WILLIAM MORRIS.

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HIS PLACE IN LITERATURE.

Few, if any of the contributors to Macmillan's " English Men of Letters" library have had a more difficult task to perform than Mr. Alfred Noyes, who has just produced the volume on "William Morris." For such a series it is naturally but one aspect of Morris's many sided nature and career that has to be kept immediately in view. It is as a man of letters that Mr. Noyes has to deal with him, and in many respects Mr. Noyes should have been just the man for this delicate piece of work. He is himself an epic poet of no mean repute. He has entered into the rich literary heritage bequeathed by the great writers of the past century, among whom Morris must always take high rank, and he is a critic of considerable insight, though as it now appears, of somewhat limited sympathies.

Despite his undoubted qualifications, Mr. Noyes, it must be confessed, has just missed what was really a great opportunity. His monograph is full of valuable comment, and it contains illuminating pages which will be most welcome to Morris's many lovers, but it fails to be what it might have been, because Mr. Noyes is patently not of the Morris school, but a devotee of the Tennysonian tradition. He admires Morris unfeignedly, but his ideal is the polished elaborate perfection of phrase which is so characteristic of Tennyson and Virgil, and he cannot do justice to the "native wood notes wild," the blithe Chaucerian spirit of the beautiful tapestry by a narration of Morris. Moreover, he is too prone to take Morris's literary work as something apart from Morris's life, as the creation of mediæval dreams, rather than as the expression of the living man's active existence. We miss in Mr. Noyes's criticism appreciation of the real unity of the poet and the man of action in Morris. In his poetry, in his art designs —wall-papers bookbinding and stained windows— in his militant socialism, and in his daily life Morris was one and the same, not, as Mr. Noyes implies, the visionary who strove to escape to things of beauty through mediæval fancies, but a strenuous reformer who sought to bring beauty into the world of facts.

His position in the great "renascence of wonder," of which Mr. Watts-Dunton has written, cannot yet be defined, but his "Life and Death of Jason," his "Earthly Paradise," his Sigurd, and his exquisite lines make him something far more than his own modest estimate, "The idle singer of an empty day." He viewed life as a great epic struggle of right with wrong, or what to him was the same thing, of beauty with ugliness. Compared with Tennyson, a comparison which Mr. Noyes makes "ad nauseum," and often irrelevantly, Morris was undoubtedly pagan and sensuous, rather than Christian and spiritual in his attitude to life. Fear of death was from his earliest days his great horror, but it was not the morbid fear of the sin-oppressed fanatic, but the ancient tragic sense of a short existence amid light and warmth, flowers, songs, bright colours, and human affections, lived between two dark, shadowy eternities—the long past before birth, and the long future after death. This sense of life's tragedy did not make him sad or pessimistic. On the contrary, it made him, like the Greeks of old time, determined to make the most of his little span, to enter into it all the joy and all the beauty he could, and to help, as far as in him lay, to make the world a place of joy and beauty for his fellow-men. He was the artist in action, and therein is found the key to his poetry, his arts and craft work, and his socialism. Impossible is his socialistic dreams were, as he himself sometimes realised when he had to work with ordinary socialists, they were part and parcel of his love of beauty. He hated the ugliness of the squalid slum, of the dull factory life, of the home without taste, and he wanted to turn the whole social edifice into a piece of art. His "News from Nowhere" is socially and economically all wrong, but its artistic beauty has coloured our whole view of the world. As long as he was dealing with art his reforms were effective, and no man has done more than he to make homes beautiful, while few poets have given more unalloyed joy of life to their readers.

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Saturday 30 January 1909, page 4