Chapter VII: Prose Romances and Poems by the Way

During the later years of his life, when he was distracted by the many claims of his active socialism and constantly harassed by details of organization and the efforts to reconcile people who, having the same interests, persisted in misunderstanding each other, Morris wrote a series of prose romances that hold a distinctive place in his art. His long poems show us a life conceived on lines that I have sought to trace, approached in a mood of austere responsibility and defined with all the completeness that he could bring to work. In these prose romances the life is unchanged, but it is seen through a different mood. It is as though he turned aside from the stress of his daily work to the world that his imagination had already created as the only sane one for men, and saw it with a kind of new leisureliness and wholesome irresponsibility. It was impossible for him to allow fancy to intrude upon the life that he desired to the exclusion of any of its vital qualities, but, as far as was possible without such offence to his artistic conscience, in these romances he indulged his faculty for story-telling without curb. The people and their adventures and characters are still, as in the poems, related continuously to Morris's radical conception of life, but they are no longer related to any central purpose contained in the work of art itself. The waywardness and profuseness of romanticism are here carried to their extreme limits, and yet we never feel that the narratives are formless, so powerful and fixed is the vision through which Morris draws them into unity. The justification of his indifference to the ordinary demands of construction in a book like _The Roots of the Mountains_, is that we do not feel that the work would gain in any way were he scrupulously careful in this matter. Morris had created a world in his imagination, just and beautiful as it seemed to him. From that world he drew the substance of his great poems, reducing it to the essential and symbolic terms of art. _Jason_ and _The Earthly Paradise_ and _Sigurd_ are all perfectly constructed results of the submission of this world to the severe process of artistic selection. But in the later prose romances we are led into the very world itself from which these things were drawn, and given leave to wander through it as we will. We find that it is cosmic as life is cosmic, but it is not yet wrought into the stricter proportions of art. If we can think of Morris writing through another generation, it is impossible to believe that he would have turned again, say, to the Volsung story; that he had shaped finally in _Sigurd the Volsung_; but we feel that he might have found material in these romances for poem after poem, that, indeed, they are, as it were, a panoramic expression of the world from which his poems must inevitably be imagined. There is in them nothing of inconsistency, but there is a prodigal diffuseness that belongs rather to nature than to art. They are the storehouse from which Morris's own art was drawn, and poets to come may yet turn to them as they do to Malory or as Morris himself did to the Sagas.

The choice of prose for these romances was, for this reason, not in any way arbitrary but the result of sound artistic deliberation. Where Morris used the same material and crystallized it through his finest imaginative impulse, verse was the natural and inevitable medium; but he is here showing us the material before it had been subjected to this highest creative energy, and there is not the spiritual fusion that makes verse necessary to complete expression. The prose that he uses is stamped always with his personality, and so justifies itself even where most open to criticism. It is commonly of extraordinary beauty, full of the gravity and high manners that belong to the heroic atmosphere of the stories themselves; and even where the adaptation of an archaic method of speech is most pronounced it is not self-conscious. All language is dependent largely on convention, and that Morris used a convention that was not generally accepted was a virtue in workmanship rather than a vice. The important thing is that he was consistent in the use, or, in other words, that his convention was never a mannerism but definitely a corporate part of his style.

These stories are but another instance of the remarkable range of Morris's artistic power. They do not, of course, rank with his own most splendid work, but in a particular kind of prose romance they attain an excellence that had not been known in England for several centuries. And in the ease with which they hold our interest in the story and at the same time maintain a perfect consistency of character, they show that, had he chosen, Morris might have added yet another to his many achievements, and challenged comparison with the best of Fielding's successors. The Bride and the Sunbeam, Face-of-God and Walter and Folk-Might, and, above all, Dallach, are drawn with that certainty and depth of understanding of the individual that are perhaps the chief distinction of the youngest of the literary arts in England.

In 1891 Morris's last book of poems, _Poems By The Way_, was published by the Kelmscott Press. In it the poet gathered together some fifty of his shorter poems written at intervals during the thirty years since the publication of _The Defence of Guenevere_, and there are naturally in the volume a wide range of subjects and much diversity of manner. Fragments from rejected or unfinished tales intended for _The Earthly Paradise_, fine echoes and memories of his Icelandic studies and travel, lyrical expressions of this mood or that, translations from the Flemish and Danish and his beloved saga-tongue, fairy tales, chants that grew out of his socialism, and a few poems that show that when he chose to apply his poetic vision to modern conditions he could do so with profound penetration, are brought together almost at haphazard. If, as Mr. Arthur Symons says, a pageant is a shining disorder, then this book is truly a pageant. And yet behind all these expressions of many times and moods is to be seen the central impulse of Morris's life knitting them together into a clear spiritual unity. It seems a far cry from the delicate tenderness of 'From the Upland to the Sea' to the passion of 'Mother and Son,' from the sombre brooding of 'To the Muse of the North' to the airy romance of 'Goldilocks and Goldilocks,' yet they are all unmistakably begotten of the same temperament. The high reverence for naked life, the insistence on labour being joyful if it was not to be abominable, the fierce worship of beauty and the courageous acceptance of its passing, these were the things by which Morris had his being, and they are woven into all the pages of his last book. He was a man who took literally no thought as to the relation of the work in hand to that of years passed. A story is told of him that when a friend who was helping him to collect the material for _Poems By The Way_ brought a poem to him he could not remember having written a line of it. The perfect consistency of his aim and temper from first to last is the more remarkable in consequence, and the kinship between two fragmentary expressions of his life, divided perhaps by thirty years, is fine to see. His understanding of the ideal towards which he strove became clearer as he passed through his strenuous existence, and his powers of realizing it in his art matured steadily to the end, but the ideal itself was unchanged. That in an artist is a splendid thing: a thing that perhaps of all others is the token of his divinity. For it is that central certainty of purpose that is immortal in him, austerely set above the change of circumstance. The form of his art may pass from its first imitative and awkward groping slowly to its perfection or it may prove itself at the beginning, but it is the great guiding purpose that he cannot gain by seeking, and that lends truth to the common phrase.

Of certain of the poems no more than a word need be said, whilst others need to be considered more fully. The northern poems, such as 'Gunnar's Howe' and 'Of the Wooing of Hallbiorn' and those belonging to the _Earthly Paradise_ period are beautiful strays from phases of the poet's work that have already been discussed. Here and there we find a deliberate return to an earlier manner, as in 'The Hall and the Wood,' written in 1890, where many of the devices used in the Guenevere volume are again employed and with even greater success. Here, for example, is a beautiful reminiscence of lines already quoted--

She stood before him face to face,
With the sun-beam thwart her hand,
As on the gold of the Holy Place
The painted angels stand.

With many a kiss she closed his eyes;
She kissed him cheek and chin:
E'en so in the painted Paradise
Are Earth's folk welcomed in.

The short lyrics, 'Love's Gleaning Tide,' 'Spring's Bedfellow,' 'Pain and Time Strive Not,' and two or three others, have just that intangible beauty that makes lyrical poetry at once unforgettable and impossible to discuss in any detail. In one of them, 'The Garden by the Sea,' which is the lovely song from the Hylas episode in _Jason_, Morris altered three lines, not, I think, for the better. The fairy poem 'Goldilocks and Goldilocks' is play, but the play of a great poet. Then we have the charming verses written for tapestries and pictures, slight enough and yet struck by Morris's unerring instinct into sparks of poetry. This of the Vine--

I draw the blood from out the earth;
I store the sun for winter mirth.

and this of the Mulberry Tree--

Love's lack hath dyed my berries red:
For Love's attire my leaves are shed.

are perfect of their kind. There remain two groups, both inspired more or less by the same impulse, but differing a good deal in their artistic value. The first of these consists of poems written directly to embody the principles of active socialism that absorbed the greater part of his energy in later life; it includes 'All for the Cause,' 'The Day is Coming,' and 'The Voice of Toil' among others. Here again Morris proved his incapacity to write verse that was not poetry, but he gets nearer to the border-line at times in these poems than he does anywhere else in his work; he is, however, still well on the right side. 'All for the Cause' is a fine direct challenge to the workers to assert their own lives, but the challenge is made to all that is best in their nature, even to the best of that nature that the poet hopes will yet be fostered in them. 'The Day is Coming' has a strong vein of irony in it that looks a little strange in Morris's verse, and yet it is admirably managed--

For then, laugh not, but listen to this strange tale of mine,
All folk that are in England shall be better lodged than swine.

Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the
deeds of his hand,
Nor yet come home in the even too faint and weary to stand.

Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fear
For to-morrow's lack of earning and the hunger-wolf anear.

I tell you this for a wonder, that no man shall be glad
Of his fellow's fall and mishap to snatch at the work he had.

For that which the worker winneth shall then be his indeed,
Nor shall half be reaped for nothing by him that sowed no seed.

O strange new wonderful justice! But for whom shall we
gather the gain?
For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand shall
labour in vain.

Then all Mine and all Thine shall be Ours, and no more
shall any man crave
For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a
slave.

The tremendous sincerity that induced an artist so sensitive to the proper uses of his art to press it into the service of a cause to which he had linked his life is in itself a justification of the result. The higher qualities of his imagination may be momentarily set aside, but the thing is nevertheless afire; it burns with conviction. The optimism that disgusts us is the optimism that is not in direct relation to effort. The sacrifices that Morris was making to his socialism in the practical conduct of his life were reflected quite clearly in the spirit of these poems and quickened it. It is said that this poetry was written for the occasion, but it must be remembered that the occasion was one knit into the very fibre of the poet's being. A curious poem which belongs to this group is 'The God of the Poor,' the first draft of which was written about 1870 or earlier. A simple story of allegorical cast, telling of the overcoming of the oppressor of the people, Maltete, by their deliverer Boncoeur, it is interesting as showing a definite attitude in the poet's mind towards these problems years before he sought actively to deal with them.

In the second of the groups of which I speak are six or seven poems that deal with some particular rather than general aspect of life. 'Hope Dieth: Love Liveth' and 'Error and Loss' touch remote, though essential, aspects of the psychology of love, if I may use the phrase, with a subtlety that was one of Browning's peculiar distinctions. The endurance of love when everything, even hope, is lost, and the pathos of the defeat of love's end by mere chance, have never been handled with greater poignancy and insight. 'Of The Three Seekers' lacks this depth of vision, and states rather than convinces, though there is that habitual simplicity of Morris in the statement that gives it its own value. In 'Drawing Near the Light' we have lyrical expression of a universal mood drawn into contact with a particular state. It may be quoted in full--

Lo, when we wade the tangled wood,
In haste and hurry to be there,
Nought seem its leaves and blossoms good,
For all that they be fashioned fair.

But looking up, at last we see
The glimmer of the open light,
From o'er the place where we would be:
Then grow the very brambles bright.

So now, amidst our day of strife,
With many a matter glad we play,
When once we see the light of life
Gleam through the tangle of to-day.

There is here a suggestion of the application of Morris's whole poetic vision to the concrete affairs of his socialism that found its supreme achievement in the three magnificent poems, 'The Message of the March Wind,' 'Mother and Son' and 'The Half of Life Gone.' In these poems the contemplation of life amid the conflicting currents that spring from a particular phase in the evolution of civilization rather than from the fundamental sources of humanity is lifted into the highest regions of poetry. They stand apart from, though not above, the rest of Morris's work, and are indirectly an emphatic vindication of his general method. What that method was we have examined already, but in these poems he gave final proof that if he chose to bring his art into superficial and obvious relation with the localized conditions of his time he could do so as admirably as any man. That with the consciousness of this power in himself he deliberately chose the other method in the great mass of his work is the reply to his critics who suggest that he turned away from his own time in his art because he was not stirred to any real imaginative understanding of it.

'The Message of the March Wind' is the complete expression of the central tenet of his socialistic creed. The poet--or the speaker--is keenly responsive to the things that Morris held to be alone of worth in life. He is among the green beauty of earth in the springtide; the woman he loves with him. They have wandered

From township to township, o'er down and by village,

and now they stand in the twilight, looking down the white road before them, where

The straw from the ox-yard is blowing about;
The moon's rim is rising, a star glitters o'er us,
And the vane on the spire-top is swinging in doubt.

They are in the full content of their love and the sweetness of the earth, and then--

Hark, the wind in the elm-boughs! from London it bloweth,
And telleth of gold, of hope and unrest:
Of power that helps not; of wisdom that knoweth,
But teacheth not aught of the worst and the best.

The contrast is thus imagined, and leads the poet into a direct statement of his understanding of the whole problem. He never flattered the people for whom he was working into the belief that the great unleavened majority had the wisdom of the world on its side. His rejection of that idea was as emphatic as Ibsen's. What he sought was to make them realize the fact themselves. He did not tell them that they were fitted for the great simple joys of life, but that they had the right to be so fitted, and that it was in themselves alone to assert that right. His aim was to make them discontented with themselves and the ugliness of their own lives, knowing that once this was done the rest would inevitably follow. And he realized, on the other hand, that the life which he worshipped was made impossible and all its virtue destroyed simply by the surroundings that by some obscure process of evil had established themselves on earth. The happiness of the speaker and his lover in this fresh beauty of the spring twilight was the outcome not of any inherent virtue of their own, but of the mere chance of their escape from this disease of circumstance.

Hark! the March wind again of a people is telling:
Of the life that they live there, so haggard and grim,
That if we and our love amidst them had been dwelling
My fondness had faltered, thy beauty grown dim.

The poem takes up, with exquisite tenderness, the hope that these people over whom the March wind has passed will yet awaken from their sleep of degradation, and turns back again to the quiet peace of the village inn with the 'lights and the fire,'

And the fiddler's old tune and the shuffling of feet;
For there in a while shall be rest and desire,
And there shall the morrow's uprising be sweet.

The whole poem is one more witness to the sovereignty of art. The deepest social difficulty of our time is here drawn through the meshes of the artist's imagination and, purged of everything inessential, set out in vibrating colour and line far more appealing and convincing than all the statistical statements of the lords of rule. The failure of our modern legislation to realize the value of art in any hope of national regeneration is not the least of its blunders. Artists have, happily, escaped from the patronage of courts, but until the propagandists rediscover the fact that they must bring back the artists to their help, not as servants but as fellow labourers, they will not work wisely. The artists continue their labour, building some beauty in the world. That labour can be directed by no one but themselves, but it is at their peril that the workers who are striving, earnestly enough, towards a better hope refuse to throw the creations of the artist into the balance with their own endeavour. To bring poetry to the issue of a definite social problem, is, unfortunately, thought of as mere idleness. But let 'The Message of the March Wind' be delivered to the people up and down the land, as systematically if need be as the demand for rent or taxes, and it will be heard willingly enough, and when it is heard there will be new life among us. I speak in metaphors, but there may be method even in a metaphor. For 'The Message of the March Wind' might bring people in turn to _The Earthly Paradise_, and then the aim of Morris's art--of all art--would be understood by the world.

'Mother and Son' is wider than 'The Message of the March Wind' in its scope inasmuch as it deals with a subject less peculiar to a particular generation or age, narrower in that it is concerned with one definite event instead of general conditions. A woman is speaking to her love-child. To analyse the poem would be to quote it almost line by line, but the conflict of the very roots of humanity with the blind dictates of circumstance, the tenderness of motherhood and the wistful yearning of a soul crossed in an uncharitable social scheme could scarcely find an expression more purely poetic. And 'The Half of Life Gone' touches this conflict with equal vigour and pity.

Reading these poems we are glad that Morris ordered his art as he did. Beautiful as they are and perfectly as they show the possibility of bringing all things into the purifying influence of the imaginative faculty, they yet leave us with an exultation that has in it some strain of despondency. Through no fault in the poet's working there is somewhere a flaw in the crystal. We thank him for showing us these things as we had not seen them before, but he has already tutored us too well. We turn back to the life that he has already made necessary to our being in the quiet ways of _The Earthly Paradise_ and the great wind-swept world of _Sigurd the Volsung_.