THE FIRST MORRIS 269 But even so the mystery of Guenevere is only half dispelled. We still have to account for its uncanny wisdom and glittering power. For ranged round the problem, deepening its shadows tremendously, stand certain fixed facts of biography. Morris was barely more than a boy when he wrote Guenevere ; Jason was the work of his manhood. A nine-years interval lay between the two, years of singularly gracious growth, of a continually increasing mastery both of art and of life. The book that seems boyish, that is to say, was born of experience and proud purpose ; while the one that seems weighted by an almost troubling wisdom was written by a bungling under- graduate. "These early poems," says Mr. Mackail very beautifully, " have the evanescent and intangible grace of a new beginning in art, the keen scent and frail beauty of the first blossoms of spring. . . . Such in their time had been the troubled and piercing charm of the Virgilian * Eclogues,' of the early Florentine or Sienese paintings." "When Morris read his first poem, the first he had written in his life," says another fine critic, himself a poet, who was happy enough to form one of the eager Oxford circle, " I felt it was something the like of which had never been heard before. It was a thing entirely new, founded on nothing previous. . . ." Side by side with these utterances, it is good to place Morris's own comment. When the hushed group of listeners had breathed their applause — " Well, if that's poetry," said he, "it's jolly easy to do." IV So — who fished the murex up? How was this first effect produced — so "easy," so abnormal, so irrecover- able? And what caused the change? Criticism, in part the docile registrar, meekly making definitions
