Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/316

290 290 THE FIRST MORRIS And there you have another of these mysterious trans- formations being actually, visibly, performed ! ^ VIII And how much more than these elfin refractions does this diagnosis of the process not explain ! It ex- plains the blind gait of the words, that seemed to be stumbling and groping beneath the burden of a mean- ing too inordinate for speech, but that are now seen to be palsied by nothing more dreadful than inexperi- ence ; and the vivid incoherence of the narrative — distressed, as we thought, by the same wordless desire — clotting and huddling tensely into those hieroglyphs of knights and queens and painted moons — a system of signs profounder and more elemental than language — is seen to be only the result of a kind of incomplete larceny. Made of a solid crust of massed images, fused by none of the solving vapours of narrative, verse of this graphic sort was bound to present a surface full of fissures, scored with gaps in the thought, unbridged plodding tick-tock of the metre, pursuing its way imperturbably, quite indifferent to the human stresses of the speaker's voice or the natural modulations of the story, actually produces an effect of incommunicable tensions and mysterious significances by tugging the skin of the verse away from the simple under- lying meaning. If the reader's voice obeys the injunctions of the rhythm, it often puts an emphasis on unimportant words — on words, certainly, that had no special meaning for Morris ; and the result of this disparity between their sound-value and their sense-value is a strange acquisition of mystical momentous- ness, as though they meant infinitely more than they said. But in Jason, on the other hand, written when Morris was a con- scious craftsman, precisely the contrary method is followed, and instead of the story going on steadily it is continually being held up and thinned out, in order to fit the movement of the verse — with, of course, a distinct lowering of the dramatic pitch and a general dilution of the emotional interest.
 * It is worth while noting, too, how extraordinarily this