nd directness of our English tongue four centuries ago. From an
artistic point of view it may be described as an attempt to return by a
self-conscious effort to the conditions of an earlier and a fresher age.
Attempts of this kind are not uncommon in the history of art. From some
such feeling came the Pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day and the
archaistic movement of later Greek sculpture. When the result is
beautiful the method is justified, and no shrill insistence upon a
supposed necessity for absolute modernity of form can prevail against the
value of work that has the incomparable excellence of style. Certainly,
Mr. Morris's work possesses this excellence. His fine harmonies and rich
cadences create in the reader that spirit by which alone can its own
spirit be interpreted, awake in him something of the temper of romance
and, by taking him out of his own age, place him in a truer and more
vital relation to the great masterpieces of all time. It is a bad thing
for an age to be always looking in art for its own reflection. It is
well that, now and then, we are given work that is nobly imaginative in
its method and purely artistic in its aim. As we read Mr. Morris's story
with its fine alternations of verse and prose, its decorative and
descriptive beauties, its wonderful handling of romantic and adventurous
themes, we cannot but feel that we are as far removed from the ignoble
fiction as we are from the ignoble facts of our own day. We breathe a
purer air, and have dreams of a time when life had a kind of poetical
quality of its own, and was simple and stately and complete.

The tragic interest of The House of the Wolfings centres round the figure
of Thiodolf, the great hero of the tribe. The goddess who loves him
gives him, as he goes to battle against the Romans, a magical hauberk on
which rests this strange fate: that he who wears it shall save his own
life and destroy the life of his land. Thiodolf, finding out this
secret, brings the hauberk back to the Wood-Sun, as she is called, and
chooses death for himself rather than the ruin of his cause, and so the
story ends.

But Mr. Morris has always preferred romance to tragedy, and set the
development of action above the concentration of passion. His story is
like some splendid old tapestry crowded with stately images and enriched
with delicate and delightful detail. The impression it leaves on us is
not of a single central figure dominating the whole