Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/317

THE FIRST MORRIS 291 by abstractions, across which the reader's mind has to fling itself desperately, leaping from picture to picture — actually displaying, as well as seeming to watch, the galvanic conduct of a mind fevered by strong vision. Nor was it less innocently inevitable, nor less uncon- scious and unsought, that the strained figures stooping in these pictures should seem weighted with a sacra- mental purpose or to move with the rigour of ecstatics ; for it was out of missals that many of them came, it was from painted books and devout pictures that the faces of these adulterous queens and spell-bound lovers were taken, and in their angularity alone, if in nothing deeper, they bear the marks of the fastings and vigils which stiffened the monkish fingers that made them. The white face of Jehane and the rigid sword-grip of Sir Guy might well recall the lips and hands of anchorites, for it was by the hands of actual anchorites that they were originally carved on old tombs. And finally, whilst their parched speech was the result of one kind of inexperience — Morris's own primitive technique, and their constricted gestures the result of another, an actual historical innocence, the awkwardness of the youth of the world; whilst the sense of subtle spiritual strain is directly due to a simple boyish liking for bright pictures, and the effect of an uncannily intimate comprehension of re- condite sexual moods to a naive contentment with art instead of life; so the lapidary brightness of the result, that seemed to testify so surely to a state of abnormal, almost nightmare, apprehensiveness, was in reality but the outcome of an open-air pleasure in a sort of sunny solidity. The more muscularly young Morris pressed upon his medium, delighting in its growing distinctness, the more strangely did it seem to start up from the page and accost us with the brittle colours of delirium. Just as those contem- porary P.R.B. pictures, painted by the band of hearty