William Morris

The Critical Heritage

Peter Faulkner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415134743
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136175282
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. The Collected Critical Heritage set will be available as a set of 68 volumes and the series will also be available in mini sets selected by period (in slipcase boxes) and as individual volumes.

THE DEFENCE OF GUENEVERE, AND OTHER POEMS

1858

1. Unsigned notice, Spectator

February 1858, xxxi, 238

For a discussion of these reviews, see Introduction, pp. 6-7.

The Poems of Mr. William Morris chiefly relate to the knights and ladies of King Arthur’s time, and nearly all the rest of the pieces belong to the vaguely fabulous age of chivalry; though the author has introduced into his poems touches of what modern research or judgment has shown to be its real coarseness and immorality. To our taste, the style is as bad as bad can be. Mr. Morris imitates little save faults. He combines the mawkish simplicity of the Cockney school with the prosaic baldness of the worst passages of Tennyson, and the occasional obscurity and affectation of plainness that characterize Browning and his followers. Some of the smaller poems are less unpleasing in their manner than the bulk of the book, and a poetical spirit runs through the whole, save where it is unskilfully overlaid. We do not, however, augur much promise from this power; the faults of affectation and bad taste seem too deeply seated.

2. Richard Garnett, unsigned review, Literary Gazette

March 1858, xlii, 226-7

May Morris, in her Introduction to her father’s Collected Works (London, 1910-15), IV, x, attributes this friendly review to Joseph Knight. But Knight was in Leeds until 1860 (see No. 7). The review was more probably the work of Richard Garnett (1835-1908), who had recently begun his career at the British Museum; it is attributed to him with convincing circumstantial detail in an article in the Dublin University Magazine, November 1878, n.s. ii, 557, entitled ‘William Morris, M.A.', and in a later article by O. L. Triggs in Poet-Lore, March 1893, v, 116, entitled ‘The Socialistic Thread in the Life and Works of William Morris’ (when the date is given as 6 March 1859). May Morris refers to a review by Garnett of The Defence of Guenevere as ‘cordial and discriminating’ in Collected Works, I, xxi.

It might not be easy to find a more striking example of the indestructibility of anything truly beautiful, than the literary resurrection of King Arthur and his Knights, after so many centuries’ entombment in the Avalon of forgetfulness. The Israfel of this revival was Mr. Tennyson, the first peal of whose awakening trumpet sounded some twenty-six years ago in his marvellous ‘Lady of Shalott,’ followed by utterances of no inferior beauty, some made public for our delight, others, it is whispered, as yet withheld from us. But the movement thus inaugurated has taken a direction which Mr. Tennyson cannot have anticipated. We are not alluding to Sir E. Bulwer’s elegant but affected and artificial ‘King Arthur,’ nor to Mr. Arnold’s lovely ‘Tristram and Iseult.’ These are remarkable poems, but not startling phenomena. But the pre-Raphaelite poets and painters have made the Arthurian cyclus their own, by a treatment no less strange and original than that which has already thrown such novel light on the conceptions of Shakspeare and the scenery of Palestine. Not long since our columns contained a notice of certain fresco illustrations of Arthurian romance attempted at Oxford by painters of this school, who, being for the most part utterly unknown to fame, may be supposed to have been invented on purpose. One of these gentlemen has now enabled us to form some opinion of his qualifications for his task by the publication of the book before us; and we do not hesitate to pronounce, that if he do but wield the brush to half as much purpose as the pen, his must be pictures well worth a long pilgrimage to see.

In advocating the claims of an unknown poet to public attention, it is before all things necessary to establish his originality—a very easy matter in the present instance. It might almost have seemed impossible for any one to write about Arthur without some trace of Tennysonian influences, yet, for Mr. Morris, the Laureate might never have existed at all. Every one knows Tennyson’s ‘Sir Galahad’—Mr. Morris’s exquisite poem on the same subject is unfortunately much too long for quotation, but our meaning will be sufficiently illustrated by a few of the initiatory stanzas:

It is the longest night in all the year,

Near on the day when the Lord Christ was born;

Six hours ago I came and sat down here,

And ponder’d sadly, wearied and forlorn.

The winter wind that pass’d the chapel-door,

Sang out a moody tune, that went right well

With mine own thoughts: I look’d down on the floor,

Between my feet, until I heard a bell

Sound a long way off through the forest deep,

And toll on steadily; a drowsiness

Came on me, so that I fell half asleep,

As I sat there not moving: less and less

I saw the melted snow that hung in beads

Upon my steel-shoes, less and less I saw

Between the tiles the bunches of small weeds:

Heartless and stupid, with no touch of awe

Upon me, half-shut eyes upon the ground,

I thought; O! Galahad, the days go by,

Stop and cast up now that which you have found,

So sorely you have wrought and painfully.

The difference between the two poets obviously is that Tennyson writes of mediaeval things like a modern, and Mr. Morris like a contemporary. Tennyson’s ‘Sir Galahad’ is Tennyson himself in an enthusiastic and devotional mood; Mr. Morris’s is the actual champion, just as he lived and moved and had his being some twelve hundred years ago. Tennyson is the orator who makes a speech for another; Mr. Morris the reporter who writes down what another man says. Whatever medievalists may assert, poetry flourishes far more in the nineteenth century than it ever did in the seventh; accordingly the Laureate is as superior in brilliance of phrase, finish of style, and magic of versification, as he is inferior in dramatic propriety and couleur locale. We might continue this parallel for ever, but shall bring the matter to a head by observing that Mr. Morris’s poems bear exactly the same relation to Tennyson’s as Rossetti’s illustrations of the Laureate to the latter’s own conceptions. We observed in noticing these designs that they illustrated anything in the world rather than Tennyson, and have certainly seen no reason to change our opinion. The more we view them, the more penetrated we become with their wonderful beauty (always excepting that remarkable angel in the Robinson Crusoe cap), but also the more impressed with their utter incompatibility with their text. Tennyson is the modern par excellence, the man of his age; Rossetti and Morris are the men of the middle age; and while this at once places them in a position of inferiority as regards Tennyson, it increases their interest towards ourselves, as giving us what it would be vain to expect from any one else. Who but Mr. Rossetti or his double could have written anything like this?—

For these vile things that hem me in,temporary.

These Pagan beasts who live in sin,

The sickly flowers pale and wan,

The grim blue-bearded castellan,

The stanchions half worn-out with rust,

Whereto their banner vile they trust—

Why, all these things I hold them just

Like dragons in a missal-book,

Wherein, whenever we may look,

We see no horror, yea, delight We have, the colours are so bright;

Likewise we note the specks of white,

And the great plates of burnish’d gold.

Just so this Pagan castle old,

And everything I can see there,

Sick-pining in the marshland air,

I note; I will go over now,

Like one who paints with knitted brow,

The flowers and all things one by one,

From the snail on the wall to the setting sun.

Four great walls, and a little one

That leads down to the barbican,

Which walls with many spears they man,

When news comes to the castellan

Of Launcelot being in the land.

And as I sit here, close at hand

Four spikes of sad sick sunflowers stand,

The castellan with a long wand

Cuts down their leaves as he goes by,

Ponderingly, with screw’d up eye,

And fingers twisted in his beard—

Nay, was it a knight’s shout I heard?

Other pieces are yet more characteristic; for example, ‘Golden Wings,’ which seems to conduct us through a long gallery of Mr. Rossetti’s works, with all their richness of colouring, depth of pathos, poetical but eccentric conception, and loving elaboration of every minute detail. After all, those who have read the beautiful poems, contributed by the painter to the defunct Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, will probably think this dissertation and Mr. Morris’s dedication equally superfluous.

Another influence, however, has done something towards making Mr. Morris what he is. In spite of his having taken every precaution that human foresight can suggest to render himself unintelligible, it is impossible that so fine a poet and deep a thinker as Mr. Browning should remain without influence on a generation so accessible as our own to the fascination of genius. Accordingly his influence widens day by day, and he already counts several disciples of unusual talent, from Mr. Owen Meredith downwards. These, however, are too undisguisedly imitators to earn a higher praise than that of considerable adroitness. In Mr....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Note on the Text
• The Defence of Guenevere, and other Poems (1858)
• 2 RICHARD GARNETT, unsigned review, Literary Gazette, March 1858
• 3 H. F. CHORLEY, unsigned review, Athenaeum, April 1858
• 4 Unsigned review, Tablet, April 1858
• 5 Unsigned review, Saturday Review, November 1858
• 6 J. H. SHORTHOUSE contrasts Morris with Tennyson, 1859
• The Life and Death of Jason (1867)
• 8 A. C. SWINBURNE, review, Fortnightly Review, July 1867
• 9 C. E. NORTON, review, Nation, August 1867
• 10 HENRY JAMES, unsigned review, North American Review, October 1867
• 11 HENRY JAMES, a novelist’s view of the Morrises, March 1869
• The Earthly Paradise (1868-70)
• 13 ALFRED AUSTIN, unsigned article, Temple Bar, November 1869
• 14 Unsigned review, Pall Mall Budget, December 1869
• 15 G. A. SIMCOX, review, Academy, February 1870
• 16 Unsigned review, Spectator, March 1870
• 17 SIDNEY COLVIN, review, Academy, December 1870
• 18 G. W. COX, unsigned review, Edinburgh Review, January 1871
• 19 Unsigned review, Westminster Review, April 1871
• The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs (1870)
• 21 Unsigned review, Spectator, August 1870
• 22 Unsigned article, New Englander, October 1871
• 23 W. J. COURTHOPE, unsigned article, Quarterly Review, January 1872
• Comments by contemporary men of letters
• 25 ALFRED TENNYSON, 1867-84
• 26 ROBERT BROWNING, 1868-70
• 27 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, 1856-71
• 28 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, 1858-95
• 29 GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, 1877-81
• 30 Southern American views, 1868-84
• Love is Enough (1872)
• 32 SIDNEY COLVIN, review, Fortnightly Review, January 1873
• Three Northern Love Stories (1875)
• The Aeneids of Vergil (1875)
• 35 HENRY NETTLESHIP, review, Academy, November 1875
• 36 SIDNEY LANIER, article, Southern Magazine, January 1875
• Sigurd the Volsung (1876)
• 38 EDMUND GOSSE, review, Academy, December 1876
• 39 Unsigned review, Saturday Review, January 1877
• 40 Unsigned review, Literary World, February 1877
• 41 Unsigned review, North American Review, March 1877
• 42 Unsigned review, Atlantic Monthly, April 1877
• 43 HENRY HEWLETT, review, Eraser’s Magazine, July 1877
• 44 Unsigned review, International Review, September 1877
• 45 OSCAR WILDE on Morris and the English Renaissance, January 1882
• Hopes and Fears for Art (1882)
• 47 Unsigned review, Century Magazine, July 1882
• 48 Unsigned review, Athenaeum, September 1882
• 49 Unsigned article, Saturday Review, January 1885
• The Odyssey of Horner (1887-8)
• 51 OSCAR WILDE, unsigned reviews, Pall Mall Magazine, April 1887 and November 1888
• 52 MOWBRAY MORRIS, unsigned article, Quarterly Review, October 1888
• 53 EDWARD DOWDEN: ‘Mr. Morris has found a faith’, 1888
• Signs of Change (1888)
• 55 Unsigned review, Today, November 1888
• A Dream of John Ball (1888)
• The House of the Wolfings (1889)
• 58 HENRY HEWLETT, review, Nineteenth Century, August 1889
• 59 Unsigned review, Atlantic Monthly, June 1890
• The Roots of the Mountains (1890)
• News from Nowhere (1891)
• 62 MAURICE HEWLETT, review, National Review, August 1891
• 63 NORDAU ON Morris’s degeneracy, 1892
• Poems by the Way (1892)
• 65 OLIVER ELTON, review, Academy, February 1892
• Socialism: its Growth and Outcome (1893)
• 67 Unsigned review, Critic, February 1894
• 68 Unsigned article, London Quarterly Review, April 1894
• 69 F. W. H. MYERS, article, Nineteenth Century, January 1893
• The Wood Beyond the World (1895)
• 71 Unsigned review, Spectator, July 1895
• Beowulf (1895)
• Old French Romances (1896)
• 74 ROBERT BLATCHFORD, Clarion, October 1896
• 75 A. T. QUILLER-COUCH, Speaker, October 1896
• 76 PETER KROPOTKINE, Freedom, November 1896
• 77 EDWARD CARPENTER, Freedom, December 1896
• 78 WALTER CRANE, Progressive Review, November 1896
• The Well at the World’s End (1896)
• 80 A. C. SWINBURNE, review, Nineteenth Century, November 1896
• 81 W. B. YEATS, review, Bookman, November 1896
• The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897)
• The Sundering Flood (1897)
• 84 H. H. STATHAM, unsigned review, Edinburgh Review, January 1897
• Bibliography
• Index