O June, O June, that we desired so,
Wilt thou not make us happy on this day?—
—it is, indeed, unnecessary to add example to example—are of the highest order of lyric poetry. The lusty strength and naked passion of Sigurd the Volsung are as yet unattempted at any sustained pressure, but in all other respects the achievement of Jason and The Earthly Paradise is complete and representative. Remembering Pope's "awful Aristarch"—
Thy mighty Scholiast, whose unweary'd pains
Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains.
Turn what they will to Verse, their toil is vain,
Critics like me shall make it Prose again—
I have refrained from any attempt to re-tell the stories that must be read as Morris told them or not at all. It has been my purpose rather to hold for a moment in trembling hands the spirit that is in them and that went to their creation.
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:—