Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/489

80 about it, which he does in the best vein possible; he is most steadily enthusiastic about it. Now time was when the poetry resulting merely from this intense study and love of literature might have been, if not the best, yet at any rate very worthy and enduring: but in these days when all the arts, even poetry, are like to be overwhelmed under the mass of material riches which civilization has made and is making more and more hastily every day; riches which the world has made indeed, but cannot use to any good purpose: in these days the issue between art, that is, the godlike part of man, and mere bestiality, is so momentous, and the surroundings of life are so stern and unplayful, that nothing can take serious hold of people, or should do so, but that which is rooted deepest in reality and is quite at first hand: there is no room for anything which is not forced out of a man of deep feeling, because of its innate strength and vision.

"In all this I may be quite wrong and the lack may be in myself: I only state my opinion, I don't defend it; still less do I my own poetry."

He was thinking in these last words, no doubt, of his own unwritten poem on the same subject, the story of Tristram and Iseult: the one which his "soul yearned to do" twelve years before, when he had just completed "The Earthly Paradise," and which was the episode of the whole Arthurian cycle that held his imagination most strongly.

On the 23rd of August he writes more cheerfully to Mrs. Burne-Jones:

"We went on Saturday to call on the De Morgans at Witley and found them lodging in a newish red brick house, the surroundings of which rather reminded one of Mrs. Bodichon's Scalands: afterwards we drove down with them and the Allinghams through woodland