Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/458

426 songs of life with such power of enchantment as is shown in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise." He has chosen his function, or, rather, it has chosen him, and he sees and owns his place. He does not set himself up as a teacher, does not seek to entangle his tales with the intricate problem of human life, or to load down his rhymes with reasons.

The very charm of his poetry is in that while it does not strive "to set the crooked straight," it is yet penetrated, as we see in many sad, sweet lines the writer's soul is penetrated, with the keen knowledge of the woe of life and the weariness. In this respect, as in some others, William Morris differs from one of our poets, Edmund Spenser, with whom, in richness of fancy, in strength of imagination and sustained narrative power, as well as in a sweet full flow of verse, he has much in common. But Spenser wrote in allegory, with the deliberate purpose of setting forth the twelve moral virtues. A good purpose and a thoughtful, but most unpoetical. It cramped his fancy, as much as it could be cramped, and it bound up his imagination in so far as it could be bound. As teaching, "The Fairie Queen" is fast fading out of the world's memory; and it is read now only by those who go through its cantos as they walk through splendid picture galleries, absorbed in the beauty of the scenes the poet sets before them, and listen dreamily to his wisdom—for he is wise—as to the echoes of their own foot-falls. Spenser is the poet of the imaginative and the thoughtful. The poet whom Morris most resembles is Chaucer, whom he is like in the clean, sharp outline of his figures and their vivid coloring, and the firm straightforwardness of his simple thought, revealed although it is through a rich poetic style. This likeness comes of inborn impulse, but no less of purpose. The poet himself tells us at whose feet he has sitten a learner in some beautiful lines of his "Jason," which set Chaucer's style before us with fine appreciation. He disclaims comparison with his master, and even the credit of being his worthy pupil, with a modesty which is touching because it is manifestly genuine, but it is too great. For, William Morris is eminently a poet of imagination, and he does bring before our eyes the image of the thing his heart is filled with. His "Earthly Paradise" is a succession of scenes, either of repose or of action, which he has seen, and which he enables us to see as clearly as we saw the friends we sat with yesterday. He is not sententious, not philosophical; he does not trouble himself or us with the twelve moral virtues; he comes not to offend us by preaching to us, or to please us by scourging the rest of the world; he is no writer of epigrams or sayer of sayings; he does not even give us poetry, as Bunsby uttered wisdom "in solid chunks," but he diffuses it throughout the stories that he tells us in sweet rhymes that run so easily and with such mere charm of sound and motion, that it seems as if he must have had as much pleasure in the writing of them as we do in the reading. His poems are not jewel cases from which you can pick out shining couplets to flash in the eyes of wondering folk, and say, See how this little trinket glitters; they are structures the beauty of which lies in their outline, in the harmony of their parts, and in the spirit that breathes from them, even more than from their details, although these are all wrought exquisitely. They are conceived, however, not for themselves, but as parts of a great whole.

And the stories that he tells, what of them? Wonderful new stories, you suppose. No; they are the wonderful old stories; stories that were told a thousand years, and most of them two thousand years ago; which grammar-school boys have had flogged into them as tasks for centuries—the stories of Medea, of Atalanta, of Cupid and Psyche, of Alcestis, of Crœsus, of Pygmalion, or to mix the new and the modern with the old, the story of Ogier the Dane, who was one of Charlemagne's paladins—stories which, if told by the right man, are just as fresh and just as charming now as they were to the people who first heard them. For all the beauty of a story that does not lie in the heart of the hearer lies in the tongue of the teller. Nothing is easier than to write a new story. The making of one is the easiest and the lowest feat of author-craft. The skill to do it belongs to many men and to most women. Every year a thousand new ones