Part 5 (1/2)
In February he asks:
Shalt thou not hope for joy new born again, Since no grief ever born can ever die Through changeless change of seasons pa.s.sing by?
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Kelmscott Manor House from the Orchard_]
Thus across the charming images of French romance, h.e.l.lenic legend, and Norse drama, falls the suggestion of his own personality, and it is due to this pervading personal mood or sentiment that _The Earthly Paradise_ has a power to stir the imagination almost wholly lacking to his later work.
It cannot be said that even here he is able to awaken a strong emotion.
But the human element is felt. A warm intelligence of sympathy creeps in among dreams and shadows, the reader is aware of a living presence near him and responds to the appeal of human weakness and depression. It is because Morris in the languid cadences of _The Earthly Paradise_ spoke with his own voice and took his readers into the confidence of his hopeless thoughts, that the book will remain for the mult.i.tude the chief among his works, the only one that portrays for us in its most characteristic form the inmost quality of his temperament. Nor does he seem to have had for any other book of his making quite the intimate affection he so frankly bestowed upon this. The final stanzas in which the well-known message is sent to ”my Master, Geoffrey Chaucer,” confide the autobiographic vein in which it was written. Says the Book of its maker:
I have beheld him tremble oft enough At things he could not choose but trust to me, Although he knew the world was wise and rough: And never did he fail to let me see His love,--his folly and faithlessness, maybe; And still in turn I gave him voice to pray Such prayers as cling about an empty day.
Thou, keen-eyed, reading me, mayst read him through, For surely little is there left behind; No power great deeds unnameable to do; No knowledge for which words he may not find; No love of things as vague as autumn wind-- Earth of the earth lies hidden by my clay, The idle singer of an empty day.
Written at great speed, one day being marked by a product of seven hundred lines, the last of _The Earthly Paradise_ was in the hands of the printers by the end of 1870, and Morris was free for his Icelandic journey and new interests.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Portrait of Edward Burne-Jones_
_By Watts_]
He was no sooner home from Iceland than he set to work upon a curious literary experiment--a dramatic poem of very complicated construction, called _Love is Enough, or the Freeing of Pharamond: A Morality_, the intricate metrical design of which is interestingly explained by Mr.
Mackail. Rossetti and Coventry Patmore both spoke in terms of enthusiasm of its unusual beauty. The story is that of a king, Pharamond, who has been gallant on the field and wise on the throne, but is haunted by visions of an ideal love sapping his energy and driving peace from his heart. He deserts his people, and with his henchman, Oliver, wanders through the world until he encounters Azalais, a low-born maiden, who satisfies his dream. He returns to find that his people have become estranged from him and he abdicates at once, to retire into obscurity with his love. There has been an obvious struggle on the part of the poet to obtain a strong emotional effect, and certain pa.s.sages have indeed the ”pa.s.sionate lyric quality” ascribed to them by Rossetti; but as a drama it hardly carries conviction. The songs written to be sung between the scenes have nevertheless much of the haunting beauty soon to be lost from his work, and of these the following is a felicitous example:
Love is enough: it grew up without heeding In the days when ye knew not its name nor its measure, And its leaflets untrodden by the light feet of pleasure Had no boast of the blossom, no sign of the seeding, As the morning and evening pa.s.sed over its treasure.
And what do ye say then?--that Spring long departed Has brought forth no child to the softness and showers; That we slept and we dreamed through the Summer of flowers; We dreamed of the Winter, and waking dead-hearted Found Winter upon us and waste of dull hours.
Nay, Spring was o'er happy and knew not the reason, And Summer dreamed sadly, for she thought all was ended In her fulness of wealth that might not be amended, But this is the harvest and the garnering season, And the leaf and the blossom in the ripe fruit are blended.
It sprang without sowing, it grew without heeding, Ye knew not its name and ye knew not its measure, Ye noted it not 'mid your hope and your pleasure; There was pain in its blossom, despair in its seeding, But daylong your bosom now nurseth its treasure.
Although Morris planned a beautifully decorated edition of the poem which was highly valued by him, its failure to impress itself upon the public was no great grief to him, and he put it cheerfully out of mind to devote himself to translation and to Icelandic literature.
The surprising task to which he first turned was a verse translation of Virgil's _aeneid_, in which he attempted to give the closest possible rendering of the Latin and to emphasise the romantic side of Virgil's genius. He followed with an almost word-for-word accuracy the lines and periods of the original using, and he threw over the poem a glamour of romance, but Mr. Mackail says truly that he had taken his life in his hands in essaying a cla.s.sic subject with his inadequate training and uncla.s.sic taste. The same authority, who on this subject, certainly, is not to be disputed by the lay reader, considers the result a success from Morris's own point of view, declaring that he ”vindicated the claim of the romantic school to a joint owners.h.i.+p with the cla.s.sicists in the poem which is not only the crowning achievement of cla.s.sical Latin, but the fountain-head of romanticism in European literature.” The opposing critics are fairly represented by Mr. Andrew Lang, who, in this case as in many another, is an ideal intermediary between scholar and general reader.
”There is no more literal verse-translation of any cla.s.sic poem in English,” he says, ”but Mr. Morris's manner and method appear to me to be mistaken. Virgil's great charm is his perfection of style and the exquisite harmony of his numbers. These are not represented by the singularly rude measures and archaistic language of Mr. Morris. Like Mr.
Morris, Virgil was a learned antiquarian, and perhaps very accomplished scholars may detect traces of voluntary archaism in his language and style. But these, if they exist, certainly do not thrust themselves on the notice of most readers of the _aeneid_. Mr. Morris's phrases would almost seem uncouth in a rendering of Ennius. For example, take
'manet alta mente repostum Judicium Paridis, spretaeque injuria formae.'
This is rendered in a prose version by a fine and versatile scholar, 'deep in her soul lies stored the judgment of Paris, the insult of her slighted beauty.' Mr. Morris translates:
'her inmost heart still sorely did enfold That grief of body set at naught by Paris' doomful deed.'
Can anything be much less Virgilian? Is it even intelligible without the Latin? What modern poet would naturally speak of 'grief of body set at naught,' or call the judgment of Paris 'Paris' doomful deed'? Then 'manet alta mente repostum' is strangely rendered by 'her inmost heart still sorely did enfold.' This is an example of the translation at its worst, but defects of the sort ill.u.s.trated are so common as to leave an impression of wilful ruggedness, and even obscurity, than which what can be less like Virgil? Where Virgil describes the death of Troilus, 'et versa pulvis inscribitus hasta' ('and his reversed spear scores the dust'), Mr. Morris has 'his wrested spear a-writing in the dust,' and Troilus has just been 'a-fleeing weaponless.' Our doomful deed, is that to be a-translating thus is to write with wrested pen, and to give a rendering of Virgil as unsatisfactory as it is technically literal. In short, Mr. Morris's _aeneid_ seems on a par with Mr. Browning's _Agamemnon_. But this,” Mr. Lang is careful to add, ”is a purely personal verdict: better scholars and better critics have expressed a far higher opinion of Mr. Morris's translation of Virgil.”
Mr. Lang's whimsical despair over the affectations of language which abound in the translation of the _aeneid_ with less pertinence than in many other writings of Morris where also they abound, recalls the remonstrance that Stevenson could not resist writing out in the form of a letter although it was never sent on its mission. Acknowledging his debt to Morris for many ”unforgettable poems,” the younger writer and more accomplished student of language protests against the indiscriminate use of the word _whereas_ in the translations from the sagas. ”For surely, Master,” he says, ”that tongue that we write, and that you have ill.u.s.trated so n.o.bly, is yet alive. She has her rights and laws, and is our mother, our queen, and our instrument. Now in that living tongue, _where_ has one sense, _whereas_ another.”
The translation of the _aeneid_ was published under the t.i.tle of _The aeneids_, in the autumn of 1875. Morris had written a good part of it in the course of his trips back and forth on the Underground Railway, using for these first drafts a stiff-covered copybook, which was his constant companion. In the summer of the same year he had brought out a volume of the translations from the Icelandic which he was making in collaboration with Mr. Magnusson, calling it _Three Northern Love-Stories and Other Tales_. He had still, he declared ”but few converts to Saga-ism,” and he regarded his translating from the Icelandic as a pure luxury, adopting it for a Sunday amus.e.m.e.nt. During the winter of 1875-76, however, he was embarked on a cognate enterprise of the utmost importance to him, although he thought, and with truth, that his public would be indifferent to it.
This was the epic poem which he called _The Story of Sigurd the Volsung_, based on the Volsunga Saga, the story of the great Northern heroes told and re-told from generation to generation, polished and perfected until the final form, in which it preserves the traditions of the people who cherish it, is the n.o.blest attained in the Icelandic legends. Morris had published a prose translation of the saga in 1870, and the following pa.s.sage from his preface shows how deeply his emotions were stirred by his subject:
”As to the literary quality of this work we might say much,” he writes, ”but we think we may well trust the reader of poetic insight to break through whatever entanglement of strange manners or unused element may at first trouble him, and to meet the nature and beauty with which it is filled: we cannot doubt that such a reader will be intensely touched by finding amidst all its wildness and remoteness such startling realism, such subtlety, such close sympathy with all the pa.s.sions that may move himself to-day. In conclusion, we must again say how strange it seems to us, that this Volsung Tale, which is in fact an unversified poem, should never before 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 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.”
In the course of the following six years, during which he was constantly increasing his intimacy with the literature of the North, an impulse not unlike that which tempted Tennyson toward the _Idylls of the King_ led him to try the winning of a wider audience for the tale of great deeds and elemental pa.s.sions by which he himself had been so much inspired. In the prose translation he had given the Volsunga Saga to the public as it had been created for an earlier public of more savage tastes and fiercer tendencies. Now he proposed to divest it of some of the childish and ugly details that formed a stumbling block to the modern reader (though plausible and interesting enough to those for whom they were invented), and to add to the ”unversified poem” rhyme and metre, emphasising the essential points and such characteristics of the actors as most appealed to him. A comparison of the saga with the poem will show that in his effort to preserve the heroic character of the antique conception by accentuating everything pleasing, leaving out much of the rudeness and cruelty, and adorning it with copious descriptive pa.s.sages, he robs the story of a great part of the wild life stirring in its ancient forms, and more or less confuses and involves it. The modern poem really requires for its right understanding a mind more instructed in its subject than the prose translation of the old saga, and readers to whom the latter is unfamiliar may find a plain outline of the story not superfluous.
In the translation, the origin of the n.o.ble Volsung race, of which Sigurd is the flower and crown, is traced to Sigi, called the son of Odin, and sent out from his father's land for killing a thrall. He is fortunate in war, marries a n.o.ble wife, and rules over the land of the Huns. His son is named Rerir. Volsung is the son of Rerir, and thus the great-grandson of Odin himself. He marries the daughter of a giant, and the ten sons and one daughter of this union are strong in sinew and huge in size, the Volsung race having the fame of being ”great men and high-minded and far above the most of men both in cunning and in prowess and all things high and mighty.” Volsung becomes in his turn king over Hunland, and builds for himself a n.o.ble Hall in the centre of which grows an oak-tree whose limbs ”blossom fair out over the roof of the hall,” and the trunk of which is called Branstock.