Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/311

290 spective, he approximates dramatic poetry to the manner of treatment of those late mediæval tapestries, the finest of which were his ideal of decorative arrangement. The outer frame is given by the rustic lovers, Giles and Joan. Within this is a second plane, in which stand the Emperor and Empress. Within this again, in the central plane, is Love as the interpreter of the action, both inwards and outwards. On the fourth plane is the main action itself, the dramatic interlude of the Freeing of Pharamond: and on the last and inmost of all, subtilized out of any definite personality and charged with all the distilled emotion of the fourfold action, is "the Music," the final and interpenetrating spirit of the whole work. The detailed structure of this multiplex arrangement is worked out with an extraordinary ingenuity and elegance. Morris's best decorative designs have just such an ordered intricacy, such a free yet precisely adjusted pattern. Most notable of all is the instinctive art which keeps all these planes of action interlaced or interfused, so that the whole poem constitutes a single design. The problem was of the same kind as he had to face in designing for wall-papers or chintzes, that of so arranging the "repeat" that the pattern should flow continuously over the whole space to be filled and not fall asunder into patches. It is here further complicated by another condition, a fact of texture, as it would be called if the matter being dealt with were a textile fabric. To make the different planes of action distinct, each has its own metre. These metres are the short octosyllabic couplet, the heroic decasyllable, the alliterative unrhymed verse of the body of the play, and, for the "Music," an exquisite invention of rhymed dactylics. The way in which they are interwoven is a masterpiece of metrical