Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/297

271 THE FIRST MORRIS 271 being broken and too innocent to be seduced by gallantries. But Morris — half Berserker, half babe — had both the strength and the simplicity ; and the tale of his life, broadly scanned, resolves itself into a long wrestle with his daemon, a match between the comfortable methods that appealed to his plain mind and the cryptic plans of this masked power. He won — we lost; and all his eagerness to share his prize, and the handsome figure he cut as he received it, rich consolations though they are, must not pre- vent us from frankly realizing our ill-fortune. Guene- vere is the golden, tantalizing proof of it. Wrung from him when he was still dizzy with youth, before he had found his footing and learned his rights and resources. The Defence of Guenevere is a victory for the powers he was later to subdue. An involuntary cry, it lets his secret slip. It shows the message he was charged to deliver but which he shrank from and smoothly suppressed. Guenevere declares the poet Morris refused to become. This is not mere hyperbole. Much of Jasons mildness is directly the result of Morris's increased powers of craftsmanship and his increased mastery of life ; and the special quality of Cruenevere, the rare, high note that makes it magical, did steal into it, as we are now to see, quite without Morris's consent — even without his knowledge — actually invalidating his deliberate design. It may sound fantastic, but it is circumstantially true, that he was one of the few readers of the book who failed to understand its significance. It is a matter of record that he never liked it; that he deliberately destroyed a bundle of contemporary verse, veined with the same quality; that he consented to the publication of a second edition with extreme reluctance and only on condition that he was allowed to revise and reshape it ; and it is in the deliberate, cool adjust-