ABSTRACT
Mr. Morris's Northern Poems are not only interesting in themselves, for those qualities of dim beauty and sweetness long drawn out in which few poets since Spenser can approach him, but as recalling attention to the whole cycle of Northern mythology. Nearly half a century ago Mr. Carlyle, in his essay on the Nibelungen Lied, spoke with 'gratitude and love' of the unknown singers of that 'wondrous old tale,' with 'its true epic spirit, its meaning and charms for us'; and again, in his Lectures, he found out the perennial value ofthe old Odin worship which was the centre of the Northern religions. But since then, till very lately, there has been no re-creation of the stories themselves for a modern public, no attempt to reinvest the characters of the Sagas and their German counterparts with a human interest. At last, however, and in the same year, 'music and sweet poetry agree' to recall Sigurd or Siegfried, Chriemhild or Gudrun, from their sleep of ages; in Bayreuth and in London Wagner and Morris make simultaneous celebration. Perhaps this is no more than a coincidence; and no doubt with the German the dominant motive was one that is absent from the English poet-that is to say, a national motive. But Mr. Morris's own interest in this subject is a sign of the times. Let us not call it a reaction against the influence of the South, against Greek art and classical tradition; rather it is a new development of that very Renascencewhich brought Greek models back to Europe-it is a fresh departure in the 'search for beauty and pleasure' which the Renascence began. Science, in showing the essential unity of all mythologies, has given the hint; and now the artist asks, if Greece in gazing upon the Sun created Apollo, the North in the same way created Sigurd, and how is Sigurd less beautiful than Apollo? Change what must be changed, for the Athenian, 'ever delicately moving through most polluted air,' put the Northman, Goth or Volsung, toiling over the waste and the fell, or feasting while the storm beats upon his hall, and you have the same field for poetry, the same eternal human passions, and the same needs, 'hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love
and death.' Human nature is wide, it is true, and the 'note' of a Northern poem must be different from the note of a Southern; the Greek is full of a senseof order, the Saga-maker of a sense of mystery; but the humanity is at bottom the same in both. It is in the admirable way in which he has wedded these two elements, the living and human element, and the special Northern element of mystery-a mystery as ofthe storm, a senseofdark dragon-haunted places, ofunknown forces ringing in man's life-that Mr. Morris has made good his claim to be considered in the first rank of modern poets. We regard this Story o..f Sigurd as his greatest and most successful effort; of all poetical qualitie s strength, subtlety, vividness,mystery, melody, variety-there is hardly one that it does not exhibit in a very high degree.
