Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/321

295 THE FIRST MORRIS 295 the calamitous young dreamers, poor Dowson and Thompson, who sought an earher heraldry still in our London, and used religion as a rosary to summon dreams beyond her own reach — were all in their fashion subtly working. Some of these men came after our schoolboy, but their debt to him is well marked: without Morris, a very different Yeats. But from those who went before him he is distinguished by his amazing innocence of all intellectual tactics, by his beautiful inability to make the subtle mistake of the Symbolists and substitute (as they did) a philosophy of letters for one of life, a ladder in place of the pedestal, a silver wire for the old simple stem. Young poets before Morris had studied their pre- decessors; some even had decided on this sort of filtration ; but none had done both so unconsciously and illiterately, with such a complete absence of limiting theory. Morris alone, with his simple boy's heart and his giant frame, with no care for philosophy and little ear for verbal music, had blessed innocence enough to walk unscathed to the treasure and then the strength to crush its contents into one crystal. A cleverer giant would have turned aside to argue, a more sophisticated one would have been tempted by wise or useful alloys ; a less lusty simpleton would merely have made an absolutely perfect anthology. Morris turned his anthology into an alphabet, using each of its items as a letter. He sent his great voice pealing out in a song that used solid poems for its notes. He walked the waves without noticing them, sustained by his perfect trust in art, intent only on the pretty colours in the spray ; and he picked these up because he wanted them, and bound them together in a bow, and carved corridors and climbing stairways and enchanted rooms in the heart of them, all because he was as a little child. No, when we felt we were " entering Noah's rainbow and being made companions