Every one has heard
enough about his companions, Mr. Burne Jones, Mr. Rossetti, Canon Dixon,
and the others of the old _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, where Mr.
Morris's wonderful prose fantasies are buried. Why should they not be
revived, these strangely coloured and magical dreams? As literature, I
prefer them vastly above Mr. Morris's later romances in prose--"The
Hollow Land" above "News from Nowhere!" Mr. Morris and his friends were
active in the fresh dawn of a new romanticism, a mediaeval and Catholic
revival, with very little Catholicism in it for the most part. This
revival is more "innerly," as the Scotch say, more intimate, more
"earnest" than the larger and more genial, if more superficial,
restoration by Scott. The painful doubt, the scepticism of the Ages of
Faith, the dark hours of that epoch, its fantasy, cruelty, luxury, no
less than its colour and passion, inform Mr. Morris's first poems. The
fourteenth and the early fifteenth century is his "period." In "The
Defence of Guenevere" he is not under the influence of Chaucer, whose
narrative manner, without one grain of his humour, inspires "The Life and
Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise." In the early book the rugged
style of Mr. Browning has left a mark. There are cockney rhymes, too,
such as "short" rhyming to "thought." But, on the whole, Mr. Morris's
early manner was all his own, nor has he ever returned to it.
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