Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/455

1868.] are written, and read with interest. Indeed it would be difficult to determine the lowest limit of intellectual gifts and training compatible with the power to write a story which might be pronounced absorbing and thrilling, which would be finished by seven out of ten of those who began to read it, and which would, therefore, make a good serial for a weekly publication, or a good advertisement, if the first part of it were published in one paper where it should be broken off in the middle of a sentence, with the assurance that the remainder would be found in another. The great stories that have lived are very short, and could most of them be written on this page. They have lived for two reasons: first, their essential parts are simple and well rooted in human nature, and next, because they have been kept alive in the mouths of great poets, who have told the stories, each in his own way, and that a great one. So painters represent nature to us as they see her; and of several who represent the same subject, all being faithful, some will produce but poor common-place pictures, and one or two, great pictures, because these not only see more, but are more than the others, and add themselves to nature.

"Jason" is inferior to "The Earthly Paradise," chiefly because there is in it less of the poet. He has confined himself more to the old classic authorities; he has followed more the old classic models. The influence of these is very manifest in his choice of epithet. He writes "tough well-twisted hawser," "the well-built Argo," "Tolches's well-built walls," "quick-eared rabbits." In this he imitates Homer, purposely we may assume, but not advantageously. Such epithets are not poetical; they are, rather, exceedingly prosaic. But when he says that the rowers "unto their breasts the shaven ash-trees brought," and again indicates an Argonaut as one

he at least improves upon his model. But in this poem are many passages which are filled with a spirit of poetry that has been born since the days of the blind bard of Scio, and which give new life to the old tale of Medea and the Argonaut. One of the most beautiful of these is in the opening of the ninth book, where Jason and the princely sorceress, who has given up all that she might give herself to him, stand together outside her father's palace. Then, with a touching premonition of her fate,

Then he breaks out with vows of constancy, and swears the old oath, forever. What young man ever did, ever could do less, and do it, too, in simple honesty? Had she been mere woman, she would have believed him; but she was a sorceress, and she looked, though but a little way. into the cloud before her, and trembled; but, being more woman than sorceress, she did not hesitate.

O, the old, sad story that will be ever fresh while man is man and woman woman! with what tender nobleness of beauty is it told here; with what exquisite art is it revealed to us in the very first flush of mutual passion between these two lovers, before he has begun to waver and she to eat her own heart with jealousy. Who can be untouched by her reply, which has a certain grandeur! She loves him, not because she trusts him, but because he is her heart's desire, and, to use the poet's words on another occasion, she has cast her heart into the hand of fate. In all modern poetry known to us, there is no more clearly-imagined picture, none more filled with meaning than this one of Medea standing with Jason in the starlight upon the threshold of their strange, woful love. For this, and for what is like it in the poem, William Morris owes nothing to