Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/304

278 278 THE FIRST MORRIS alive again in Morris's poems," he was once persuaded to attest, "and we knew better what thoughts and emotions lay in the secrets of their hearts than we could from the bright superficial pages of Froissart." But we must resist the infection ; we are not going to be hectored. If the figures Froissart carved seem to move again in these pages it is with the rude marks and blunders of the mediaeval chisel still on their faces and limbs — a race of locomotory effigies, tombs as men walking. The influence of Browning does break into these poems, but it is in the shape of a shattered fierceness, in flakes of raw colour, in lines of a sudden physical violence that twitch the poem like a spasm — such as — A wicked smile Wrinkled her face, her lips grew thin, A long way out she thrust her chin — which might be a strip torn from a portrait of Ottima and set startlingly on a tapestry — producing an effect as different from the genial heartiness and wide glow of their source as the splintered sunlight stabbing through a thick underwood is unlike the serene spread- ing radiance outside. From Malory and Froissart young Morris meant, without doubt, to take a certain knightly directness of narrative and stories that rang as they moved. What he actually seized was the numbness that clogs the limbs of his characters, the incoherence of their attitudes and their rigidity — the very qualities that make them move like men locked in a trance. He sought a simple sturdiness and obtained a queer somnambulism. Similarly with Browning. He in- tended to borrow virility and the heat of human passion. The sudden tensions he took merely filled the air with a monastic fever, heightened the very unreality they were meant to dispel. He mixed his colours carefully, applied them in all confidence — but