John William Mackail

“ Looking back in his forty-ninth year over what he had done and what he had failed to do, and looking to the future in the light of the past, he found himself forced reluctantly to the conclusion that hitherto he had not gone to the root of the matter; that, art being a function of life, sound art was impossible except where life was organised under sound conditions; that the tendency of what is called civilisation since the great industrial revolution had been to dehumanise life ”

“ Palgrave was one of those men whose distinction and influence consist less in creative power than in that appreciation of the best things which is the highest kind of criticism, and in the habit of living, in all matters of both art and life, at the highest standard. ”

“ With 'Jason' and the 'Earthly Paradise' he attained a wide popularity: and these poems, appearing as they did at a time when the poetic art in England seemed narrowing into mere labour on a thrice-ploughed field, not only gave a new scope, range, and flexibility to English rhymed verse, but recovered for narrative poetry a place among the foremost kinds of the art. A certain diffuseness of style may seem to be against their permanent life, so far as it is not compensated by a uniform wholesomeness and sweetness which indeed marks all Morris's work. ”

“ The Democratic Federation—a league of London working men's radical clubs with leanings towards state-socialism—was the only organisation at hand which seemed to Morris, from this point of view, to be at work in the right direction. In the belief that better conditions of life for the working class which substantially included the objects towards which that body worked were the necessary first step towards all further progress, and that they could be attained by properly organised action on the part of the working class itself, Morris joined the federation in January 1883. ”

“ For several years about this time there may be traced in all Morris's work a restlessness due to the constant search after fresh methods of artistic expression, and the growing feeling that, inasmuch as true art is coextensive with life, the true practice of art involves at every point questions belonging to the province of moral, social, and political doctrine. ”

“ The seceders organised themselves as a separate body under the name of the Socialist league, and Morris, much against his will, was forced into a leadership of this group, among whom he was conspicuous alike by means, education, and character. To the service of the league he gave himself up with even more complete devotion, managing and financing their journal, the 'Commonweal,' preaching socialism among the working class in most of the industrial centres of Great Britain, and addressing street meetings regularly with the view of organising discontent towards a social revolution. ”

“ Already as a boy he had acquired a singularly minute knowledge of trees, flowers, and birds. At Marlborough he had, with the aid of the school library and all the specimens of ancient building within reach, made himself a good antiquary, 'knowing,' as he afterwards said, 'most of what was to be known about English Gothic;' and Savernake Forest and the Wiltshire downs made a background in complete harmony with his growing sense of romance and love of beauty. At Oxford he at once formed a close friendship with Edward Burne-Jones [q. v. Suppl.] ”

“ Just so his work, in whatever field, while it expressed his own ideas with complete sincerity, bears an aspect of mediævalism, because it was all produced in relation to a single doctrine: that civilisation had ever since the break-up of the middle ages been, upon the whole, on a wrong course, and that in the specific arts as well as in the general conduct of life it was necessary to go back to the middle ages, not with the view of remaining at the point which had been then reached, but of starting afresh from that point and tracing out the path that had been missed. ”

“ The unfinished drafts of a cycle of lyrico-drainatic poems called 'Scenes from the Fall of Troy' are the only surviving product of that period. But on his return to London he resumed the writing of poetry in a completely new manner and with extraordinary copiousness. The general scheme of the 'Earthly Paradise' had been already framed by him ; and in 1866 he began the composition of a series of narrative poems for this work, which he continued for about four years to pour forth incessantly. ”

“ In 1855 Palgrave returned to London on the discontinuance of the training college, and served in Whitehall, first as examiner and afterwards as assistant secretary of the education department, till his retirement in 1884. In 1854 he had published 'Idyls and Songs,' a small volume of poems which has not achieved permanence. He was for several years art critic to the 'Saturday Review,' and contributed a large number of reviews and critical essays dealing with art and literature to the 'Quarterly Review' and other periodicals. ”

“ He worked in Street's office for the rest of that year, first at Oxford, and afterwards in London when Street removed thither in the autumn. Meanwhile Burne-Jones had left Oxford without taking a degree in order to begin life as a painter in London. The influence of Rossetti was immensely strong on both ; and when Morris also came to London and shared rooms with Burne-Jones, Rossetti succeeded in convincing him that he too ought to be a painter. ”

“ Increased leisure, and the conviction (finally confirmed by the events of 13 Nov. 1887 in Trafalgar Square) that no social revolution was now practicable, and that the true work of socialists lay in education towards revolution by influence on opinion, were leading Morris by this time, on the one hand towards a more passive socialism, and on the other towards the resumption of other and older interests. The ideal human life of the future lay far beyond reach ”

“ But it remains one of those rare instances in which critical work has a substantive imaginative value, and entitles its author to rank among creative artists.
In 1862 Palgrave was employed in the revision of the official catalogue of the fine art department of the exhibition of that year, and the compilation of a descriptive handbook to the art collections there, and also wrote a memoir of Clough, who had died the autumn before. In 1866 he published a volume of 'Essays on Art,' and a critical biography of Scott prefixed to a collected edition of his poems. ”

“ In connection with one of these meetings in East London he was arrested in September 1885, but discharged without trial. During this period he wrote much in the 'Commonweal,' and also published many socialist tracts and pamphlets, both prose and verse. Not until the spring of 1886 did he begin to find time for literature other than that of direct socialism. He then took up a task, or rather to him a recreation, delightful in itself and the more pleasant by contrast with his political work, the translation of the 'Odyssey' into English verse. ”

“ Its requirements, and the problems it suggested, had a large share in leading to the formation, in April 1861, of the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co., manufacturers and decorators, and to the whole of Morris's subsequent professional life. Rossetti, Burue-Jones, Madox Brown, and Webb were Morris's partners in the firm, together with C. J. Faulkner and P. P. Marshall, the former of whom was a member of the Oxford Brotherhood, and the latter a friend of Brown and Rossetti. The decoration of churches was from the first an important part of the business. ”

“ The manuscript was finally laid aside for the translation, and the 'Æneids of Virgil' was published in November 1875. It had been preceded earlier in the year by a volume of translations from the Icelandic under the title of 'Three Northern Love Stories,' and was followed almost at once by the composition of his longest poem, the epic of 'Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs.' This was published at the end of 1876. Morris himself thought it his highest, if not his best, work in poetry. ”

“ In it the selection made failed to give general satisfaction; and indeed the judgments in poetry of a man of seventy are likely to have lost much and gained little in the years of declining life. By that time too the way he had opened thirty-five years before was thronged with followers, and the new volume took a place only as one among the crowd. Two more volumes of original poems, the 'Visions of England' (1881) and 'Amenophis' (1892) , complete the list of his own contributions to English poetry.
In 1884 Palgrave resigned his assistant secretaryship in the education department. ”

“ Soon after completing his probationary year at Exeter he returned to the public service by accepting an appointment under the education department, in which the rest of his active life was spent. From 1850 to 1855 he was vice-principal, under Dr. Temple, the present archbishop of Canterbury, of Kneller Hall, a government training college for elementary teachers at Twickenham. ”

“ A volume of his Oxford lectures, 'Landscape in Poetry' (1897) , collected and revised by him after he vacated the chair, was Palgrave's last published work. His health had been for some years failing, and he died after a brief illness on 24 Oct. ”