My dear Wincott,--I hear that a book has lately been published by an American lady,in which all the modern poets are represented.The singers have been induced to make their own selections,and put forward,as Mr.Browning says,their best foot,anapaest or trochee,or whatever it may be.My information goes further,and declares that there are but eighteen poets of England to sixty inspired Americans.
This Western collection of modern minstrelsy shows how very dangerous it is to write even on the English poetry of the day.
Eighteen is long odds against a single critic,and Major Bellenden,in "Old Mortality,"tells us that three to one are odds as long as ever any warrior met victoriously,and that warrior was old Corporal Raddlebanes.
I decline the task;I am not going to try to estimate either the eighteen of England or the sixty of the States.It is enough to speak about three living poets,in addition to those masters treated of in my last letter.Two of the three you will have guessed at--Mr.Swinburne and Mr.William Morris.The third,I dare say,you do not know even by name.I think he is not one of the English eighteen--Mr.Robert Bridges.His muse has followed the epicurean maxim,and chosen the shadowy path,fallentis semita vitae,where the dew lies longest on the grass,and the red rowan berries droop in autumn above the yellow St.John's wort.But you will find her all the fresher for her country ways.
My knowledge of Mr.William Morris's poetry begins in years so far away that they seem like reminiscences of another existence.Iremember sitting beneath Cardinal Beaton's ruined castle at St.
Andrews,looking across the bay to the sunset,while some one repeated "Two Red Roses across the Moon."And I remember thinking that the poem was nonsense.With Mr.Morris's other early verses,"The Defence of Guinevere,"this song of the moon and the roses was published in 1858.Probably the little book won no attention;it is not popular even now.Yet the lyrics remain in memories which forget all but a general impression of the vast "Earthly Paradise,"that huge decorative poem,in which slim maidens and green-clad men,and waters wan,and flowering apple trees,and rich palaces are all mingled as on some long ancient tapestry,shaken a little by the wind of death.They are not living and breathing people,these persons of the fables;they are but shadows,beautiful and faint,and their poem is fit reading for sleepy summer afternoons.But the characters in the lyrics in "The Defence of Guinevere"are people of flesh and blood,under their chain armour and their velvet,and the trappings of their tabards.
There is no book in the world quite like this of Mr.Morris's old Oxford days when the spirit of the Middle Ages entered into him,with all its contradictions of faith and doubt,and its earnest desire to enjoy this life to the full in war and love,or to make certain of a future in which war is not,and all love is pure heavenly.If one were to choose favourites from "The Defence of Guinevere,"they would be the ballads of "Shameful Death,"and of "The Sailing of the Sword,"and "The Wind,"which has the wind's wail in its voice,and all the mad regret of "Porphyria's Lover"in its burden.
The use of "colour-words,"in all these pieces,is very curious and happy.The red ruby,the brown falcon,the white maids,"the scarlet roofs of the good town,"in "The Sailing of the Sword,"make the poem a vivid picture.Then look at the mad,remorseful sea-rover,the slayer of his lady,in "The Wind":
"For my chair is heavy and carved,and with sweeping green behind It is hung,and the dragons thereon grin out in the gusts of the wind;On its folds an orange lies with a deep gash cut in the rind;If I move my chair it will scream,and the orange will roll out far,And the faint yellow juice ooze out like blood from a wizard's jar,And the dogs will howl for those who went last month the war.""The Blue Closet,"which is said to have been written for some drawings of Mr.Rossetti,is also a masterpiece in this romantic manner.Our brief English age of romanticism,our 1830,was 1856-60,when Mr.Morris,Mr.Burne Jones,and Mr.Swinburne were undergraduates.Perhaps it wants a peculiar turn of taste to admire these strange things,though "The Haystack in the Floods,"with its tragedy,must surely appeal to all who read poetry.
For the rest,as time goes on,I more and more feel as if Mr.
Morris's long later poems,"The Earthly Paradise"especially,were less art than "art manufacture."This may be an ungrateful and erroneous sentiment."The Earthly Paradise,"and still more certainly "Jason,"are full of such pleasure as only poetry can give.As some one said of a contemporary politician,they are "good,but copious."Even from narrative poetry Mr.Morris has long abstained.He,too,illustrates Mr.Matthew Arnold's parable of "The Progress of Poetry.""The Mount is mute,the channel dry."
Euripides has been called "the meteoric poet,"and the same title seems very appropriate to Mr.Swinburne.Probably few readers had heard his name--I only knew it as that of the author of a strange mediaeval tale in prose--when he published "Atalanta in Calydon"in 1865.I remember taking up the quarto in white cloth,at the Oxford Union,and being instantly led captive by the beauty and originality of the verse.
There was this novel "meteoric"character in the poem:the writer seemed to rejoice in snow and fire,and stars,and storm,"the blue cold fields and folds of air,"in all the primitive forces which were alive before this earth was;the naked vast powers that circle the planets and farthest constellations.This quality,and his varied and sonorous verse,and his pessimism,put into the mouth of a Greek chorus,were the things that struck one most in Mr.