thing it touched upon.  This study of Fillippino’s has all the singular charm of the romantic school. . . .  The clear form has gone, the old beauty dropped out of sight . . . but the mediaeval or romantic form has an incommunicable charm of its own. . . .  Before Chaucer could give us a Pandarus or a Cressida, all knowledge and memory of the son of Lycaon and the daughter of Chryses must have died out, the whole poem collapsed into romance; but far as these may be removed from the true tale and the true city of Troy, they are not phantoms.”

But of all this group, the one most thoroughly steeped in mediaevalism—­to repeat his own description of himself—­was William Morris.  He was the English equivalent of Gautier’s homme moyen age; and it was his endeavour, in letters and art, to pick up and continue the mediaeval tradition, interrupted by four hundred years of modern civilisation.  The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not attract him; and as for the eighteenth, it simply did not exist for him.[28] The ugliness of modern life, with its factories and railroads, its unpicturesque poverty and selfish commercialism, was hateful to him as it was to Ruskin—­his teacher.  He loved to imagine the face of England as it was in the time of Chaucer—­his master; to

  “Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
  Forget the snorting steam and piston smoke, . . . 
  And dream of London, small and white and clean,
  The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.”

The socialistic Utopia depicted in his “News from Nowhere” (1890) is a regenerated Middle Age, without feudalism, monarchy, and the mediaeval Church, but also without densely populated cities, with handicrafts substituted for manufactures, and with mediaeval architecture, house, decoration, and costume.  None of Morris’ books deals with modern life, but all of them with an imaginary future or an almost equally imaginary past.  This same “News from Nowhere” contains a passage of dialogue in justification of retrospective romance. “’How is it that though we are so interested with our life for the most part, yet when people take to writing poems or painting pictures they seldom deal with our modern life, or if they do, take good care to make their poems or pictures unlike that life?  Are we not good enough to paint ourselves?’ . . .  ’It always was so, and I suppose always will be,’ said he, ’however, it may be explained.  It is true that in the nineteenth century, when there was so little art and so much talk about it, there was a theory that art and imaginative literature ought to deal with contemporary life; but they never did so; for, if there was any pretence of it, the author always took care . . . to disguise, or exaggerate, or idealise, and in some way or another make it strange; so that, for all the verisimilitude there was, he might just as well have dealt with the times of the Pharaohs.’” [29]