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 fiesh 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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