Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/283

 THE FIRST MORRIS

—William Morris's first hook, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poemg, was published in 1858. ''Morris, that is to say, was only twenty-four, and most of the poems were written during his undergraduate days, when he was but a puzzled and tempestuous schoolboy. None the less, as most readers have felt, it is not only by far the most magical of his books, thrilled and pierced by a troubled, strange beauty that never reappears in his work and that is, indeed, unique in English letters); but it also continually seems to display a rare gift for curious psychology, an astonishing comprehension of obscure moods of the soul, which the after-years proved plainly to be precisely the talent which Morris most markedly lacked. Wholesome, simple, nobly balanced, Morris's later work is; but its characterization is as naive as his simple social theories were, as free as they from any understanding or appreciation of individuals. The books he wrote as a man have always a sweet childishness: yet the book he wrote when a boy reflects a wisdom almost sinister. When he closed The Defence he seemed to snap a lock on the genius that produced it." These anomalies, taken together, make up a phenomenon that is probably, both humanly and technically, the most intriguingly perverse and apparently incomprehensible which the recent course of our major literature provides. The pages that follow represent an effort to discover the secret cause of it, without falling back on such stop-gap 'terms as "inspiration," "intuition." The method pursued has been the patient one of the impressionist. The exact emotional effect of The Defence volume is first of all defined; the various elements in this effect are then traced back to their separate sources; these, next, are successively related to the schoolboy's personality so that all that is involuntary, unintentional, lies revealed; and though the practical deduction (in both senses) which is thus made possible involves much that is distinctly disturbing {an accusation of cowardice, for instance, against the later Morris, and of a disappointing innocence in the earlier) it does at the same time seem to invest the whole queer occultation with a quality of quiet human logic—which is, after all, much more reassuring than ideals left intact but unexplained.''

's first book begins with a "But"—

But knowing now that they would have her speak—

and the odd, abrupt jerk of the opening might have been the jar of a delicate lever—disturbing the Men of Letters.