ART. IX.-1. The Earthly Paradise. By WILLIAM MORRIS. Parts I.-IV. London: 1869-70.

2. The Life and Death of Jason. A Poem. By WILLIAM MORRIS. London: 1868.

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NOT many men have been more richly endowed with the gift of song than the author of the beautiful poems which are here woven together as a garland of flowers gathered in an earthly Paradise. Not many poets have so successfully schooled themselves to rest content with the mere appearances of things; and hence it is that, while he professes to seek only to draw forth sweet music from a harp which could scarcely be swept by more skilful fingers, he has succeeded in impressing on all his utterances the character of the philosophy, which regards the outward aspect of things as all that may be known about them. This success he has achieved, not by any efforts to fathom the depths and measure the varying currents of human thought. His purpose is rather to watch the movements or the calms on the surface of the waters, without an answer to the question of that inner life which dwells beneath it. Thus while his words flow on in streams soft as any which might come from the lyre of Hermes or the reed of Pan, they carry with them the burden of a strange weariness and sadness.

In truth, the exquisite simplicity and grace of Mr. Morris's poems are the fruit of consummate art and skill. The subjects which he has chosen are with few exceptions subjects which have been already handled by the Homeric and Orphic poets, by Pindar and Stesichorus, by Sophocles and Euripides. They are, in other words, the stories with which the bards of the Greek heroic age charmed their countrymen, and which in the hands of the tragic and lyric poets were made vehicles of the highest lessons of political or ethical wisdom, or means of imparting the purest and most intense delight. These stories Mr. Morris has told again, professedly with the latter of these two purposes only. He speaks of himself emphatically as the idle singer of an empty day;' and, as we read tale after tale, it would be vain to attribute to him the fixed design by which Mr. Tennyson has worked the several parts of the Arthurian story into one magnificent whole. But as our thoughts rest on the Medea and Alcestis of Mr. Morris, we cannot banish from our minds the images of the Medea and Alcestis of Euripides, and we are led to contrast the atmosphere in which these creatures of Greek imagination move, with that in which the same forms are exhibited to us by the modern poet. Probably none have sought

more earnestly to relate these stories simply as stories, and certainly none have imparted to them a more touching charm. The Arthur of Mr. Tennyson is manifestly the embodiment of the highest Christian chivalry, and the Prometheus of Shelley is the man who strives against injustice and wrong in all ages and in all countries; these poems may therefore be regarded from a point of view lofty and immutable. Mr. Morris's tales can be submitted to no such criticism. They are put before us as 'murmuring rhymes;' insensibility to their delightful melodies would argue a strange coldness to versification. Yet, while we give up ourselves to the spell of the enchanter as at the waving of his wand the scenes change and each creation of his plastic power comes before us, it is impossible to rest under it. It may not be fair to compare a poet with other poets, but it can scarcely be unfair to compare him with himself; and if Mr. Morris's purpose has been only to charm away the hours when 'feeling kindly unto all the earth,' we

'Grudge every minute as it passes by,

Made the more mindful that the sweet days die,'

we cannot help marking the signs which seem to show the channel in which the thoughts of the poet have been running, or sometimes pausing to reflect how far it may be wise to follow in the same path.

The melody of Mr. Morris's verse is so sweet, the movement so smooth, that we care as little to assume the attitude of critics towards these poems as to analyse our feelings while we watch the light playing on calm waters beneath a cloudless summer sky. Some flaws may doubtless be found-a few false rhymes, a few sentences which differ from prose only in the recurrence of the same sound at the end of each couplet, and, more frequently, a certain ruggedness and faultiness of scanning. With Mr. Morris, 'real' is invariably a monosyllable, and 'really' a dissyllable. But we need not give instances of defects which, after all, are little more than the purposed discords of the musician. While we accompany Mr. Morris we roam through an enchanted land; and we are too much contented with the beauty of the scenes before us to dwell on the neutral tints or the few unshapely objects which in no way mar their loveliness.

The tales related in the Earthly Paradise' are strung together on a very simple framework. The horrors of a wasting plague at Micklegarth give strength and shape to the vague dreams of a happier land far away to the West, with which some of its people had been wont to solace themselves while

serving among the Varangian guards at Byzantium; and the learned squire Nicholas, whose betrothed is ready to follow him over the world, makes a vow with the Swabian Lawrence and others, that they will at once set out and never give up their search for this land,

'Till death or life have set their hearts at rest.'

In the English Channel they fall in with the fleet of EdwardIII. and the Black Prince, who gives them some lines of writing, lest they should find it hard to deal with some of his people 'who pass not for a word

Whate'er they deem may hold a hostile sword.'

But the story of the voyage, until they descry a new land, differs little, if at all, from the story of Columbus and his men, or of others who have wandered through unknown seas led on chiefly by their hopes and fancies. It is the old tale of eager anticipation and wild enjoyment, followed by blank depression and dismay; but when, after surmounting dangers not less terrible than those which Ulysses encountered in the land of the Læstrygonians or the dwelling of Circe, after escaping from an ocean of misery, in which they had grown to be like devils and learnt what man sinks to

'When every pleasure from his life is gone,'

they come at last to a land where the simple folk, taking them to be gods, treat them as kings, we may well doubt whether the insane yearning for an earthly home where there is no death can live on in the hearts of men who had already numbered their threescore years and ten. But this passion to escape from Death is the burden of Mr. Morris's poems. From the Prologue to the Epilogue of the Earthly Paradise,' which concludes the fourth and last part, his ancient mariners are described as men who

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'deemed all life accurst

By that cold overshadowing threat-the end.'

If the delights of a life not without some likeness to that of the Lotos-eaters still left, as it might well leave, them dissatisfied, the longing would surely be rather for the old home, where they might once again hear the old familiar speech. But though after a time their life seemed to them once more trivial, poor, and ' vain,' not a thought is given to Norway; and the one desire is still to find the country where the old may become young again, and the young may not die. They would be fools and victims, and the veiled prophet was not wanting to lure them on to their destruction. From the horrible captivity which follows they

escape at last, only to see their numbers dwindle quickly away from sickness of body and mind, until Nicholas, the most learned and the most besotted of them all, dies and is left beneath the trees upon the nameless shore, and the scanty remnant is at length brought to a shining city in a distant sea, where they hear not the language of Norway, but the softer sounds of that Greek tongue to which they had listened long ago in Byzantium. Here, kindly welcomed by the grey-haired elders, they feel that their earthly wanderings are done, and their journey to the grave must now be

'like those days of later autumn-tide,

When he who in some town may chance to bide
Opens the window for the balmy air,
And seeing the golden hazy sky so fair,
And from some city garden hearing still
The wheeling rooks the air with music fill,
Sweet hopeful music, thinketh, Is this spring,
Surely the year can scarce be perishing?
But then he leaves the clamour of the town,
And sees the withered scanty leaves fall down,
The half-ploughed field, the flowerless garden-plot,
The dark full stream by summer long forgot,
The tangled hedges where relaxed and dead
The twining plants their withered berries shed,
And feels therewith the treachery of the sun,

And knows the pleasant time is well-nigh done.'

This mournful sound of autumn-tide runs as a keynote through all the tales which the city elders and these stormtossed men relate to each other, and which are here woven into the chaplet of the Earthly Paradise.' They may be tales which tell of high hopes and heroic deeds; they may paint the joys of the young and the mighty achievements of fearless men; but the shadow of death is on these murmuring rhymes'

which

'Beat with light wing against the ivory gate,

Telling a tale not too importunate

To those who in the sleepy region stay;'

and the touch of the very fingers of death alone stirs within us whatever sense of life there may be left. If it be hard to say whether the music of Mr. Morris's song carries with it more of pleasure than of pain, the pleasure must at the least be that of men who sit at the banquet-table in the presence of the veiled skeleton, and the enjoyment that of the youth who is bidden to rejoice because all is vanity and vexation of spirit, and because the hour will soon come when the bowl shall be broken at the fountain. That the idle singer of an empty day,' who

has here woven together some blossoms which lay before his footsteps in a flowery land, fair beyond words,'

'Not plucked by him, not overfresh or bright,'

has given us melodies of exquisite sweetness, it would be mere ingratitude to deny; but the music of this Earthly Paradise is mournful because it is so earthly. Whether the tale be that of Perseus victorious over every enemy who seeks to bar his way, or of Alcestis going forth in all the freshness of youth to the dark land whither her husband should have gone, or of Ogier the Dane, who rises from his charmed sleep to strike a blow for the land where the great Karl had reigned; whether it be the legend of Jason turning deliberately from the old love to the new, or of Psyche toiling on with the very sickness of hope deferred in her search for the glorious being on whom her eyes had but for one moment rested, there is everywhere the same thought that gladness is only gladness because it is dogged by decay and change. The lesson may be true; but the penalty for the iteration of it is a monotony which disposes rather for drowsiness than enjoyment; and the words by which it is enforced leave on the mind the impression of a faith altogether less hopeful than that of the poets who told these tales long ago in their old land, and of whom we are wont to speak as heathens.

The truth is that Mr. Morris never cares to lift his eyes from the earth, except to the visible heaven in which we may see the glories of dawn and sunset; and only on this earth and under this heaven is there any real hope and any real joy for man. For the agonies involved in the constant flux and reflux of human affairs the only remedy lies in the crucible of time,' 'that tempers all things well,

That worketh pleasure out of pain,
And out of ruin golden gain.'

But for the individual man the language of the poet throughout is not only that of resignation to a doom of absolute extinction after a short sojourn here, but of the philosophy which makes this extinction the one justification of merriment. The cornel-wood image stands in the city of Rome

'For twice a hundred years and ten,
While many a band of striving men
Were driven betwixt woe and mirth
Swiftly across the weary earth,
From nothing unto dark nothing;'

and the fact that a log of wood will last

'While many a life of man goes past,
And all is over in short space,'