of life is distanced in the poem.
The method of narration throughout is leisurely—“a smooth song sweet enow”—and full of archaisms. That this style was adopted after deliberation is clear from some of the earliest rejected drafts of the poems.1 A comparison between two passages of the Prologue, “The Wanderers” (one of the first to which Morris turned his hand), will reveal the change in manner. The first Prologue was written in quatrains, both more diffuse and more regular than his early poems, but still preserving some roughness and overrunning from verse to verse when demanded by the action. In these two passages, the Wanderers are the victims of a night-attack in a strange land. In the rejected version Morris wrote:
“But in the dead of night I woke,
And heard a sharp and bitter cry,
And there saw, struck with a great stroke,
Lie dead, Sir John of Hederby.
“We armed us with what speed we might,
And thick and fast the arrows came,
Nor did we any more lack light,
For all the woods were red with flame.
“Straight we set forward valiantly
While all about the blacks lay hid,
Who never spared to yell and cry—
A woeful night to us befell.
“For some within the fire fell,
And some with shafts were smitten dead,
Neither could any see right well
Which side to guard, nor by my head
“Did we strike stroke at all that night,
For ever onward as we drew
So drew they back from out our sight.
This is thin verse, with several careless and flat lines thrown in, as it seems, to marry off a rhyme. But it is still verse which can carry action: the sudden awakening is vividly shown: the sequence of events is clear: the confusion and impotence of the warriors at night presented with movement and conviction. The published version is in the usual rhyming couplets:
“But therewithall I woke, and through the night
Heard shrieks and shouts of clamour of the fight,
And snatching up my axe, unarmed beside
Nor scarce awaked, my rallying cry I cried,
And with good haste unto the hubbub went;
But even in the entry of the tent
Some dark mass hid the star-besprinkled sky,
And whistling past my head a spear did fly,
And striking out I saw a naked man
Fall ‘neath my blow, nor heeded him, but ran
Unto the captain’s tent, for there indeed
I saw my fellows stand at desperate need,
Beset with foes, nor yet more armed than I,
Though on the way I rallied hastily
Some better armed, with whom I straightway fell
Upon the foe, who with a hideous yell
Turned round upon us…”
On the surface this passage reveals that technical accomplishment so often claimed by nineteenth-century critics for The Earthly Paradise. The verse seems to scan all right, there are no grammatical howlers, a few “felicities” of poetic diction. But—as too often in these poems—it is a “technical mastery” at odds with real poetic achievement. The passage describes action: it does not begin to evoke it—what line could with less conviction convey speed and confusion than the sedate, “And with good haste unto the hubbub went”? The archaisms underline the static, decorative effect—“the rewithall”, “beside”, “at desperate need”, “beset with foes”. Even more characteristic, in the press of imminent death the narrator can find time to note the conventional poetic beauties, “the star-besprinkled sky”. The confusion at the end of the passage, in which by an afterthought the narrator reaches the captain’s tent with some better-armed comrades, conveys not the confusion of battle but an imprecision in the poet’s imaginative realization of the scene. The rhythms are ugly and clogged: the action muddled.
Not all of Morris’s scenes of action in The Earthly Paradise can come under all these criticisms. But the general sense of the criticism is true throughout. These leisurely narratives never falter: but at the same time they never mend their pace. They are old tales re-told, and this is constantly emphasized by the liberal use of archaic, or “poetic” diction. The poem marks an important stage in the tendency, so often commented upon, for the later romantics to confine both their themes and their vocabulary to certain limited fields of experience. Even in the first version of the Prologue, Morris described the ship of the Wanderers, when they first set out, as supplied with “stockfish and salt-meat”: in the published version, it is a “fair long-ship”, “well victualled”. Consistently the vocabulary is limited so as to prevent the intrusion of the humdrum, the sharp realistic detail, the unpleasant or shocking fact. If scenes of labour are presented, they are seen by the observer as picturesque—the sickle, the barefooted damsels, the mellowing grapes. If scenes of battle, they are decorative, as seen through a dim heroic mist. If scenes of love, they are sensuous but featureless, presented as a mood of luxury rather than a human relationship. The characters are the simplest shadows of folk types, the fabulous king, the hero, the lovelorn maiden, the scholar, the traveller, the misanthrope. They are brought into relationship, not through the pressures of character, but through the incidents of the story. From the very opening of the poem, the “Apology” and the first lines of the Prologue:
“Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small, and white, and clean…”
we are transported to a “shadowy isle of bliss”, in which we are not invited to judge either the events or the characters according to our own experience. In the Defence of Guenevere volume we are made to feel that the characters-Sir Peter Harpdon, the narrator of “Geffray Teste Noire”, Guenevere herself—are motivated by passions whose nobility or intensity may exceed our own, but which we still recognize in ourselves. The conditions within which they act may be strange to us, but the consequences of their actions follow with the same logic that we experience in our own lives. With The Earthly Paradise we enter through Keats’s “magic casements” into “the realm of gold”:
“A nameless city in a distant sea,
White as the changing walls of faerie,
Thronged with much people clad in ancient guise
I am now fain to set before your eyes.”
The realism which was the very salt of Morris’s youthful poetry is deliberately abandoned; and the tension between the closely-imagined detail and the atmosphere of dream is broken. The laws of everyday experience no longer hold good, and we enter a land of the marvellous and strange, in which the poet may make and break his own laws—a land filled with dragons, magic of several kinds, fabulous kingdoms and hoards of wealth, Gods on earth and pagan sacrifices. The land is a land of dream.
So much is generally recognized, although the distinction between the romantic realism of The Defence of (Juenevere, and the dream-like “romance” of The Earthly Paradise is not always understood. But romance, however far-fetched and dream-like, cannot escape from some indirect relevance to living experience. Morris himself, indeed, claimed this relevance for one of the most miraculous of his tales, “The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon”:
“A dream it is, friends, and no history
Of men who ever lived; so blame me nought
If wonderous things together there are brought,
Strange to our waking world—yet as in dreams
Of known things still we dream, whatever gleams
Of unknown light may make them strange, so here
Our dreamland story holdeth such things dear
And such things loathed, as we do; else, indeed,
Were all such marvels nought to help our need.”
Morris did not think that he was writing fairy stories for children, but adult poetry. Moreover, he had shown himself in his first volume to have one of the most original poetic talents of the century, and he showed throughout his life a deep reflective seriousness inconsistent with the character of a casual entertainer. What impelled him to chose the form of romance for his most sustained poetic work? Why did his tales of magic and dragons establish for him so high a reputation among his contemporaries? What relevance did these stories have to his own experience? These are among the problems which demand some answer.
III. “A sense of something ill…”
Romance is often seen as a sympton of decadence within a culture. In its sophisticated literary forms it has flourished among the idle class, divorced from the labour of production. But in the nineteenth century it found an even wider and growing audience, among the exploited as well as among the exploiters. This audience found in it a refuge from the drab-ness of their own lives: a compensation for the extinction of the heroic and beautiful in their everyday existence. And the manifesto of this new romance was in the often-quoted “Apology” which prefaces The Earthly Paradise:
“The heavy trouble, the bewildering care
That weighs us down who live and earn our bread,
These idle verses have no power to bear;
So let me sing of names remembered,
Because they, living not, can ne’er be dead…”
Here there is evidence enough that Morris’s turn to romance was deliberately and consciously taken:
“Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.
“Folk say, a wizard to a northern king
At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show,
That through one window men beheld the spring,
And through another saw the summer glow,
And through a third the fruited vines a-row,
While still unheard, but in its wonted way,
Piped the drear wind of that December day.
“So with this Earthly Paradise it is,
If ye will read aright, and pardon me,
Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss
Midmost the beating of the steely sea,
Where tossed about all hearts of men must be;
Whose ravening monsters mighty men must slay,
Not the poor singer of an empty day.”
Because this “Apology” is concerned with a real and personal experience—the poet’s own creative problems—and because it claims the attention of the reader with its constant sense of contrast between the rich illusions of art and the hostile realities of life, it is finer poetry than all but a few passages of the poems for which it serves as a Preface. It carries still the flickering spirit of revolt—“Of Heaven and Hell I have no power to sing”—where Morris turns his back upon the impoverished moralizing of contemporary schools, rejecting the age of “improvement”. But in its sum it is a confession of defeat: considered within the traditions of the romantic movement, it is a rejection of Shelley’s claims for the poet, a refusal to sustain the struggle of Keats for full poetic consciousness and responsibility. The tension between the ideal and the real, between the rich aspirations of life and art and the ignoble and brutal fact, which underlies the best of Keats’s poetry and (in a more complex way) Morris’s own early poems, is no longer present. It is restated in the “Apology”: but when the main poem is entered the open conflict has been abandoned.
But the conflict cannot be exorcised as easily as that. While the conscious effort to reconcile, or merely to bring into poetic opposition, man’s desire and the reality of his life, is abandoned, the same conflict persists in a muted form upon nearly every page of The Earthly Paradise. A close reading of every poem in the sequence reveals that Morris is not really interested in either the characters or in the action—in the sense that the action is in itself either significant or purposeful. The poetry is a poetry of mood: the climaxes are climaxes of mood: the real action lies in variations of mood. The narratives are little more than the machinery for this variation, the basic movement of which is an almost mechanical oscillation between sensuous luxury and horror, melancholy or despair. “The Lady of the Land” is discovered by a voyager among fabulous cloisters stored high with precious gems and gold:
“Naked she was, the kisses of her feet
Upon the floor a dying path had made
From the full bath unto her ivory seat;
In her right hand, upon her bosom laid,
She held a golden comb, a mirror weighed
Her left hand down, aback her fair head lay
Dreaming awake of some long vanished day.”
At the end of the tale she is transformed into a vile dragon:
“A fearful thing stood at the cloister’s end,
And eyed him for a while…
And as it came on towards him, with its teeth
The body of a slain goat did it tear,
The blood whereof in its hot jaws did seeth,
And on its tongue lie saw the smoking hair…”
This” movement is repeated in poem after poem. It is stated early in the Prologue, where the narrator tells of a dream that he was a king,
“Set on the throne whose awe and majesty
Gold lions guard; before whose moveless feet
A damsel knelt, praying in words so sweet
For what I know not now, that both mine eyes
Grew full of tears, and I must bid her rise
And sit beside me; step by step she came
Up the gold stair, setting my heart a-flame
With all her beauty, till she reached the throne
And there sat down, but as with her alone
In that vast hall, my hand her hand did seek,
And on my face I felt her balmy cheek,
Throughout my heart there shot a dreadful pang,
And down below us, with a sudden clang
The golden lions rose, and roared aloud,
And in at every door did armed men crowd,
Shouting out death and curses…”
Repeated once again, purely in terms of mood, in “The Hill of Venus”:
“Time and again, he, listening to such word,
Felt his heart kindle; time and again did seem
As though a cold and hopeless tune he heard,
Sung by grey mouths amidst a dull-eyed dream;
Time and again across his heart would stream
The pain of fierce desire whose aim was gone,
Of baffled yearning, loveless and alone.”
It is found in a significant image which recurs several times in the poems, of the living struck dead in the postures of life: the human sacrifice met by the Wanderers: the figures in the tomb in “The Writing on the Image”: the dead-alive people at the end of “The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon”: the land peopled with the dead images—
“Of knights and ladies sitting round,
A set smile upon every face;
Their gold gowns trailing on the ground,
The light of gold through all the place.”
in the first version of the “Wanderers”.
In fact Morris has made this oscillation of mood the prevailing movement in many whole poems. It is a mechanical oscillation: the sense of real conflict and struggle is absent. In “King Arthur’s Tomb” (one of the Defence of Guenevere volume) Morris speaks of “that half-sleep, half-strife/(Strange sleep, strange strife) that men call living”. It is a significant phrase. In this early volume, life—while strange and idealized—is made up equally of action and of desire. Men are not content with moods alone: they fight, work, enter into relations with each other, in the effort to make their desires into realities. A symbolical incident takes place at the opening of The Earthly Paradise. The Wanderers, setting out on their quest for the land of eternal life (a desire which Morris would never have put into the head of Sir Peter Harpdon or even Launcelot) encounter FCing Edward III in the Channel. He is perhaps the only real character in the poem:
“Broad-browed he was, hook-nosed, with wide grey eyes
No longer eager for the coming prize,
But keen and steadfast, many an ageing line,
Half-hidden by his sweeping beard and fine,
Ploughed his thin cheeks…”
He, after hearing of their quest, gives them licence to proceed:
“… the world is wide
For you, I say,—for me a narrow space
Betwixt the four walls of a fighting place.”
Then he is left in the world of strife and action: the Wanderers go on into the world of sleep and of dream, leaving the “fighting place” behind. It is true that they meet adventures enough: but these adventures happen to them: they are not willed, and their significance is only in their shattering of the subjective illusions of the Wanderers. The ambitions, strife and achievements of men and women have little more significance than they have to “The Man Who Never Laughed Again”:
“But all the folk he saw were strange to him,
And, for all heed that unto them he gave,
Might have been nought; the reaper’s bare brown limb,
The rich man’s train with litter and armed slave,
The girl bare-footed in the stream’s white wave-
Like empty shadows by his eyes they passed,
The world was narrowed to his heart at last.”
We are left with the question asked in the verses for November:
“Art thou so weary that no world there seems
Beyond these four walls, hung with pain and dreams?”
The four walls of the “fighting-place” have contracted to the four walls of the solitary individual’s heart.
It is impossible not to judge The Earthly Paradise within the context of romanticism in decline. To Morris, oppressed by “bourgeoisdom and philistinism”, the real world of “the piston stroke” and “hideous town” (and also of his unhappy personal life) had become unbearable. We do not need to reconstruct his state of mind from hints and suggestions, for he did this himself in a remarkable passage in his article, “How I became a Socialist” (1894):
“Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization… What shall I say concerning its mastery of and its waste of mechanical power, its commonwealth so poor, its enemies of the commonwealth so rich, its stupendous organisation—for the misery of life! Its contempt of simple pleasures which everyone could enjoy but for its folly? Its eyeless vulgarity which has destroyed art, the one certain solace of labour? All this I felt then as now, but I did not know why it was so. The hope of the past times was gone, the struggles of mankind for many ages had produced nothing but this sordid, aimless, ugly confusion; the immediate future seemed to me likely to intensify all the present evils by sweeping away the last survivals of the days before the dull squalor of civilization had settled down on the world. This was a bad look-out indeed, and, if I may mention myself as a personality and not as a mere type, especially so to a man of my disposition, careless of metaphysics and religion, as well as of scientific analysis, but with a deep love of the earth and the life on it, and a passion for the history of the past of mankind. Think of it! Was it all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap, with Podsnap’s drawing-room in the offing, and a Whig committee dealing out champagne to the rich and margarine to the poor in such convenient proportions as would make all men content together, though the pleasure of the eyes was gone from the world, and the place of Homer was to be taken by Huxley? Yet, believe me, in my heart, when I really forced myself to look toward the future, that is what I saw in it, and, as far as I could tell, scarce anyone seemed to think it worth while to struggle against such a consummation of civilization.’’
This passage was written at the end of Morris’s life, when his new convictions enabled him to express his earlier attitudes with greater logic than they were felt by him at the time. But what is important is that Morris was not imagining emotions which he might have felt when he was in his thirties, but striving to re-create his earlier state of mind with precision. It is rubbish to suppose that Morris, in his middle years, was a bluff craftsman, insensitive to the life around him; or that The Earthly Paradise is a sweet song of pleasure written carelessly by a man advancing by easy steps to the effortless acceptance of Socialist convictions. Such an interpretation lessens the splendour of the struggle for the human spirit enacted in Morris’s life. In truth, the underlying note of The Earthly Paradise is neither sweet nor careless: it is a note of despair. If we set some of Swinburne’s poems aside, the poem closest in mood to much of The Earthly Paradise is that of James Thomson, the unhappy alcoholic and insomniac—The City of Dreadful Night.
“The hope of the past ages was gone…” As we have seen “hope” was a key-word in Morris’s vocabulary. By “hope” he meant all that gives worth and continuity to human endeavour, all that makes man’s finest aspirations seem possible of achievement in the real world. Of his later conversion to Socialism Morris wrote (in the same article): “I did not measure my hope, nor the joy it brought me.” But without hope the romantic movement lost its forward impetus: it was no longer a movement of revolt, but one of compensation or escape: “only in ourselves and the world of literature and art was there any hope”. Aspiration, denied the hope of fulfilment, could only be nourished and brooded upon in the solitary individual’s heart. But, as William Blake had warned, “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence”. The romantic is caught in the mood of “The Man Who Never Laughed Again”:
“If, thinking of the pleasure and the pain,
Men find in struggling life, he turned to gain
The godlike joy he hoped to find therein,
All turned to cloud, and nought seemed left to win.
“Love moved him not, yea, something in his heart
There was that made him shudder at its name;
He could not rouse himself to take his part
In ruling worlds and winning praise and blame;
And if vague hope of glory o’er him came,
Why should he cast himself against the spears
To make vain stories for the unpitying years?”
The world is “empty” because it is an entirely subjective world. No matter how rich the illusion of happiness it is always transient and poisoned by the knowledge of mortality. The Wanderers, in the Epilogue of the poem, recall
“… That day of their vanished youth, when first
They saw Death clear, and deemed all life accurst
By that cold overshadowing threat—the End.”
The “isle of bliss” is amid the “beating of the steely sea”: the wizard to the northern king transforms the room by his miraculous windows, but the continuous reality outside is the piping of the December wind: always we are on the verge of-
“… the waking from delight
Unto the real day void and white.”
of “The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon”.1 Never are we permitted to escape into illusion for long: rather, we are trying in anxious wakefulness to recall a dream. Nor are the illusions themselves free from the same taint: more often, like “The Golden Apples”,
“… the tale did seem
Like to the middle of some pleasant dream,
Which, waked from, leaves upon the troubled mind
A sense of something ill that lurked behind.”
Mortality is a theme common to all poetry. But the attitude of poets to the fact of death has changed no less than attitudes to other aspects of man’s experience. Death has been faced with resignation or with fear of the unknown: it has been seen as a leveller or as a welcome release. Mortality has given value to heroism and poignancy to love. Rarely, before the nineteenth century, was death felt as the poisoner of all value in life. Darwin’s evidence of evolution published in the mid-century had made men view themselves in a diminished perspective. Even Tennyson was impelled to question, in In Memoriam, not only whether individual men were doomed to extinction, but the human race itself,
“Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seaPd within the iron hills?”
Tennyson quickly put the question back behind a veil of wishful religious sentiment. But for James Thomson—who must have been at work on The City of Dreadful Night at the same time as Morris was finishing The Earthly Paradise—the question had become an accepted fact:
“The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.”
And, to the horror of the fact of mortality in an indifferent universe, James Thomson could only oppose the refrain. “No hope could have no fear”.
It is the total absence of hope which is new—hope not for a future life, but for human fulfilment upon earth. Moreover, this absence of hope fell within the context of a society whose basic ethic was that of naked individualism, where every pressure tended to isolate man from his neighbour, and to deny the objective values of men acting together in society, striving for goods both wider and more permanent than those of the individual’s satisfaction. “The place of Homer was to be taken by Huxley…”—it is no accident that Morris singled out as the enemy not the great scientist Darwin, but the notable publicist of evolutionary theory and polemical rationalist, T.H. Huxley. For it was Huxley, far more than Darwin, who was responsible for that caricature of science commonly mistaken for “the theory of evolution” by the Victorian public: a caricature in which nature was seen as “red in tooth and claw”, engaged in a merciless and meaningless struggle for survival on the pattern of the competitive ethics of industrial capitalist society, in which the predatory insticts formed the motive power of “progress”. Indeed, Huxley repeatedly crossed the border into political theory, and declared in a phrase which lodged in the popular memory: “For his successful progress man has been largely indebted to those qualities he shares with the ape and the tiger.” Moreover, he came forward as the champion of a mechanical materialism which—while it helped to liberate scientific enquiry from the trammels of superstition—was closely akin in spirit to Mr. Gradgrind’s utilitarianism, the deadly foe of Morris’s youth. Where Morris’s master, Keats, had written, “Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth”, T.H. Huxley declared that he had no faith “in any source of truth save that reached by the patient application of scientific methods”. Morris had (perhaps unfairly) taken Huxley as the Prophet of a society utterly careless of beauty, of art, and the finer human virtues, which looked upon both nature and the past of mankind as an “ugly confusion”, a jungle of accidents within which predatory passions and lusts fought for survival, and in which self-interest and the values of possession contaminated every relationship, from the labour market to the marriage bed.
These are among the reasons why the recognition of mortality fell with such horror upon Morris’s mind, and those of many of his more sensitive contemporaries. On every side he was faced by the “sordid, ugly, aimless confusion”. Death appeared as doubly bitter: as closing with terrible finality a life whose potentialities had never been even partially fulfilled, whose aspirations, denied by a hostile society, must always remain unsatisfied: and as sealing a life whose focus was becoming ever more subjective, without the compensation of that sense of continuity which the active participation in the struggle for wider social ends must always bring. But, paradoxically, this horror bred its opposite. Since the romantic mind, once “hope” was abandoned, could not contemplate life without turning to the fact of death, so a desire for death was generated as a means of escape from the “unpitying” reality of life. So marked in Swinburne, it is also one of those undertones in The Earthly Paradise which bring the “sense of something ill that lurked behind”.
Morris, in The Earthly Paradise, rarely turned to look his fear in the face—perhaps only in the finest of the verses for the months, as at the close of “November”:
“Yea, I have looked, and seen November there;
The changeless seal of change it seemed to be,
Fair death of things that, living once, were fair;
Bright sign of loneliness too great for me,
Strange image of the dread eternity,
In whose void patience how can these have part,
These outstretched feverish hands, this restless heart?”
In these lines, because Morris dared to look steadily at his enemy, we are left with the sense, not of death, but of life. But whenever he took refuge from his fear in the world of romance, we meet, not life, but the constant undertow back towards death. The dream, so much desired, is always breaking down:
“Ah, these, with life so done with now, might deem
That better is it resting in a dream,
Yea, e’en a dull dream, than with outstretched hand,
And wild eyes, face to face with life to stand…
Than waking in a hard taskmaster’s grasp
Because we strove the unsullied joy to clasp—
Than just to find our hearts the world, as we
Still thought we were and ever longed to be,
To find nought real except ourselves, and find
All care for all things scattered to the wind,
Scarce in our hearts the very pain alive.
Compelled to breathe indeed, compelled to strive,
Compelled to fear, yet not allowed to hope—”
he concludes “The Man Who Never Laughed Again”. Indeed, it may be suggested that one of the pressures which impelled him to write Jason and The Earthly Paradise was the desire to shake off that morbidity of preoccupation which contributed in making James Thomson into an alcoholic. The speed with which he wrote—on occasion upwards of 700 lines in a night—not only accounts for much of the technical slackness (the easy, often repeated rhymes, the clumsy archaisms—“therewithal”, “gan”, “uswards”, etc.—thrown in to enable the rhythm to muddle through) but is also evidence that neither his mind nor his feelings were seriously engaged in much of the work. It is as if his feverish activity, both in the crafts and in poetry in these years, is like the labour of the craftsman in “Pygmalion and the Image”, which “soothes his heart, and dulls thought’s poisonous sting”.
The reason for the constant oscillation of mood in the poem now becomes more clear. It is caused by the constant undertow of death. The movement reminds us of Keats once again, and of the “Ode to Melancholy”:
“She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shring…”
“Veil’d melancholy”, the consciousness of the passing of life and of beauty, may only be seen by him “whose strenuous tongue/Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine”. This melancholy is met and accepted as the price of consciousness in the revised Hyperion. What may be called a “muted Hyperion theme” persists in The Earthly Paradise. It is the theme of the hero, dissatisfied with humdrum life, aspiring to some goal, which, once achieved, brings a moment of bliss, and then disaster or despair. Among whole poems where this theme predominates are “The Watching of the Falcon”, “The Man Who Never Laughed Again”, “The Writing on the Image”, “The Hill of Venus”, while it appears with slight variations in “The Wanderers” and “The Lady of the Land”, and, in an inverted form, in “Pygmalion and the Image” and “The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon”, which, while ending happily, do so with many suggestions of the evanescence of mortal happiness. But, because Morris never treats with full awareness the conflict which this theme symbolizes, it has gone tawdry and picturesque. The aspirations of the heroes have diminished to the lust for wealth or sensuous pleasure or mere romantic restlessness and curiosity: the struggle is replaced by the miraculous, the satisfaction suited to the aspiration, the disaster mechanical’, and having little more moral implication than that “curiosity killed the cat”. The conflict is never openly stated or posed in terms of human choice or agency: certainly it is never resolved. Its recurrence represents little more than a profound dissatisfaction with life, and a fear of death under whose shadow all human values seem to fall apart.
Here, then, is some answer to our questions. The Earthly Paradise is the poetry of despair. The extinction of hope in the world around him drove Morris to abandon Keats’s struggle, and the struggle of his own youth, to reconcile his ideals and his everyday experience, and he turned his back on the world by telling old tales of romance. But, as Keats had warned in his revision of Hyperion, this road must lead to the death of the poetic genius, by excluding from poetry the active, suffering consciousness, and limiting its themes to certain “poetic” regions of experience. Since one of his main impulses towards writing poetry was in the desire to shake free from despair, the poetry itself reveals this feeling of despair as a constant undertow: but since he rarely met his despair openly, he rarely evoked it with any depth of feeling or dignity. For these reasons, The Earthly Paradise must be seen as romantic poetry which has entered the phase of decadence. Much of it is exceedingly competent narrative verse: “The Man Born to Be King”; “The Writing on the Image”; “The Man Who Never Laughed Again”; these and others are well-told tales. Morris has a. persuasive manner of telling a story, an unfaltering self-possessed passage from event to event. But the essential qualities of great art are absent.
Is this all that can be said of the poem? Fortunately, no. If it were, then we would be hard put to it to explain that capacity for change, for the re-birth of life and hope, evident in Morris’s life. As another constant underswell to the poem, never dominant except in the verses for the months, and rarely found without a note of melancholy, there is a suggestion of that “deep love of the earth and the life on it” recalled in his essay. It is found, again and again, in the sensitive evocation of natural beauty and of the seasons. It is found in touches of description of ordinary human life, which, while still picturesque, carry a feeling of a world outside the circle of despair in which men and women carry on the business of life, perhaps without conscious aim, but at least with faith in life and confidence in the future. This sense of normality comes with freshness in the return of “The Man Who Never Laughed Again” from his sojourn of horror to human habitation, passing—
“The slender damsel coming from the well,
Smiling beneath the flashing brazen jar,
Her fellows left behind thereat, to tell
How weary of her smiles her lovers are…
“The trooper drinking at the homestead gate,
Telling wild lies about the sword and spear,
Unto the farmer striving to abate
The pedler’s price; the village drawing near,
The smoke, that scenting the fresh eve, and clear,
Tells of the feast; the stithy’s dying spark,
The barn’s wealth showing dimly through the dark,
“How sweet was all! how easy it should be
Amid such life one’s self-made woes to bear!”
Above all, it is found in the struggle to throw off the mood of death-longing at the end of the verses for “October”:
“—O hearken, hearken! through the afternoon,
The grey tower sings a strange old tinkling tune!
Sweet, sweet, and sad, the toiling year’s last breath,
Too satiate of life to strive with death.
“And we too—will it not be soft and kind,
That rest from life, from patience and from pain;
That rest from bliss we know not when we find;
That rest from Love which ne’er the end can gain?—
—Hark, how the tune swells, that erewhile did wane!
Look up, love!—ah, cling close and never move!
How can I have enough of life and love?”
IV. “The time lacks strength”
“This sordid, aimless, ugly confusion”, “a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap, with Podsnap’s drawing-room in the offing”—so Morris was later to describe England in the years when The Earthly Paradise was first published. And yet, despite the “hatred of modern civilisation” which underlay the poem, it was immediately received with acclaim among a very wide section of the middle-class reading public. Morris (declared the reviewer in St. James’s Magazine) was “one of those men this age particularly wants”. The “world”—“all that roar of machinery and that bustle about wealth—is too much with us”:
“It is not necessary that Mr. William Morris, or indeed, any single man whatsoever, should supply a full and adequate antidote to prevalent feverishness;but he does a distinct and notable service when he provides one possible means of escape.”1
The reviewer of the Pall Mall Gazette also found himself “glad to retire from the stress and the cares of his ugly workaday English life and be entertained… with that succession of gracious pictures… of a remote romantic world”.1 The Saturday Review, attacking Browning for his obscurity found it refreshing to meet “with a modern poem of the Chaucerian type”:
“There is a fairer chance for poetry to be read and appreciated and taken back into favour by a busy material age, if its scope is distinct and direct, its style clear and pellucid, and its manner something like that of the old rhapsodists, minnesingers, and tale-tellers who in divers climes and ages have won such deserved popularity. So seems Mr. Morris to have thought.”
So seem also to have thought a class of readers who bring to mind Mr. Plint, the Leeds stockbroker, and the industrialists who patronized Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and the Morris firm:
“Mr. Morris’s popularity has… something remarkable about it. He is, we have noticed, appreciated by those who as a rule do not care to read any poetry. To our personal knowledge, political economists and scientific men to whom Shelley is a mystery and Tennyson a vexation of spirit, read the ‘Earthly Paradise’ with admiration.”2
If the poem had been intended to voice a revolt against the age, then it would seem to have been a signal failure. Rather, it seemed to strike a chord in the very age which Morris despised. How can this startling reception of the poem be explained?
Morris’s readers were largely drawn from the great middle class into which he himself had been born, which had been enriched by the Industrial Revolution, and which was reaching the climax of its power and prosperity during Morris’s youth and middle age—in the twenty years which followed the Great Exhibition of 1851, when Britain was indeed the workshop of the world. In the census of 1851, 272,000 were numbered in the professions: in 1871, 684,000. In the same years the numbers classed as domestic servants swelled from 900,000 to iy2 millions. Between 1854 and 1880 British capital invested overseas (largely in foreign loans and railways) jumped from about £210 millions to £1,300 millions. By this latter date there were close on 50,000 shareholders in Indian railway stock alone, most of whom lived in Great Britain. At the climax of these years, shortly after the passing of the Reform Bill of 1867, John Bright, champion of Free Trade, uttered one of his many paeons of triumph. “The aristocracy of England which so lately governed the country has abdicated”, he declared:
“There is no longer a contest between us and the House of Lords; we need no longer bring charges against a selfish oligarchy; we no longer dread the power of the territorial magnates; we no longer feel ourselves domineered over by a class; we feel that denunciation and invective now would be out of place; the power which hitherto has ruled over us is shifted.”1
This vast middle class, part actively engaged in commerce and industry, part rentier, part professional, which felt itself to be the real ruler not only of England but of the greater part of the world, was the soil in which the characteristic attitudes which we now name “Victorianism” flourished.
“Victorianism” did not arise suddenly in 1851. Wilberforce the prototype of so many “Victorian” public men, was dead before Queen Victoria came to the throne. Ernest Jones had pilloried the Victorian middle-class Liberal when Chartism was still a living force:
“Against the slave trade he had voted,
‘Rights of Man’, resounding still;
Now, basely turning, brazen-throated.
Yelled against the Ten Hours Bill.”2
and when Samuel Fielden denounced the “cotton conscience” in 1849, he was commenting on a theme which had been familiar to Lancashire and Yorkshire working-men for twenty years:
“These masters about Stalybridge, he heard, were principally dissenters, and many of them unitarians, his [Mr. Fielden’s] own set-[Laughter]—and he believed he was among a very bad lot; for true it was, that unitarians and quakers were the worst politicians in existence. They had agitated, defended, and passed more measures tending to enslave and oppress the poor man than any set of men in the country. Their cry of civil and religious liberty all the world over was now pretty well understood. It meant liberty for them to help themselves, and put down all who were in the way of their doing so. These were the men who made all the hubbub about black slavery, but who thought nothing of working their own people to death…”1
What was new in the years after 1851 was the widespread power exercised by the breed of Wilberforce and the Stalybridge masters in every field of public life; the permeation of the arts, the sciences, of all intellectual life by many of their attitudes; the increasing complacency of a triumphant class, surfeited with wealth and self-importance; and the great extension in the rentier class which drew its dividends but took no direct part in the exploitation of labour.
For Morris, it was always Dickens’ inspired chapter, “Podsnappery”, in Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) which described (for his mingled delight and fury) the characteristic attitudes of this class. Mr. Podsnap was “well to do, and stood very high in Mr. Podsnap’s opinion”:
“Beginning with a good inheritance, he had married a good inheritance, and had thriven exceedingly in the Marine Insurance way, and was quite satisfied. He never could make out why everybody was not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with most things, and, above all other things, with himself.”
Other countries he considered “a mistake”, and would dismiss their customs and culture with the devastating observation, “Not English!” Mr, Podsnap’s world was entirely well-regulated and respectable:
“The world got up at eight, shaved close at a quarter past, breakfasted at nine, went to the City at teh, came home at half-past five, and dined at seven. Mr. Podsnap’s notions of the Arts in their integrity might have been stated thus. Literature; large print, respectfully descriptive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Painting and Sculpture; models and portraits representing Professors of getting up at eight… Music; a respectable performance (without variations)… sedately expressive of getting up at eight…”
But Mr. Podsnap’s greatest faculty lay in his ability to evade and dismiss all unpleasant realities “calculated to call a blush into a young person’s cheek”:
“There was a dignified conclusiveness—not to add a grand convenience—in this way of getting rid of disagreeables… ‘I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!’ Mr. Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him…”
Should anyone stray into Podsnap’s company and commit such a breach of etiquette as to refer to the death by starvation of paupers in the London streets, he was soon brushed aside:
“I must decline to pursue this painful discussion. It is not pleasant fo my feelings… I… do not admit these things… If they do occur (not that I admit it), the fault lies with the sufferers themselves. It is not for me… to impugn the workings of Providence… The subject is a very disagreeable one… It is not one to be introduced among our wives and young persons…”1
Was Podsnap a conscious hypocrite? Possibly: but the working of man’s conscience is a complex matter, and certainly many typical “Victorians” did not feel themselves to be hypocrites. Even the Podsnaps like to appear to themselves, as well as to others, as enlightened, humane, in the forefront of progress. To Matthew Arnold (whose Culture and Anarchy was published in 1869, the same year as a part of The Earthly Paradise) the middle classes were not so much hypocrites as the “Philistines”, “mechanically worshipping their fetish of the production of wealth and of the increase of manufactures and population, and looking neither to the right nor left so long as this increase goes on”. The Philistines, he said “have developed one side of their humanity at the expense of all others, and have become incomplete and mutilated men in consequence”. The word “mutilated” gives a clue perhaps as important as any other in Matthew Arnold’s book. The characteristic “Victorian” middle-class sensibility was made up of a veritable complex of involuntary inhibitions and evasions, the sum of which made up that shallow culture in which both sentimentality and hypocrisy flourished. The greatest evasion of all was to be found in the hallowing of the “laws of supply and demand”, as “God’s laws” or “Nature’s simplest laws”, to hide the fact of the exploitation of man by man. Around this central evasion a thousand others grew unchecked. The rentier class in the London suburbs, in the cathedral and university cities, might cultivate a love of nature or an interest in foreign missions and charities, while remaining in ignorance of the source of their own incomes. The sons of the self-made millowners were given an expensive education, which equipped them with an earnest sense of their own moral mission of leadership, for no better reason than that their fathers had been able to pay their fees. In every field of life and of art these evasions and this confusion of wealth with righteousness re-appear. In complex ways (which Butler was to lay bare in The Way of All Flesh) the reduction of human values to property values, the pressure of “respectability” and of orthodoxy, made the “Victorians” ashamed of all the vitalities of life which could not be harnessed to the chariot of “Self-Help”. The middle classes eased their own consciences by accusing the poor of being guilty of indigence, intemperance, and sensual and sexual excess. Mrs. Grundy covered her bare skin down to her ankles, gathered her children close to her, and tightened her lips in hostility to life.
Of course, such a limitation of intellect and sensibility was not imposed suddenly and uniformly upon a whole class. Rather, it resembled a poison seeping through the veins of society, and yet continually resisted by the forces of life. These years are also years of great advances in scientific theory: of the battle between Darwinism and obscurantism: of the movement among women of the middle classes for educational, legal and professional rights: of the militant secularist and birth-control agitations in the face of Mrs. Grundy. But even these courageous opponents of “Victorian” attitudes revealed in one part or another of their outlook the same impoverished sensibility. Even the finest and most sensitive minds did not entirely escape the taint of this poison (not Dickens nor George Eliot nor Matthew Arnold) although the fight they put up was strenuous, and their victories many times more noble than their defeats.
Examine for a moment a judgement upon a painting from a critic who should not be called a “typical Victorian”:
“Go into the Dulwich Gallery, and meditate for a little over that much celebrated picture of the two beggar boys, one eating, lying on the ground, the other standing beside him. We have among our own painters one who… as a painter of beggar or peasant boys, may be set beside Murillo, or any one else,—W. Hunt. He loves peasant boys, because he finds them more roughly and picturesquely dressed, and more healthily coloured, than others. And he paints all that he sees in them fearlessly; all the health and humour, and freshness and vitality, together with such awkwardness and stupidity, and what else of negative or positive harm there may be in the creature; but yet so that on the whole we love it, and find it perhaps even beautiful, or if not, at least we see that there is capability of good in it, rather than of evil; and all is lighted up by a sunshine and sweet colour that makes the smock frock as precious as cloth of gold. But look at those two ragged and vicious vagrants that Murillo has gathered out of the street. You smile at first, because they are eating so naturally, and their roguery is so complete. But is there anything else than roguery there, or was it well for the painter to give his time to the painting of those repulsive and wicked children? Do you feel moved with any charity towards children as you look at them? Are we the least bit more likely to take any interest in ragged schools, or to help the next pauper child that comes in our way, because the painter has shown us a cunning beggar feeding greedily? Mark the choice of the act. He might have shown hunger in other ways, and given interest to even this act of eating, by making the face wasted, or the eye wistful. But he did not care to do this. He delighted merely in the disgusting manner of eating, the food filling the cheek; the boy is not hungry, else he would not turn round to talk and grin as he eats.
“But observe another point in the lower figure. It lies so that the sole of the foot is turned towards the spectator; not because it would have lain less easily in another attitude, but that the painter may draw, and exhibit the grey dust engrained in the foot. The lesson, if there be any, in the picture, is not one whit the stronger. Do not call this the painting of nature; it is mere delight in foulness. We all know that a beggar’s bare foot cannot be clean; there is no need to thrust its degradation into the light, as if no human imagination were vigorous enough for its conception.”1
Here, side by side with those magnificent passages in The Stones of Venice which set young Morris’s mind aflame, John Ruskin himself falls to the depths of “Victorian” sentiment. Even the “fearless” painting of “nature”, it seems, must be done in such a way as to make poverty seem “picturesque”, and to light up all “by a sunshine and sweet colour”. Two children bear the full weight of the Prophet’s indignation: the stops of Ruskin’s rich moral organ are all opened: the boys are “ragged and vicious”, “cunning”, “repulsive and wicked”, “gathered out of the street”—and all because they have committed the sin of being born poor. But this is not the only source of Ruskin’s indignation. The poor are all very well, providing that they show signs of a sense of their own sin, and excite feelings of benevolence and charity which flatter a middle-class beholder. Murillo’s crime is to depict, not a “wasted” and “wistful” “pauper child”, but the vitality of childhood (and even, perhaps, of the working class itself?) shattering the middle-class concepts of shamefaced suppliance on the one hand and righteous philanthropy on the other. The children are evil because they do not plead for charity and they do not care what the middle-class beholder thinks of them: they are guilty of open sensual indulgence (“the food filling the cheek”), and (the tone implies) they robbed the parson’s orchard to get their apples without the least sense of guilt; and, final horror of all, they are not even ashamed of their own dirty feet. In short, they have committed the crime of being happy without the help of a philanthropist.
John Ruskin was to set aside some (but not all) of this rubbish in his middle and later years. But the fact that so fine a mind could be guilty of such lapses serves to emphasize Arnold’s phrase, “mutilated men”. The conscience and sensibility of men could not be cheapened without doing them injury. Where public professions and the facts of experience were at variance, where the culture of the past criticized the commonplace sentimentalities of the present, conflicts and tensions were bound to be set up in the individual’s mind.
Despite the public applause of “progress”, the daily experience of tens of thousands even among the professional workers in the great cities was far different:
“The facts of life for most of us are a dark street, crowds, hurry, commonplaceness, loneliness, and worse than all a terrible doubt, which can hardly be named, as to the meaning and purpose of life”,
wrote Mark Rutherford. Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the few men who escaped the shallowness of his time, and who (whenever he dared to look) registered in the depths of his being the impact of the truths of his society, wrote in 1881 to Morris’s old friend, Canon Dixon:
“My Liverpool and Glasgow experience laid upon my mind a conviction, a truly crushing conviction, of the misery of town life to the poor and more than to the poor, of the misery of the poor in general, of the degradation even of our race, of the hollowness of this country’s civilisation: it made even life a burden to me to have daily thrust upon me the things I saw.”1
Both Mark Rutherford and Hopkins were exceptional men: but what they could feel and express was present as an incommunicable dissatisfaction among even their Philistine contemporaries. Personal experience and public utterances were at odds: the energies of life, however repressed, still sought an outlet. The more that is known of the lives of the great Victorians, the more the acute conflict in their minds becomes apparent. And these conflicts were present not only in the leaders of thought and of art. They are found in an hundred forms in the life of the Victorian middle class, revealing a vast accumulation of half-conscious anxieties and guilt.
This may help us to understand why almost no literature of permanent value was written during these years which voices the dominant faith in “progress” and “Self-Help”: why, on the contrary (in the words of Mark Rutherford):
“The characteristic of so much that is said and written now is melancholy, and it is melancholy, not because of any deeper acquaintance with the secrets of man than that which was possessed by our forefathers, but because it is easy to be melancholy, and the time lacks strength.”
“The time lacks strength”—a curious comment on the age of England’s industrial supremacy, but one which, in its turn, may help us to understand the almost universal welcome given to The Earthly Paradise when it first appeared.
This welcome came from two apparently incompatible schools of thought. On one hand stood the utilitarians. Frederick Harrison, the positivist, had already aroused Matthew Arnold’s wrath by setting forward the doctrine of the separation of the arts and public life. “The man of culture is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive… No assumption is too unreal, no end too unpractical for him.”1 Poetry was no use in public life, and might be actively dangerous by reason of its encouragement of unpractical idealism. On the other hand, in its proper place, it might be given the active encouragement of enlightened men. It was Morris’s distinction (in the view of this school of critics) to have found this proper place in The Earthly Paradise. This was the opinion of the Saturday Review, which thought that a “busy material age” could find room for Morris’s “clear and pellucid style”, also, it seems, of the “political economists and scientific men” to whom most poetry was a “vexation of spirit”.
It was Harrison’s positivist colleague, John Morley, who applied the doctrine of the immunization of art with most sympathy to Morris. First, he welcomed Morris’s liberation of poetry from theology, and “the turgid perplexities of a day of spiritual transition”. While (he pointed out) Morris was careless not only of religion, but also of “the conventional aims and phrases of politics and philanthropy”, Morley was prepared to accept this:
“Morality is not the aim and goal of fine art… Art has for its end the Beautiful only. Morality, so far from being the essence of it, has nothing to do with it at all.”2
This was a fairly comforting conclusion, since it meant that man’s aspirations towards Beauty might be fed in quiet, without being to the detriment “of energetic social action in the country”. Moreover, this relegation of poetry to a world of private satisfaction and escape, might in the end bring social fruits:
“Only on condition of this spacious and manifold energizing in diverse directions, can we hope in our time for that directly effective social action which some of us think calculated to give higher quality to the moments as they pass than art and song.”1
This school welcomed The Earthly Paradise, then, quite simply because it was poetry of escape. For one thing—although this was stated only by implication—it was “safe”. By retreating to a world of “Beauty” it did not ask that kind of question about the capitalist ethic which was so pronounced in the writings of Carlyle and Ruskin, and which appeared through the fitful mists of yearning of Tennyson’s youthful poetry. Since it was safe, it had clearly found the proper place for poetry in the scheme of social advance. It could be read—and read publicly—by men of action and men of business as a mark of culture. But this line of argument was little more than a rationalization of more subterranean emotional currents—those same currents which were at work in Morris’s own creative impulses. And so there was to be found another school of criticism, which also praised the escapism of the poem, but which started from different premises.
This was the school of Romanticism in its decline. Flaubert, watching the ravages upon the human spirit of the bourgeois victory in France, commented in Madame Bo vary:
“Every bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises. The most paltry libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet.”
Writing in a not dissimilar vein, Morris commented in a letter to his wife, presumably about some middle-class acquaintance:
“People like you speak about don’t know either what life or death means, except for one or two supreme moments of their lives, when something pierces through the crust of dullness and ignorance, and they act for the time as if they were sensitive people.”1
Both passages strike the authentic note of a time that “lacks strength” when melancholy is “easy”. The flames of the Romantic Revolt could not be dowsed in a couple of decades. The Victorians may have been “mutilated men”, but mutilation cannot be accomplished without pain. The embers of romanticism persisted, and they lacked only the wind of hope to fan them into flame. But desire without hope, as we have seen, turns into nostalgia, luxurious melancholy, individualist gestures of protest, self-pity, and all that complex of emotions springing from a self-absorbed dissatisfaction with life which has no outlet in action. Those who, like Edward Burne-Jones, had felt “exquisite misery” in brooding upon “Tears, Idle Tears” during the hot summer afternoons of their adolescence, found in The Earthly Paradise more food for indulging their melancholy. The Academy declared:
“The main current of intellectual energy runs now to science and politics and history and prose-fiction… Poets themselves are a ‘survival’; and it is the law of survivals to dwindle and become extinct; while there are any left they might be allowed to feed in peace upon their natural food, the transformed emotions which arise from a vanished, decaying past.”2
The concluding image is extraordinarily apposite.
So, to the approval of a section of the utilitarians, there was added a chorus of praise from the reviewers who—while taking no objective action to revolt against the humdrum routines of their existence—still enjoyed the luxury of feeling that they too, like Morris, were misfits “born out of due time”, capable of “immense passions” and “lofty enterprises” in any other age. They looked to poetry to fulfil the task defined in France by Lesconte de Lisle—to “give an ideal life to those who no longer have a real one.”1 So we find that the reviewer of the Pall Mall Gazette (like the reviewer of St James’s Magazine) was a confirmed escapist, “glad to retire from the stress and the cares of his ugly workaday English life and be entertained… with that succession of gracious pictures… of a remote romantic world.”2 And so, indeed, was the reviewer in the popular John Bull, glad to be free from the “turmoil of the restless driving life” and the “fierce intellectual struggles” of his age, while Morris “tells us in strains most musical his quaint old-world stories.”3
Just as Morley lifted the platitudes of the utilitarian critics to a more serious level of discussion, so among the escapists Walter Pater was to be found. In Pater we find full-blown the theories of Art for Art’s Sake already implicit in Keats. To prevent the soiling of art by utilitarianism, to defend it from a “tarnished actual present”, Morris was right, Pater thought, to project—
“above the realities of its time a world in which the forms of things are transfigured. Of that world this new poetry takes possession, and sublimates beyond it another still fainter and more spectral, which is literally an artificial or ‘earthly paradise’. It is a finer ideal, extracted from what in relation to any actual world is already an ideal… The secret of the enjoyment of it is that inversion of homesickness, that incurable thirst for the sense of escape, which no actual form of life satisfies…”4
Man’s aspirations can never break through and be realized in life: they can only find relief in the creation of the Beautiful in art; and, since Pater believed this to be true, it followed that artistic beauty of form became an end in itself.
The reception of The Earthly Paradise, then, gives an insight of extraordinary interest into the emotional crosscurrents of the age, against which Morris was to be in such uncompromising revolt barely ten years later. It provoked throughout the reviews a discussion of “escapism” in art, in which the most incompatible schools of thought joined in Morris’s praise. This discussion served to give rise to that theory of art, which Oscar Wilde—taking Morris as a leading example of the “English Renaissance of Art”—was later to defend:
“Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realizes that which we desire… Into the secure and sacred house of Beauty the true artist will admit nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing that gives pain, nothing that is debatable, nothing about which men argue.”1
Moreover, this reception “placed” Morris in the mind of the Victorian reading public once and for all. He was the sweet unpractical singer, the poet of escape, of the Beautiful and the antique. When Morris began to reveal quite different capacities and attitudes, the public was either disappointed or refused to notice the change. When Morris shocked his public by appearing in the Thames Police Court on the charge of assaulting a policeman, he was sadly admonished by H.D. Traill in the Saturday Review to return to his “Earthly Paradise”:
“Were it not better that ye bore him hence,
Muses, to that fair land where once he dwelt,
And with those waters at whose brink he knelt
(Ere faction’s poison drugged the poet-sense)
Bathed the unhappy eyes too prone to melt
And see, through tears, men’s woes as man’s offence?”2
In all this profusion of comment, the underlying note of the poem, the note of despair, received very little attention. A few reviewers commented upon it in passing, as proof that even Morris could not shake free entirely from the doubts of his age. Only one—Alfred Austin, writing in Temple Bar— faced the issue clearly, and drew some conclusions:
“The realities of the latter half of the nineteenth century suggest nothing to him save the averting of his gaze. They are crooked; who shall set them straight? For his part, he will not even try… He sings only for those who, like himself, have given up the age, its boasted spirit, its vaunted progress, its infinite vulgar nothings, and have taken refuge in the sleepy region.”
In Austin’s view, Morris was wise to “give the go-by” to an age which will be known to posterity as “the age of Railways, the age of Destructive Criticism, or the age of Penny Papers”. On the other hand—
“in doing so not only has he not produced great poetry—he has evaded the very conditions on which alone the production of great poetry is possible. Even in co-operation with an age—as the present one, for instance—it may be impossible to develop it; but without that cooperation all hope of such is bootless and vain… [Morris] is not a great poet—at most and at best the wisely unresisting victim of a rude irreversible current; the serene martyr of a mean and melancholy time.”1
What was the reaction of the poet himself to the critical controversy which he had stirred up? His letters reveal very little. The favourable reception of the poem gave him pleasure. When his publisher sent him Austin’s unfavourable review his reply was untroubled:
“from the critical point of view I think there is so much truth as this in his article, as that we poets of to-day have been a good deal made by those of the Byron and Shelley time—however, in another sixty years or so, when it won’t matter three skips of a louse to us (as it don’t matter much more now), I suppose we shall quietly fall into our places.”1
When the whole poem was completed in 1870, he felt that the time hung on his hands:
“I confess I am dull now my book is done; one doesn’t know sometimes how much service a thing has done us till it is gone: hpwever one has time yet; and perhaps something else of importance will turn up soon.”2
It was well enough for the critics to discuss the pros and cons of the poetry of escape: but for William Morris the despair he felt was no affectation but compulsive and real. When, in his last years, his despair had been overcome by his new hope for humanity, it is related that he “pooh-poohed the ideal beauty of The Earthly Paradise, and said that there was ‘more real ideal’ in News from Nowhere”. “The best thing about it”, he is reported to have said of The Earthly Paradise, “is its name”. “Some day or other that will inspire others when every line of the blessed thing is forgotten. That is what we’re all working for.”3
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1 Works, Vol. XXIV.
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1 See Works, Vol. XXIV, and May Morris, I, pp. 397 ff.
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1 Cf. The City of Dreadful Night, Section XII, with its refrain “I wake from daydreams to this real night.”
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1 St. James’s Magazine, January, 1878. See Oscar Maurer, in Nineteenth-century Studies, edited Davis, De Vane, and Bald (Cornell U.P., 1940). See also Karl Iitzenburg “William Morris and the Reviews”, The Review of English Studies, October, 1936; P. Faulkner, William Morris: The Critical Heritage (1973).
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1 Pall Mall Budget, December 11th, 1869.
2 The Saturday Review, May 30th, 1868.
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1 Address to the working men of Edinburgh, November 5th, 1868, Public Addresses by John Bright, M.P. (1879), pp. 122–3.
2 “A Christmas Story”, The Labourer, Vol. I (1847).
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1 Speech at Stalybridge, August 10th, 1849.
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1 Morris was later to publish extracts from this chapter in Commonweal.
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1 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol. II, Ch. 6, sections 60-1.
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1 Correspondence of CM. Hopkins and R.W. Dixon (1935), p. 97.
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1 Quoted by Matthew Arnold in the Introduction to Culture and Anarchy: “Culture is a desirable quality in a critic of new books, and sits well on a professor of belles lettres: but as applied to politics, it means simply a turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action. The man of culture is in politics, &c.”
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1 The Fortnightly Review, January 1st, 1867. This review does not refer directly to Morris, but indicates the standard by which Morley welcomed The Earthly Paradise.
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1 The Fortnightly Review, 1873, p. 476.
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1 Letters, p. 36.
2 The Academy, August 1st, 1873.
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1 Quoted in G.V. Plekhanov, Art and Social Life (1953), p. 178.
2 Pall Mall Budget, December 11th, 1869.
3 John Bull, December 31st, 1870.
3 Westminster Review, October, 1868: reprinted in the 1st edition of Pater’s Appreciations.
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1 Lecture, “The English Renaissance of Art”, delivered in New York, January, 1882. See Davis, De Vane, and Bald, op. cit., pp. 266–7.
2 Saturday Review, September 26th, 1885.
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1 Temple Bar, May and August, 1869. Later this bitter young critic was to accept the Poet Laureateship which Morris contemptuously rejected on Tennyson’s death, and so provided an ironic commentary on the need to “cooperate with the age.”
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1 Letters, p. 28.
2 Ibid., p. 37.
3 Recollections of William Sharp in the Atlantic Monthly, December, 1896.