The subsequent events are the outgrowth of the tragic guilt thus incurred. Sigurd reveals the secret of Brynhild's wooing to his wife, and allows her to take possession of the fatal ring, which she during a quarrel shows to Gunnar's wife. Brynhild thus informed of the fraud practised on her, thinks of vengeance, and incites her husband and his brothers to kill Sigurd. The deed is done while Sigurd lies asleep in his chamber with Gudrun, or, according to the more poetic version of the German epic, while he bends over a brook in the forest to quench his thirst after a day's hunting. But as soon as her beloved foe is killed the old passion never quenched rises up again in Brynhild's heart. To be united with her lover in death she pierces her breast with a sword, and one pyre consumes both.
With this climax Wagner very properly concludes his drama. But the epic poet likes to follow the course of events to their ultimate consequences, and Morris, in accordance with the Volsunga Saga, proceeds to relate how, after many years of mournful widowhood, Gudrun is married to Atli, a mighty king, the brother of Brynhild. Eager to become possessed of Sigurd's treasure he invites the Niblungs, its actual owners, to his country, and there the kingly brothers and all their followers are killed by base treachery and after the most heroic resistance. They refuse sternly to ransom their lives by a discovery of the hoard which previous to their departure they have hidden at the bottom of a lake, and which thus is irrecoverably lost to mankind. Gudrun has incited her husband to the deed and has looked on calmly while her kinsmen were slain one after the other. But when all are dead and the murder of Sigurd has been revenged, the feeling of blood relationship so powerful among Northern nations is reawakened in her. While Atli and his earls are asleep she sets fire to the kingly hall, and her wretched husband falls by her own hand. It is characteristic of the Icelandic epic that after all these fates and horrors Gudrun lives for a number of years and is yet again married to a third husband. But to this length even Morris refuses to accompany the tale. In accordance with the Volsunga Saga his Gudrun throws herself into the sea; but the waves do not carry her "to the burg of king Imakr, a mighty king and lord of many folk."
All this is very grand and weird, the reader will say, but where is the moral, the ideal essence of which these events are but the earthly reflex? To this essence we gradually ascend by inquiring into the mythological sources of the tale, by asking who is Sigurd, whence does he come, on what mission is he sent and by whom? also what is the significance of the treasure watched by a dragon and coveted by all mankind? This treasure we then shall find and the curse attaching to it ever since it was robbed from Andvari, the water-elf, is the keynote of the whole story. The curse proves fatal to all its successive owners from Andvari himself and Fafnir, who, for its sake, kills his father, down to Sigurd and Brynhild and the Niblung brothers. Nay, Odin himself, the supreme God, becomes subject to the curse of the gold through having once coveted it, and we dimly discern that the ultimate doom of the Aesir, the Ragnarök, or dusk of the Gods, of which the Voluspa speaks, is intimately connected with the same baneful influence. It further becomes evident that Sigurd the Volsung, the descendant of Odin, is destined to wrest the treasure and the power derived from it from the Niblungs, the dark or cloudy people who threaten the bright godworld of Valhall with destruction. And this leads us back to a still earlier stage of the myth in which Sigurd himself becomes the symbol of the celestial luminary conquering night and misty darkness, an idea repeatedly hinted at by Morris and splendidly illustrated by Wagner, when Siegfried appears on the stage illumined by the first rays of the rising sun. In the work of the German poet all this is brought out with a distinctness of which only dramatic genius of the highest order is capable. With an astounding grasp of detail and with a continuity of thought rarely equalled, Wagner has remoulded the confused and complex argument of the old tale, omitting what seemed unnecessary, and placing in juxtaposition incidents organically connected but separated by the obtuseness of later sagamen.
Morris, as has been said before, proceeds on a different principle. His first object is to tell a tale, and to tell it as nearly as possible in the spirit and according to the letter of the old Sagas. In this he has succeeded in a manner at once indicative of his high poetic gifts and of a deep sympathy with the spirit of the Northern Myth, which breathes in every line and in every turn of his phraseology. To compare the peculiar tinge of his language with the ordinary archaisms and euphonisms of literary poets would be mistaking a field flower for its counterpart in a milliner's shop window. It is true that he also hints at the larger philosophic and moral issues of the tale. But when he refers to the end of the gods brought about by their own guilt or to the redeeming mission of Sigurd, it is done in the mysterious, not to say half conscious manner of the saga itself, and the effect is such as from his own point of view he intended it and could not but intend it to be.
Between the publication of The Defence of Guenevere and that of Jason ten years elapsed. During most of this time the poet was employed in artistic pursuits. In 1861 he started in conjunction with a number of friends the business of decorator and artistic designer which still bears his name. Growing from very modest beginnings this enterprise was destined to work an entire change in the external aspect of English homes. It soon extended its activity to every branch of art-workmanship. D. G. Rossetti, Madox Brown, and Burne Jones drew cartoons for the stained glass windows to be seen in many of our churches and colleges. Morris himself designed wall-papers and the patterns of carpets. The latter are woven on hand-looms in his factory at Merton Abbey, which stands on the banks of the river Wandle surrounded by orchards, and looks as like a medieval workshop as the modern dresses of the workgirls will allow. Another member of the firm, Philip Webb, was the first modern architect to build houses of red brick in the style vaguely and not quite correctly described as "Queen Anne." At present these houses count by thousands in London and a whole village of them has been built at Turnham Green. The members of the firm did not confine their attention to any particular style or age or country. Wherever beautiful things could be found they collected them and made them popular. Old china English, and foreign, Japanese fans and screens, Venetian glass and German pottery were equally welcome to them and through them to the public generally. It may be said that the "aesthetic" fashion as it came to be called will like other fashions die out, and that people in the course of time will grow tired of "living up to" their furniture and dresses. At the same time the idea thus insisted upon that beauty is an essential and necessary ingredient of practical modern English life is not likely to be without beneficial and permanent effect.
It was as artistic worker and employer of skilled labour that Morris imbibed that profound disgust with our social condition which induced him to adopt the principles of extreme socialism. For a long time his views had tended in that direction, and at the end of 1884 he joined the Socialist League, a body professing the doctrines of international revolutionary socialism. He is the editor of its official organ, the Commonweal, which contains many contributions from his pen both in prose and verse. That the poet has not been entirely sunk in the politician, that longing for beauty is at least the partial cause of this desire for change at any price, is however proved by such a sentiment as, "Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident of human life which people can take or have as they choose, but a positive necessity of life, if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is unless we are content to be less than men," or by such a vision of a future earthly paradise as is expressed in the following lines:
Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in the deeds of his hand, Nor yet come home in the even, too faint and weary to stand, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For that which the worker winneth shall then be his indeed, Nor shall half be reaped for nothing by him that sowed no seed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Then all mine and thine shall be ours, and no more shall any man crave For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave.
One may admire the pathetic beauty of such lines, without sharing the poet's hope, that their import will ever be realised, in a world peopled by men and not by angels. History teaches and personal experience confirms that art enjoyment and art creation of the highest type must be confined to the few, and it is to be feared that social democracy, whatever it may do for the physical welfare of the many, will care little about beauty, either in nature or in art. The Demos will never admire Rossetti's pictures or Keats's poetry, and the first thing the much-vaunted peasant proprietors, or peasant communes would do would be to cut down our ancient trees, level every hedgerow and turn parks and commons into potato plots or it may be turnip fields. One may feel certain of all this and yet admire the author of The Earthly Paradise, "the idle singer of an empty day" when he preaches universal brotherhood in the crossways of Hammersmith, and wrestles with policemen, or wrangles with obtuse magistrates about the freedom of speech. Conviction thus upheld at the cost of worldly advantage and personal convenience and taste must command respect even from those who cannot share it.
Francis Hueffer.