William Morris: A Critical Study

by John Drinkwater

On the Thrones are the Powers that fashioned, and they
name the Night and the Day,
And the tide of the Moon's increasing, and the tide of his
waning away;
And they name the years for the story; and the Lands
they change and change,
The great and the mean and the little, that this unto that
may be strange:
They met, and they fashioned dwellings, and the House
of Glory they built;
They met, and they fashioned the Dwarf-kind, and the
Gold and the Gifts and the Guilt.

There were twain, and they went upon earth, and were
speechless unmighty and wan;
They were hopeless, deathless, lifeless, and the Mighty
named them Man;
Then they gave them speech and power, and they gave
them colour and breath;
And deeds and the hope they gave them, and they gave
them Life and Death;
Yea, hope, as the hope of the Framers; yea, might, as the
Fashioners had,
Till they wrought, and rejoiced in their bodies, and saw
their sons and were glad:
And they changed their lives and departed, and came back
as the leaves of the trees
Come back and increase in the summer:—and I, I, I am
of these;
And I know of Them that have fashioned, and the deeds
that have blossomed and grow;
But nought of the God's repentance, or the God's undoing
I know.

No more striking example of the meaning of personality in poetry could well be found than in a comparison between this song and the famous second chorus of Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon," which had been published ten years earlier. Superficially there is a kinship both of substance and music, but superficially only. A moderately sensitive ear will immediately catch the difference in the swell of the lines, and the substance is alike just as a landscape of Turner is like one of Corot's—they are both landscapes.

The imaginative and moral atmosphere of Sigurd is that of the northern peoples. The figures of the story are giants and move along their lives as such, but there is always behind them the mute shadow of a yet greater immensity, the fate that reveals itself through no oracles. At the moments of their most glorious victories and sweetest attainment, these men and women, Sigurd and Gunnar and Brynhild and Gudrun and their fellows, are more or less consciously in the presence of the end that makes neither presage nor promise. The hope of Valhall is in reality no more than sublime courage. Morris himself, in a letter written at the time when he was going through the Sagas, said 'what a glorious outcome of the worship of Courage these stories are.' This is, finally, the supreme gift of the northern race to the world, and it is embodied for us for ever in the song of Sigurd the Volsung; not unquestioning acceptance, not the cheerful strength of faith, not mere indifference begotten of the delights of the immediate moment, but a deep sense of the mystery that may or may not be beneficent in its design, and in the face of all an invulnerable Courage.

VI
TRANSLATIONS AND SOCIALISM

The completion of Sigurd the Volsung may conveniently be treated as a half-way house in Morris's career. The poet had fully proved himself. The lovely morning song of Guenevere, a little uncertain both in its own expression of life and in the direction along which it pointed the singer's development, but nevertheless clearly the promise of some memorable doings in the world of poetry, had matured through the simple clarity and joyousness of Jason and The Earthly Paradise into this fierce and elemental strength, corrected as it were from step to step by the practical experience of the poet's daily life. At the beginning of the translation of the Völsunga Saga he had written—

So draw ye round and hearken, English Folk,
Unto the best tale pity ever wrought—

and now he had fashioned that tale anew into its greatest presentment, raising its spirit into an expression worthy to rank with the supreme masterpieces of the world. His creativeness as poet had not exhausted itself, but it had achieved its most urgent purpose; it had evolved a life which the poet's imaginative longing told him might yet be realized on earth. From this time the business of setting the crooked straight among the affairs of his day began to absorb his attention and energy, and in the outcome he published but one more book of poems, which will be considered later. In 1875 he had printed his verse translation of The Aeneids of Virgil, about which, as was inevitable, the opinion of classical scholars was, and remains, divided. There is a quality in poetry which is finally untranslatable from one language to another, the quality that is knit into the words themselves. The ecstasy of which I have spoken is capable of a thousand shades of spiritual colour, and when a poet is moved by it he is moved by it in a kind that can never be precisely repeated, either in himself or another. The translator as a rule gives us the substance and loses this other quality altogether; the most that we can hope for is that he may be a poet himself, and, retaining the substance, substitute an ecstasy of his own which shall in some measure compensate for the loss of the particular exaltation of the original. This Morris does; reading his translation we may—indeed must—miss some essential Virgilian quality, but we have the great story faithfully told, and we have poetry. We may continue to ask for more than that, but we shall continue to be denied. This translation was followed by The Odyssey in 1887 and Beowulf in 1895.

The growth of Morris's socialism can fortunately be traced without divergence into chronological data. Of its nature we have already seen something in considering his poetry, but in A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere he defined it in detail, not only in its imaginative but also in its practical aspect. Before turning to these it will be well briefly to outline his movements in the later years of his life. The business of Morris and Company had already passed into his own hands, not without some difficulty—though without friction—in closing the partnership arrangements. This really meant but little added labour, as he had in effect been responsible for its control almost since its commencement. In 1877 he was asked whether he would accept the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford in the event of its being offered to him, and declined emphatically though graciously enough. In the next year he moved to the house on the Mall at Hammersmith to which was attached the lecture room where the early meetings of the Hammersmith Socialists were held, and his active propagandist work had begun. In addition to constant meetings and lectures on socialism and art, the conduct of his paper The Commonweal, and his own business affairs, he undertook any work that came to his hand for the furtherance of his fixed ideal. Among other things he was one of the founders and the first secretary of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, and finally he linked to his name the brief but noble career of the Kelmscott Press. He died on the 3rd of October, 1896, at the age of sixty-three, and was buried in the churchyard at Kelmscott, wearied out but not embittered by the strife of his later years and the insults of people who could only feel the vigour of his blows without understanding the cause in which they were struck.