ABSTRACT
This is a good thing spoilt. Had Mr. Morris been content to tell us about the men of Burgdale, 'their friends, their neighbours,. their foemen, and their fellows-in-arms,' in a style which would be easilycomprehended of the ordinary plain person, the freshness and novelty of this attempt to reconstruct the Pagan ideal of rural life would have pleased where it now only exasperates. From beginning to end, the story is written in what a critic has happily called 'Wardour Street English.' Mr. Morris disdains to use a good English phrase, no matter how old, that is still current. It is his constant endeavour to unearth the archaic, or to coin some quasi-archaicphrase. Thus, he disdains to use the expression 'great with child,' and must needs talk of women 'big with babes;' and reaches the reductio adabsurdum of his method by his avoidance of the homely but expressivefigure, 'as the crow flies,' in order to substitute for it some laborious periphrasis. He will not talk of shooting with, but in the bow. People are not buried, they are 'borne to mound.' This studied researchofthe antique sometimesleads Mr. Morris into positive error. His disinclinationto use the term 'track' induces him to talk of the 'slot of men.' Now, unless we are greatly mistaken, the term 'slot' not only never is, but never was, correctly used of men. It is surely the object of a writer of a simple tale of primitive life to appeal to a wide circle of hearers. But Mr. Morris curtails his circle very considerably by using a lingo which to many people would prove unintelligible. Take one passage: 'Within these
houses had but a hall and solar, with shut-beds out from the hall on one side or two, with whatso of kitchen and buttery and out-bower men deemed handy.' Ordinary persons who are not skilled in the Wardour Street dialect will be fairly stumped. This luay be vulgar, but Mr. Morris drives us into Philistinism by such words as 'erne,' 'mazer,' 'carline,' 'flockmeal,' 'heft-sax,' 'sackless,' 'flatlings,' and the like. 'Come hither,' says one of the characters on p. 37, 'and handsel him self-doom for thy fool's onset.' It is a sort of travesty of that laboriously simple and artfully artless work, Professor Freeman's Old English History for Children. This, then, is the first great blot on the work, that it is not written in dialect, and yet requires a glossary. What would an ordinary novel-reader know about 'handselling' a person 'self-doom'?
