Part 7

At the time of publication of the last volume of _The Earthly Paradise_, Morris had begun the study of Icelandic story that was to find its splendid culmination six years later in _Sigurd the Volsung_. The history of these beginnings will be told more fitly later in connection with the consideration of that poem. The completion of his great cycle of tales left him momentarily with a sense of purposelessness. 'I feel rather lost at having done my book,' he writes. 'I must try to get something serious to do as soon as may be ... perhaps something else of importance will turn up soon.' He turned again to painting, and occupied some of his time in book-illumination, an art in which he attained a perfection no less memorable than that of the mediæval masters. The business of Morris and Company was developing rapidly, and in 1871 he found a new interest in Kelmscott House, the old manor in Oxfordshire that was to be his country home until his death. The abiding pleasure that his retreat afforded him has been beautifully pictured for us in Mr. Mackail's "Life." In the same year he made his first journey to Iceland, and on his return he wrote the poem, which is next to be considered, _Love is Enough_.

[1] Mr. Stopford Brooke.

V

LOVE IS ENOUGH AND SIGURD THE VOLSUNG

Discipleship in art is a thing very commonly misunderstood. The poet with centuries of activity behind him will inevitably find in this voice or that an expression with which his own temperament is in more or less direct sympathy, and, if his nature be not cramped, he will make full acknowledgment of the fact. But this loving recognition of fellowship has nothing whatever to do with imitation. In demanding originality of the poet we do not expect him to sing as though he moved in an untrodden world. We might as reasonably ask each man to invent a new speech; we should be doing no more than carrying our demand to its logical issue. We insist, and rightly, that the poet shall interpret experience for us in the terms of his own personality, but we must remember that the work of his predecessors is an enormously important part of experience, and when he finds some aspect of that work in correspondence with his own adventures he will, quite naturally, take it up in some measure into his own creation. Confusion in this matter has led to considerable injustice in many estimates of Morris. His repeated announcements of Chaucer as his master and his open allegiance throughout his life to certain phases of mediæval art, have caused it to be said that his mood and expression are alike archaic, the word being used to mean obsolete. As to the mood, the suggestion is so preposterous as to be unworthy of an answer; it is obsolete just in so far as the fundamental things of life are obsolete. As to expression, Morris's free use of such words as 'certes,' 'Fair sir,' 'I trow,' and so forth is supposed to lend support to the suggestion. It does nothing of the kind, of course. Morris uses these words not for their especial value, but as simply and naturally as he does the common parts of speech. The words in themselves are perfectly fit for use in poetry, and the discredit into which they may have fallen is entirely due to inferior writers who have sought to make them in themselves substitutes for poetry. To rule that their abuse henceforth makes their proper use impossible is, however, absurd. It may be discreet in a poet to-day to avoid nymphs and Diana and the pipes of Pan, but to say beforehand that his traffic with these will be disastrous is merely to lay ourselves open to the most salutary correction at any moment. Morris used words such as those of which I have spoken without hesitation, but he always subordinated them to their right offices, and their influence in either direction upon his general manner is negligible.

This question arises more naturally in the discussion of _Love is Enough_ than elsewhere. Superficially the play may be said to be an attempt to reconstruct the spirit and, in a smaller degree, the form of the early English morality, but close consideration of the play necessitates qualification of this statement at almost every step. The resemblance in form is to be found not in the structure but in the alliterative verse that Morris uses for the central action of the play. But even in the verse there are qualities that belong to Morris alone; he not only discarded rhyme, which was employed by Bale and the unknown poets of an earlier day in their interludes and mysteries, but he brought to his lines a greater regularity and fulness. The pauses that play so important a part in the early alliterative verse are replaced by syllabic values, and the shortening of lines is far less arbitrary than in his models. The result, especially of the added fulness, is that a certain bare simplicity is lost, and curiously enough this poem, where he was influenced by a form that with all its faults has an extraordinary directness and incisiveness of statement, is the most difficult among all his works to read. The long lines with their constant tightening up of syllables are frequently too heavy for the statement. Many passages are of great beauty, as for example:--

As my twin sister, young of years was she and slender, Yellow blossoms of spring-tide her hands had been gathering, But the gown-lap that held them had fallen adown And had lain round her feet with the first of the singing; Now her singing had ceased, though yet heaved her bosom As with lips lightly parted and eyes of one seeking She stood face to face with the Love that she knew not, The love that she longed for and waited unwitting...

and there are numberless lines where the precision of statement is admirable, as--

In memory of days when my meat was but little And my drink drunk in haste between saddle and straw...

and

I saw her Stealing barefoot, bareheaded amidst of the tulips Made grey by the moonlight...

but the experiment in a form that is not now, after four centuries of development, really natural to the language is, on the whole, a failure. It is, indeed, true that as we read through it the measure becomes more acceptable to the ear, but there is a difficulty in the outline which no familiarity can wholly overcome.

The structure of the play is mainly of Morris's own invention, and is of singular beauty. The figure of Love, who may be said to correspond roughly to the Doctor or Messenger of the early moralities, stands, not between the action and the audience, but between the action and the people of an outer play; and, again, beyond this we have a further group. The structure is, briefly, this. The morality itself; Love and The Music who act as spiritual interpreters and as chorus between the action and the Emperor and Empress for whom the townsfolk are having the play performed; and finally the peasants Giles and Joan who are equally interested in the play and its imaginary spectators, translate the spiritual commentaries of Love and The Music into terms of their own simple workaday existence, and, lastly, act in some sort as chorus between the whole representation and the actual audience. There is a subtlety of design in all this that reaches far beyond the conceptions of the sombre and rugged poets of pre-Shakespearean England, and although the play fails in other respects, Morris here shows more clearly even than in _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_ that he understood the exact meaning of the element contributed by the chorus to drama more fully than any poet of recent times.

In the central action, the morality itself, there are three principal figures, Pharamond the King, Oliver his old counsellor and foster-father, and Azalais. Morris retains the method of his models in that these figures are not characters but rather abstractions. Pharamond is not so much a man as mankind, Everyman. Oliver is much more definitely a personality, but he is used as a symbol of the better nature of man, not able quite to understand spiritual nobility, but content, even eager, to follow it. Azalais is Love, both giving and taking. The motive of the play is stated clearly in the title, Love is Enough. Pharamond leaves kingship, fame, everything, and sets out to find this thing only, and in finding it proves and finds himself. But we must return to the motive a little later. The point next to be considered is this symbolic use of figures in action. The method of the old poets was to invest these figures at the outset with a certain presupposed and generally accepted significance, and to start from that point. They did not attempt to explain what Luxury, Riot, Riches, Knowledge, Humility and Charity were, but simply gave these names to their figures and trusted their audience to fill in the outlines. Then taking a central figure as protagonist, Everyman or Youth or some such symbol, they brought him into contact with the rest and allowed all the emotion of the play to arise out of the transition of his moods as he is influenced by them in turn. There is never the least doubt as to the lines along which each of these figures will work; they carry their natures in their names. We know that Pride will betray Youth as surely as we know that his Knowledge and Good Deeds alone will bide with Everyman. But there is nothing dramatic in the spectacle of Pride forsaking Youth until we see the complementary loyalty of Charity and Humility, and we are moved by the tenderness of Good Deeds and Knowledge towards Everyman simply because we have just seen Strength and Beauty desert him in his need. These transitions of mood are carried through with consistent swiftness and are defined by the direct contact of the figures, not by reflective comment, or only so in a subordinate degree. _Everyman_, which is the crown of these early plays, realizes these conditions most perfectly. The protagonist is commanded to make his reckoning before God. He asks Fellowship to accompany him on his journey through Death's gates. Fellowship refuses, and so in turn do Goods, Kindred, Strength, Discretion, Five Wits, and the rest of them, as we knew they would. Then he is aided by Knowledge, Good Deeds and Confession, and sets out content. Save for the few speeches that summarize the situation from time to time, there is absolutely no comment on the development of the play; the whole effect depends on the swift passage from one crude symbol to another. Within its own limitations, this simple method not only succeeded in holding the audience for whom it was first employed, but is completely effective to-day. The Elizabethan drama threw it aside to make room for its own greater glories, but it is not impossible that a great poet should yet return to it, and with the accumulated wisdom of the poets who have worked since then in his blood, refashion it into something of a strange new beauty. In _Love is Enough_ Morris adopted it only to a point, and failed in consequence. He set out to enunciate a definite lesson, and he invested his figures with symbolic significance, but he carried the method no further. Pharamond, instead of passing swiftly from stage to stage in pursuit of his end and showing us that love is enough, pauses for long periods to tell us that love is enough. His speeches are, generally, lyrical developments of one theme, and wholly beautiful as many of them are as such they destroy the cohesion of the play as a whole. The design of _Love is Enough_ is no wider in its scope than that of "Everyman," indeed not so wide, and yet the play is, roughly, three times as long. I am not, of course, attempting any comparison of the spirit of the two plays; there is no point at which this is possible; my comparison is merely between the uses to which they employ the same method.

Herein, it seems to me, lies the failure of _Love is Enough_ in so far as it is a failure at all. The central part of the design is so carried out as to disturb the general balance. It was not necessary for Morris to choose this particular form for his inner play, but having done so he was mistaken in not observing its principles more closely. But, having said this, it is necessary to add that in many ways _Love is Enough_ stands with Morris's finest achievements in poetry. In the morality of Pharamond itself, and apart from all difficulties of the verse-form, there is love-poetry that is scarcely to be surpassed in its depth and tenderness. In this play Morris departed from his usual ways. His narrative and epic writing and his lyrics have nothing of that didacticism which if not essential is at least proper to the greatest art. Art confesses to no limitations. In _Love is Enough_, however, he allowed himself this new privilege, and he translates his teaching into art with perfect instinct. Here, as throughout his work, it is impossible to point to any passage and say, "that is not poetry," and yet speech after speech is as specifically didactic as the Sermon on the Mount. In the words of Pharamond, in the stately heroic couplets spoken by Love, and in the exquisite stanzas of The Music he pursues the same theme, and over and over again he carries it to a sublime pitch of intensity.

What, Faithful--do I lie, that overshot My dream-web is with that which happeneth not? Nay, nay, believe it not!--love lies alone In loving hearts like fire within the stone: Then strikes my hand, and lo, the flax ablaze! --Those tales of empty striving and lost days Folk tell of sometimes--never lit my fire Such ruin as this; but Pride and Vain-desire, My counterfeits and foes, have done the deed. Beware, Beloved! for they sow the weed Where I the wheat: they meddle where I leave, Take what I scorn, cast by what I receive, Sunder my yoke, yoke that I would dissever, Pull down the house my hands would build for ever.

In this poem, too, we find the isolated instances wherein Morris makes some allusion to the desire for seeing beyond the veils of our existence, some suggestion of the hope of spring when leaves are falling. Even here there is none of the exultant certainty of the _Ode to the West Wind_, but a quiet fearlessness that is no less inspiring and consoling in its way--

Live on, for Love liveth, and earth shall be shaken By the wind of his wings on the triumphing morning, When the dead and their deeds that die not shall awaken, And the world's tale shall sound in your trumpet of warning, And the sun smite the banner called Scorn of the Scorning, And dead pain ye shall trample, dead fruitless desire, As ye wend to pluck out the new world from the fire.

And again--

In what wise, ah, in what wise shall it be? How shall the bark that girds the winter tree Babble about the sap that sleeps beneath, And tell the fashion of its life and death? How shall my tongue in speech man's longing wrought Tell of the things whereof he knoweth nought? Should I essay it might ye understand How those I love shall share my promised land! Then must I speak of little things as great, Then must I tell of love and call it hate, Then must I bid you seek what all men shun, Reward defeat, praise deeds that were not done.

The Emperor and Empress who watch the play point its moral for themselves, and their somewhat remote humanity serves admirably as a step between the pure poetry of the central action and the homespun reality of Giles and Joan. They send gifts to the actors of Pharamond and Azalais, and then the Emperor--

Fain had I been To see him face to face and his fair Queen, And thank him friendly, asking him maybe How the world looks to one with love set free; It may not be, for as thine eyes say, sweet, Few folk as friends shall unfreed Pharamond meet. So is it: we are lonelier than those twain, Though from their vale they ne'er depart again.

But Giles and his wife are under no such restraint of state; they will bid the players to their home and be their scholars for a while

In many a lesson of sweet lore To learn love's meaning more and more,

and the scene between the two peasants that ends the play is an idyll full of the simple fragrance and humanity and earth-love that were the crowning splendours of _Jason_ and _The Earthly Paradise_.

In 1869 the poet had published his translation of the _Grettir Saga_, carried out in collaboration with Eiríkr Magnússon, and this was followed in the next year by the _Völsunga Saga_ from the same hands. Morris's feeling for the northern stories had already found expression in more than one of the tales in _The Earthly Paradise_, notably 'The Lovers of Gudrun,' and the Icelandic visit of 1871 was followed by a second in 1873. In 1875 he published _Three Northern Love Stories_, translations of extraordinary directness and conviction, and these six years of study of and service to the curiously neglected story of the northern race were now approaching their culminating triumph. To examine these various preliminary essays in detail here is neither possible nor necessary. The journals of the travel in Iceland, written as they were without any definite purpose of publication, show how intensely he was moved by the spirit of the Sagas, how close his own being was to it. Every stone was quick with a tradition that meant for him the very breath of splendid and heroic life. His feeling for the earth was at all times, as we have seen, one of an almost indefinable tenderness and yearning, but once he had seen Iceland it was the earth that nourished Sigurd and Brynhild and Gunnar and Gudrun that was thenceforth most deeply rooted in his love. The austere beauty and gloomy strength of the Icelandic countryside were from that time sacred things in his imagination, and it was, perhaps, not without taking thought that in the first poem that he wrote on his return he made Pharamond, when trying to recall the country to which he must again turn to find the end of his seeking, say that

ever meseemeth 'Twas not in the Southlands.

In the preface to the translation of the _Völsunga Saga_, the last paragraph says:--

'In conclusion, we must again say how strange it seems to us, that this Volsung Tale, which is in fact a universified poem, should never have been translated into English. For this is the Great Story of the North, which should be to all our race what the Tale of Troy was to the Greeks--to all our race first, and afterwards, when the change of the world has made our race nothing more than the name of what has been--a story too--then should it be to those that came after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been to us.'

That was in 1870. Now, five years later, with the whole story matured in his mind, with its appeal quickened by the exploration of its landscape, he determined to gather up its essential features and fuse them through his own temperament into a new completeness both of substance and music. It was a tremendous undertaking, both in its actual difficulties and its responsibility. Morris was not likely to hesitate before the difficulties, but he realized perfectly the danger of attempting to reshape a story which, as it stood, he reverenced as the greatest in the world. To have done it ill or in any way other than excellently would have been an unpardonable sin against himself. The risk was taken, and _The Story of Sigurd_, _The Volsung_, and the _Fall of the Niblungs_ was published in 1876. It is not only the supreme achievement of a great poet, but one of the very great poems of the modern world.

The story of Sigurd, showing in the beginning the Volsung heritage to which he is born and in the end the fall of the Niblung house that comes of his death, with his life set between these, satisfies the requirements of epic poetry as, perhaps, does no other. We have the first necessities of architectural form satisfied--the beginning, the development, the close. Then in the main theme, the life of Sigurd, we have a story of men and women living under normal conditions. They are, indeed, the conditions of a heroic world, but the central events of the tale are controlled not by abnormal circumstance or artificial conditions, but by fundamental human emotions. Behind these events we have a landscape that is in direct imaginative correspondence with the character of the people--that has gone to the shaping of this character. This is a matter of peculiar importance. When, in poetry, the scene of action moves freely from one country to another, as it does, for example, in "Childe Harold," the landscape becomes merely an ornament, but when the scene is fixed and the characters move consistently in their own homeland, then the landscape becomes a corporate part of the poem's significance. Sigurd would be the less Sigurd away from his grey mountains and unpeopled heaths and the dusk of his pine-woods. And then finally we have the will set over man's will suffusing the whole in the intangible yet tremendous sense of Fate, the Wrath and Sorrow of Odin.

It has been said that in opening the poem with the tale of Sigmund, Sigurd's father, and the destruction of the Volsungs Morris imperilled the unity of his epic, if indeed he did not destroy it. When a critic of Mr. Mackail's distinction and proved insight makes a pronouncement we can differ from him only with the greatest respect, and knowing that ultimately these things are not fixed, being variable as men's understandings. It seems to me, then, that this first book, called Sigmund, is the inevitable opening of the epic of Sigurd. Not because, as another critic suggests, it forms a background of mystery and heroic terror upon which to throw the more human story that follows, but because it introduces the whole motive of that story. One does not wish to stray into polemics, but here again I must dissent from another writer, Miss May Morris, and again I do so with full appreciation of the value of those introductions of which I have already spoken. Miss Morris also points out that this first book 'introduces the very motive of the epic,' but she identifies that motive with the Wrath and Sorrow of Odin. But the motive is in reality the splendid survival of one brand plucked from the ashes of the Volsung house; the avenging, not in blood, but in the one swift arc of Sigurd's heroic life in a world wherein he stands magnificently alone, of the Volsung name. The sense of Fate, the wide horizons, the sinister figure of Grimhild and the terrors of the Glittering Heath are all alike influences that work upon the shaping of this central theme, and to confuse them with the motive itself makes it impossible to see clearly the rightful place of the book of Sigmund in the poem. It is there that the disaster, the catastrophe, of which Sigurd's passage from birth to death is the compensation and adjustment is set forth, and without it, it seems to me, the epic unity of the poem would not have been intensified, but made impossible.