Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/301

THE FIRST MORRIS 275 tions. No other reader, we may be sure, ever con- nected that mesmeric rune with clanking steel ; or realized that the book was to be regarded as a new series of Dramatic Lyrics. Victorian literature was a various mother, but few of her children were less alike than Pippa and the two Jehanes, or Blougram and Sir Bors ; and the contrast between the spurting idiom that describes the first, a spangled riot of mad neologisms, pouring helter-skelter from all sorts of newly-picked pockets — the novelist's jargon fired into ecstasy — and the primitive epithets, laboriously strung, that spell out the portraits of the others, is barely wide enough to measure the difference between the temper of the curiosities that created them. Yet Morris was perfectly sincere in his ascription ; he offered it in absolute good faith. With a little adjustment, indeed, by looking at them afresh from a certain angle, it is possible even for us to decipher a sort of buried Browning motive at the back of many of these pieces, glimmering to the surface, as we peer, much as an old fresco will gleam through later washes. Approach The Defence retrospectively — looking at it, not in square isolation, but down the long, slanting, resonant aisle of Morris's robust later activities — his hearty socialism, his ringing sagas, his clattering looms and printing-presses and solid furni- ture — and you do begin to see the old sturdy inten- tion linking up, collecting special patches of colour and salient corners, shaking off as irrelevances the queer curdled angles and tints that we took for the main design. The name-poem itself begins to change : Guenevere's plea displays a simple logic, the logic falls into place as part of a well-set stage-scene climbing up to a conventional curtain — the clapping of releas- ing horse-hoofs " off " ; and the distraught images that held the sight before fall back, emptied of moment, revealed as minor details that bad drawing had swollen