Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/322

296 THE FIRST MORRIS of the images of wonder," we were not being so absurdly deceived. An abstract of earlier art, a dis- tillation of old dreams, Guenevere does hang above the ranging tides of verse, a chord of essential colour, at once a completion and a pledge. And sweeping out of and surpassing this narrow technical legitimacy, this proof of the book's place in letters, there now comes the sense of a larger validity, a profounder conformity, a fulfilment of something more lasting than a literary tradition. The ultimate basis of all these queer involuntary virtues, as we have seen, is just the fact that the book is the work of a boy writing with the creative energy of a man ; and it is this union of the strong decisiveness of manhood with the special dreams and limitations of youth that gives it a right to rank as something much more in- dependent than a link in a chain of development. The Defence of Guenevere will retain its magic, one suggests, even after its descendants have carried poetry on into clearer kingdoms. For The Defence fulfils demands that are immune from development, recurrent as the spring, as stable as the body's need for food. It is the perfect embodiment of the dim desires of adolescence ; it is a clear and ringing definition of the longings and the dreams which come before articulation, which had hitherto seemed bound up with dumbness, bone of its bone, dissolving always at the touch of that experience which brings the trick of words, the craft and equip- ment of speech. Feeding his own desires with his more than adult energy, this glorious undergraduate made a volume that might very well be called The Book of Youth, a complete response to all those "romantic" appetites which every clean-drawn stripling feels, but which none is able to expound. Nor is it likely that the formula which Morris manufactured w^ill prove a temporary solace, soon outmoded. It was in the arts of all the centuries that he sought his