Art; English literature -- History and criticism; Literature -- History and criticism
But it is I who am being less than just now. From what I have said any
one might infer that I had not read, or had not appreciated, that volume
called "The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems," in which are to be
found things of pure beauty, "Summer Dawn," "In Prison," "The Wind,"
"The Haystack in the Floods"; any one might suppose that I did not know
"Love is Enough." These are the poems which, with "Sigurd," give William
Morris his place amongst the poets. Mr. Clutton Brock feels this surely
enough, because he possesses, besides intellect, that other and rarer
critical faculty, that spiritual tuning-fork by which a fine critic
distinguishes between emotion and sentimentality, between rhetoric and
rant. It is because Mr. Brock possesses this peculiar sensibility--part
aesthetic, part ethical, and part intellectual, it seems--that he can be
trusted to detect and dislike even the subtlest manifestations of that
quality which most distinguishes Tennyson from Morris, Kipling from Walt
Whitman, and the Bishop of London from the Vicar of Wakefield. That is
why I suppose Mr. Brock to be one of our best critics.
If there were anything fundamentally nasty about Morris Mr. Brock would
not be inclined to overrate him. Mr. Brock pardons no unpardonable
horrors: there are none here to pardon. But he overrates, or rather
overmarks, William Morris as a scrupulous but soft-hearted examiner
might overmark a sympathetic pupil. He never gives marks when the answer
is wrong, but he gives a great many when it is right: and he is a little
blind to deficiencies. He does not make it clear that Morris, as an
artist, was cursed with two of the three modern English vices, that he
was provincial and amateurish. But he gives him full credit for not
being goaded to futility by a sense of his own genius.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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