other; while Morris leaves it as he found it, a looselyfashioned recital which snaps in half under the pressure of re-telling.

In other words, the story of Sigmund and the story of Sigurd, as the saga gives them, have no real continuity; not only is each complete by itself, but they belong to entirely different imaginations. Sigurd and Brynhild, as was indicated just now, are, for all their ruthlessness, sensitive to a network of forces as subtle as can readily be either exposed or understood; whereas for Sigmund and his sister-wife there is in their terrible simplicity no such thing as doubt, and no law but that of vengeance. The tale of the woes of Sigmund is no more complicated than fire and sword; the woes of Sigurd are as much more unspeakable as jealousy is keener than revenge, or as wounded love is more relentless than hatred. The two parts of the drama do not act themselves upon the same level; and yet the earlier is itself too tremendous and too self-centred to form a subordinate introduction. Morris refused a great opportunity when he elected to bind himself by the form of the saga (though even he, it may be noted, does not pursue the end quite as far as the insatiable saga-writer)-the opportunity of bringing this incomparable matter of heroes and high deeds, of a breadth and a reach into human depths beyond even the genius of the Greeks, into the circle of a single imagination. But of what he took instead he made the greatest epic that modern days have seen.

Morris's work as a translator, from the moment he left the comparatively straightforward problem of Icelandic for the thornier field of the classics, must here be passed over, as raising too many outlying questions. Neither his Odyssey nor his Aeneid has taken an unchallenged place among existing versions, though, indeed, so far as that goes, they rank themselves below none of the rest. It will be better to save available space for the original work of his later years, putting with it the morality of 1871, 'Love is Enough.' Between 'Sigurd' (1876) and the Odyssey ten years later Morris published nothing, making, during that time, one comprehensive sacrifice of all his spare energies to the 'cause-it was his own word, and meant, as he understood it, not the abandon

ment of art, but the sole means of furthering it which could be ultimately effective. The melancholy record of disappointment and disillusion-never in respect of the ideals he had divined, but only of the brains and the nerves of those whom he supposed to have divined them too-ended in his return, for the last ten years of his life, to the serener ways which no one, however, can venture to say he had left in vain. The writings with which he was incessantly occupied from this point until his death -he dictated the last lines of his last book within a month of the end-reflect in its completeness the final form in which his conclusions had adjusted themselves. He wrote no more verse; but the Dream of John Ball'and 'News from Nowhere,' as well as the series of romances which began with 'The House of the Wolfings 'and ended with The Sundering Flood,' are poetry, it may almost be said, in all but their shape. From them we may disentangle the three closely-twisted strands which for Morris made up the fitting life of a man.

There is first his relation towards his work. This, the most urgent question of all, as Morris held it, because the one that seemed furthest from its right answer, is here beyond our purpose. He answered it himself, with an imagination as mellow and charming as it may perhaps be felt to be innocent, in his two idylls, named above, of the past and the future. Innocence, in such a connexion, may not be the quality which most inspires confidence. No doubt it is not for what are called practical details that we should read News from Nowhere,' but rather for a generalisation more practical (to say the least of it) than any detail, the demand of the future for a new spirit, in the evident bankruptcy of the old. The book was written in a strong impulse of reaction from theories offered to the world in the name of rigid common-sense ; but there is more common-sense in Morris's divination of some of the less easily formulated needs of man than we shall soon understand or exhaust.

Next to this comes man's relation to the earth he lives on, to all the growth and decay and re-growth which is bound on to the circle of the seasons-the principle of life on which our own so closely depends, but from which, say what we will, we so deeply distinguish it. And here, In a matter cheapened and sentimentalised as we have

seen it by every shade of slackness in thought and insincerity in practice, we may well find ourselves turning even from the spectacle of disciplined philosophies and soundly emotional insight, to the utterly simple and direct appeal which drew Morris to the sights and sounds and smells of the earth. He loved it with hunger, but loved it somehow as one who has really had to do with it, who has handled and worked with it too closely to have any high names for its influence, not as one who has only watched and questioned it, with whatever concentration and brilliance. There is a word which is a touchstone for this particular strain of feeling, whether or no it is the strain we prefer. If we ask of which of the writers famous for their celebrations of nature' the word 'bucolic' can be used, the ground becomes wonderfully cleared. Virgil remains there and a few others, but none with a swifter response than Morris. Others may have driven their questions deeper; Morris gives a sense of not having thought or cared about any such matter, so secure was he in his possession of the thing questioned. Intense as his feeling is, and rare as anything of the sort may be in the daily world, it is plain that it is not in its nature a possession for genius only. The possibility, in the things any child of man might have for his own, of beauty and wonder enough to fill a life from end to end -that was Morris's deepest belief; and his own delight in beauty was not other in kind than might be shared by the humblest.

And the same is to be said of the spirit in which he touched that other relation, whose all-embracing aspect found in 'Love is Enough' the completest expression he ever gave it. Later on, in the form of prose romance which he invented for himself, it was at times as though some strengthening influence had been lost with the abandonment of verse; for it must be admitted of these very charming books that the cup of their amorosity is too lavishly, too perpetually brimmed. Such writing may well and rightly be pretty and sugared very nearly up to the point at which it shall occur to the discriminating reader to use those words; but the moment the words are actually uttered the pages are condemned. Morris's glittering plains and wondrous isles and woods beyond the world never have much margin to spare, and not

seldom they pay the forfeit. They are one and all delightful, and they have passages of high beauty, but for the sound and exquisite strain we are concerned with they will not serve. For this we turn to what is technically the most elaborately complicated structure that Morris ever devised, the morality of 'The Freeing of Pharamond.' Here the extreme ingenuity of the formthe 'receding planes' on which the action takes place, the endless subtleties in the distribution of metre, the deft modulations of lyric, elegiac, dramatic effect-might have made it and left it a sort of toy of filigree, but that all the intricacy is mastered and brought to its place by the strong undecorated simplicity of the emotion. There is perhaps no poem of its length (it fills more than a hundred pages) in which the ornament is more thoroughly organic. It leaves one long impression of beauty, changing and shifting from moment to moment, but changing, like water streaming over a rock, with the lines of the structure beneath. Pharamond's love has no philosophic articulation, no transcendent mysteries, no lingering delight in expression; it looks straight in one direction and looks there always, with the one simple craving for self-surrender and for identification with the love that somewhere at last, far off, will turn to meet it. Such, then, is the triad that Morris gives us senting a quality of life which justifies itself. seer or a saint, offering purer airs and keener lights in return for an ever more arduous effort and sacrifice, but as a man who believes that life may be turned to immeasurable beauty by every hand that works and every heart that feels-so Morris lived, and so he expressed himself in all his varied achievement. His achievement was art; and his art, as we explore and analyse it, is always rewarding us with fresh aspects of its charm. But art, in Morris's view, need never be named as part of our demand from life, being no more and no less than the expression of a life which is rightly based, an expression it could not withhold if it would. That is a conclusion which spreads far beyond the limits of literary criticism; but it belongs to that criticism to remember that the point where it drops its quest was to Morris the beginning of the meaning of art.

as repre

Not as a

PERCY LUBBOCK.

Art. 10. THE ENGLISH BIBLE.

1. The Authorised Version of the English Bible, 1611. Edited by W. Aldis Wright. Five vols. Cambridge: University Press, 1909.

2. The Authorized Edition of the English Bible, 1611; its subsequent reprints and modern representatives. By

F. H. A. Scrivener. Cambridge: University Press, 1910. 3. The Holy Bible. A Facsimile. . . of the Authorized Version. With an introduction by A. W. Pollard, and illustrative documents. Oxford: University Press, 1911. 4. The Hexaplar Psalter. Edited by W. Aldis Wright. Cambridge: University Press, 1911.

5. Records of the English Bible. The documents relating to the translation and publication of the Bible in English, 1525-1611. Edited with an introduction by A. W. Pollard. London: Frowde, 1911.

6. The History of the English Bible. By John Brown. Cambridge: University Press, 1911.

7. Our English Bible. By H. W. Hoare. Revised edition. London: Murray, 1911.

IT was to be expected that the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, so long and so intimately associated with the printing of the English Bible, should lead the way in celebrating the tercentenary of the year 1611; and no fault can be found with the manner in which they have performed this duty. Two years ago the Cambridge Press published a careful reprint of the Authorised Version in a form convenient for the modern reader, who is intolerant of heavy books; and this reprint has been supplemented by a re-issue of Dr Scrivener's scholarly work on the original text and on the 'numberless and not inconsiderable' variations from it which have been introduced in succeeding editions. From the same Press comes also Mr Aldis Wright's Hexaplar Psalter, a most valuable contribution to the internal history of the English Bible, in which the six principal English versions of the Psalms, from Coverdale's first translation to that of the Revisers in our own time, are printed side by side; while Dr Brown contributes a convenient résumé of the external facts with some interesting