ordinary English people listened to it, they came to the conclusion
that it was a frame of mind they would rather hear about than
experience. But these later poets did, so to speak, spread their soul in
all the empty spaces; weaker brethren, disappointed artists, unattached
individuals, very young people, were sapped or swept away by these
songs; which, so far as any particular sense in them goes, were almost
songs without words. It is because there is something which is after all
indescribably manly, intellectual, firm about Fitzgerald's way of
phrasing the pessimism that he towers above the slope that was tumbling
down to the decadents. But it is still pessimism, a thing unfit for a
white man; a thing like opium, that may often be a poison and sometimes
a medicine, but never a food for us, who are driven by an inner command
not only to think but to live, not only to live but to grow, and not
only to grow but to build.

And, indeed, we see the insufficiency of such sad extremes even in the
next name among the major poets; we see the Swinburnian parody of
mediaevalism, the inverted Catholicism of the decadents, struggling to
get back somehow on its feet. The aesthetic school had, not quite
unjustly, the name of mere dilettanti. But it is fair to say that in the
next of them, a workman and a tradesman, we already feel something of
that return to real issues leading up to the real revolts that broke up
Victorianism at last. In the mere art of words, indeed, William Morris
carried much further than Swinburne or Rossetti the mere imitation of
stiff mediaeval ornament. The other mediaevalists had their modern
moments; which were (if they had only known it) much more mediaeval than
their mediaeval moments. Swinburne could write--

"We shall see Buonaparte the bastard
Kick heels with his throat in a rope."

One has an uneasy feeling that William Morris would have written
something like--

"And the kin of the ill king Bonaparte
Hath a high gallows for all his part."

Rossetti could, for once in a way, write poetry about a real woman and
call her "Jenny." One has a disturbed suspicion that Morris would have
called her "Jehanne."

But all that seems at first more archaic and decorative about Morris
really arose from the fact that he was more virile and real than either
Swinburne or Rossetti. It arose from the fact that he really was, what
he so often called himself, a craftsman. He had enough masculine
st