Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/327

THE FIRST MORRIS 301 the essential nature of man was something as simple and courteous, as calm and contented, as decoratively lusty as the smooth figures he found, made proud and perfect by Time or tender craftsmen, in the pictures he accumulated in his Aladdin's cave ; he felt t^^at all the rest was but accident and distortion, and that the modern world had but to shake itself in order to shed the shabby husks it had acquired and step out in the old stately simplicity. Perhaps he was right. The faces mirrored in the arts, down the ages, may indeed be the divine archetypes, clear projections of the ideals we all dimly desire, and to which we will therefore one day assuredly attain. But the point to be recognized now is that his belief was based on no study or knowledge of actual human nature or human history, that it was born out of mirrors, three removes from reality, in a cavern more phantasmal than Plato's. And thus, when he spoke of happiness, it was a specially pellucid sort of happiness that he meant. His idea of human felicity was something rainless and rhythmical, strong without restlessness, refined but never subtle : a Lotos-land peopled by Lancelots who had taken pas- toral lessons in Arcadia. It seems ironic, perhaps, that such an immaterial fabric should solidify into something placidly earthly ; but that was inevitable : it was sensuously gathered and was bound to result in a kind of radiant materialism. But the irony grows distinctly keen when we discover, as we are now com- pelled to do, that it was the purely poetic source of this conception of life that spoiled the poetry produced in its name. For the poetry that flowered in the soft sun of such a system was simply bound to be smooth and mild. It had to be doubly indulgent : a source of simple happi- ness to the reader on the one hand, a joyous pastime for the writer on the other. Morris wanted to write