Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/318

292 292 THE FIRST MORRIS youths who were his friends, were strung up to the intensity of parables, invested with a kind of hushed holiness, by a mere dogged attention to detail, a pedestrian transcription of every stem and stain and stone, so do these graphic lyrics seem to grow more breathless and mystical the more precisely and mate- rialistically they were made. One of the best of those pictures, burdened (as it seems) with presage, is that simple gardening bonfire scene, painted by the happy young athlete Millais, known as "Autumn Leaves." By a process not dissimilar, in a spirit just as joyous, this book of borrowed brightness, this heap of garnered spoil, was invested with the same piercing iridescence, seemed to wear " the evanescent and intangible grace of a new beginning in art," and, in spite of its actual autumnal sensuousness, seems to thrill and tingle with the tidings of a strange new spiritual spring. IX Is the whole thing, then, one immense, amazing '* spoof," and are we, the solemn readers, with our reverential ecstasies, no better than a row of mawkish gulls ? By the Heels of Apollo — no ! Who are we to say that the work a man's hand does in defiance of his neatly-framed intentions is not obeying far pro- founder laws than any that could be codified by that prim bureaucrat his brain? Consider the cold scien- tific character of the verses thus involuntarily made. Composed of clamped metaphors, a solid crust of imagery, might they not be expected, on that account alone, to contain a keener, purer magic than poetry that is mostly matrix, a bed and vehicle for single gems? Though we scarcely ever admit it, checked by a rather winning sort of shame, afraid of being found too trivial, it is actually for the sake of these concentrated pictures, these little pools of vision, that