Shelburne Essays: William Morris (Part 4)

(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 fourth (concluding) 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 4)

In one respect Sigurd is like Morris’s earlier work. If you read the poem pencil in hand you will find that you have no impulse to mark the lines for future reference, that you are never tempted to linger and reflect, but are jostled on from page to page. This is partly due to the metrical rhythm, which deserves a word to itself. In the tales of The Earthly Paradise Morris used the ordinary iambic pentameters and tetrameters, but he gave them a new character by lightening the accents, so that in place of the grave marching measure of Milton or the regular rattle of Scott, there is an even, almost unstressed flow. To such an extent does he carry this procedure that many of the octo-syllabic lines have only three accents, with a huddling together of two or three unaccented syllables, while the pentameters have a trick of loosening into series of four or even three accents with still longer groups of unaccented syllables. The rhythm is not without its beauty and its appropriateness to the main theme of the Tales. But Morris employs it without variation or discrimination, and an imprecation, as for example the Queen’s curse of Bellerophon, is poured out with the same unstressed diffuseness and swiftness as the scenes of pretty playfulness. Now write together two of these three-stressed verses of the Tales, and you have the verse of Sigurd: 

“Then he rose at once to his feet, and smote the harp with his hand, 
And it rang as if with a cry in the dream of a lonely land;”

or, to take a more characteristic line, showing the tendency to bunch three light syllables at the caesura: 

“But the thought of my heart is unstable, and my hope as the winter drift.”

Morris himself no doubt believed that he was using a metre equivalent in effect to the Greek hexameter; as a matter of fact, his rhythm, as Mr. Mackail observes, is probably closer to the original tumbling ballad sing-song out of which the classical dactyls and spondees were developed. Only there is still this difference, which Mr. Mackail does not observe: that the absence of a fixed syllabic quantity, such as we may assume to have been even more pronounced in Homeric than in later Greek, gives to Morris’s measure an unpausing haste and, so to speak, a vague and fitful restlessness. 

But this metrical effect, better than in The Earthly Paradise, harmonises with the emotional quality of the poem. As you read on and the spell of the song lays hold of the mind, you seem indeed to have been rapt away into the dream of a lonely land. Nothing is quite familiar, nothing quite stable. Before you drives a broken mist, through the rifts of which you catch glimpses of a changing and disconnected panorama—gold-gleaming palaces and grey weather-beaten castles, groups of huntsmen driving the deer in the deep glades, terrible kings frowning forward from their thrones, warriors battling within rings of fire, women wonderfully fair calling men to blind dooms. The effect comes, in part, no doubt, from the story itself as Morris found it in the Icelandic saga, but he has shown extraordinary skill in adaptation. Some of the cruder, more savage details he has omitted, and about the others he has thrown an emotional atmosphere almost entirely his own. Sigurd’s fateful arrival at the castle of the Niblungs, for example, is told in the saga with the utmost simplicity: “Thus he rides until he comes to the hall of King Giuki; there he rides into the burg.” That is all; whereas in the poem all the tragic doom of the future seems to meet the hero at the gate: 

“Upriseth the heart of Sigurd, but ever he rideth forth 
Till he comes to the garth and the gateway built up in the 
face of the north: 
Then e’en as a wind from the mountains he heareth the 
warders’ speech, 
As aloft in the mighty towers they clamour each to each; 
Then horn to horn blew token, and far and shrill they cried.
And he heard, as the fishers hearken the cliff-fowl over 
the tide: 
But he rode in under the gate, that was long and dark as a 
cave 
Bored out in the isles of the northland by the beat of the 
restless wave; 
And the noise of the winds was within it, and the sound of 
swords unseen. 
As the night when the host is stirring and the hearts of 
Kings are keen. 
But no man stayed or hindered, and the dusk place knew 
his smile. 
And into the court of the warriors he came forth after a 
while, 
And looked aloft to the hall-roof, high up and grey as the 
cloud. 
For the sun was wholly perished; and there he crieth 
aloud. . . .” 

There is, in fact, little feeling of any kind evident in the saga, but a mere recital of stark deeds. When Gudrun kills her two children, the brief scene is snapped off with a “yet for all that, she cuts the throats of them”—it is quite in the day’s work. Now there is, properly speaking, little more of real humanity in Morris than in the Icelandic story. His sense of moral values is of the most rudimentary sort, and the law of cause and effect, which we associate with the moral law, scarcely exists for him. As a consequence, we have small human sympathy with his characters. Yet an emotional quality he does have, and that in a high degree, latent no doubt in the original but developed into something quite his own. From first to last one feels a kind of dim fatality brooding over the poem, a strange troubled necessity, such as cannot be found in any other of the great epics. It is not the mystical fate of Virgil, the unknown law that governs men and gods for its own far ends; nor the apportioned lot of Homer; nor the blind chance of Lucretius; nor the divine will of Milton. It is the fatality of magic, a web of mist and cloud spun by the Norns; a something inhuman and elfin that sends through the reader a boding thrill as from the night-terrors of his childhood. The Earthly Paradise was a lovely and rather cloying fairy tale; Sigurd is the enthralling fable of a witch. 

Something perhaps I ought also to say about Morris’s prose, and about his political activity out of which most of his prose grew, although, to be frank, I have never been able to take either of these quite seriously. Socialism was for him the veritable Gospel of Discontent, of a piece with his general impatience at the restraints of order. Civilisation, “I know now,” he once exclaims, “is doomed to destruction, and probably before very long: what a joy it is to think of ! and often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies.” In his revolt against the smug commonplace of Victorian art and in his effort to bring back something of the craftsman’s joy in his handiwork, Morris stood on firm ground and was a considerable force for good; but when he undertook to formulate a new order of society he talked of things of which he had no understanding. He meant seriously enough; he even “tackled Marx,” as he says, suffering thereby “agonies of confusion of the brain over reading the economics of that work.” But his attempt, in such a book as News from Nowhere, to portray a rejuvenated society would be merely funny, if it were not tiresome. Anything less practical it would be hard to conceive than this fool’s paradise in which all the world is off on a perpetual May-day. Morris himself seems to have been aware of the inanity of his puppets, when he let slip an allusion to “some forgotten corner of the earth, where people are unhappy, and consequently interesting to a story-teller.” There cannot be much comfort for a strenuous follower of Marx in these rose-scented idyls; but in one respect at least their author shows a curious kinship to the professional reformers of all ages. Morris once remarked of Rossetti that “he would take abundant trouble to help any one person who was in distress of mind or body; but the evils of any mass of people he couldn’t bring his mind to bear upon. I suppose, ” continues Morris, “it needs a person of hopeful mind to take disinterested notice of politics, and Rossetti was certainly not hopeful.” And now for the other side. “Did you ever notice that Top never gives a penny to a beggar?” said Rossetti one day; and Mr. Mackail observes of Morris in his socialistic time that “the sufferings of individuals often only moved him to a certain impatience.” [This indifference to individual suffering may be observed to this day among liberals, e.g., impatience with Mother Teresa for the charity she lavished on suffering individuals. See also “Conservative households gave, on average, 30 percent more money to charity than liberal households, within every income class, from poor to rich.” —Review of “Who Really Cares? America’s Charity Divide—Who Gives, Who Doesn’t and Why it Matters” by Arthur C. Brooks; https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/who-gives-more-liberals-or-conservatives/] There is a profound lesson in this difference of temperament between Rossetti, the man of genius, and Morris, the man of talent. In Morris it is connected with the same inability to fix the attention on a stable point, the same fluidity impatient of fact, that form the chief characteristic of his verse. 

[The End.]