Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/326

300 300 THE FIRST MORRIS scraps of description heard in their childhood, that take secret root and slowly collect mental adjuncts ; but for a man like Morris — so specially incapable of abstract speculation, hedged about in an unreal hush by his father's wealth, and abnormally capable of turning descriptions into solid kingdoms, where he could pace and live contentedly — it was inevitable that his philosophy, his view of life, his sense of its possibilities and perfections, should be formed out of books and pictures, out of exactly the material which we saw him crushing together to make into his first poetry. To speak of him, as the fashion is now, as a mediae valist born,^ a strayed soul from the thirteenth century, is pretty perhaps, but, surely, sentimental and unsound ; he was in essence but a mass of undetermined energy surging with predilections for pure Comeliness, Symmetry, Law, and if he had been born, like Burne-Jones, in a Birmingham thorough- fare, and sent to a nail factory or brassfounder's, he might have used his great strength and sound instincts to straighten up the social tangle into which machinery at first plunged us ; or at least have wrought reality into a pattern in the shape of modern books and plays. But he was bred in a moated grange, islanded out of the clamour, on that queer, unreal, middle kingdom which middle-class wealth alone can make — diligently detached from the town on the one hand, yet having no share in the immemorial feudal mechanism of the soil on the other ; he was educated on Gothic architecture, ancient peace, romances and missals, a course sustained, by happy accident, through his solitary schooldays in Savernake ; and it was out of the lovely elements thus provided that he sheathed his desires and gave them the dog- matic body that we know. He came to believe that ^ "The love of the Middle Ages was born in him," says Mr. Mackail.