52. The Sagas and modern life – Morris, Mr Yeats, and the originals: Dorothy M. Hoare, The Works of Morris and of Yeats
‘And yet one hesitates’, says Miss Hoare on page 145 of her scholarly essay. It is timely and honestly said, and it is on a certain hesitation that much of the value of her book depends. Her task has been to compare certain works by Morris and Mr Yeats with their Icelandic or Irish originals and to explain the differences between them.
Such studies encourage a confusion between changes of kind and losses of value, as when we see Pope condemned for being unlike Theocritus, or Tennyson for being unlike Malory. But Miss Hoare, for the most part, has escaped this disease. Her final judgement on ‘Sigurd the Volsung’ perhaps assumes that what is ‘more in the nature of tragedy’ (like the Saga) must differ from what is less tragic simply as better differs from worse: and her excellent account of Mr. Stephen's ‘Deirdre’ is sometimes less concerned to establish the goodness either of the ectype or of the archetype than to praise both for their similarity.
In general, however, the author cannot be accused of thus mixing questions. Her belief that the medieval originals are not only different from but also better than the corresponding pieces by Morris and Mr Yeats, is conscious and explicit: to defend it is part of her purpose. The initial difficulty – how things, on Miss Hoare's own showing, so unlike can be arranged in a unilinear series of value – has not been solved: but in other respects her position is clear. The old texts have a ‘fierce active response to life’, reveal ‘actuality’ and treat of ‘feelings at the root of human nature’; the modern versions, on the other hand, exist at a ‘remove from actuality’ and ‘seek to evade life’. Such expressions as ‘a bias away from reality’, ‘unable to face distasteful facts’, ‘escape from life’, ‘without significance and reality’, ‘away from reality to vagueness and dream’, recur in her pages with monotonous, but perhaps unavoidable, frequency.
If this were all that Miss Hoare had to offer, her book would be less interesting than it is. The theory of literature implied would not be new nor very profound; and that sense of the words ‘reality’ and ‘life’ which excludes such emotional experience as that expressed in The Shadowy Waters, or even our emotions about the imagined past, would need further definition. To cry for the moon is, after all, a commoner experience for most of us than to suffocate a wife or to be turned out into a thunderstorm by our pelican daughters: it also lasts longer. But here Miss Hoare's invaluable hesitation saves her from dullness. The most interesting characteristic of her book – the thing most useful to others in her predicament and fullest of promise for her own future as a critic – is the discrepancy between her actual literary experience and her implicit literary theory. Her very choice of subjects reveals it; and so does the fact that her most ‘emotive’ pages of criticism are devoted to Morris's prose romances and to The Shadowy Waters itself. Of this she admits with truthful reluctance that ‘one can abandon oneself to it for a time’. Similarly, after complaining that The Life and Death of Jason ‘is never strung up to intolerable pitch’ (why should it be?) and sadly lacks ‘rawness and fierceness of passion’, she frankly adds that ‘somehow’ – the word is significant – ‘somehow . . . one reads, and reads to the end’. It is ‘only when the end has been reached’ that Miss Hoare discovers its defects; only, in other words, when she passes from imaginative experience to literary theories.
To praise a critic for honesty will seem damnation by faint praise only to those who have never tried very hard either at honesty or criticism; but it is a great thing to remain true to the facts under a severe strain.
Of Mr Yeats posterity will judge. Of Morris we can only say that Miss Hoare should read him again, with less submission to a narrow theory of literature. His real theme is very difficult to describe, but it is ‘actual’ enough. Morris himself does not state it philosophically. We may say, if we will, that it becomes explicit in The House of the Wolfings when the hero has to choose between immortality and mortal life with ‘the kindreds’, or again in The Glittering Plain where we reach the land of the everliving only to long for our escape from it. But in so far as these stories pose a question and give an answer they are not typical. More characteristic is the strange poise of the Argonauts between ‘formless and wailing thoughts’ and the recurrent business of sail-mending, launching, and camping: or the knight who carries with him to the well of life, and back, the resolution to be a good king in his own small country. But we cannot, in the long run, thus disengage characters or episodes. From the whole atmosphere of each tale arises our awareness that something which has made the vast unnoticed background to much of our experience is at last being given expression. We recognise (it is no other poet's theme) the endless hithering and thithering of natural desire, the irrepressible thirst for immortality, and its inevitable recoil to the familiar – the sweet familiar whose very sweetness must once more reawake the rebel passion. Morris may build a world in some ways happier than the real one; but happiness puts as stern a question as misery. It is this dialectic of desire, presented with no solution, no lies, no panacea, which gives him his peculiar bittersweet quality, and also his solidity. He has faced the fact. There are greater writers than Morris. You can go on from him to all manner of subtleties and sublimities which he does not offer: but you cannot go behind him.
Fortunately Miss Hoare has a real appreciation of romantic literature which the mistaken scruples of her literary conscience cannot wholly suppress. She is free from the usual misunderstandings of Morris's prose style, and sensitive to that quality in him which she happily describes as ‘cleared and cool’ – his triumph over ‘turmoil and muddle’, and his ‘mature, autumnal quiet’. She sees that his romance is ‘not entirely an airy thing’ but full of ‘actual vivid sights and sounds’.
Her account of Mr Yeats's earlier manner is not unsympathetic, and she has good things to say about its characteristic rhythms. Perhaps by underemphasizing the element of believed occultism in his work (she touches the subject only once) she is led to neglect that important cleavage between him and Morris which results from the difference between fantasy known for such by author and reader alike and that which is not truly fantasy at all, being fact for the author and error for most readers. Both, no doubt, would be flights from reality on Miss Hoare's view; but surely not flights of the same kind or of the same significance.
On Morris's real defects as a translator Miss Hoare has much that is valuable to say. Certainly whenso and were or ware have overtones for us which the style of the sagas probably had not for their first hearers. It is a nice question whether their translator should give his readers what they would have got if they had been medieval Icelanders or what they would get if they now knew how to read Icelandic. Morris is as much in love with the language as with the stories – its influence on his original prose is considerable – and he is tempted by the second ideal; and, though he does not succeed, his methods are reasonable in so far as Icelandic strikes the modern ear as an archaic speech. The problem becomes most acute in the translation of Kenningar. We cannot, in a literary version, sit on the fence and say with Miss Hoare ‘ships (lit. sail-steeds)’. If we write twigsbane, wormsbed and Odin's ransom we produce an oddity which the original had not: if we write ‘fire’, ‘gold’ and ‘eye’ we are omitting its most obvious characteristics.
Miss Hoare's account of the Icelandic sagas is attractive and duly praises ‘the barrenness and coolness of the expression’ and the ‘way in which things are not said’. One may venture to doubt whether either the behaviour of the heroes or the style owe as much to nature and as little to art as her words sometimes suggest. No noble tradition of speech or conduct is likely to be ‘natural’ except in the sense in which everything is natural. On p. 46 there is a slight ambiguity: the uninstructed reader would infer that Birdalone comes in The Well at the World's End and not in The Water of the Wondrous Isles. And the same reader might be even more misled when on p. 54 Miss Hoare says that Morris's ‘they tilted over a wain’ (for þeir tjölduþu vagu) suggests ‘a kind of leisure wrestling’.