William Morris: A Critical Study

by John Drinkwater

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.