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.
There is, however, a difficulty of another kind in this opening book.
The quality of all others in the _Völsunga Saga_ that fits it for the
highest poetry is its elemental humanity, and it was this that
stirred Morris most deeply and inspired his most memorable work, here
as elsewhere. The Sigmund Story of the Saga, however, is as much
savage as human, and savage not with the primal fierceness of man but
with the terrible and implacable caprice of a malign, or at least
inhuman Fate. Here, as later in the poem, that Fate is embodied in
the figure of Odin, but there is a profound difference. When Sigurd
has slain Fafnir and found Brynhild on Hindfell, the humanity of the
story reacts perfectly clearly upon the Fate that overshadows all.
The Fate loses none of its power, but it is humanized, mellowed, and
as it were made tolerable by taking into itself something of the
human spirit of love. In the Sigmund book there is none of this,
and, indeed, the same is to be said of the second book called Regin.
Until Sigurd himself begins to control the story, the characters are
in constant peril of being swung out of their courses by some fierce
stroke of the gods, meaningless and wholly unrelated to anything in
themselves. It is a supportable argument to advance that this
happens in life, but the answer is that it should not happen in great
art. Morris's difficulty was, of course, that he was loth to
interfere with the story as it came to him in the Saga, but I cannot
help feeling that he here allowed his loyalty in some measure to
betray his artistic instinct. It was just one of those supreme
difficulties that face only the men who are attempting supreme ends.
_Sigurd The Volsung_ as it stands ranks with the masterpieces of
which the countless millions of men have but created a score or so
between them. The Sigmund book was essential to his epic; had Morris
been able to retain the terror of the Saga and yet invest it more
fully with the primal impulse of humanity, it is not easy to point to
any product of man that would have been clearly entitled to rank
above this poem.
In speaking of a thing for which we have the deepest reverence, we
would be very clear. The books of Sigmund and Regin, as Morris has
given them to us, remain the poetry of a great poet. Whole passages
rise to a height as to which there can be no question. The first
lines of the poem are enough to satisfy any intelligence that knows
what epic poetry is that here we are to be in the presence of fine
issues finely wrought--
There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old;
Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched
with gold;
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its
doors:
Earls' wives were the weaving-women, queens' daughters
strewed its floors.
And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men
that cast
The sails of the storm of battle adown the bickering blast.
There dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great
Met the good days and the evil as they went the way of fate,
There the gods were unforgotten, yea whiles they walked
with men,
Though e'en in that world's beginning rose a murmur now
and again
Of the midward time and the fading and the last of the
latter days,
And the entering in of the terror, and the death of the
People's Praise:
and the greatness of the poem is manifested long before the finding
of Brynhild. But up to that point there is lacking in the spirit of
the work as a whole that sense of the inevitable and logical cause
and effect in the weaving of human destiny that gives so marvellous a
strength to the books called Brynhild and Gudrun.
The plan of the poem seems to me, then, to be perfectly wrought, and
the treatment of one part of it not so instinctively right as that of
the rest, which is beyond all criticism. As to the actual
workmanship apart from the design, the general examination of
Morris's methods which has already been made in an earlier chapter
covers its main characteristics. But there are qualities here which
were not found in _Jason_ or _The Earthly Paradise_. There was in
those poems an extraordinary ease and at the same time an indication
of a titanic strength in reserve. In _Sigurd_ this reserve is used,
but all the ease is, by some superb paradox of artistic power,
retained. The hewn rocks and the cloud-wrack of Iceland, the great
thews of Sigurd and the might of his god-given sword, the proud
beauty of the deep-bosomed women who are the mates and mothers of
fierce and terrible kings, all these things are sung with a vigour as
tremendous as is their own, and yet there is not a strained moment or
an uncontrolled turn of expression from beginning to end. And, save
in places where the substance of the story itself momentarily
excludes it, there is always beauty in the strength. Again we have
but to read a page or two into the poem to find an example. Sensuous
beauty and fiery strength could not well be more perfectly blended
than in this description of the Volsung throne under the Branstock:--
So there was the throne of Volsung beneath its blossoming
bower,
But high o'er the roof-crest red it rose 'twixt tower and
tower;
And therein were the wild hawks dwelling, abiding the dole
of their lord,
And they wailed high over the wine, and laughed to the
waking sword.