had never told any story of his own with conspicuous success should, after thirty years' apprenticeship under the greatest masters, gain the skill to write original romances, is hardly wonderful. That he should write them in prose, too, was not, after his long exercise in prose translation from the Icelandic, an altogether doubtful experiment. It may even be doubted whether he did not at last find in this polished archaic prose his most congenial form of expression. But that the "idle singer of an empty day," who cared not aught "to set the crooked straight," should burst upon the world with Socialist ballads of an alarming earnestness, and scatter them broadcast as tracts and leaflets, headed with the motto, "Agitate; organise!" is a spiritual phenomenon not easily explained. Morris himself has offered an explanation in the article, published also as a leaflet, entitled How I became a Socialist. But this explanation only touches the intellectual side of the question, and, in spite of its manifest sincerity, is obviously inadequate. One or two things may here, therefore, be noted as contributing towards further explanation. Morris has been often called a pessimist, but he is very far from being a pessimist in the same sense that Leopardi and Schopenhauer and James Thomson are pessimists. To them, life is not worth living at all, upon any terms whatever it is simply an evil in itself. But to Morris, life is sweet: he relishes its joys to the full; his greatest grief is that they fade and pass away, and that every new joy only brings us a step nearer to that impending end, when they must all be exchanged for-who knows what? 66 : Let me here quote a charming lyric which is found in Ogier the Dane," the second story for August in The Earthly Paradise. It is sung by a youth and maid under Ogier's window in the royal garden at Paris. HE. SHE. In the white flowered hawthorn-brake, HE. Hidden by my golden hair Wilt thou weep that sweet days wear? Sad and old, and near my death. What thing cometh after death? Morris projects himself freely into the sentiments of all his characters in turn, but the above lyric expresses the ground-tone of his narration better than anything else I know. We may, without injustice, call the spirit of it pagan, but to call it pessimistic is absurd, for it expressly denies the two main tenets of philosophic pessimism, namely, that life is joyless, and that death is no calamity. It was therefore still open to Morris, without the slightest inconsistency, to embark on a movement for making the world happy. Let us recall, also, his disgust at the squalid grime which is incident to the modern English town, as he felt it when he bade his London reader Forget six counties overhung with smoke, He had spent the prime of his years in trying to persuade people to love, and seek, and make things beautiful, and he may well have seen at last that to fight ugliness in detail from the outside was simply Quixotic; that ugly towns are really the outcome and natural expression of ugly social conditions; that if we are effectually to sweeten Art, we must begin by sweetening the Life from which it springs. But when we have made all these reflections they do not, after all, quite explain the generation of the third Morris out of the second. They shew, perhaps, that the elements were there, but whence came the vital spark which brought them to a new birth and a new being? The spirit and tenour of the Socialist chants may be gathered from the concluding lines of "All for the Cause." Oft, when men and maids are merry, ere the sunlight leaves the earth, And they bless the day beloved, all too short for all their mirth, Some shall pause awhile and ponder on the bitter days of old Ere the toil of strife and battle overthrow the curse of gold; Then 'twixt lips of loved and lover solemn thoughts of us shall rise: We, who once were fools and dreamers, then shall be the brave and wise: There amidst the world new-builded shall our earthly deeds abide, Though our names be all forgotten and the tale of how we died. Life or death then, who shall heed it, what we gain or what we lose? Fair flies life amid the struggle, and the Cause for each shall choose. Hear a word, a word in season, for the day is drawing nigh When the Cause shall call upon us, some to live, and some to die. I must not conclude without noticing that Morris's greatest effort in translation belongs also to his later life. He translated the Odyssey on the same principles as he had translated the Aeneid twelve years before, and his success was greater, because his method was more consonant with the genius of the older master. Let me quote the opening lines of the 21st book: Now the grey-eyed, the goddess Athene, planted a thing to grow For the birth of strife and murder within Odysseus' hall. So up the lofty stair of her chamber now she went, And in her strong hand took she the key that was shapely bent, And brazen and fair, with a handle thereto of ivory, And she went with her women of service to the outermost chamber on high, Wherein there lay together the treasure of the King, Both gold and brass and iron, well-wrought in the smithying. And therein lay the bent-back bow, and the shaft-full quiver lay there, Wherein were a many arrows the grief and the groan that bear, Which same were the gift of a friend, god-like, whom while agone He met in Lacedæmon, e'en Iphitus, Eurytus' son. But all Morris's translation-work belongs in spirit to his second period: it was prompted by the search for materials for The Earthly Paradise. His prose romances, on the other hand, belong in time, and largely in spirit, to his third, or Socialist period. This prompting appears clearly in The Dream of John Ball, which was the first of the series, and recurs strongly in News from Nowhere; after that they become more purely literary. Such are, in brief summary, the services of William Morris to English literature. II. HIS ART. BY HENRY LONGUET HIGGINS. WE now pass from the occupation of William Morris's leisure hours-his workmanship in the art of poetry-to his life-work, which was that of a craftsman engaged in the practice of the lesser or decorative fine arts. The step is not a great one, for we have merely reached another region in the wide realm of artistic beauty, which some will deem to include even the last division of our subjectMorris's teaching as to how to make Life itself lovely and pleasant the great Art of Living. The worthiest human lives include those which are guided by one or more ideals—ideals of perfect knowledge, of perfect goodness, or of perfect beauty. In the case of William Morris, the bond which linked together his many-sided labours was his intense love of Beauty in all that concerns human life. He was, before all things, an Artist in the widest sense of the term, a preacher and follower of the gospel of Beauty; and he especially delighted in all those forms of beauty which it is in the power of the human brain and hand to create. Even in his poetry, as has been well remarked, appears his vivid delight in works of art, in everything which the skill of the painter, the goldsmith, the embroiderer, the architect, can fashion. This delight, says Mr. Andrew Lang, reminds us of Homer's keen and childlike pleasure in all the details of beautiful workmanship, whether gold work, architecture, webs of price, sculptured gates, or painted palaces. Morris's artistic genius was essentially of the mediaval type. As in his poems the splendour of the Middle Ages is re-created, so, in architecture, he thought there was no |