Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/766

ÆT. 63] self an object or an effect with perfect clearness: how far he had executed his own design, how far fallen short of it, he felt he knew better than any one could teach him; and that his design was not what this or that other person would have chosen, was not what the public liked or understood, was not, in a word, something else instead of being itself, were matters to him of infinite unconcern. The adverse criticisms encountered by his prose romances on the ground of their mannerisms of vocabulary and construction never induced him to modify the diction which he had chosen, and which was in truth natural to him in a much deeper way than modern newspaper English is natural to the ordinary educated writer. The common literary English of the present day Morris denounced as "a wretched mongrel jargon," corresponding in its own vices to the so-called modern architecture. His own prose style, so difficult to the average careless reader, he maintained to be far simpler and more natural. So indeed it essentially is, as may be seen by the sudden contrast, like a patch of bad colour in a tapestry, when from carelessness or weariness or the mere overwhelming force of surroundings, he has here and there allowed his style for a few lines together to slip into modernism. But he confessed mournfully that for working men (and he thought that working men had a natural intelligence at least equal to that of the middle classes) his writing was "too simple to be understood." The debased modern journalistic style, like the debased modern typography, had grown so familiar from universal use, that a reversion to older and purer types threw people out, and made them complain of a difficulty which they quite honestly felt.

"Verse has a privilege to be more old-fashioned than prose," observes one of the most scholarly and