Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/330

304 304 THE FIRST MORRIS his pen, brought the sun back, and soaked his happy- senses all afresh : — So there they lay until the second dawn Broke fair and fresh o'er glittering glade and lawn ; Then Jason rose, and did on him a fair Blue woollen tunic, such as folk do wear On the Magnesian cliffs, and at his thigh An iron-hilted sword hung carefully ; And on his head he had a russet hood ; And in his hand two spears of cornel wood. . . And so stept forth into the sunny morn. The deduction seems difficult to avoid. The flat- ness and diffuseness of Jason are the marks of his new jovial materialism, the measure of his devotion, both in his work and outside it, to the creature com- forts of the earth. His happiness was the price of our betrayal. It might be urged, indeed, that the work done on this ample scale, these lyrics as large as life and stories that spread like a plain, are meat only for men as gigantic as himself, too big for our precious modern appetite, with its pigmy craving for quintessences and epitomes ; that the time will come when we too will prefer tapestries to tiny pictures, and epics to little edgy tales. And there is more than mercy in the view. If The Defence of Guenevere is the book of youth, then The Earthly Paradise and his endless tales in prose may perhaps be called the reading for mankind's middle age. But we are mani- kins still, we have not yet reached our maturity; and to grow we must be fed. Jason for us lacks vitality ; Guenevere spurs and stings ; — and so Morris too, whom we had grown to think of as the radiant exception, whom Mr. Yeats has called "the happiest of the poets," joins with Keats the consumptive and Shelley the outcast, with Blind Harry and Homer and Milton, and all the countless maimed ministers