Complete works of willia.., p.798
Complete Works of William Morris, page 798
“This morning I assisted at the dyeing of 20 lbs. of silk (for our damask) in the blue vat; it was very exciting, as the thing is quite unused now, and we ran a good chance of spoiling the silk. There were four dyers and Mr. Wardle at work, and myself as dyers’ mate: the men were encouraged with beer and to it they went, and pretty it was to see the silk coming green out of the vat and gradually turning blue: we succeeded very well as far as we can tell at present; the oldest of the workmen, an old fellow of seventy, remembers silk being dyed so, long ago. The vat, you must know, is a formidable-looking thing, 9 ft. deep and about 6 ft. square: and is sunk into the earth right up to the top. To-morrow I am going to Nottingham to see wool dyed blue in the woad vat, as it is called; on Friday Mr. Wardle is going to dye 80 lbs. more silk for us, and I am going to dye about 20 lbs. of wool in madder for my deep red. With all this I shall be very glad indeed to be home again, as you may well imagine.
“I am glad you liked my work at the show, though I don’t think it was much to make a row about; the silk piece I thought was the best. Mrs. Lewes came from this country-side, by the way: I went through the village where she lived, on Sunday: Ellaston, I think, it was called; a dull village; I seem to see a good few people about like the ‘Aunts’ in the ‘Mill on the Floss.’
“I hope you are well.
“I am your affectionate
“WILLIAM MORRIS.”
The following words were written also from Leek, during this visit, to a friend who was passing through one of those darknesses in which the whole substance of life seems now and then to crumble away under our hands. They contain, in brief words that are free from either doubt or arrogance, the confession of his own faith: a matter as to which he was reserved of speech, and only revealed himself under the stress of some unusual emotion.
“Wherein you are spiritless, I wish with all my heart that I could help you or amend it, for it is most true that it grieves me; but also, I must confess it, most true that I am living my own life in spite of it, or in spite of anything grievous that may happen in the world. Sometimes I wonder so much at all this, that I wish even that I were once more in some trouble of my own, and think of myself that I am really grown callous: but I am sure that though I have many hopes and pleasures, or at least strong ones, and that though my life is dear to me, so much as I seem to have to do, I would give them away, hopes and pleasures, one by one or all together, and my life at last, for you, for my friendship, for my honour, for the world. If it seems boasting I do not mean it: but rather that I claim, so to say it, not to be separated from those that are heavy-hearted only because I am well in health and full of pleasant work and eager about it, and not oppressed by desires so as not to be able to take interest in it all. I wish I could say something that would serve you, beyond what you know very well, that I love you and long to help you: and indeed I entreat you (however trite the words may be) to think that life is not empty nor made for nothing, and that the parts of it fit one into another in some way; and that the world goes on, beautiful and strange and dreadful and worshipful.”
So much as I seem to have to do! — the words were in one form or another habitually on his lips all through his life: yet he never used them complainingly or grudgingly, but rather as one who felt the world perpetual in its interest and variety, and to whom no length of days could be long enough to exhaust either the work that there was for him to do or his own active pleasure in doing it. But to one of his own heroes, whether Greek or Northern, the wish to be once more in some trouble of his own, however lightly uttered, might have seemed a wilful provocation of fate, and only too certain to draw down its own fulfilment. Within the next few months trouble of his own came to him against which he could have made no provision. The form that trouble took was one which can only be briefly touched upon, but which had too profound an effect upon his whole life to be entirely passed over. His elder daughter, now a girl of fifteen, exceptionally bright, clever, and diligent, was already her father’s chosen companion, and gave promise of a brilliant future. In the summer of 1876 her health broke completely down. From this distress his mind was never henceforth free. To all who had the privilege of a close knowledge, his tenderness and unceasing thought and care for her were the most touchingly beautiful element in his nature; but his anxiety over her was literally continuous for the remainder of his life.
On the 18th of July he wrote to Mrs. Morris, who was at Deal with the two children:
“I am so glad to hear that things go well so far: though of course I cannot help being anxious. Yes, I got the dear thing’s letters, and answered them on Sunday (else I should have written to you), and very pretty letters they were. The news from here is little or none; e.g., that I broke the strings of the Venetian blind in my room last night; that no water came into the cistern on Sunday, and very little yesterday, and so on. Item, I was not the man that threw the medicine bottles at the dog last Saturday, and was fined a shilling for that righteous indignation.
“I can’t help thinking that you have not been so hot as we have been these last days; though last night and to-day it has been cooler: so much so, that, calling on Kate yesterday evening, I found her refusing to go out with her mother because the wind was so cold: nay, she durst not go near the window, for she said that the bitter north wind cut her in half. As for me, that the grumbling circle may be complete, I am longing for that tail of the glacier in Thorsmark, or our camp in the wilderness at Eyvindarkofarver under the snow mountains: in fact, though I don’t feel unwell (and therefore ought to hold my noise, as you very truly say), I am depressed and languid (say lazy) and don’t care for my work, at any rate not the bread and cheese part of it: though for want of finding any amusement in books on Saturday and Sunday I did manage to screw out my tale of verses, to the tune of some 250 I think. By the way the Athenæum has been very civil to me about that scrap of poem I published in it the other day, though it was not worth publishing either, and sent me £20: it seems, such is the world’s injustice and stupidity, that it was a success — never mind; I shall pay for it when my new poem comes out. I cannot tell you how pleased I am to hear that you think so well of Jenny: you don’t say much about May: I suppose it can’t fail to do her good: I think it would be a great pity to hurry them away if the place really seems to suit them, and if you can hold out there: I will give you as much of my company as work will let me: to-day week or to-morrow week I hope to come down, and shall stay three days or so at any rate: I am looking forward to it very much. Take care of yourself, my dear, and tell me of anything you want: I think we had better spend that £20 in carriages at Deal?”
In spite of the engrossing occupation of the dyeing work and the unsettlement caused by his daughter’s illness, the composition of “Sigurd the Volsung “ had been advancing swiftly throughout the year. It was published at the end of November. What reception he anticipated for it may be gathered from the letter just quoted: and, in fact, for one reason or another, it was but languidly received. In his own judgment, it stood apart from the rest of his poetry, less because it showed any higher perfection in craftsmanship than because the subject was the story which he counted the first in the world, and because he was convinced that he had treated this story with a fidelity and a largeness of manner for which he could answer to his own conscience. The Volsunga Saga had for long seemed to him almost too great a story to be re-told, and too perfectly set forth in the noble Icelandic prose of the twelfth century to gain, or not to lose, from fresh handling. “This is the Great Story of the North,” he had written six years before, “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 a name of what has been, a story too, then should it be to those that come after us no less than the Tale of Troy has been to us.” When at last he resolved to attempt the re-telling, he was bound by an almost impossible loyalty to his original. For the purposes of an epic it is almost obvious that the story begins far too early, and has epic unity only from the point at which Sigurd’s own conscious life begins. The Icelandic Saga is a chronicle which the genius of its tellers has almost against their will converted into an epic, but which retains much history that the limits of an epic reject. The whole of the life of Sigmund, which fills the first of the four books of the poem, is a separate story, containing a strange and savagely magnificent epic of its own, centring round the three colossal figures of Sigmund and Signy and their son Sinfiotli. No art or skill can make this earlier epic either subordinate to, or coherent with, the epic of the After-born; of Sigurd, only born after Sigmund’s death, and of those with whose lives an inextricable fate enwound his. It is as though the epic of Troy opened with a recital of the epic of Thebes. Both in the Greek and in the Scandinavian cycle the story that comes earlier in the history is also earlier in its structure; more primitive, more colossal, less fully human. The cannibal savagery of Tydeus, the incest of Œdipus and Jocasta, the living burial of Antigone, rouse a greater horror than anything in the Trojan story, but it is not one based on the same universal human sympathy. And so it is with the story of Sigmund: the wolf-change of the Volsung, the cruel purposeless slaughter of Signy’s children, the strangely inhuman life and death of the son of that awful brother and sister, are tragic indeed, but with such tragedy as belongs to the dim and monstrous reign of the older gods. With what skill Morris effects the transition, with what genius he drives the story through into its destined channel, is hardly to the purpose: the fact remains that what he tried to do was wrong, and that no skill can set it wholly right. Indeed when he came to the end of the story he was obliged to confess as much. The Volsunga Saga does not end with the episode of Gudrun casting herself into the sea while the palace of Atli roared up in flame. Here Morris stops. But the Saga-writer goes pitilessly on: and after it has lost Gudrun as well as Brynhild the story relapses into something of its earlier horror and savagery. The death of Swanhild, her head tied in a bag because “when she opened her eyes wide, then the horses durst not trample her,” is followed by the dismal ending of Gudrun’s sons: nor will the Saga-writer stay his hand till he can set down the destruction of that whole kin, root and stem. To pursue the Saga to its end, in a fifth book, Morris no doubt felt to be impossible. To continue after the main interest is gone would be a grave fault of art. But it is a fault of art scarcely less grave to anticipate that interest, and excite it at the opening of the tale in disparate matter, and, as it were, on a false issue.
Yet the main story, as it is told in the other three books of the poem, is undoubtedly unsurpassed in the world for epic grandeur and tragic tension; and in his version, the most Homeric poem which has been written since Homer, Morris felt that he had given it no inadequate treatment. It is a story at once deeper-searching into human nature and more universal in its view of human life than that of either the Iliad or the Odyssey. To cool reflection it must be plain that the story of the Iliad is in itself one of the second order: one that had to be filled up with episodes of extraneous interest, and is raised to its rank, as, on the whole, the greatest poetical achievement of mankind, only by the prodigious genius of its final author. The story of the Odyssey, as it is summed up in the well-known words of Aristotle— “a certain man being in foreign lands for many years, and watched jealously by Poseidon, and alone, and things at home being likewise in such case that his substance was spent by suitors and plots laid against his son, arrives after a tempestuous voyage, and discovering himself to certain persons, attacks his enemies and destroys them, but is saved himself” — is a Saga of the simplest order without any dramatic motive of great depth or complexity, but told with incomparable skill, and brought into a wider atmosphere by the Phæacian romance and the Arabian tales of miraculous adventure incorporated with the original story. Had the luminous intelligence to which we owe the Iliad and Odyssey been applied to a story in itself so tremendous as that of Sigurd, Brynhild, and Gudrun, it is difficult to imagine to what unscaled heights the epic might have risen. As it is, for want of that Greek intelligence, the story is not fully humanized. Grimhild’s witch-drink, for instance, is not, like the cup of Circe, the mere embroidery of a fairy-tale: it is essential to the tragedy, and is a type of that savage or inhuman element which lingered through the literature as well as the life of the North.
To Morris’ mind, at any rate, the philosophy or religion that lived under these half-humanized legends was something quite real and vital: and it substantially represented his own guiding belief. In a summarized statement of the northern mythology which he wrote out about this time, he concludes with the following striking sentences :
“It may be that the world shall worsen, that men shall grow afraid to ‘change their life,’ that the world shall be weary itself, and sicken, and none but faint-hearts be left — who knows? So at any rate comes the end at last, and the Evil, bound for a while, is loose, and all nameless merciless horrors that on earth we figure by fire and earthquake and venom and ravin. So comes the great strife; and like the kings and heroes that they have loved, here also must the Gods die, the Gods who made that strifeful imperfect earth, not blindly indeed, yet foredoomed. One by one they extinguish for ever some dread and misery that all this time has brooded over life, and one by one, their work accomplished, they die: till at last the great destruction breaks out over all things, and the old earth and heavens are gone, and then a new heavens and earth. What goes on there? Who shall say, of us who know only of rest and peace by toil and strife? And what shall be our share in it? Well, sometimes we must needs think that we shall live again: yet if that were not, would it not be enough that we helped to make this unnameable glory, and lived not altogether deedless? Think of the joy we have in praising great men, and how we turn their stories over and over, and fashion their lives for our joy: and this also we ourselves may give to the world.
“This seems to me pretty much the religion of the Northmen. I think one would be a happy man if one could hold it, in spite of the wild dreams and dreadful imaginings that hung about it here and there.”
In this spirit it was that Morris approached the story of Sigurd. Nor need it be matter of surprise that the strength of the poem no less than its weaknesses, its unity of spirit and motive no less than the complexity of its scheme, made it pass over the heads of a public little accustomed to the strenuous task of embracing and taking in any work of great scope and organic structure. Whether or not it be true, as is often lightly said, that the age for epics is over, the time when “Sigurd “ appeared was emphatically an age of the idyl, and unresponsive to the appeal of the larger poetic architecture. Morris himself never concealed his own opinion of the merits of the poem. To a petulant, but not wholly unjustified, criticism which Rossetti made on the dragon-transformation of Fafnir, as an element in the story which was not merely barbarous, but silly, he made a reply which can scarcely be quoted here, but which no one who has heard it is ever likely to forget. But he did not let the tepid welcome which “Sigurd “ met with weigh on his spirits. Two months after its publication he writes from Leek, where he was again busy among his dye-vats and ordering three hundredweight of poplar-twigs for experiments in yellow dyeing (the colour they gave did not turn out sufficiently fast to satisfy him):
“My ill temper about the public was only a London mood and is quite passed now: and I think I have even forgotten what I myself have written about that most glorious of stories, and think about it all (and very often) as I did before I began my poem.”
“I had been reading the Njala,” this letter goes on, “in the original before I came here: it is better even than I remembered; the style most solemn (Dasent now and then uses a word too homely I think, which brings it down a little): all men’s children in it, as always in the best of the northern stories, so venerable to each other, and so venerated: and the exceeding good temper of Gunnar amidst his heroism, and the calm of Njal: and I don’t know anything more consoling or grander in all literature (to use a beastly French word) than Gunnar’s singing in his house under the moon and the drifting clouds: or do you remember the portents at Bergthorsknoll before the burning, and how Skarphedinn takes them? or Skarphedinn’s death; or how Flosi pays the penalty for the Burning, never appealing against the due and equal justice, but defending himself and his folk stoutly against it at every step. What a glorious outcome of the worship of Courage these stories are.”
His position as a poet was in any case secure among those best qualified to judge; and popularity with any large mass of thoughtless opinion was not a thing he very much cared for. The element of aristocratic fastidiousness in his nature rather shrank from it, and it was not till later, when he became the exponent of an active creed, that he felt any of the discouragement that comes of appealing vainly to unheeding or averted ears. Just at this time Matthew Arnold had completed his tenure of the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. Morris was at once thought of by his friends as (at all events if Mr. Swinburne were excepted) the most eminent of other living Oxford poets; and though his want of orthodoxy alike in politics and in religious belief made it certain that he could not be an unopposed candidate, inquiry seemed to justify them in thinking that he might be asked to stand with fair prospects of success. The offer was one which tempted him greatly. His love for Oxford, in spite of his hatred of the typical Oxonian, was very deep-seated, and the position was one which, without involving any serious labour, was both influential and distinguished. But finally he made up his mind against it.
“I am afraid,” he wrote on the 16th of February, 1877, to Mr. Thursfield, who had approached him on the subject on behalf of the members of Convocation who were anxious that he should consent to strand, “you must think I have been a long while answering your letter; I beg you to excuse my apparent neglect on the grounds that I found it hard to make up my mind what was right to do. In the first place I thank you personally very much for moving in the matter, and I must say that nothing hardly would please me so much as such a recognition from my University, apart from considerations of fitness on my side: nor would laziness or the various heavy business on my hands prevent me from coming forward if I thought I could be of any real use: neither would a contested election frighten me, though I don’t like such things. It is therefore with the greatest regret that I find I must needs say ‘no’; and this simply because I feel that I am not the man to fill the post: I suppose the lectures a Poetry Professor should give ought to be either the result of deep and wide scholarship in the matter, or else pieces of beautiful and ingenious rhetoric, such, for example, as our Slade Professor could give; and in both these things I should fail and do no credit either to the University or myself. It seems to me that the practice of any art rather narrows the artist in regard to the theory of it; and I think I come more than most men under this condemnation, so that though I have read a good deal and have a good memory, my knowledge is so limited and so ill-arranged that I can scarce call myself a man of letters: and moreover I have a peculiar inaptitude for expressing myself except in the one way that my gift lies. Also may I say without offence that I have a lurking doubt as to whether the Chair of Poetry is more than an ornamental one, and whether the Professor of a wholly incommunicable art is not rather in a false position: nevertheless I would like to see a good man filling it, and, if the critics will forgive me, somebody who is not only a critic. I ask your pardon for writing so much about myself, but your kindness has brought it on your head.”
