Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/292

266 266 THE FIRST MORRIS the mind — have all been smoothed down and simplified, as though by an actual tide ; and character is to be distinguished from character only by the colours of their robes, their blue eyes or their grey — never by traits of temper or desire. And love itself moves among them, no longer a lord of terrible aspect, but dimpled and pouting, cherubic, a pretty matter of blushes and sighs : — Therewith she made an end ; but while she spoke Came Love unseen and cast his golden yoke About them both, and sweeter her voice grew, And softer ever, as betwixt them flew, With fluttering wings, the new-born strong desire ; And when her eyes met his grey eyes, on fire With that that burned her, then with sweet new shame Her fair face reddened, and there went and came Delicious tremors through her. . . . And so on — pure sugar and sentiment. Character and emotion are naively conventionalized ; the writer seems as unaware of individualities as a child. In the whole of The Life and Death of Jason; in all the tales of The Earthly Paradise ; in the prose romances that followed these and the social theories they accompanied ; in all Morris's work, in short, from now until he died, there is never the faintest sign of the possession by the poet of that gift of almost unhuman understanding of human nature, of its intricate passions and exotic, fierce moods, which seemed to enable him, in this first book, to follow Guenevere's agony unremittingly through shade after shade — using it, like some Inquisitor acting on behalf of the rest of us, to extort new knowledge of the darker places of the soul and discover the last secrets of desire. What caused this recoil ? It is a question that has never yet been answered. My own first idea was