Chapter 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 As to the mood, the suggestion is so preposterous as to be unworthy of an answer; it is obsolete just in so far as the fundamental things of life are obsolete.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:--

As my twin sister, young of years was she and slender,
Yellow blossoms of spring-tide her hands had been gathering,
But the gown-lap that held them had fallen adown
And had lain round her feet with the first of the singing;
Now her singing had ceased, though yet heaved her bosom
As with lips lightly parted and eyes of one seeking
She stood face to face with the Love that she knew not,
The love that she longed for and waited unwitting...

and there are numberless lines where the precision of statement is admirable, as--

In memory of days when my meat was but little
And my drink drunk in haste between saddle and straw...

and

I saw her
Stealing barefoot, bareheaded amidst of the tulips
Made grey by the moonlight...

but the experiment in a form that is not now, after four centuries of development, really natural to the language is, on the whole, a failure. It is, indeed, true that as we read through it the measure becomes more acceptable to the ear, but there is a difficulty in the outline which no familiarity can wholly overcome.

The structure of the play is mainly of Morris's own invention, and is of singular beauty. The figure of Love, who may be said to correspond roughly to the Doctor or Messenger of the early moralities, stands, not between the action and the audience, but between the action and the people of an outer play; and, again, beyond this we have a further group. The structure is, briefly, this. The morality itself; Love and The Music who act as spiritual interpreters and as chorus between the action and the Emperor and Empress for whom the townsfolk are having the play performed; and finally the peasants Giles and Joan who are equally interested in the play and its imaginary spectators, translate the spiritual commentaries of Love and The Music into terms of their own simple workaday existence, and, lastly, act in some sort as chorus between the whole representation and the actual audience. There is a subtlety of design in all this that reaches far beyond the conceptions of the sombre and rugged poets of pre-Shakespearean England, and although the play fails in other respects, Morris here shows more clearly even than in _Sir Peter Harpdon's End_ that he understood the exact meaning of the element contributed by the chorus to drama more fully than any poet of recent times.

In the central action, the morality itself, there are three principal figures, Pharamond the King, Oliver his old counsellor and foster-father, and Azalais. Morris retains the method of his models in that these figures are not characters but rather abstractions. Pharamond is not so much a man as mankind, Everyman. Oliver is much more definitely a personality, but he is used as a symbol of the better nature of man, not able quite to understand spiritual nobility, but content, even eager, to follow it. Azalais is Love, both giving and taking. The motive of the play is stated clearly in the title, Love is Enough. Pharamond leaves kingship, fame, everything, and sets out to find this thing only, and in finding it proves and finds himself. But we must return to the motive a little later. The point next to be considered is this symbolic use of figures in action. The method of the old poets was to invest these figures at the outset with a certain presupposed and generally accepted significance, and to start from that point. They did not attempt to explain what Luxury, Riot, Riches, Knowledge, Humility and Charity were, but simply gave these names to their figures and trusted their audience to fill in the outlines. Then taking a central figure as protagonist, Everyman or Youth or some such symbol, they brought him into contact with the rest and allowed all the emotion of the play to arise out of the transition of his moods as he is influenced by them in turn. There is never the least doubt as to the lines along which each of these figures will work; they carry their natures in their names. We know that Pride will betray Youth as surely as we know that his Knowledge and Good Deeds alone will bide with Everyman. But there is nothing dramatic in the spectacle of Pride forsaking Youth until we see the complementary loyalty of Charity and Humility, and we are moved by the tenderness of Good Deeds and Knowledge towards Everyman simply because we have just seen Strength and Beauty desert him in his need. These transitions of mood are carried through with consistent swiftness and are defined by the direct contact of the figures, not by reflective comment, or only so in a subordinate degree. _Everyman_, which is the crown of these early plays, realizes these conditions most perfectly. The protagonist is commanded to make his reckoning before God. He asks Fellowship to accompany him on his journey through Death's gates. Fellowship refuses, and so in turn do Goods, Kindred, Strength, Discretion, Five Wits, and the rest of them, as we knew they would. Then he is aided by Knowledge, Good Deeds and Confession, and sets out content. Save for the few speeches that summarize the situation from time to time, there is absolutely no comment on the development of the play; the whole effect depends on the swift passage from one crude symbol to another. Within its own limitations, this simple method not only succeeded in holding the audience for whom it was first employed, but is completely effective to-day. The Elizabethan drama threw it aside to make room for its own greater glories, but it is not impossible that a great poet should yet return to it, and with the accumulated wisdom of the poets who have worked since then in his blood, refashion it into something of a strange new beauty. In _Love is Enough_ Morris adopted it only to a point, and failed in consequence. He set out to enunciate a definite lesson, and he invested his figures with symbolic significance, but he carried the method no further. Pharamond, instead of passing swiftly from stage to stage in pursuit of his end and showing us that love is enough, pauses for long periods to tell us that love is enough. His speeches are, generally, lyrical developments of one theme, and wholly beautiful as many of them are as such they destroy the cohesion of the play as a whole. The design of _Love is Enough_ is no wider in its scope than that of "Everyman," indeed not so wide, and yet the play is, roughly, three times as long. I am not, of course, attempting any comparison of the spirit of the two plays; there is no point at which this is possible; my comparison is merely between the uses to which they employ the same method.

Herein, it seems to me, lies the failure of _Love is Enough_ in so far as it is a failure at all. The central part of the design is so carried out as to disturb the general balance. It was not necessary for Morris to choose this particular form for his inner play, but having done so he was mistaken in not observing its principles more closely. But, having said this, it is necessary to add that in many ways _Love is Enough_ stands with Morris's finest achievements in poetry. In the morality of Pharamond itself, and apart from all difficulties of the verse-form, there is love-poetry that is scarcely to be surpassed in its depth and tenderness. In this play Morris departed from his usual ways. His narrative and epic writing and his lyrics have nothing of that didacticism which if not essential is at least proper to the greatest art. Art confesses to no limitations. In _Love is Enough_, however, he allowed himself this new privilege, and he translates his teaching into art with perfect instinct. Here, as throughout his work, it is impossible to point to any passage and say, "that is not poetry," and yet speech after speech is as specifically didactic as the Sermon on the Mount. In the words of Pharamond, in the stately heroic couplets spoken by Love, and in the exquisite stanzas of The Music he pursues the same theme, and over and over again he carries it to a sublime pitch of intensity.

What, Faithful--do I lie, that overshot
My dream-web is with that which happeneth not?
Nay, nay, believe it not!--love lies alone
In loving hearts like fire within the stone:
Then strikes my hand, and lo, the flax ablaze!
--Those tales of empty striving and lost days
Folk tell of sometimes--never lit my fire
Such ruin as this; but Pride and Vain-desire,
My counterfeits and foes, have done the deed.
Beware, Beloved! for they sow the weed
Where I the wheat: they meddle where I leave,
Take what I scorn, cast by what I receive,
Sunder my yoke, yoke that I would dissever,
Pull down the house my hands would build for ever.

In this poem, too, we find the isolated instances wherein Morris makes some allusion to the desire for seeing beyond the veils of our existence, some suggestion of the hope of spring when leaves are falling. Even here there is none of the exultant certainty of the _Ode to the West Wind_, but a quiet fearlessness that is no less inspiring and consoling in its way--

Live on, for Love liveth, and earth shall be shaken
By the wind of his wings on the triumphing morning,
When the dead and their deeds that die not shall awaken,
And the world's tale shall sound in your trumpet of warning,
And the sun smite the banner called Scorn of the Scorning,
And dead pain ye shall trample, dead fruitless desire,
As ye wend to pluck out the new world from the fire.

And again--

In what wise, ah, in what wise shall it be?
How shall the bark that girds the winter tree
Babble about the sap that sleeps beneath,
And tell the fashion of its life and death?
How shall my tongue in speech man's longing wrought
Tell of the things whereof he knoweth nought?
Should I essay it might ye understand
How those I love shall share my promised land!
Then must I speak of little things as great,
Then must I tell of love and call it hate,
Then must I bid you seek what all men shun,
Reward defeat, praise deeds that were not done.

The Emperor and Empress who watch the play point its moral for themselves, and their somewhat remote humanity serves admirably as a step between the pure poetry of the central action and the homespun reality of Giles and Joan. They send gifts to the actors of Pharamond and Azalais, and then the Emperor--

Fain had I been
To see him face to face and his fair Queen,
And thank him friendly, asking him maybe
How the world looks to one with love set free;
It may not be, for as thine eyes say, sweet,
Few folk as friends shall unfreed Pharamond meet.
So is it: we are lonelier than those twain,
Though from their vale they ne'er depart again.

But Giles and his wife are under no such restraint of state; they will bid the players to their home and be their scholars for a while

In many a lesson of sweet lore
To learn love's meaning more and more,

and the scene between the two peasants that ends the play is an idyll full of the simple fragrance and humanity and earth-love that were the crowning splendours of _Jason_ and _The Earthly Paradise_.

In 1869 the poet had published his translation of the _Grettir Saga_, carried out in collaboration with Eiríkr Magnússon, and this was followed in the next year by the _Völsunga Saga_ from the same hands. Morris's feeling for the northern stories had already found expression in more than one of the tales in _The Earthly Paradise_, notably 'The Lovers of Gudrun,' and the Icelandic visit of 1871 was followed by a second in 1873. In 1875 he published _Three Northern Love Stories_, translations of extraordinary directness and conviction, and these six years of study of and service to the curiously neglected story of the northern race were now approaching their culminating triumph. To examine these various preliminary essays in detail here is neither possible nor necessary. The journals of the travel in Iceland, written as they were without any definite purpose of publication, show how intensely he was moved by the spirit of the Sagas, how close his own being was to it. Every stone was quick with a tradition that meant for him the very breath of splendid and heroic life. His feeling for the earth was at all times, as we have seen, one of an almost indefinable tenderness and yearning, but once he had seen Iceland it was the earth that nourished Sigurd and Brynhild and Gunnar and Gudrun that was thenceforth most deeply rooted in his love. The austere beauty and gloomy strength of the Icelandic countryside were from that time sacred things in his imagination, and it was, perhaps, not without taking thought that in the first poem that he wrote on his return he made Pharamond, when trying to recall the country to which he must again turn to find the end of his seeking, say that

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.

The plan of the poem seems to me, then, to be perfectly wrought, and the treatment of one part of it not so instinctively right as that of the rest, which is beyond all criticism. As to the actual workmanship apart from the design, the general examination of Morris's methods which has already been made in an earlier chapter covers its main characteristics. But there are qualities here which were not found in _Jason_ or _The Earthly Paradise_. There was in those poems an extraordinary ease and at the same time an indication of a titanic strength in reserve. In _Sigurd_ this reserve is used, but all the ease is, by some superb paradox of artistic power, retained. The hewn rocks and the cloud-wrack of Iceland, the great thews of Sigurd and the might of his god-given sword, the proud beauty of the deep-bosomed women who are the mates and mothers of fierce and terrible kings, all these things are sung with a vigour as tremendous as is their own, and yet there is not a strained moment or an uncontrolled turn of expression from beginning to end. And, save in places where the substance of the story itself momentarily excludes it, there is always beauty in the strength. Again we have but to read a page or two into the poem to find an example. Sensuous beauty and fiery strength could not well be more perfectly blended than in this description of the Volsung throne under the Branstock:--

So there was the throne of Volsung beneath its blossoming
bower,
But high o'er the roof-crest red it rose 'twixt tower and
tower;
And therein were the wild hawks dwelling, abiding the dole
of their lord,
And they wailed high over the wine, and laughed to the
waking sword.

And again, when Sigurd is singing in the Niblung hall:--

But his song and his fond desire go up to the cloudy roof,
And blend with the eagles' shrilling in the windy night aloof.

It is at the end of the book of Regin that Sigurd finds Brynhild asleep

on the tower-top of the world,
High over the cloud-wrought castle whence the windy bolts
are hurled;

and from the moment he awakens her new light and life break into the narrative. Not only in their troth-plighting is a new note of human passion struck, but the Volsung spirit in Sigurd undergoes a change and takes on a larger charity and a more beneficent purpose.

So the day grew old about them and the joy of their desire,
And eve and the sunset came, and faint grew the sunset fire,
And the shadowless death of the day, was sweet in the
golden tide;
But the stars shone forth on the world and the twilight
changed and died;
And sure if the first of man-folk had been born to that
starry night,
And had heard no tale of the sunrise, he had never longed
for the light:
But Earth longed amidst her slumber, as 'neath the night
she lay,
And fresh and all abundant abode the deeds of Day.

And these abundant deeds of day are deeds of peace and healing. Sigurd among Hemir and his 'Lymdale forest lords' brings the dawn of a new age, when

The axe-age and the sword-age seem dead a while ago,
And the age of the cleaving of shields, of brother by
brother slain,
And the bitter days of the whoredom, and the hardened lust
of gain;
But man to man may hearken, and he that soweth reaps,
And hushed is the heart of Feurir in the wolf-den of the
deeps...

and again, when he rides to the Niblungs it is with peace and comfortable words upon his lips--

For peace I bear unto thee, and to all the kings of earth
Who bear the sword aright, and are crowned with the crown
of worth;
But unpeace to the lords of evil, and the battle and the death;
And the edge of the sword to the traitor, and the flame to
the slanderous breath:
And I would that the loving were loved, and I would that the
weary should sleep,
And that man should hearken to man, and that he that
soweth should reap.
Now wide in the world I fare, to seek the dwellings of kings,
For with them would I do and undo, and be heart of their
warfarings;
So I thank thee, lord, for thy bidding, and here in thy house
will I bide,
And learn of thy ancient wisdom till forth to the field we ride.

It is in this mellowing of the fierce Volsung strain that the redemption of the cosmic spirit of the epic is found. To show this is a purpose not less noble than that of Milton when he robed himself to justify the ways of God to man, and it is one which must be clearly understood before we can hope to grasp the imaginative impulse that runs as a central thread through all the coloured jewels of Morris's masterpiece. This new chastening of the humanity in Sigurd not only makes the life among which he moves sweeter, but it reacts upon the most tragic judgments of the gods. Nothing could be finer than the way in which we are shown the ennobling influence that it has upon so terrible an event as the betrayal of Sigurd by the Niblung Gunnar and his brothers. It is an act of the blackest treachery, a violation of sacred vows sworn under the roof-tree of their home, an act which in the world of Sigmund would have been merely horrible. But here it is transfigured by the elemental humanity working along the logical ways of cause and effect in the heart of Sigurd and from him into the action of his betrayers, into pure tragedy. Before this quickening, enmity between man and man was a sullen and savage thing, some blinding of their eyes by the hands of mocking gods, but now it springs from the clear conflict of essential emotions and it has in it a new element of pity. Gunnar knows that the ravelled web can be straightened only in this way, but there is no loveless exultation in his mood, and in after days he cherishes the great memory of the man whom he has slain. And Sigurd knows of the coming end, but there is no hatred in him--

the heart of Hogin he sees,
And the heart of his brother Gunnar, _and he grieveth sore for
these_.

In detail Morris discovers a wealth of inventiveness that appears to be inexhaustible. He never allows his beauty of expression to be isolated in such a way as to interfere with the swiftness of narration, but there are many more instances of separable splendours in _Sigurd_ than in any other of his poems. When Sigurd tells King Elf, his stepfather, that he would go out into the world, the King answers--

Forsooth no more may we hold thee than the hazel copse
may hold
The sun of the early dawning, that turneth it all into gold.

And how exquisite is this of Gudrun's beauty--

And her face is a rose of the morning by the night-tide
framed about.

and how perfect in imagination this of the Volsung King's sword--

Therewith from the belt of battle he raised the golden sheath,
And showed the peace-strings glittering around the hidden death.

and there is surely no more lovely description in poetry than this--

So the hall dusk deepens upon them till the candles come arow,
And they drink the wine of departing and gird themselves to go;
And they dight the dark-blue raiment and climb to the wains aloft
While the horned moon hangs in the heaven and the
summer wind blows soft.
Then the yoke-beasts strained at the collar, and the dust
in the moon arose,
And they brushed the side of the acre and the blooming dewy close;
Till at last, when the moon was sinking and the night was
waxen late,
The warders of the earl-folk looked forth from the Niblung gate
And saw the gold pale-gleaming, and heard the wain-wheels crush
The weary dust of the summer amidst the midnight hush.

In _Sigurd_, too, Morris's power of investing his language with the utmost dramatic compression at exactly the right moment is developed to its highest point. One example may be given. Regin means to use Sigurd for his own ends--to make him secure the treasure of Fafnir. But Sigurd as yet has no will for action--

the wary foot is surest, and the hasty oft turns back.

Then the craft of Regin is concentrated into six lines--

The deed is ready to hand,
Yet holding my peace is the best, for well thou lovest the land:
And thou lovest thy life moreover, and the peace of thy
youthful days,
And why should the full-fed feaster his hand to the rye-bread raise?
Yet they say that Sigmund begat thee and he looked to fashion a man.
Fear nought; he lieth quiet in his mound by the sea-waves wan.

and Sigurd cries back--

Tell me, thou Master of Masters, what deed is the deed I
shall do?
Nor mock thou the son of Sigmund lest the day of his
birth thou rue.

In the treatment of the poem throughout, however, the quality that is predominant may be most fittingly described as magnificence of imagination. This is, of course, a thing quite distinct from mere magnificence of phrase. Not only is the utterance splendid, but the thing uttered and the thing suggested are splendid too. The voices are indeed tremendous, but that is because they are the voices of tremendous people. We feel always that we are moving among a humanity not in any way idealized, but framed in the proportions of giants, purged of everything inessential and tautened in all its sinews. And when the spirits of these people are drawn up to some unwonted height of emotional intensity the result is a cry from a world the knowledge of which moves us to a heroic hope for our race. The grief of Gudrun over Sigurd dead, with the wonderful refrain interwoven by the narrator, is a grief that in itself is a triumph over any blows that destiny can inflict. Once man can sorrow in this fashion, we feel he has conquered his fate. And the death-song of Gunnar is yet more magnificent. The poet who wrote that wonderful chant of man in the face of death has fathomed the very depths of song-craft. Readers who know Morris's poetry will forgive me for taking them through these lines once again--

So perished the Gap of the Gaping, and the cold sea
swayed and sang,
And the wind came down on the waters, and the beaten
rock-walls rang;
There the Sun from the south came shining, and the
Starry Host stood round,
And the wandering Moon of the heavens his habitation
found;
And they knew not why they were gathered, nor the
deeds of their shaping they knew:
But lo, Mid-Earth the Noble 'neath their might and their
glory grew,
And the grass spread over its face, and the Night and the
Day were born,
And it cried on the Death in the even, and it cried on the
Life in the morn;
Yet it waxed and waxed, and knew not, and it lived and
had not learned;
And where were the Framers that framed, and the Soul
and the Might that had yearned?

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.