LITERATURE AND ART.
WILLIAM MORRIS.[1]
The world is richer by a new poet, a genuine, born maker and singer. William Morris, were he to write nothing more than "Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise," is sure of a hold upon the world's ear and heart that will not be loosened for many a year, perhaps for generations. Mr. Morris's name was not unknown in literature and in art (he belongs to the Rossetti set), but he has come upon us suddenly with these evidences and fruits of high poetic power. Indeed, the manner in which he and Mr. Swinburne have asserted their positions at once by works largely conceived and finely wrought is in striking contrast to Tennyson's painful and gradual ascent up through many years from "The Skipping Rope," "Oriana," and airy, fairy "Lilian," to "The Idyls of the King." Whether this has happened because the elder poet unwisely let us see the work of his 'prentice hand, and even its failures, instead of taking a hint from Brummel and sending them into oblivion by the back stairs, and the younger kept themselves in reserve until they had produced something that would command general attention and could be tried by a high standard of criticism, or whether Tennyson has, in fact, climbed toilfully up the steep of Parnassus, while they have mounted upon wings, is a question upon which there may be two opinions, ours having been more than hinted in the last number of The Galaxy. As regards the younger men, we have no fear, in Mr. Morris's case at least, of the old proverb about those who are soon ripe. For the beauty with which he charms us is of the kind that is perennial. Pericles and Aspasia would have delighted in these poems, and Charlemagne, Alfred, Queen Elizabeth, Dr. Johnson, nay even the stupid Brunswicker who declared that "beobles had no business to be boets," and who was more than half right in his opinion.
The manner of these poems is new to this generation; but it is no new manner. The delight that they give is fresh; but it is the old delight for which men have longed in their hearts ever since they began to feel and to think, and which has been ministered to them by men born to that office through centuries and cycles. What we crave, unless we are gross, material, and sordid, is the beauty of human life, and to show us this is what we ask of our poets. The beauty of the whole of it, of its sorrows as well as of its joys, of its graver as well as of its lighter employments; of its grand purposes, its absorbing passions, its passing moods, its reveries, its gaiety and its gloom. For it all has beauty—beauty which a great painter shall detect and set before you in the mingled craft and misery of a beggar, as a great poet has, in the agony of a forlorn, insulted father and crazy king. There are two ways by which this end can be attained; one is by the representation of real life, which is the aim of the novelist, whether in prose, or in verse like that of Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh;" the other the creation of an ideal world, of life freed from material cares, from what must be to most of us its chief concern—daily toil and the multiplication table. To present the latter is the chief function of the poet when he works simply as a poet—a maker—and does not assume the functions of priest, sage, seer, or prophet. And rarely has a man of this order sung his
- ↑ "The Life and Death of Jason." A Poem, by William Morris. 16mo, pp. 307. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
"The Earthly Paradise." A Poem, by William Morris, Author of "The Life and Death of Jason." 16mo, pp. 676. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
