Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/323

THE FIRST MORRIS 297 special spoil, and he ransacked the romance of every clime. Youth hounding him on pitilessly, his great body answering nobly, he hammered out a kind of Volapiik, discovered the common element in eastern tales and northern sagas, and wrote out the answer he wanted in a kind of universal language, a picture- Esperanto that may very well prove specially im- pregnable to time. Youth lashed him on — and it was this fell urgency, finally, that forced him to crush and concentrate as never again, and to give this book the poignancy that makes even maturity regard it as his masterpiece. Youth is full of fears, sees dangers in dubiety ; youth dreads the dark, and hungers for a reassuring vehe- mence. In the strength of young Morris's grip at this time there is a little of the violence of terror. He dreaded and he longed, as young men do, the un- known couched in the blackness all about them : he clutched all he touched and riveted his gains, making every step a conquest. It was in this concentrated way that Guenevere was written, in a narrow circle as of torch-light in a forest. And it was the sunny cessation of these tremors and fears, it was the termination of all the special tortures which Youth applies to its vassals, that finally dissolved the fruitful spell. Here, indeed, we do reach something genuinely discomfiting. Guenevere is beautiful because it was written in a kind of darkness ; Jason is dull because it was born in the sun. Our rainbow, it seems, required a background of storm. These colours owe their brightness to heart's blood. For The Defence of Guenevere^ compared with The Life and Death of Jason^ was really written on the rack. " It was an anxious and a difficult time," says his biographer of the undergraduate years when some