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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
William Morris once said to a friend, “if there is a God, He never meant us to know much about Himself, or indeed to concern ourselves about Him at all.” The remark indicates a relationship that several of Morris' early stories and poems have to each other. In “Lindenborg Pool,” the protagonist seeks, but does not receive, a sign from God; in “The Hollow Land,” two medieval knights who thought they did have signs from God finally realize that they have only taken their own judgments for His; and even “The Judgment of God,” in spite of its title, argues that men should not attempt to ascertain God's judgment. Morris' Guenevere, in her “Defence,” does not defend herself against the charge of adultery but against Gauwaine's claim that his judgment is the same as God's. On the other hand, when Guenevere (in the poem “King Arthur's Tomb”) follows Morris' advice, when she does not concern herself about God or His judgment, she discovers the truth about her guilt, that while she may not have sinned against God (as Gauwaine said she had), she has certainly sinned against a man, against Arthur, her husband.
1 The Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris (London: Longmans, 1910-15), xxiii, 280. Unless (as here) otherwise noted, Morris' quotations are from Vol. i of The Collected Works, and page and line numbers have been incorporated into the text.
2 The Letters of William Morris, ed. Philip Henderson (London: Longmans, 1950), p. 290.
3 John Heath-Stubbs, The Darkling Plain (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1950), p. 170.
4 J. Bruce Glasier, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement (London: Longmans, 1921), p. 171. I am aware of R. Page Arnot's harsh comments about Glasier's book (Arnot, William Morris: The Man and the Myth, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1964, p. 14), and I contend that what I have to say in this article vindicates much of Glasier's chapter on “Morris and Religion.”
5 The two most recent books about Morris, Philip Henderson's new biography, William Morris: His Life, Work, and Friends (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), and Paul Thompson's general introduction, The Work of William Morris (London: Heinemann, 1967), say nothing about his early stories and little about his early poetry. What they do say is very like what was said twenty years ago by Graham Hough (The Last Romantics, London: Duckworth, 1949) and again recently by Cecil Lang (The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), that Morris' early poetry owes a debt to Browning's dramatic techniques and to Rossetti's vivid details, While this generally accepted opinion certainly describes Morris' early poetry, it does not begin to define his themes.
6 The most recent studies of “The Defence of Guenevere,” by Laurence Perrine (“Morris's Guenevere: An Interpretation,” PQ, 39, 1960, 234–41), Mother Angela Carson, O.S.U. (“Morris' Guenevere: A Further Note,” PQ, 42, 1963, 131–34), and Carole G. Silver (‘“The Defence of Guenevere’:, A Further Interpretation,” SEL, 9, 1969, 695–702), agree that Guenevere's innocence or guilt of adultery is important, the usual opinion of the poem.