Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/709

300 obscurity of many parts of the original, made more obscure by gaps and corruptions in the text, cannot be got over in any translation which Morris would have regarded, or which it is possible fairly to regard, as faithful: but this means that the only translation practicable is a paraphrase, an "interpretation," as it was called in the old editions of the classics, which shall not profess to reproduce the original, but confine itself to the humbler use of being printed below the original to make it easier of comprehension. As the work advanced, he seems to have felt this himself, and his pleasure in the doing of it fell off. Between this, and the slow progress of the Chaucer, which was chiefly owing to the great difficulty of getting Burne-Jones's designs satisfactorily rendered upon wood—"we shall be twenty years at this rate in getting it out," he writes rather dolefully in May—he was not in the best of spirits that summer about his printing, and began to think that some caution in restricting his output might be not undesirable.

Another matter which seriously vexed him was the total defeat in Convocation, in June, 1893, of his attempt to save the mediæval statuary on the spire of St. Mary's, Oxford, from the hands of the restorer. Those images were much decayed and loosened by past neglect, and were as they stood admittedly unsafe: the question, therefore, became one in which Morris's principles as regards restoration came into the sharpest conflict with those of the ordinary architect. Stated briefly, the question was one of sacrificing truth and history on the one hand, or appearance on the other. "Jackson took me up on the spire," Morris writes after his return from Oxford, "and I had a good look at the images and fought Jackson at every point. The fact is, he would now willingly keep the images, if he