John Drinkwater

“ But whilst the insistence that the poet should be swiftly responsive to the life about him is perfectly just, indeed inevitable in any right understanding of art, it is equally necessary to remember always that the poet's vision itself is turned upon life from places remote and untrodden, that the seasons of his contemplation are seasons of seclusion. To say that the poet is the product of his age is to be deceived by one of the most dangerous of critical half-truths. The poet is the product of his own temperament and personality, or he is nothing. ”

“ He saw men having no adventurousness in their own spirits, dulled by routine, and with their own wills bent and impoverished by the will of some one else, degraded into mere echoes and reflections. He saw that the crying need of the world was character, and he sought to teach men that in bringing back joy to their daily work they would put their feet on the first step towards the only true dignity and pride of life. ”

“ To love, and if needs be to battle for love, to labour and find labour the one unchanging delight, to be intimate with all the moods and seasons of earth, to be generous alike in triumph and defeat, to fear death and yet to be heroic in the fear, to be the heirs of sin and sorrow in so far as these things were the outcome of events that were permanent and not ephemeral in their nature—of such did he conceive the state of men to be in the earthly paradise that he was tying to create in his art. ”

“ It is in this mellowing of the fierce Volsung strain that the redemption of the cosmic spirit of the epic is found. To show this is a purpose not less noble than that of Milton when he robed himself to justify the ways of God to man, and it is one which must be clearly understood before we can hope to grasp the imaginative impulse that runs as a central thread through all the coloured jewels of Morris's masterpiece. This new chastening of the humanity in Sigurd not only makes the life among which he moves sweeter, but it reacts upon the most tragic judgments of the gods. ”

“ Morris is for me among the supremely important poets, but I know that to some men to whose powers of perception I bow he is not of such vital significance. I do not dispute their conclusions; I can only endeavour to explain and justify my own.
Poetry seems to me to be the announcement of spiritual discovery. Experience might be substituted for discovery, for every experience which is vital and personal is, in effect, a discovery. The discovery need not be at all new to mankind; it is, indeed, inevitable that it will not be so. Nor need it be new to the poet himself. ”

“ We feel always that we are moving among a humanity not in any way idealized, but framed in the proportions of giants, purged of everything inessential and tautened in all its sinews. And when the spirits of these people are drawn up to some unwonted height of emotional intensity the result is a cry from a world the knowledge of which moves us to a heroic hope for our race. The grief of Gudrun over Sigurd dead, with the wonderful refrain interwoven by the narrator, is a grief that in itself is a triumph over any blows that destiny can inflict. ”

“ Experience proves the advent of a great poet to be apparently capricious, the unconsidered whim of powers that make but little distinction of seasons. The "Songs of Innocence" were quite definitely sung in the wilderness. But that manifestation of genius which covers a range wider than its own finest creation, and takes on something of universality in pervading itself not only with its own life but with the life of the world, would seem to be reserved for days that mark the culmination of some memorable epoch of imaginative activity, and in itself to be the crowning expression of such days. ”

“ They denote, on the contrary, a spiritual activity astonishing in its range and sanity. For they imply a recognition on the part of the poet that to pass down a river on a golden afternoon, or to lie beneath the stars at night, or to move beneath the walls of an unknown city whilst memories of home and kin crowd on the mind, is an experience as adventurous as the riding of a storm or the winning of a Golden Fleece. To be languid is to be indifferent, and indifference in the presence of anything not wholly alienated from nature and simple humanity was the last thing of which Morris was capable. ”

“ Gray and Collins, Shelley and Keats, and, in daily practice, any one poet and any other whose books happen to be on the table at the same moment.
The relation of the age to its poets is that of sunlight to a landscape. The trees and the rivers, the hills and the plains, all turn to the same source for the power whereby to express themselves, the same light is upon them all. But no one thinks in consequence of comparing Snowdon with the Thames. Without his age a poet cannot speak, but the thing that his age empowers him to utter is that which is within him. ”

“ But if we fail to keep pace with his glorious and inexhaustible curiosity, if our joy is not sane and unjaded as his, it will not mend our case to call him languid. It is we who lack energy, not he. Every man is quick-witted in the ranks of battle or the sack of cities; the true test of his vitality is to see whether he remains so under the orchard boughs or in the walk from his doorstep to the market-place. Our position in this matter is but the logical issue of a social condition against which the whole of Morris's life and art were a revolt. ”

“ Had he not written at all he would still have been a remarkable and memorable man, but having written much, and as poet, his claim as such must be considered before all others. And Morris's poetry is a permanent record of the man's temper, of his spiritual adventures and discoveries, not a desultory series of impressions imposed by external events, but the continuous manifestation of his reading of life. His conception of art, formed in his youth, as the expression of joy in living, as the immediate and necessary outcome of life itself wherever life was full, knew no change to the end. ”

“ His long poems show us a life conceived on lines that I have sought to trace, approached in a mood of austere responsibility and defined with all the completeness that he could bring to work. In these prose romances the life is unchanged, but it is seen through a different mood. It is as though he turned aside from the stress of his daily work to the world that his imagination had already created as the only sane one for men, and saw it with a kind of new leisureliness and wholesome irresponsibility. ”

“ We have seen that the earth was to Morris from boyhood in some sort a sacred thing. And the people of the earth were no less. His one overmastering passion was for a world wherein men and women lived in full responsiveness to the beauty of the earth, labouring with their hands and adventurous and capricious in spirit, finding joy in their work and in contact with each other, and rejecting all the things of civilization that were dulling and mechanical. ”

“ The world as he found it was fettered and numbed, and he sought in his art to create a world free and exultant, one peopled by perfectly normal people whose sorrows were the sorrows of common experience and whose sins were the expression merely of the darker, but not diseased, passions of humanity. When active socialism became part of his work, his sole purpose was, in his own words, to make socialists, which meant, for Morris, to bring men to a sense of the possibility of the life of large simplicity that he had created as poet. ”

“ The wisdom of childhood is sometimes supposed to lie in the child's attitude of unquestioning acceptance, but the truth is that it lies in a constant sense of adventure. The wisdom of the poet is as the child's in this; for both wake daily in the hope and expectancy of new revelations. Unquestioning acceptance and the stifling of curiosity are the last infirmities of foolish minds. Life ceases to be lovely when it ceases to be adventurous. ”

“ Think of the joy we have in praising great men, and how we turn their stories over and over, and fashion their lives for our joy: and this also we ourselves may give to the world.' It was curiously prophetic of that which we feel about Morris himself. His life, his art, the figure of the man, all fit into the outlines of a heroic story such as those that he loved. He gave, indeed, to the world in this manner and in large measure. And he added generously to the joy that we have in praising great men. ”

“ The daily charities and heroisms, the discipline of fellowship and love, the worship of beauty and the pride of shaping with hand and brain, are all independent of them, and they are the justification of life. If we have crowded them out of our daily courses, then it is for the poets to lead us back to them. This they do most certainly, not by denouncing us for our folly or reviling the evil to which we have fallen, but by showing us, in being, our lost estate. This Morris did, and to understand this is to understand the root and flower of his philosophy as poet. ”

“ But if we really know the iron works itself, we know that it is hideously ugly, using men half as beasts, half as machines, choking the air and wounding the earth, a thing definitely unpoetic because definitely a denial of life. Morris worked in quite another manner. Instead of lending ugliness the undeserved beauty and colour of his own temperament, he stripped all things that came into his vision of all that was inessential, all the excrescences of accident and will, and then allowed them in their renewed simplicity to find natural and direct expression. ”

“ This is why his poetry, all its vitality and strength notwithstanding, is so peaceful. His people may suffer great troubles and deal hard blows, love passionately and lose fiercely, but at no time do they move with the confused unrest of men who are never sure of themselves, having between their vision and the world a thousand petty accidents of will. They are deep-lunged, but they never babble and chatter; they have enormous energy but are never restless.
As though to emphasize the singleness of his aim in these poems, Morris uses the simplest verse-forms. ”

“ Strands of his influence have already been drawn through the art and life of his followers, but the work that has been done in deliberate imitation of his is scarcely recognizable as such. A poet may imitate Tennyson with some success because he may inherit the same tradition that shaped Tennyson; the impulse is already in his blood towards the expression and temper of which his model is the consummation. But there is no such tradition behind Morris; his art was in a peculiar degree the creation of his own vision alone, and that is a thing which is beyond imitation. ”