Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/121

a story of modern life. In common with the unfinished and unpublished modern novel which he wrote many years afterwards, it gives the curious impression of some one writing about a kind of life which he only knows from books, with a strange sort of inverted antiquarianism. Put him in the thirteenth century and he is completely and conspicuously at his ease; the pictures rise, the narrative flows, as though he had seen and heard all he describes. But once in the nineteenth, his imagination is clogged and half crippled. On the imaginative side he was far behind, and far before, his own time: he belongs partly to the earlier Middle Ages, and partly to an age still far in the future. The stories of "The Unknown Church" and "Lindenborg Pool" have what may be called a semi-historical setting; they are placed, that is, in a definite European country and in a more or less definite epoch. But in the other five tales, the flower of Morris's early work, the world is one of pure romance. Mediæval customs, mediæval buildings, the mediæval Catholic religion, the general social framework of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, are assumed throughout, but it would be idle to attempt to place them in any known age or country. The world of fantasy in which they are set is like and yet unlike that of the second cycle of prose tales which began more than thirty years later, when he abandoned the semi-historical setting of "John Ball" and "The House of the Wolfings" and returned to a world of pure romance in the story of "The Roots of the Mountains" and the series of stories which followed it. Both worlds are vaguely mediæval, but the men and women who move in these earlier tales are less strong and more passionate; and the world itself is more opulent, more Southern, reminding one often of Provence or Italy rather than of the rich but temperate Northern