In “Jason” he entered on his long career as a narrator; a poet retelling the immortal primeval stories of the human race.  In one guise or another the legend of Jason is the most widely distributed of romances; the North American Indians have it, and the Samoans and the Samoyeds, as well as all Indo-European peoples.  This tale, told briefly by Pindar, and at greater length by Apollonius Rhodius, and in the “Orphica,” Mr. Morris took up and handled in a single and objective way.  His art was always pictorial, but, in “Jason” and later, he described more, and was less apt, as it were, to flash a picture on the reader, in some incommunicable way.

In the covers of the first edition were announcements of the “Earthly Paradise”:  that vast collection of the world’s old tales retold.  One might almost conjecture that “Jason” had originally been intended for a part of the “Earthly Paradise,” and had outgrown its limits.  The tone is much the same, though the “criticism of life” is less formally and explicitly stated.

For Mr. Morris came at last to a “criticism of life.”  It would not have satisfied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and it did not satisfy Mr. Morris!  The burden of these long narrative poems is vanitas vanitatum:  the fleeting, perishable, unsatisfying nature of human existence, the dream “rounded by a sleep.”  The lesson drawn is to make life as full and as beautiful as may be, by love, and adventure, and art.  The hideousness of modern industrialism was oppressing to Mr. Morris; that hideousness he was doing his best to relieve and redeem, by poetry, and by all the many arts and crafts in which he was a master.  His narrative poems are, indeed, part of his industry in this field.  He was not born to slay monsters, he says, “the idle singer of an empty day.”  Later, he set about slaying monsters, like Jason, or unlike Jason, scattering dragon’s teeth to raise forces which he could not lay, and could not direct.

I shall go no further into politics or agitation, and I say this much only to prove that Mr. Morris’s “criticism of life,” and prolonged, wistful dwelling on the thought of death, ceased to satisfy himself.  His own later part, as a poet and an ally of Socialism, proved this to be true.  It seems to follow that the peculiarly level, lifeless, decorative effect of his narratives, which remind us rather of glorious tapestries than of pictures, was no longer wholly satisfactory to himself.  There is plenty of charmed and delightful reading—­“Jason” and the “Earthly Paradise” are literature for The Castle of Indolence, but we do miss a strenuous rendering of action and passion.  These Mr. Morris had rendered in “The Defence of Guinevere”:  now he gave us something different, something beautiful, but something deficient in dramatic vigour.  Apollonius Rhodius is, no doubt, much of a pedant, a literary writer of epic, in an age of Criticism.  He dealt with the tale of “Jason,” and conceivably