Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/767

358 accomplished of his critics in discussing "The Roots of the Mountains"; "but Mr. Morris's prose is more old-fashioned than his verse." This is true; it seems, however, to miss or ignore the fact which is essential to a sympathetic understanding of the whole of Morris's work, that in literature as well as in the manual arts he was throughout his life striving to take up and continue the dropped threads of the mediaeval tradition; and that his work in both fields, while it was in one sense completely modern and even in advance of his age, was based on the return to and development of methods which had long since gone out of fashion, if they had not become completely obsolete. To go back to the fourteenth century, not with the view of staying there, but of advancing from it on what he conceived to be the true high road out. of which the arts had long wandered, was his perpetual principle. But it so happens (whether from anything essential to the art or from particular causes to be sought in history) that the fashion of poetry has changed much less since Chaucer's time than the fashion of prose. The English version of the "Gesta Romanorum" (a work which Morris considered to be the perfection of English prose) is, though more recent in date, more old-fashioned than either Piers Plowman or the Canterbury Tales: or in Chaucer himself, the Tale of Melibœus, or the Treatise on the Astrolabe, is more old-fashioned than the Knight's Tale, or than the Book of Troilus and Cressida. It was some feeling of this sort, in combination with his inveterate love of paradox, that made Morris repeatedly startle his friends by casually alluding to Chaucer as "the great corrupter of the English language." For in matters of style and diction, Chaucer, as is proved by the fact that English poetry made no sensible advance