Farewell, it yet may hap that I a king Shall be remembered but by this one thing, That on the morn before ye crossed the sea Ye gave and took in common talk with me;But with this ring keep memory with the morn, O Breton, and thou Northman, by this horn Remember me, who am of Odin's blood.'"All this encounter is a passage of high invention. The adventures in Anahuac are such as Bishop Erie may have achieved when he set out to find Vinland the Good, and came back no more, whether he was or was not remembered by the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl. The tale of the wanderers was Mr. Morris's own; all the rest are of the dateless heritage of our race, fairy tales coming to us, now "softly breathed through the flutes of the Grecians," now told by Sagamen of Iceland. The whole performance is astonishingly equable; we move on a high tableland, where no tall peaks of Parnassus are to be climbed. Once more literature has a narrator, on the whole much more akin to Spenser than to Chaucer, Homer, or Sir Walter. Humour and action are not so prominent as contemplation of a pageant reflected in a fairy mirror. But Mr.
Morris has said himself, about his poem, what I am trying to say:-"Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant;Life have we loved, through green leaf and through sere, Though still the less we knew of its intent;The Earth and Heaven through countless year on year, Slow changing, were to us but curtains fair, Hung round about a little room, where play Weeping and laughter of man's empty day."Mr. Morris had shown, in various ways, the strength of his sympathy with the heroic sagas of Iceland. He had rendered one into verse, in "The Earthly Paradise," above all, "Grettir the Strong" and "The Volsunga" he had done into English prose. His next great poem was "The Story of Sigurd," a poetic rendering of the theme which is, to the North, what the Tale of Troy is to Greece, and to all the world. Mr. Morris took the form of the story which is most archaic, and bears most birthmarks of its savage origin--the version of the "Volsunga," not the German shape of the "Nibelungenlied." He showed extraordinary skill, especially in ****** human and intelligible the story of Regin, Otter, Fafnir, and the Dwarf Andvari's Hoard.
"It was Reidmar the Ancient begat me; and now was he waxen old, And a covetous man and a king; and he bade, and I built him a hall, And a golden glorious house; and thereto his sons did he call, And he bade them be evil and wise, that his will through them might be wrought.
Then he gave unto Fafnir my brother the soul that feareth nought, And the brow of the hardened iron, and the hand that may never fail, And the greedy heart of a king, and the ear that hears no wail.
"But next unto Otter my brother he gave the snare and the net, And the longing to wend through the wild-wood, and wade the highways wet;And the foot that never resteth, while aught be left alive That hath cunning to match man's cunning or might with his might to strive.
"And to me, the least and the youngest, what gift for the slaying of ease?
Save the grief that remembers the past, and the fear that the future sees;And the hammer and fashioning-iron, and the living coal of fire;And the craft that createth a semblance, and fails of the heart's desire;And the toil that each dawning quickens, and the task that is never done;And the heart that longeth ever, nor will look to the deed that is won.
"Thus gave my father the gifts that might never be taken again;Far worse were we now than the Gods, and but little better than men.
But yet of our ancient might one thing had we left us still:
We had craft to change our semblance, and could shift us at our will Into bodies of the beast-kind, or fowl, or fishes cold;For belike no fixed semblance we had in the days of old, Till the Gods were waxen busy, and all things their form must take That knew of good and evil, and longed to gather and make."But when we turn to the passage of the eclaircissement between Sigurd and Brynhild, that most dramatic and most MODERN moment in the ancient tragedy, the moment where the clouds of savage fancy scatter in the light of a hopeless human love, then, I must confess, I prefer the ******, brief prose of Mr. Morris's translation of the "Volsunga" to his rather periphrastic paraphrase. Every student of poetry may make the comparison for himself, and decide for himself whether the old or the new is better. Again, in the final fight and massacre in the hall of Atli, I cannot but prefer the Slaying of the Wooers, at the close of the "Odyssey," or the last fight of Roland at Roncesvaux, or the prose version of the "Volsunga." All these are the work of men who were war-smiths as well as song-smiths. Here is a passage from the "murder grim and great":-"So he saith in the midst of the foemen with his war-flame reared on high, But all about and around him goes up a bitter cry From the iron men of Atli, and the bickering of the steel Sends a roar up to the roof-ridge, and the Niblung war-ranks reel Behind the steadfast Gunnar: but lo, have ye seen the corn, While yet men grind the sickle, by the wind streak overborne When the sudden rain sweeps downward, and summer groweth black, And the smitten wood-side roareth 'neath the driving thunder-wrack?