THE FIRST MORRIS

Note. — William Morris's first hook, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poemg, was published in 1858. Morris, that is to say, was only twenty-four, and most of the poems were written during his undergraduate days, whenhe was but a puzzled and tempestuous schoolboy. None the less, as most readers have felt, it is not only by far the most magical of his books, thrilled and pierced by a troubled, strange beauty that never reappears in his work {and that is, indeed, unique in English letters) ; but it also continually seems to display a rare gift for curious psychology, an astonishing comprehension of obscure moods of the soul, which the after-years proved plainly to be precisely the talent which Morris most markedly lacked. Wholesome, simple, nobly balanced, Morris's later work is ; but its characterization is as naive as his simple social theories were, as free as they from any understanding or appreciation of individuals. The books he lorote as a man have always a sweet childishness: yet the book he wrote when a boy reflects a wisdom almost sinister. When he closed The Defence he seemed to snap a lock on the genius that produced it. These anomalies, taken together, make up a phenomenon that is probably, both humanly and technically, the most intriguingly perverse and apparently in- comprehensible which the recent course of our major literature provides. The pages that follow represent an effort to discover the secret cause of it, without falling back on such stop-gap 'terms as ^^inspiration," ^* intuition." The method pursued has been the patient one of the impressionist. The exact emotional effect of The Defence volume is first of all defined; the various elements in this effect are then traced back to their separate sources ; these, next, are successively related to the schoolboy's personality so that all that is involuntary, unintentional, lies revealed; and though the practical deduction {in both senses) which is thus made possible involves much that is distinctly dis- turbing {an accusation of coivardice, for instance, against the later Morris, and of a disappointing innocence in the earlier) it does at the same time seem to invest the whole queer occultation with a quality of quiet human logic — which is, after all, much more reassuring than ideals left intact but unexplained. I Morris's first book begins with a " But " — But knowing now that they would have her speak — and the odd, abrupt jerk of the opening might have been the jar of a delicate lever — disturbing the Men of Letters. Jg 357