GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



describing the moods and aspects of inanimate Nature, he makes 

 no attempt to strike a note of real human tragedy ; for as before 

 mentioned, he cared less for people than for things, and Socialist 

 and Idealist though he was, valued the type, more than the indi- 

 vidual man. Hence he was not concerned with idiosyncrasy, 

 mentality, and the hidden springs of human actions ; nor yet with 

 the forces, spiritual, and sensuous, that move men and women, 

 to do right and to sacrifice, to suffer and to sin. The affinities and 

 repulsions, the relations of the sexes, the social problems yet 

 unsolved, as they touch individual lives, and all those elemental 

 human passions that, before the war, bulked so largely I think 

 too largely in current fiction, have no place in his poetry, for they 

 did not interest him at all. Consequently the reader follows the 

 adventures of his heroes and heroines much as we watch the dumb 

 actors in a kinematograph show they are not flesh and blood 

 realities ; they are far removed from the cosmic upheavals, the 

 tragic happenings, and also from those complexities of daily and 

 domestic life that, in the middle of a world-war, are not the least 

 of our present troubles ; and we look at them from the outside 

 only, 



Morris was a man of fiery temper, great physical strength, and 

 remarkable energy ; so restless that his friends say he could never 

 sit still for long, but must be always springing up and pacing the 

 room like a caged lion. The contrast, therefore, between his poetry 

 and himself is one of the most extraordinary things about him ; 

 and one might have expected to find in his writings some self-reve- 

 lation of his temperament ; something of the ruggedness, and the 

 vigorous style of his great contemporary, Browning ; perhaps, too, 

 something of Browning's power of creating strong and entangling 

 situations, and of his dramatic force ; but, strange to say, the man 

 who designed so many intricate and beautiful patterns (all founded 

 on natural objects), who rose at sunrise to weave them with his own 

 loving hand into a lovely tapestry of colour and line, setting up for 

 the purpose a loom in his bedroom at Kelmscott House, troubled 

 himself but little about plot in his epics. Unlike the old Greek 

 tragedians, unlike Shakespeare, unlike Browning, too, he cared 

 nothing for the interplay of passion and circumstance, for the inter- 

 minglement of tragedy and comedy in the warp and woof of human 

 existence. Life, as he paints it, is never a resistless torrent, carrying 



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