This tale, told briefly by Pindar, and at
greater length by Apollonius Rhodius, and in the "Orphica," Mr. Morris
took up and handled in a single and objective way. His art was always
pictorial, but, in "Jason" and later, he described more, and was less
apt, as it were, to flash a picture on the reader, in some incommunicable
way.
In the covers of the first edition were announcements of the "Earthly
Paradise": that vast collection of the world's old tales retold. One
might almost conjecture that "Jason" had originally been intended for a
part of the "Earthly Paradise," and had outgrown its limits. The tone is
much the same, though the "criticism of life" is less formally and
explicitly stated.
For Mr. Morris came at last to a "criticism of life." It would not have
satisfied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and it did not satisfy Mr. Morris! The
burden of these long narrative poems is _vanitas vanitatum_: the
fleeting, perishable, unsatisfying nature of human existence, the dream
"rounded by a sleep." The lesson drawn is to make life as full and as
beautiful as may be, by love, and adventure, and art. The hideousness of
modern industrialism was oppressing to Mr. Morris; that hideousness he
was doing his best to relieve and redeem, by poetry, and by all the many
arts and crafts in which he was a master. His narrative poems are,
indeed, part of his industry in this field. He was not born to slay
monsters, he says, "the idle singer of an empty day.
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