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Those who have watched the progress of Morris’s socialism know that, so far from being out of keeping with the “anti-scrape” philippics and the tapestry weaving, it is in entire harmony with them. Out of a noble anger against the “jerry builder” and his detestable doings sprang this the last of the Morrisian epics, as out of the wrath of Achilles sprang the Iliad.
“Morris’s ‘Earthly Paradise’!” the reader will exclaim. Yes; and here we come upon that feature of originality which, as has been before said, distinguishes Morris’s socialism from the socialism of the prosaic reformer. Political opinions almost always spring from temperament.
It is a serious impeachment of latter-day criticism that in very many cases, perhaps in most cases, the plaudits given to the last new “leading poet” of the hour are awarded to “felicitous lines,” every felicity of which is rhetorical and not poetical. The news of the grave turn suddenly taken by William Morris’s illness prepared the public for the still worse news that was to follow.
Whatever chanced to be Morris’s goal of the moment was pursued by him with as much intensity as though the universe contained no other possible goal, and then, when the moment was passed, another goal received all his attention.
The thought that Morris’s life had ended in the tragedy of pain—the thought that he to whom work was sport and generosity the highest form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the mortal coil—would have been intolerable almost.
Not one word passed Morris’s lips, as far as I remember at this distance of time, which had not some relation to fish and baits. He had come from London for a few hours’ fishing, and all the other interests which as soon as he got back to Queen’s Square would be absorbing him were forgotten.
This subject of Chaucer’s humour and Morris’s lack of it demands, however, a special word even in so brief a notice as this. No man of our time—not even Rossetti—had a finer appreciation of humour than Morris, as is well known to those who heard him read aloud the famous “Rainbow Scene” in ‘Silas Marner’ and certain passages in Charles Dickens’s novels.
Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the eagerness as completely as Chapman’s free-and-easy paraphrase, and in a rendering as literal as Buckley’s prose crib, which lay frankly by Morris’s side as he wrote.
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