an accurate knowledge of the capabilities of under-surface vessels, and so lay the foundation for good ideas in attacking and attempting to minimise the offensive power of hostile submarines' (p. 366).

From the time when the submarine entered the British service there has never been the slightest difficulty in obtaining more than an adequate number of volunteers, both officers and men. No doubt the much higher pay received by the crews of these vessels has not been without its influence; but, apart from this, the service has from the first appealed with a strong fascination to the younger men of the Navy. The landsman has watched the development of the under-water craft, its silent approach, suddenness of attack and invulnerability to gunfire when submerged, with feelings of marked antipathy. The tendency has been to exaggerate the dangers to the crews that are inherent in this type of vessel. The Navy, with its accumulating practical experience, appears to have gauged the advantages and disadvantages of submarine duty with greater accuracy. Among the younger officers and men the submersible ship is certainly not regarded as ́a death-trap.' In the smaller craft the conditions are cramped, and life generally is lacking in comfort; but in the newer ships the provision for the crews is greatly improved. During the early sea practices some lamentable disasters occurred, but the causes to which they were traceable are being eliminated, safety appliances have been introduced, and experience in the management of such craft is contributing to the well-being of officers and men. Moreover these under-water craft offer to the crew a means of protection from gun-fire-submersion under water—which is entirely lacking in the ordinary torpedoboat and destroyer, and is even more effective than armour because it screens them not only from direct hits, but also from injury by splinters and from such sudden fires as have frequently broken out on board ship during hostilities. Consequently, while the submarine service is an admirable training-school, it is in fact attended by far fewer dangers than is popularly supposed. We can therefore face the future with good heart and with a lively curiosity, for there are undoubtedly many surprising developments which time will disclose.

Art. 9. THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS.

1. The Works of William Morris. Twenty-four vols. London: Longmans, 1910-11. (In course of publication.) 2. The Defence of Guenevere (1858), The Life and Death of Jason (1867), The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), Grettir the Strong (1869), The Volsungs and Niblungs (1870), Love is Enough (1873), The Æneids (1876), Sigurd the Volsung (1877), The Odyssey (1887), Dream of John Ball (1888), House of the Wolfings (1889), News from Nowhere (1890), The Sundering Flood (1897), and other works by William Morris.

3. The Life of William Morris. By J. W. Mackail. Two vols. London: Longmans, 1899.

THE beautiful volumes in which the poetry and prose of William Morris are now being for the first time collected, under the direction of his daughter, in a uniform edition, demand no less than high and unqualified praise. They will doubtless be felt to satisfy even the exacting standard of taste in the matter of the fine equipment of books which, like our standards in so many of the so-called lesser arts, we owe largely to Morris himself; and, if this is so, they need no other recommendation. The ample, clear pages, simple and dignified, give a background of unobtrusive seemliness which heightens the pleasure of re-reading, without sounding a more emphatic note than the author's, the most essential condition of all. Miss May Morris's introductions to the various volumes are not only attractive and sympathetic, but solidly useful as well; not, indeed, that they add much to the actual facts of her father's biography which we knew before, but that they throw a light, project an atmosphere, in which the details may be newly and perhaps more intelligently read.

Mr Mackail's 'Life' is a book to which anyone who ventures to write about Morris must find himself indebted at every turn; the more closely it is read, in conjunction with Morris's books, the more indispensable it becomes. But a sort of private and personal glow attends the purely informal sketch which is based on a child's memories and familiarities; and nothing else quite replaces the sharp sense of reality which is so produced. Miss Morris's warm, bright vignettes of the life in Queen's

Square and at Kelmscott strike vividly home, slight as they may be, and have as much value in their way as the more tangible evidences, with which she is also liberal, of unpublished letters and poems. Some of these poems are of great interest both in themselves and also as showing Morris's ruthless way with his own work, if it failed of completely satisfying him. He experimented so freely, he threw aside and re-wrote so readily, that these fragments are much less fragmentary, and generally speaking much more doubtfully deserving of rejection, than relics of the sort usually are. Not one of them but adds its weight to the impression which is still markedly deepening-that, with all its lavish fluency, this imagination was a highly concentrated force, and that, with all its air of being born out of due time, it was really of its time one of the most far-reaching signs.

In one of his lectures Morris recalls the days of the Red House at Upton, the unfinished palace of art which he set about building for himself on his marriage, in a Kentish apple-orchard. He speaks of the impossibility, at that time, of discovering anything among the decorative products of the day which was fit to have a place in it; when he began to look for curtains and wall-hangings, it appeared that everything which then passed for ornamental was out of the question. I remember,' he says,

what a rummage there used to be for anything tolerable. On the whole I remember that we had to fall back on turkey-red cotton and dark blue serge.' Of the whole output of early-Victorian industrialism, there was nothing but a plain traditional fabric or two on which the age had not set its mark of degradation; and, till he could create a new art, he confined himself to these. The anecdote is finely illustrative of Morris's debt to his own day in other matters than upholstery. If there was anything which he deigned to appropriate to himself in the whole mind and temper of the civilisation which flowered like a prize dahlia in the exhibition of 1851, it was some underlying quality, some fund of energy and hope, some plain red cotton which would serve to set off his own designs; not for one moment would any of the florid machine-made ideals, stamped on that ground by Victorianism, satisfy his fastidiousness.

The red cotton was not long left a blank. Morris possessed the precious gift, so seldom granted to dissatisfied youth, of knowing from the outset precisely what he wanted. He was condemned to waste no time in tentative plunges and hesitations; his patterns grew under his hand as they were needed, simple enough at first, but right in their simplicity, so that he never had to clear them aside and tear them up, as most people have to tear up the designs of their first palaces of art. Long before he knew what it implied or where it would take him, he had picked up the thread which brought him step by step to regions so different from the Kentish appleorchard. It is easy enough now to see how inevitably the unaccountable fantasies, as they seemed to many, of Morris's later years grew out of those blithe beginnings -the Red House with its walls pictured with the Tale of Troy, the makeshift workshop in Bloomsbury, and the child-like grace of the daisies and pomegranates which challenged the unsuspecting dahlia with such ingenuous assurance. Morris's extraordinary instinct in this matter was his own birthright. Such personal influences as he ever came under-and they were very few-did little more than deepen the line of development which he himself had begun; he easily shook them off when they diverged. His first and final choice of an allegiance had been made long before. There was only one region of thought or beauty which had for him the faintest attraction; without so much as a passing glance in any other direction he gave his whole mind to it for ever. Not deliberately, not by way of critical research or an intellectual choice, least of all by a young man's hero-worship or the desire to follow an admired leader, but purely by an imaginative affinity, he went straight to the clue which he needed, the particular tradition of art which was destined to satisfy more than a young man's imagination, when in process of time it proved capable of supporting and fulfilling the deeper demands of a mature mind.

But the continuity of Morris's conclusions about art and life, and the share they have had in the change of thought that has carried us so far from the Victorianism of the fifties, lie outside the subject of these pages, which must deal in particular with his literary development. In a sense it is certainly true that his poetry

cannot be separated from his workshop, any more than his workshop from his socialism. He himself was as contemptuous of any attempt at differentiation between the various arts as between art and life. His dictum, that anyone who cannot write an epic poem while he is weaving tapestry had better give up both, is well known; and, in a view of his work as a whole, it has to be remembered that to him the poem was no more a matter of secluded rapture than the tapestry; both were pieces of work, in different mediums, but on much the same level, to be carried out as carefully and honestly as might be. Yet the comparison between his poetry and his patterns is somewhat misleading in its ease, and has possibly been over-emphasised. Morris's poetry, when taken separately, is seen to have had an independent and eventful history, less uniform and less simple than that of his work generally. There is, for example, far less direct relation between the earlier and the later tales of The Earthly Paradise' than between the daisied wall-papers of Red Lion Square and the Socialist League; and it is worth while braving Morris's hearty scorn for all literary criticism, to see why and how the change in his method took place. There could be no better proof that the distinctions a critic draws between different forms' in the art of letters-as drama, romance, epic-are natural and fundamental, than the fact that they are marked in Morris's work so clearly, and at the same time so unconsciously.

It was quite unconsciously, indeed-that is to say, without any of the usual preliminaries of ambition and apprenticeship-that he began to write. He exactly reversed the initial steps of most young writers. His imagination was full-grown long before the historic morning when he appeared in Burne-Jones's rooms at Oxford with the first poem he had ever written. This gives us a clue to the right understanding of 'The Defence of Guenevere,' which it is important to keep hold of in reading that wonderful little book. It is wrong to read it as the work of an enthusiastic beginner exercising his cleverness in reproducing archaic patterns. The ornamentation of these poems, their lances and pennons and moated castles, is not a piece of fanciful ingenuity, but a purely natural means of expression. Mr Mackail has