Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/324

298 298 THE FIRST MORRIS of the best of it was done : Morris grew ** moody and irritable, brooded much by himself, and lost a good deal of his old sweetness and affection of manner." He was suffering immoderately from all the maladies of youth — its violence and vagueness, its energy and innocence, its healthy hunger for physical beauty and its haunting sense that beauty was a sin. With more than a grown man's vitality, he knew far less of the actual world than the everyday urchin. Built on the lines of a Berserker, he regarded the Heir of Redclyffe as a thoroughly practical model and guide. His body was a cage of burning energies that could find no adequate outlet, and as they prowled and stormed and tore him he blamed himself for a fancied weakness of character. " The instability of character which he found, or thought he found, in his own character became for the time acute ... he was subject to strange fluctuations of mood." Destined for the Church, he had deeply wounded his mother by deciding not to take orders and by solemnly dedicating himself to architecture instead. And now, duly articled, Rossetti strode tyr- annously into his life, ordered him to become a painter, and he had to wound her again by obeying. He was a rebel who wanted only to do right ; one duty defeated another, and desire warred with both ; art took the place of reality, and he tried to spend his huge strength in the shadow-kingdom he had made out of pictures and poems and old tales. He overworked desperately, almost hysterically. He was desperately, cruelly in love. And all about him, a beautiful wall between him and the real nineteenth century, blocking the normal channels of relief, lay the lackadaisically earnest Ox- ford of the fifties, an Oxford as adolescent as himself, and the capital of a solemn, sentimental, profoundly inexperienced England. Socially and intellectually the hour and the atmosphere exactly matched and height- ened the exaggerated fevers and abysmal glooms of