Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/293

267 THE FIRST MORRIS 267 that it was an actual retreat — a panic-stricken with- drawal from the dubious borderland where the first book was written ; and I still feel there is much truth in this view. One remembers the mixed strain of Morris's blood — half Celtic, half Saxon (he was a Welshman of the Marches) — one remembers, too, the strange childlike fear of death which con- stantly haunted him, only passing from him at the very end of his life ; and it then becomes difficult not to perceive in this first revulsion the opening stage of a stumbling flight from the questionable shapes of the borderland, from the occult beauty to which one side of his genius held the key, towards the reassur- ing sunlight and simple strength of solid earth. The fighters in the first book follow the mystical Grail, their swords hack out a path that leaps away from life ; but Jason and his comrades are permitted to seek the earth's riches only, they fight in order to hold death at bay. They brought their maker all the bright symbols of bodily abundance, they filled his pages with the reassuring colours of fruits and crops and flowers. And even this did not suffice. He must substantiate these dreams. He must carve them in oak and clamp them with metal. He must copy out his visions of tangible beauty in something more tangible than words — in actual ores and beams and fabrics. And finally, as he heaped up, half desperately, these futile defences against the outer dark, like a man trying to build a bastion about the sweetness of spring, he came into contact with the most living and most mortal of earthly fabrics — with the bodies of live men and women. And, oddly, that contact brought him peace. A new serenity (we are told) crept into his life, a new sweetness and humanity. His work as a reformer may have shortened his life — but it seems splendidly certain it killed his fear of death. Like a child crying in the night he stretched his