Despite having lived in the North-West of
England for thirty years, I made my first-ever visit to Port Sunlight only the
other day. And what a spacious and
architecturally inspiring village it is, though Morris, I imagine, would have
scornfully seen it as merely an instance of benevolent capitalist paternalism,
an attempt to buy off genuine workers’ democracy by throwing them a few
‘palliative’ crumbs.
In the
middle of Port Sunlight is the wonderful Lady Lever Art Gallery, with its fine
collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, including Edward Burne-Jones’s ‘The
Beguiling of Merlin’ (c.1877). Looking
at that painting, in which the elderly and entrapped Merlin glares dolefully out
at the young woman Nimue, who has seduced the secrets of his magic out of him
and turned his own powers against him, I found myself instantly thinking of Old
Hammond’s words to William Guest in News from Nowhere: ‘the inexplicable desire
that comes on a man of riper years to be the all-in-all to some one woman,
whose ordinary human kindness and human beauty he has idealized into superhuman
perfection, and made the one object of his desire’ (ch. IX).
Those words
in turn look proleptically forward in the book to Guest’s own fixation on Ellen
in the last third of the text, as he, Dick and Clara travel up the Thames to
Kelmscott; ‘riper’ is certainly the correct adjective for Guest in relation to
the young Nowherian, since he is no less than 36 years older than she is (56 to
her 20). May it not be, then, if we bear
the Burne-Jones painting in mind, that Ellen is ‘beguiling’ her Victorian
visitor, draining his magical powers (which
in this case means his firsthand knowledge of history) from him, to the point
where - having achieved the upper hand over his besotted self - she can then so
painfully expel him from paradise in the Kelmscott church feast at the close of
the book? So whether ‘The Beguiling of
Merlin’ was or was not any sort of direct influence on Morris’s conception of
the Guest-Ellen relationship, it vividly sketches out a sexual and narrative
model that can sensitise us to darker possibilities in the love interest at the
very heart of his utopia.
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