Shelburne Essays: William Morris (Part 3)

(Pictured: William Morris.) Having concluded our revised re-presentation of An Apology for Poetry, which inaugurated Tradition Restored in the summer of 2016, we have returned to the essays of Paul Elmer More. Accordingly (after a long hiatus), I am happy to present the third post of More’s essay “William Morris,” one of the chapters in his Shelburne Essays, Seventh Series. P. E. More (1864-1937) was an American journalist, critic, essayist, and Christian apologist. Russell Kirk wrote, “as a critic of ideas, perhaps there has not been his peer in England or America since Coleridge.” Kirk speaks of More’s insight into the “enormous error” of secular humanists. More believed that when religion is replaced by the “mere ‘brotherhood of man,’ fratricide is not far distant.” He wrote that the one effective way of “bringing into play some measure of true justice as distinct from the ruthless law of competition . . is through the restoration in the individual human soul of a sense of responsibility extending beyond the grave.” The alternative is a society “surrendered to the theory of ceaseless flux, with no principle of judgement except the shifting pleasure of the individual.” One may say that at present we are wading through the high tide of that flux. He and his friend Irving Babbitt became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism.

William Morris (Part 3)

Void patience was not in the heart or the hands of our craftsman, and for his refuge from life he turned to the “pageant-maker’s imagery.” You remember the story of The Ring Given to Venus and the young man, who, to recover the ring and therewith gain his human bride, was forced to stand in a place of wizardry by the sea, while a procession of phantoms passed before him: 

In after time would Laurence say, 
That though the moonshine, cold and grey, 
Flooded the lonely earth that night, 
These creatures in the moon’s despite 
Were coloured clear, as though the sun 
Shone through the earth to light each one. 
* * * * * * * *
And then his dazzled eyes could see 
Once more a noiseless company; 
And his heart failed him at the sight, 
And he forgot both wrong and right, 
And nothing thought of his intent; 
For close before him now there went 
Fair women clad in ancient guise 
That hid but little from his eyes 
More loveliness than earth doth hold 
Now, when her bones are growing old; 
But all too swift they went by him, 
And fluttering gown and ivory limb 
Went twinkling up the bare hill-side, 
And lonely there must he abide. 

Such a scene is a parable of Morris’s own life, save that, unlike Laurence, he never recovered his ring; and it affords the best criticism of the whole poem of The Earthly Paradise. Like the distracted youth, the reader seems to be standing by enchanted waters drenched in a magic light, while dream-shadows flit before him, some terrible and some lovely; but the former pass with open mouths that emit no sound and raised hands that never strike, and the latter gleam only for a moment on the hillside and are gone. The best of the tales, to my taste, are those that use this pageant-like material most frankly—such as Atalanta’s Race, with its dazzling picture of the maiden running before her suitor to the goal: 

Then flew her white feet, knowing not a doubt, 
Though slackening once, she turned her head about; 

or the Cupid and Psyche in which the solid gold of Apuleius seems to have been dissolved into a golden haze, “the wavering memory of a lovely dream.” One seems to take part in the process of this transmutation by reading together passages of the Latin and of Morris’s paraphrase. Or take a few words from the story as it is translated in Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. Psyche has been carried to the palace of her invisible lover: 

“One recognised, even at the entering, the delightful hostelry of a god. Golden pillars sustained the roof, arched most curiously in cedar-wood and ivory. The walls were hidden under wrought silver. . . . Psyche, drawn forward by the delight of it, came near, and, her courage growing, stood within the doorway. One by one, she admired the beautiful things she saw; and, most wonderful of all! no lock, no chain, nor living guardian protected that great treasure house. But as she gazed there came a voice—a voice, as it were unclothed of bodily vesture—‘Mistress!’ it said, ‘all these things are thine.’ ” 

That is a fairly close translation, and does no more than convey the romantic, fairy-land atmosphere of the original Latin. But compare with it the same scene in The Earthly Paradise: 

Now went she through the chambers tremblingly, 
And oft in going would she pause and stand, 
And drop the gathered raiment from her hand, 
Stilling the beating of her heart for fear 
As voices whispering low she seemed to hear, 
But then again the wind it seemed to be 
Moving the golden hangings doubtfully. 
Or some bewildered swallow passing dose 
Unto the pane, or some wind-beaten rose. 

That is all evoked from a single phrase of the Latin: vox quaedam corporis sui nuda [“a certain disembodied voice” —From Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Bk. V, Sect. 2]. There is an element of magic in these simple words of the original, no doubt, but nothing that corresponds to the tremulous uncertainty of the paraphrase, as if a wizard’s mist had arisen between the palace and the beholder’s eyes. 

The great fault of The Earthly Paradise is its monotony. Very soon we begin to be aware that, with all its seeming diversity, it is really extraordinarily poor in ideas. If we say that beauty and death, death and beauty, form almost the whole substance of the poem, it might seem that enough had been granted to furnish forth a library of verse; but Morris uses these topics with the least variety of effect. Death is only the cessation of beauty, and beauty is only the undistinguished blaze of gold and silver, lilies and roses, slender hands and white limbs. Nowhere is there any relief or emphasis, but an even, swift flow, which never invites the mind to pause, or reflect, or go back. In all the diffuse imagery of Cupid and Psyche, for instance, one finds nothing like Apuleius’s description of the chariot of Venus; limae tenuantis detrimento conspicuum et ipsius auri damno pretiosum [“Conspicuous by the loss from the (sculptor’s ) thinning file, and precious by the damage to the gold itself.”]. Those words, which attracted Pater by the cunning of their paradox, are altogether omitted by Morris. He was not one of those poets “who hoard their moments of felicity,” but sowed from the whole sack. And, too soon, this entire lack of concentration or hesitation in the mind of the poet results in something perilously like indifference in the mind of the reader. 

If my own taste can be trusted there is less of this cloying monotony in Morris’s other great poem, Sigurd the Volsung. Already, while composing The Earthly Paradise, he had become absorbed in Icelandic studies, and one of the later tales. The Lovers of Gudrun, the finest of all his poems, if you will believe Swinburne, as I do not, was taken directly from this source. In 1870 Morris, in collaboration with Magnusson, made a translation of the prose Volsunga Saga. Six years later he developed this into the magnificent epic of Sigurd the Volsung, surely one of the high metrical triumphs of the nineteenth century. It is, of course, idle chauvinism to call these legends, as Morris does, “the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks.” Our literature and our ways of thinking do not come to us from the sagas, but from the classics and the Renaissance. And it is mere wantonness, as some hot brains have done, to place Morris’s work above, or even beside, that of Homer. Apart from the question of artistic form and beauty of expression, it lacks the full humanity of the Iliad, and its romance, beside that of the Odyssey, is as stammering to perfect speech. Some of the radical faults of the original Morris has not seen, or has failed to eliminate. There is, in the poem, as in the saga, a baffling incoherence of events, as, for instance, in the meeting and parting of Sigurd and Brynhild. And to these faults Morris has added his own impetuousness and lack of concentration. 

[To be continued.]