Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/364

ÆT. 43] 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 unsealed 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's 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 fainthearts 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