Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/768

ÆT. 63] for a hundred and fifty years after him, was far in advance of his own day. Whether Morris's attempt to launch English prose style on this fresh pathway was successful is a different question, and one which perhaps few scholars would hesitate to answer in the negative. But his prose was as sincere, and as little a forced copy of mediæval work, as were his illuminated manuscripts, or his painted windows. This may be a reason, if reason has to be assigned, why none of the various parodies of his style bear much resemblance to the original.

For the refined products of modern ingenuity which did not root themselves back on that old tradition, he had as little taste in literature as in painting. The modern books which in later life he read with the greatest enjoyment were those which, without artifice or distinction of style, dealt with a life, whether actual or imaginary, which approached his ideal in its simplicity and its close relation to nature, especially among a race of people who remained face to face with the elementary facts of life, and had never become fully sophisticated by civilization. In this spirit, he admired and praised works like Mr. Doughty's "Arabia Deserta," or "Uncle Remus," from which he was always willing and eager to read aloud, or "Huck Finn," which he half-jestingly pronounced to be the greatest thing, whether in art or nature, that America had produced. For refinement of style, for subtle psychology in creation, he had but little taste. He could not admire either Meredith or Stevenson. When he was introduced to Ibsen's plays, and called on to join in admiring their union of accomplished dramatic craftsmanship with the most modern movement of ideas, they were dismissed by him in the terse and comprehensive criticism, "Very clever, I must