The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory

By George Saintsbury

[Pg 86]

CHAPTER III.

THE MATTER OF BRITAIN.

Attractions of the Arthurian Legend. Discussions on their sources. The personality of Arthur. The four witnesses. Their testimony. The version of Geoffrey. Its lacunæ. How the Legend grew. Wace. Layamon. The Romances proper. Walter Map. Robert de Borron. Chrestien de Troyes. Prose or verse first? A Latin Graal-book. The Mabinogion. The Legend itself. The story of Joseph of Arimathea. Merlin. Lancelot. The Legend becomes dramatic. Stories of Gawain and other knights. Sir Tristram. His story almost certainly Celtic. Sir Lancelot. The minor knights. Arthur. Guinevere. The Graal. How it perfects the story. Nature of this perfection. No sequel possible. Latin episodes. The Legend as a whole. The theories of its origin. Celtic. French. English. Literary. The Celtic theory. The French claims. The theory of general literary growth. The English or Anglo-Norman pretensions. Attempted hypothesis

To English readers, and perhaps not to English readers only, the middle division of the three great romance-subjects[43] ought to be of far higher interest than the[Pg 87] others; and that not merely, even in the English case, for reasons of local patriotism. The mediæval versions of classical story, though attractive to the highest degree as evidence of the extraordinary plastic power of the period, which could transform all art to its own image and guise, and though not destitute of individual charm here and there, must always be mainly curiosities. The cycle of Charlemagne, a genuine growth and not merely an incrustation or transformation, illustrated, moreover, by particular examples of the highest merit, is exposed on the one hand to the charge of a certain monotony, and on the other to the objection that, beautiful as it is, it is dead. For centuries, except in a few deliberate literary exercises, the king à la barbe florie has inspired no modern singer—his geste is extinct. But the Legend of Arthur, the latest to take definite form of the three, has shown[Pg 88] by far the greatest vitality. From generation to generation it has taken new forms, inspired new poetries. The very latest of the centuries has been the most prolific in contributions of any since the end of the Middle Ages; and there is no sufficient reason why the lineage should ever stop. For while the romance of antiquity is a mere "sport," an accident of time and circumstance, the chanson de geste, majestic and interesting as it is, representative as it is to a certain extent of a nation and a language, has the capital defect of not being adaptable. Having little or no allegorical capacity, little "soul," so to speak, it was left by the tide of time on the shores thereof without much hope of floating and living again. The Arthurian Legend, if not from the very first, yet from the first moment when it assumed vernacular forms, lent itself to that double meaning which, though it is open to abuse, and was terribly abused in these very ages, is after all the salvation of things literary, since every age adopting the first and outer meaning can suit the second and inner to its own taste and need.

That the vitality of the Legend is in part, if not wholly, due to the strange crossing and blending of its sources, I at least have no doubt. To discuss these sources at all, much more to express any definite opinion on the proportions and order of their blending, is a difficult matter for any literary student, and dangerous withal; but the adventure is of course not to be wholly shirked here. The matter has, both in England and abroad, been quite recently the subject of that rather acrimonious de[Pg 89]bating by which scholars in modern tongues seem to think it a point of honour to rival the scholars of a former day in the classics, though the vocabulary used is less picturesque. A great deal of this debate, too, turns on matters of sheer opinion, in regard to which language only appropriate to matters of sheer knowledge is too often used. The candid inquirer, informed that Mr, or M., or Herr So-and-so, has "proved" such and such a thing in such and such a book or dissertation, turns to the text, to find to his grievous disappointment that nothing is "proved"—but that more or less probable arguments are advanced with less or more temper against or in favour of this or that hypothesis. Even the dates of MSS., which in all such cases must be regarded as the primary data, are very rarely data at all, but only (to coin, or rather adapt, a much-needed term) speculata. And the matter is further complicated by the facts that extremely few scholars possess equal and adequate knowledge of Celtic, English, French, German, and Latin, and that the best palæographers are by no means always the best literary critics.

Where every one who has handled the subject has had to confess, or should have confessed, imperfect equipment in one or more respects, there is no shame in confessing one's own shortcomings. I cannot speak as a Celtic scholar; and I do not pretend to have examined MSS. But for a good many years I have been familiar with the printed texts and documents in Latin, English, French, and German, and I believe that I have not neglected any important modern discussions of the[Pg 90] subject. To have no Celtic is the less disqualification in that all the most qualified Celtic scholars themselves admit, however highly they may rate the presence of the Celtic element in spirit, that no texts of the legend in its romantic form at present existing in the Celtic tongues are really ancient. And it is understood that there is now very little left unprinted that can throw much light on the general question. I shall therefore endeavour, without entering into discussions on minor points which would be unsuitable to the book, to give what seems to me the most probable view of the case, corrected by (though not by any means adjusted in a hopeless zigzag of deference to) the various authorities, from Ritson to Professor Rhys, from Paulin Paris to M. Loth, and from San Marte to Drs Förster and Zimmer.

The first and the most important thing—a thing which has been by no means always or often done—is to keep the question of Arthur apart from the question of the Arthurian Legend.

That there was no such a person as Arthur in reality was at one time a not very uncommon opinion among men who could call themselves scholars, though of late it has yielded to probable if not certain arguments. The two most damaging facts are the entire silence of Bede and that of Gildas in regard to him. The silence of Bede might be accidental, and he wrote ex hypothesi nearly two centuries after Arthur's day. Yet his collections were extremely careful, and the neighbourhood of his own Northumbria was certainly not that in which traditions[Pg 91] of Arthur should have been least rife. That Gildas should say nothing is more surprising and more difficult of explanation. For putting aside altogether the positive testimony of the Vita Gildæ, to which we shall come presently, Gildas was, again ex hypothesi, a contemporary of Arthur's, and must have known all about him. If the compound of scolding and lamentation known as De Excidio Britanniæ is late and a forgery, we should expect it to contain some reference to the king; if it is early and genuine, it is difficult to see how such reference could possibly be omitted.

At the same time, mere silence can never establish anything but a presumption; and the presumption is in this case rebutted by far stronger probabilities on the other side. The evidence is here drawn from four main sources, which we may range in the order of their chronological bearing. First, there are the Arthurian place-names, and the traditions respecting them; secondly, the fragments of genuine early Welsh reference to Arthur; thirdly, the famous passage of Nennius, which introduces him for the first time to probably dated literature; fourthly, the curious references in the above-referred-to Vita Gildæ of, or attributed to, Caradoc of Lancarvan. After this last, or at a time contemporary with it, we come to the comparatively detailed account of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the beginning of the Legend proper.

To summarise this evidence as carefully but as briefly as possible, we find, in almost all parts of Britain beyond the range of the first Saxon con[Pg 92]quests, but especially in West Wales, Strathclyde, and Lothian, certain place-names connecting themselves either with Arthur himself or with the early catalogue of his battles.[44] We find allusions to him in Welsh poetry which may be as old as the sixth century—allusions, it is true, of the vaguest and most meagre kind, and touching no point of his received story except his mysterious death or no-death, but fairly corroborative of his actual existence. Nennius—the much-debated Nennius, whom general opinion attributes to the ninth century, but who may be as early as the eighth, and cannot well be later than the tenth—gives us the catalogue of the twelve battles, and the exploits of Arthur against the Saxons, in a single paragraph containing no reference to any but military matters, and speaking of Arthur not as king but as a dux bellorum commanding kings, many of whom were more noble than himself.

The first authority from whom we get any personal[Pg 93] account of Arthur is Caradoc, if Caradoc it be. The biographer makes his hero St Gildas (I put minor and irrelevant discrepancies aside) contemporary with Arthur, whom he loved, and who was king of all Greater Britain. But his brother kings did not admit this sovereignty quietly, and often put him to flight. At last Arthur overthrew and slew Hoel, who was his major natu, and became unquestioned rex universalis Britanniæ, but incurred the censure of the Church for killing Hoel. From this sin Gildas himself at length absolved him. But King Melvas carried off King Arthur's queen, and it was only after a year that Arthur found her at Glastonbury and laid siege to that place. Gildas and the abbot, however, arranged matters, and the queen was given up. It is most proper to add in this place that probably at much the same time as the writings of Caradoc and of Geoffrey (v. infra), or at a time not very distant, William of Malmesbury and Giraldus Cambrensis give us Glastonbury traditions as to the tomb of Arthur, &c., which show that by the middle of the twelfth century such traditions were clustering thickly about the Isle of Avalon. All this time, however, it is very important to notice that there is hardly the germ, and, except in Caradoc, not even the germ, of what makes the Arthurian Legend interesting to us, even of what we call the Arthurian Legend. Although the fighting with the Saxons plays an important part in the Merlin branches of the story, it has extremely little to do with the local traditions, and was continually reduced in importance by the men of real[Pg 94] genius, especially Mapes, Chrestien, and, long afterwards, Malory, who handled them. The escapade of Melvas communicates a touch rather nearer to the perfect form, but only a little nearer to it. In fact, there is hardly more in the story at this point than in hundreds of other references in early history or fiction to obscure kinglets who fought against invaders.

And it is again very important to observe that, though under the hands of Geoffrey of Monmouth the story at once acquires more romantic proportions, it is still not in the least, or only in the least, the story that we know. The advance is indeed great. The wonder-working of Merlin is brought in to help the patriotism of Arthur. The story of Uther's love for Igraine at once alters the mere chronicle into a romance. Arthur, the fruit of this passion, succeeds his father, carries on victorious war at home and abroad, is crowned with magnificence at Caerleon, is challenged by and defeats the Romans, is about to pass the Alps when he hears that his nephew Mordred, left in charge of the kingdom, has assumed the crown, and that Guinevere (Guanhumara, of whom we have only heard before as "of a noble Roman family, and surpassing in beauty all the women of the island") has wickedly married him. Arthur returns, defeats Mordred at Rutupiæ (after this battle Guinevere takes the veil), and, at Winchester, drives him to the extremity of Cornwall, and there overthrows and kills him. But the renowned King Arthur himself was mortally wounded,[Pg 95] and "being carried thence to the Isle of Avallon to be cured of his wounds, he gave up the crown to his kinsman Constantine." And so Arthur passes out of Geoffrey's story, in obedience to one of the oldest, and certainly the most interesting, of what seem to be the genuine Welsh notices of the king—"Not wise is it to seek the grave of Arthur."

A few people, perhaps, who read this little book will need to be told that Geoffrey attributed the new and striking facts which he sprung upon his contemporaries to a British book which Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, had brought out of Armorica: and that not the slightest trace of this most interesting and important work has ever been found. It is a thousand pities that it has not survived, inasmuch as it was not only "a very ancient book in the British tongue," but contained "a continuous story in an elegant style." However, the inquiry whether Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, did or did not belong to the ancient British family of Harris may be left to historians proper. To the specially literary historian the chief point of interest is first to notice how little, if Geoffrey really did take his book from "British" sources, those sources apparently contained of the Arthurian Legend proper as we now know it. An extension of the fighting with Saxons at home, and the addition of that with Romans abroad, the Igraine episode, or rather overture, the doubtless valuable introduction of Merlin, the treason of Mordred and Guinevere, and the retirement to Avalon—that is practically all. No Round Table; no knights (though[Pg 96] "Walgan, the king's nephew," is, of course, an early appearance of Gawain); none of the interesting difficulties about Arthur's succession: an entire absence of personal characteristics about Guinevere (even that peculiarity of hers which a French critic has politely described as her being "very subject to be carried off," and which already appears in Caradoc, being changed to a commonplace act of ambitious infidelity with Mordred): and, most remarkable of all, no Lancelot, and no Holy Grail.

Nevertheless Geoffrey had, as it has been the fashion to say of late years, "set the heather on fire," and perhaps in no literary instance on record did the blaze spread and heighten itself with such extraordinary speed and intensity. His book must have been written a little before the middle of the twelfth century: by the end thereof the legend was, except for the embellishments and amplifications which the Middle Age was always giving, complete.

In the account of its probable origins and growth which follows nothing can be further from the writer's wish than to emulate the confident dogmatism of those who claim to have proved or disproved this or that fact or hypothesis. In the nature of the case proof is impossible; we cannot go further than probability. It is unfortunate that some of the disputants on this, as on other kindred subjects, have not more frequently remembered the admirable words of the greatest modern practitioner and though he lacked some more recent information, the[Pg 97] shrewdest modern critic of romance itself.[45] I need only say that though I have not in the least borrowed from either, and though I make neither responsible for my views, these latter, as they are about to be stated, will be found most to resemble those of Sir Frederic Madden in England and M. Paulin Paris in France—the two critics who, coming after the age of wild guesswork and imperfect reading, and before that of a scholarship which, sometimes at least, endeavours to vindicate itself by innovation for the sake of innovation, certainly equalled, and perhaps exceeded, any others in their familiarity with the actual texts. With that familiarity, so far as MSS. go, I repeat that I do not pretend to vie. But long and diligent reading of the printed material, assisted by such critical lights as critical practice in more literatures than one or two for many years may give, has led me to the belief that when they agreed they were pretty sure to be right, and that when they differed, the authority of either was at least equal, as authority, to anything subsequent.

The known or reasonably inferred historical procession of the Legend is as follows. Before the middle of the twelfth century we have nothing that can be called a story. At almost that exact point (the subject of[Pg 98] the dedication of the Historia Britonum died in 1146) Geoffrey supplies the outlines of such a story. They were at once seized upon for filling in. Before many years two well-known writers had translated Geoffrey's Latin into French, another Geoffrey, Gaimar, and Wace of Jersey. Gaimar's Brut (a title which in a short time became generic) has not come down to us: Wace's (written in 1155) has, and though there is, as yet, no special attention bestowed upon Arthur, the Arthurian part of the story shares the process of dilatation and amplification usual in the Middle Ages. The most important of these additions is the appearance of the Round Table.

As Geoffrey fell into the hands of Wace, so did Wace fall into those of Layamon; but here the result is far more interesting, both for the history of the legend itself and for its connection with England. Not only did the priest of Ernley or Arley-on-Severn do the English tongue the inestimable service of introducing Arthur to it, not only did he write the most important book by far, both in size, in form, and in matter, that was written in English between the Conquest and the fourteenth century, but he added immensely to the actual legend. It is true that these additions still do not exactly give us the Arthur whom we know, for they still concern the wars with the Saxons and Romans chiefly. But if it were only that we find first[46] in Layamon the[Pg 99] introduction of "elves" at Arthur's birth, and his conveyance by them at death in a magic boat to Queen "Argante" at Avalon, it would be almost enough. But there is much more. The Uther story is enlarged, and with it the appearances of Merlin; the foundation of the Round Table receives added attention; the voluntary yielding of Guinevere, here called Wenhaver, is insisted upon, and Gawain (Walwain) and Bedivere (Beduer) make their appearance. But there is still no Lancelot, and still no Grail.

These additions, which on the one side gave the greatest part of the secular interest, on the other almost the whole of the mystical attraction, to the complete story, had, however, it seems probable, been actually added before Layamon wrote. For the date of the earlier version of his Brut is put by the best authorities at not earlier than 1200, and it is also, according to such authorities, almost certain that the great French romances (which contain the whole legend with the exception of part of the Tristram story, and of hitherto untraced excursions like Malory's Beaumains) had been thrown into shape. But the origin, the authorship, and the order of Merlin in its various forms, of the Saint Graal and the Quest for it, of Lancelot and the Mort Artus,—these things are the centre of nearly all the disputes upon the subject.

A consensus of MS. authority ascribes the best and[Pg 100] largest part of the prose romances,[47] especially those dealing with Lancelot and the later fortunes of the Graal and the Round Table company, to no less a person than the famous Englishman Walter Mapes, or Map, the author of De Nugis Curialium, the reputed author (v. chap. i.) of divers ingenious Latin poems, friend of Becket, Archdeacon of Oxford, churchman, statesman, and wit. No valid reason whatever has yet been shown for questioning this attribution, especially considering the number, antiquity, and strength of the documents by which it is attested. Map's date (1137-96) is the right one; his abilities were equal to any literary performance; his evident familiarity with things Welsh (he seems to have been a Herefordshire man) would have informed him of Welsh tradition, if there was any, and the De Nugis Curialium shows us in him, side by side with a satirical and humorous bent, the leaning to romance and to the marvellous which only extremely shallow people believe to be alien from humour. But it is necessary for scholarship of the kind just referred to to be always devising some new thing. Frenchmen, Germans, and Celticising partisans have grudged an Englishman the glory of the exploit; and[Pg 101] there has been of late a tendency to deny or slight Map's claims. His deposition, however, rests upon no solid argument, and though it would be exceedingly rash, considering the levity with which the copyists in mediæval MSS. attributed authorship, to assert positively that Map wrote Lancelot, or the Quest of the Saint Graal, it may be asserted with the utmost confidence that it has not been proved that he did not.

The other claimant for the authorship of a main part of the story—in this case the Merlin part, and the long history of the Graal from the days of Joseph of Arimathea downwards—is a much more shadowy person, a certain Robert de Borron, a knight of the north of France. Nobody has much interest in disturbing Borron's claims, though they also have been attacked; and it is only necessary to say that there is not the slightest ground for supposing that he was an ancestor of Lord Byron, as was once very gratuitously done, the time when he was first heard of happening to coincide with the popularity of that poet.

The third personage who is certainly or uncertainly connected by name with the original framework of the legend is again more substantial than Robert de Borron, though less so than Walter Map. As his surname, derived from his birthplace, indicates, Chrestien de Troyes was of Champenois extraction, thus belonging to the province which, with Normandy, contributed most to early French literature. And he seems to have been[Pg 102] attached not merely to the court of his native prince, the Count of Champagne, but to those of the neighbouring Walloon lordships or principalities of Flanders and Hainault. Of his considerable work (all of it done, it would seem, before the end of the twelfth century) by far the larger part is Arthurian—the immense romance of Percevale le Gallois,[48] much of which, however, is the work of continuators; the interesting episode of the Lancelot saga, called Le Chevalier à la Charette; Erec et Énide, the story known to every one from Lord Tennyson's idyll; the Chevalier au Lyon, a Gawain legend; and Cligès, which is quite on the outside of the Arthurian group. All these works are written in octosyllabic couplets, particularly light and skipping, somewhat destitute of force and grip, but full of grace and charm. Of their contents more presently.

Next to the questions of authorship and of origin in point of difficulty come two others—"Which are the older: the prose or the verse romances?" and, "Was there a Latin original of the Graal story?"

With regard to the first, it has long been laid down as a general axiom, and it is no doubt as a rule true, that prose is always later than verse, and that in mediæval times especially the order[Pg 103] is almost invariable. Verse; unrhymed and half-disrhythmed prose; prose pure and simple: that is what we find. For many reasons, however, drawn partly from the presumed age of the MSS. and partly from internal evidence, the earlier scholars who considered the Arthurian matter, especially M. Paulin Paris, came to the conclusion that here the prose romances were, if not universally, yet for the most part, the earlier. And this, though it is denied by M. Paris's equally learned son, still seems the more probable opinion. For, in the first place, by this time prose, though not in a very advanced condition, was advanced enough not to make it absolutely necessary for it to lag behind verse, as had been the case with the chansons de geste. And in the second place, while the prose romances are far more comprehensive than the verse, the age of the former seems to be beyond question such that there could be no need, time, or likelihood for the reduction to a general prose summary of separate verse originals, while the separate verse episodes are very easily intelligible as developed from parts of the prose original.[49]

With regard to the Latin Graal-book, the testimony[Pg 104] of the romances themselves is formal enough as to its existence. But no trace of it has been found, and its loss, if it existed, is contrary to all probability. For ex hypothesi (and if we take one part of the statement we must take the rest) it was not a recent composition, but a document, whether of miraculous origin or not, of considerable age. Why it should only at this time have come to light, why it should have immediately perished, and why none of the persons who took interest enough in it to turn it into the vernacular should have transmitted his copy to posterity, are questions difficult, or rather impossible, to answer. But here, again, the wise critic will not peremptorily deny. He will say that there may be a Latin Graal-book, and that when that book is produced, and stands the test of examination, he will believe in it; but that until it appears he will be contented with the French originals of the end of the twelfth century. Of the characteristic and probable origins of the Graal story itself, as of those of the larger Legend of which it forms a part, it will be time enough to speak when we have first given an account of the general history as it took shape, probably before the twelfth century had closed, certainly very soon after the thirteenth had opened. For the whole Legend—even excluding the numerous ramifications into independent or semi-independent romans d'aventures—is not found in any single book or compilation. The most extensive, and by far the best, that of our own Malory, is very late, extremely though far from unwisely eclectic, and adjusted to the presumed[Pg 105] demands of readers, and to the certain existence in the writer of a fine literary sense of fitness. It would be trespassing on the rights of a future contributor to say much directly of Malory; but it must be said here that in what he omits, as well as in his treatment of what he inserts, he shows nothing short of genius. Those who call him a mere, or even a bad, compiler, either have not duly considered the matter or speak unhappily.

But before we go further it may be well also to say a word on the Welsh stories, which, though now admitted to be in their present form later than the Romances, are still regarded as possible originals by some.

It would hardly be rash to rest the question of the Celtic origin, in any but the most remote and partial sense, of the Arthurian Romances on the Mabinogion[50] alone. The posteriority of these as we have them need not be too much dwelt upon. We need not even lay great stress on what I believe to be a fact not likely to be disputed by good critics, that the reading of the French and the Welsh-English versions one after the other, no matter in what order they be taken, will leave something more than an impression that the French is the direct original of the Welsh, and that the Welsh, in anything at all like its present form, could not by any possibility be the original of the French. The test to which I refer is this. Let any one read, with as open a mind as he can procure,[Pg 106] the three Welsh-French or French-Welsh romances of Yvain-Owain, Erec-Geraint, and Percivale-Peredur, and then turn to those that are certainly and purely Celtic, Kilhwch and Olwen, the Dream of Rhiabwy (both of these Arthurian after a fashion, though quite apart from our Arthurian Legend), and the fourfold Mabinogi, which tells the adventures of Rhiannon and those of Math ap Matholwy. I cannot conceive this being done by any one without his feeling that he has passed from one world into another entirely different,—that the two classes of story simply cannot by any possibility be, in any more than the remotest suggestion, the work of the same people, or have been produced under the same literary covenant.

Let us now turn to the Legend itself. The story which ends in Avalon begins in Jerusalem. For though the Graal-legends are undoubtedly later additions to whatever may have been the original Arthurian saga—seeing that we find nothing of them in the early Welsh traditions, nothing in Nennius, nothing in Geoffrey, nothing even in Wace or Layamon—yet such is the skill with which the unknown or uncertain authors have worked them into the legend that the whole makes one indivisible romance. Yet (as the untaught genius of Malory instinctively perceived) when the Graal-story on the one hand, and the loves of Lancelot and Guinevere with which it is connected on the other, came in, they made comparatively otiose and uninteresting the wars with Saxons and Romans, which in the earlier Legend had occupied almost the whole room.[Pg 107] And accordingly these wars, which still hold a very large part of the field in the Merlin, drop out to some extent later. The whole cycle consists practically of five parts, each of which in almost all cases exists in divers forms, and more than one of which overlaps and is overlapped by one or more of the others. These five are Merlin, the Saint-Graal, Lancelot, the Quest of the Saint-Graal, and the Death of Arthur. Each of the first two pairs intertwines with the other: the last, Mort Artus, completes them all, and thus its title was not improperly used in later times to designate the whole Legend.

The starting-point of the whole, in time and incident, is the supposed revenge of the Jews on Joseph of Arimathea for the part he has taken in the burial of our Lord. He is thrown into prison and remains there (miraculously comforted, so that the time seems to him but as a day or two) till delivered by Titus. Then he and certain more or less faithful Christians set out in charge of the Holy Graal, which has served for the Last Supper, which holds Christ's blood, and which is specially under the guardianship of Joseph's son, the Bishop "Josephes," to seek foreign lands, and a home for the Holy Vessel. After a long series of the wildest adventures, in which the personages, whose names are known rather mistily to readers of Malory only—King Evelake, Naciens, and others—appear fully, and in which many marvels take place, the company, or the holier survivors of them, are finally settled in Britain. Here the imprudence of Evelake (or Mor[Pg 108]drains) causes him to receive the "dolorous stroke," from which none but his last descendant, Galahad, is to recover him fully. The most striking of all these adventures, related in various forms in other parts of the Legend, is the sojourn of Naciens on a desert island, where he is tempted of the devil; while a very great part is played throughout by the Legend of the Three Trees, which in successive ages play their part in the Fall, in the first origin of mankind according to natural birth, not creation, in the building of the Temple, and in the Passion. This later legend, a wild but very beautiful one, dominated the imagination of English mediæval writers very particularly, and is fully developed, apart from its Arthurian use, in the vast and interesting miscellany of the Cursor Mundi.

But when the Graal and its guardians have been safely established upon English soil, the connection of the legend with the older and, so to speak, historical Arthurian traditions, is effected by means of Merlin, in a manner at least ingenious if not very direct. The results of the Passion, and especially the establishment on earth of a Christian monarchy with a sort of palladium in the Saint-Graal, greatly disturb the equanimity of the infernal regions; and a council is held to devise counter-policy. It occurs apparently that as this discomfiture has come by means of the union of divine and human natures, it can be best opposed by a union of human and diabolic: and after some minor proceedings a seductive devil is despatched to play incubus to the last and chastest daughter of a prud'homme, who has been[Pg 109] driven to despair and death by previous satanic attacks. The attempt is successful in a way; but as the victim keeps her chastity of intention and mind, not only is she herself saved from the legal consequences of the matter, but her child when born is the celebrated Merlin, a being endowed with supernatural power and knowledge, and not always scrupulous in the use of them, but always on the side of the angels rather than of his paternal kinsfolk. A further and more strictly literary connection is effected by attributing the knowledge of the Graal history to his information, conveyed to his master and pupil Blaise, who writes it (as well as the earlier adventures at least of the Arthurian era proper) from Merlin's dictation or report.

For some time the various Merlin stories follow Geoffrey in recounting the adventures of the prophetic child in his youth, with King Vortigern and others. But he is soon brought (again in accordance with Geoffrey) into direct responsibility for Arthur, by his share in the wooing of Igraine. For it is to be observed that—and not in this instance only—though there is usually some excuse for him, Merlin is in these affairs more commonly occupied in making two lovers happy than in attending to the strict dictates of morality. And thenceforward till his inclusion in his enchanted prison (an affair in which it is proper to say that the earliest versions give a much more favourable account of the conduct and motives of the heroine than that which Malory adopted, and which Tennyson for purposes of poetic contrast blackened yet further) he plays the part of adviser, assistant, and good enchanter[Pg 110] generally to Arthur and Arthur's knights. He in some stories directly procures, and in all confirms, the seating of Arthur on his father's throne; he brings the king's nephews, Gawain and the rest, to assist their uncle, in some cases against their own fathers; he presides over the foundation of the Round Table, and brings about the marriage of Guinevere and Arthur; he assists, sometimes by actual force of arms, sometimes as head of the intelligence department, sometimes by simple gramarye, in the discomfiture not merely of the rival and rebel kinglets, but of the Saxons and Romans. As has been said, Malory later thought proper to drop the greater part of this latter business (including the interminable fights round the Roche aux Saisnes or Saxon rock). And he also discarded a curious episode which makes a great figure in the original Merlin, the tale of the "false Guinevere," a foster-sister, namesake, and counterpart of the true princess, who is nearly substituted for Guinevere herself on her bridal night, and who later usurps for a considerable time the place and rights of the queen. For it cannot be too often repeated that Arthur, not even in Malory a "blameless king" by any means, is in the earlier and original versions still less blameless, especially in the article of faithfulness to his wife.

We do not, however, in the Merlin group proper get any tidings of Lancelot, though Lucan, Kay, Bedivere, and others, as well as Gawain and the other sons of Lot, make their appearance, and the Arthurian court and régime, as we imagine it with the Round Table, is[Pg 111] already constituted. It is to be observed that in the earlier versions there is even a sharp rivalry between the "Round Table" proper and the "Queen's" or younger knights. But this subsides, and the whole is centred at Camelot, with the realm (until Mordred's treachery) well under control, and with a constant succession of adventures, culminating in the greatest of all, the Quest of the Graal or Sangreal itself. Although there are passages of great beauty, the excessive mysticism, the straggling conduct of the story, and the extravagant praise of virginity in and for itself, in the early Graal history, have offended some readers. In the Merlin proper the incompleteness, the disproportionate space given to mere kite-and-crow fighting, and the defect of love-interest, undoubtedly show themselves. Although Merlin was neither by extraction nor taste likely to emulate the almost ferocious horror of human affection entertained by Robert de Borron (if Robert de Borron it was), the authors of his history, except in the version of his own fatal passion, above referred to, have touched the subject with little grace or charm. And while the great and capital tragedies of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Tristram and Iseult, are wholly lacking, there is an equal lack of such minor things as the episodes of Lancelot and the two Elaines, of Pelleas and the Lady of the Lake, and many others. Nor is this lack compensated by the stories of the incestuous (though on neither side consciously incestuous, and on the queen's quite innocent) adventure of Arthur with his sister Margause, of the exceedingly unromantic wooing of Morgane le Fée,[Pg 112] and of the warlock-planned intercourse of King Ban and the mother of Lancelot.

Whether it was Walter Map, or Chrestien de Troyes, or both, or neither, to whom the glory of at once completing and exalting the story is due, I at least have no pretension to decide. Whosoever did it, if he did it by himself, was a very great man indeed—a man second only to Dante among the men of the Middle Age. Even if it was done by an irregular company of men, each patching and piecing the others' efforts, the result shows a marvellous "wind of the spirit" abroad and blowing on that company. As before, the reader of Malory only, though he has nearly all the best things, has not quite all even of those, and is without a considerable number of things not quite the best, but good. The most difficult to justify of the omissions of Sir Thomas is the early history of the loves of Guinevere and Lancelot, when the knight was introduced to the queen by Galahault the haughty prince—"Galeotto," as he appears in the most universally known passage of Dante himself. Not merely that unforgettable association, but the charm and grace of the original passage, as well as the dramatic and ethical justification, so to speak, of the fatal passion which wrecked at once Lancelot's quest and Arthur's kingdom, combine to make us regret this exclusion. But Malory's genius was evidently rather an unconscious than a definitely critical one. And though the exquisite felicity of his touch in detail is established once for all by comparing his prose narratives of the Passing of Arthur and[Pg 113] the parting of Lancelot and the queen with the verse[51] from which he almost beyond question directly took both, he must sometimes have been bewildered by the mass of material from which he had to select, and may not always have included or excluded with equally unerring judgment.

We have seen that in the original story of Geoffrey the treason of Mordred and the final scenes take place while Arthur is warring against the Romans, very shortly after he has established his sovereignty in the Isle of Britain. Walter, or Chrestien, or whoever it was, saw that such a waste of good romantic material could never be tolerated. The romance is never—it has not been even in the hands of its most punctilious modern practitioners—very observant of miserable minutiæ of chronology; and after all, it was reasonable that Arthur's successes should give him some considerable enjoyment of his kingdom. It will not do to scrutinise too narrowly, or we should have to make Arthur a very old man at his death, and Guinevere a lady too elderly to leave any excuse for her proceedings, in order to accommodate the birth of Lancelot (which happened, according to the Merlin, after the king came to the throne), the birth of Lancelot's son Galahad, Galahad's life till even the early age of fifteen, when knighthood was then given, the Quest of the Sangreal itself, and the subsequent breaking out of Mordred's rebellion, consequent upon the war between Lancelot and Arthur after the deaths of Agravain and Gareth.[Pg 114] But the allowance of a golden age of comparatively quiet sovereignty, of feasts and joustings at Camelot, and Caerleon, and Carlisle, of adventures major and minor, and of the great Graal-quest, is but a moderate demand for any romancer to make. At any rate, he or they made it, and justified the demand amply by the result. The contents of the central Arthurian story thus elaborated may be divided into four parts: 1. The miscellaneous adventures of the several knights, the king himself sometimes taking share in them. 2. Those of Sir Tristram, of which more presently. 3. The Quest of the Sangreal. 4. The Death of Arthur.

Taking these in order, the first, which is the largest in bulk, is also, and necessarily, the most difficult to summarise in short space. It is sometimes said that the prominent figure in the earlier stories is Gawain, who is afterwards by some spite or caprice dethroned in favour of Lancelot. This is not quite exact, for the bulk of the Lancelot legends being, as has been said, anterior to the end of the twelfth century, is much older than the bulk of the Gawain romances, which, owing their origin to English, and especially to northern, patriotism, do not seem to date earlier than the thirteenth or even the fourteenth. But it is true that Gawain, as we have seen, makes an appearance, though no very elaborate one, in the most ancient forms of the legend itself, where we hear nothing of Lancelot; and also that his appearances in Merlin do not bear anything like the contrast (similar to that afterwards developed in the Iberian romance-cycle as between Galaor and Amadis) which other authorities[Pg 115] make between him and Lancelot.[52] Generally speaking, the knights are divisible into three classes. First there are the older knights, from Ulfius (who had even taken part in the expedition which cheated Igraine) and Antor, down to Bedivere, Lucan, and the most famous of this group, Sir Kay, who, alike in older and in later versions, bears the uniform character of a disagreeable person, not indeed a coward, though of prowess not equal to his attempts and needs; but a boaster, envious, spiteful, and constantly provoking by his tongue incidents in which his hands do not help him out quite sufficiently.[53] Then there is the younger and main body, of whom Lancelot and Gawain (still keeping Tristram apart) are the chiefs; and lastly the outsiders, whether the "felon" knights who are at internecine, or the mere foreigners who are in friendly, antagonism with the knights of the "Rowntabull."

Of these the chief are Sir Palomides or Palamedes (a gallant Saracen, who is Tristram's unlucky rival for the affections of Iseult, while his special task is the pursuit of the Questing Beast, a symbol of Slander), and Tristram himself.

The appearance of this last personage in the Legend is one of the most curious and interesting points in it. Although on this, as on every one of such points, the[Pg 116] widest diversity of opinion prevails, an impartial examination of the texts perhaps enables us to obtain some tolerably clear views on the subject—views which are helpful not merely with reference to the "Tristan-saga" itself, but with reference to the origins and character of the whole Legend.[54] There cannot, I think, be a doubt that the Tristram story originally was quite separate from that of Arthur. In the first place, Tristram has nothing whatever to do with that patriotic and national resistance to the Saxon invader which, though it died out in the later legend, was the centre, and indeed almost reached the circumference, of the earlier. In the second, except when he is directly brought to Arthur's court, all Tristram's connections are with Cornwall, Brittany, Ireland, not with that more integral and vaster part of la bloie Bretagne which extends from Somerset and Dorset to the Lothians. When he appears abroad, it is as a Varangian at Constantinople, not in the train of Arthur fighting against Romans. Again, the religious part of the story, which is so important in the developed Arthurian Legend proper, is almost entirely absent from the Tristram-tale, and the subject which played the[Pg 117] fourth part in mediæval affections and interests with love, religion, and fighting—the chase—takes in the Tristram romances the place of religion itself.

But the most interesting, though the most delicate, part of the inquiry concerns the attitude of this episode or branch to love, and the conclusion to be drawn as well from that attitude as from the local peculiarities above noticed, as to the national origin of Tristram on the one hand, and of the Arthur story on the other. It has been said that Tristram's connections with what may be roughly called Britain at large—i.e., the British Islands plus Brittany—are, except in his visits to Arthur's court, entirely with the Celtic parts—Cornwall, Ireland, Armorica—less with Wales, which plays a strangely small part in the Arthurian romances generally. This would of itself give a fair presumption that the Tristram story is more purely, or at any rate more directly, Celtic than the rest. But it so happens that in the love of Tristram and Iseult, and the revenge and general character of Mark, there is also a suffusion of colour and tone which is distinctly Celtic. The more recent advocates for the Celtic origin of romance in general, and the Arthurian legend in particular, have relied very strongly upon the character of the love adventures in these compositions as being different from those of classical story, different from those of Frankish, Teutonic, and Scandinavian romance; but, as it seems to them, like what has been observed of the early native poetry of Wales, and still more (seeing that the indisputable texts are older) of Ireland.[Pg 118]

A discussion of this kind is perhaps more than any other periculosæ plenum opus aleæ; but it is too important to be neglected. Taking the character of the early Celtic, and especially the Irish, heroine as it is given by her champions—a process which obviates all accusations of misunderstanding that might be based on the present writer's confession that of the Celtic texts alone he has to speak at second-hand—it seems to me beyond question that both the Iseults, Iseult of Ireland and Iseult of Brittany, approach much nearer to this type than does Guinevere, or the Lady of the Lake, or the damsel Lunete, or any of Arthur's sisters, even Morgane, or, to take earlier examples, Igraine and Merlin's love. So too the peculiar spitefulness of Mark, and his singular mixture of tolerance and murderous purpose towards Tristram[55] are much more Celtic than Anglo-French: as indeed is the curious absence of religiosity before noted, which extends to Iseult as well as to Tristram. We have no trace in Mark's queen of the fact or likelihood of any such final repentance as is shown by Arthur's: and though the complete and headlong self-abandonment of Iseult is excused to some extent by the magic potion, it is of an "all-for-love-and-the-world-well-lost" kind which finds no exact parallel elsewhere in the legend. So too, whether it seem more or less amiable, the half-coquettish jealousy of Guinevere in regard to Lancelot is not Celtic: while the profligate vindictiveness at[Pg 119]tributed to her in Sir Launfal, and only in Sir Launfal, an almost undoubtedly Celtic offshoot of the Arthurian Legend, is equally alien from her character. We see Iseult planning the murder of Brengwain with equal savagery and ingratitude, and we feel that it is no libel. On the other hand, though Tristram's faithfulness is proverbial, it is an entirely different kind of faithfulness from that of Lancelot—flightier, more passionate perhaps in a way, but of a less steady passion. Lancelot would never have married Iseult the White-handed.

It is, however, quite easy to understand how, this Tristram legend existing by hypothesis already or being created at the same time, the curious centripetal and agglutinative tendency of mediæval romance should have brought it into connection with that of Arthur. The mere fact of Mark's being a vassal-king of Greater Britain would have been reason enough; but the parallel between the prowess of Lancelot and Tristram, and between their loves for the two queens, was altogether too tempting to be resisted. So Tristram makes his appearance in Arthur's court, and as a knight of the Round Table, but as not exactly at home there,—as a visitor, an "honorary member" rather than otherwise, and only an occasional partaker of the home tournaments and the adventures abroad which occupy Arthur's knights proper.

The origin of the greatest of these, of Lancelot himself, is less distinct. Since the audacious imaginativeness of the late M. de la Villemarqué, which once, I[Pg 120] am told, brought upon him the epithet "Faussaire!" uttered in full conclave of Breton antiquaries, has ceased to be taken seriously by Arthurian students, the old fancies about some Breton "Ancel" or "Ancelot" have been quietly dropped. But the Celticisers still cling fondly to the supposed possibility of derivation from King Melvas, or King Maelgon, one or other of whom does seem to have been connected, as above mentioned, by early Welsh tradition with the abduction of the queen. It is, however, evident to any reader of the Charette episode, whether in the original French prose and verse or in Malory, that Meleagraunce the ravisher and Lancelot the avenger cannot have the same original. I should myself suppose Lancelot to have been a directly and naturally spontaneous literary growth. The necessity of a love-interest for the Arthurian story being felt, and, according to the manner of the time, it being felt with equal strength that the lover must not be the husband, it was needful to look about for some one else. The merely business-like self-surrender to Mordred as the king de facto, to the "lips that were near," of Geoffrey's Guanhumara and Layamon's Wenhaver, was out of the question; and the part of Gawain as a faithful nephew was too well settled already by tradition for it to be possible to make him the lover. Perhaps the great artistic stroke in the whole Legend, and one of the greatest in all literature, is the concoction of a hero who should be not only

but more heroic than Paris and more interesting than Hector,—not only a "greatest knight," but at once the sinful lover of his queen and the champion who should himself all but achieve, and in the person of his son actually achieve, the sacred adventure of the Holy Graal. If, as there seems no valid reason to disbelieve, the hitting upon this idea, and the invention or adoption of Lancelot to carry it out, be the work of Walter Mapes, then Walter Mapes is one of the great novelists of the word, and one of the greatest of them. If it was some unknown person (it could hardly be Chrestien, for in Chrestien's form the Graal interest belongs to Percevale, not to Lancelot or Galahad), then the same compliment must be paid to that person unknown. Meanwhile the conception and execution of Lancelot, to whomsoever they may be due, are things most happy. Entirely free from the faultlessness which is the curse of the classical hero; his unequalled valour not seldom rewarded only by reverses; his merits redeemed from mawkishness by his one great fault, yet including all virtues that are themselves most amiable, and deformed by no vice that is actually loathsome; the soul of goodness in him always warring with his human frailty;—Sir Lancelot fully deserves the noble funeral eulogy pronounced over his grave, and felt by all the elect to be, in both senses, one of the first of all extant pieces of perfect English prose.

But the virtues which are found in Lancelot eminently are found in all but the "felon" knights, differing only in degree. It is true that the later[Pg 122] romances and compilations, feeling perhaps the necessity of shade, extend to all the sons of Lot and Margause, except Gareth, and to some extent Gawain, the unamiable character which Mordred enjoys throughout, and which even in the Merlin is found showing itself in Agravaine. But Sir Lamoracke, their victim, is almost Lancelot's equal: and the best of Lancelot's kin, especially Sir Bors, come not far behind. It is entirely untrue that, as the easy epigram has it, they all "hate their neighbour and love their neighbour's wife." On the contrary, except in the bad subjects—ranging from the mere ruffianism of Breuse-sans-Pitié to the misconduct of Meleagraunce—there is no hatred of your neighbour anywhere. It is not hatred of your neighbour to be prepared to take and give hard blows from and to him, and to forgather in faith and friendship before and after. And as to the other and more delicate point, a large majority of the knights can at worst claim the benefit of the law laid down by a very pious but indulgent mediæval writer,[56] who says that if men will only not meddle with "spouse or sib" (married women or connections within the prohibited degrees), it need be no such deadly matter.

It may be desirable, as it was in reference to Charlemagne, to say a few words as to Arthur himself. In both cases there is noticeable (though less in the case of Arthur than in that of Charlemagne) the tendency not to make the king blameless, or a paragon of prowess: and in both cases, as we should expect, this tendency is[Pg 123] even more noticeable in the later versions than in the earlier. This may have been partly due to the aristocratic spirit of at least idealised feudalism, which gave the king no semi-divine character, but merely a human primacy inter pares; partly also to the literary instinct of the Middle Ages, which had discovered that the "biggest" personage of a story is by no means that one who is most interesting. In Arthur's very first literary appearance, the Nennius passage, his personal prowess is specially dwelt upon: and in those parts of the Merlin group which probably represent the first step from Geoffrey to the complete legend, he slays Saxons and Romans, wrests the sword single-handed from King Ryaunce, and so forth, as valiantly as Gawain himself. It is, however, curious that at this time the writers are much less careful than at a later to represent him as faithful to Guinevere, and blameless before marriage, with the exception of the early affair with Margause. He accepts the false Guinevere and the Saxon enchantress very readily; and there is other scandal in which the complaisant Merlin as usual figures. But in the accepted Arthuriad (I do not of course speak of modern writers) this is rather kept in the background, while his prowess is also less prominent, except in a few cases, such as his great fight with his sister's lover, Sir Accolon. Even here he never becomes the complaisant wittol, which late and rather ignoble works like the Cokwold's Daunce[57] represent him as being: and he never exhibits the slightest approach to the[Pg 124] outbursts of almost imbecile wrath which characterise Charlemagne.

Something has been said of Guinevere already. It is perhaps hard to look, as any English reader of our time must, backward through the coloured window of the greatest of the Idylls of the King without our thoughts of the queen being somewhat affected by it. But those who knew their Malory before the Idylls appeared escape that danger. Mr Morris's Guinevere in her Defence is perhaps a little truer than Lord Tennyson's to the original conception—indeed, much of the delightful volume in which she first appeared is pure Extrait Arthurien. But the Tennysonian glosses on Guinevere's character are not ill justified: though perhaps, if less magnificent, it would have been truer, both to the story and to human nature, to attribute her fall rather to the knowledge that Arthur himself was by no means immaculate than to a despairing sense of his immaculateness. The Guinevere of the original romances is the first perfectly human woman in English literature. They have ennobled her unfaithfulness to Arthur by her constancy to Lancelot, they have saved her constancy to Lancelot from being insipid by interspersing the gusts of jealousy in the matter of the two Elaines which play so great a part in the story. And it is curious that, coarse as both the manners and the speech of the Middle Ages are supposed to have been, the majority of these romances are curiously free from coarseness. The ideas might shock Ascham's prudery, but the expression is, with[Pg 125] the rarest exceptions, scrupulously adapted to polite society. There are one or two coarse passages in the Merlin and the older Saint Graal, and I remember others in outside branches like the Chevalier as Deux Espées. But though a French critic has detected something shocking in Le Chevalier à la Charette, it requires curious consideration to follow him.

The part which the Holy Graal plays in the legend generally is not the least curious or interesting feature of the whole. As has been already said more than once, it makes no figure at all in the earliest versions: and it is consistent with this, as well as with the general theory and procedure of romance, that when it does appear the development of the part played by it is conducted on two more or less independent lines, which, however, the later compilers at least do not seem to think mutually exclusive. With the usual reserves as to the impossibility of pronouncing with certainty on the exact order of the additions to this wonderful structure of legend, it may be said to be probable, on all available considerations of literary probability, that of the two versions of the Graal story—that in which Percival is the hero of the Quest, and that in which Galahad occupies that place—the former is the earlier. According to this, which commended itself especially to the French and German handlers of the story,[58] the Graal Quest lies[Pg 126] very much outside the more intimate concerns of the Arthurian court and the realm of Britain. Indeed, in the latest and perhaps greatest of this school, Wolfram von Eschenbach (v. chap. vi.), the story wanders off into uttermost isles of fancy, quite remote from the proper Arthurian centres. It may perhaps be conceded that this development is in more strict accordance with what we may suppose and can partly perceive to have been the original and almost purely mystical conception of the Graal as entertained by Robert de Borron, or another—the conception in which all earthly, even wedded, love is of the nature of sin, and according to which the perfect knight is only an armed monk, converting the heathen and resisting the temptations of the devil, the world, and more particularly the flesh; diversifying his wars and preachings only or mainly by long mystical visions of sacred history as it presented itself to mediæval imagination. It is true that the genius of Wolfram has not a little coloured and warmed this chilly ideal: but the story is still conducted rather afar from general human interest, and very far off indeed from the special interests of Arthur.

Another genius, that of Walter Map (by hypothesis, as before), described and worked out different capabilities in the story. By the idea, simple, like most ideas of genius, of making Lancelot, the father, at once the greatest knight of the Arimathean lineage, and unable perfectly to achieve the Quest by reason of his sin, and Galahad the son, inheritor of his prowess but not of his weakness, he has[Pg 127] at once secured the success of the Quest in sufficient accordance with the original idea and the presence of abundant purely romantic interest as well. And at the same time by connecting the sin which disqualifies Lancelot with the catastrophe of Arthur, and the achieving of the Quest itself with the weakening and breaking up of the Round Table (an idea insisted upon no doubt, by Tennyson, but existent in the originals), a dramatic and romantic completeness has been given to the whole cycle which no other collection of mediæval romances possesses, and which equals, if it does not exceed, that of any of the far more apparently regular epics of literary history. It appears, indeed, to have been left for Malory to adjust and bring out the full epic completeness of the legend: but the materials, as it was almost superfluous for Dr Sommer to show by chapter and verse, were all ready to his hand. And if (as that learned if not invariably judicious scholar thinks) there is or once was somewhere a Suite of Lancelot corresponding to the Suite de Merlin of which Sir Thomas made such good use, it is not improbable that we should find the adjustment, though not the expression, to some extent anticipated.

At any rate, the idea is already to hand in the original romances of our present period; and a wonderfully great and perfect idea it is. Not the much and justly praised arrangement and poetical justice of the Oresteia or of the story of Œdipus excel the Arthuriad in what used to be called "propriety" (which has nothing to do with prudishness), while both are, as at least it seems to me, far inferior[Pg 128] in varied and poignant interest. That the attainment of the Graal, the healing of the maimed king, and the fulfilling of the other "weirds" which have lain upon the race of Joseph, should practically coincide with the termination of that glorious reign, with which fate and metaphysical aid had connected them, is one felicity. The "dolorous death and departing out of this world" in Lyonnesse and elsewhere corresponds to and completes the triumph of Sarras. From yet another point of view, the bringing into judgment of all the characters and their deeds is equally complete, equally natural and unforced. It is astonishing that men like Ascham,[59] unless blinded by a survival of mediæval or a foreshadowing of Puritan prudery, should have failed to see that the morality of the Morte d'Arthur is as rigorous as it is unsqueamish. Guinevere in her cloister and Lancelot in his hermitage, Arthur falling by (or at any rate in battle against) the fruit of his incestuous intercourse—these are not exactly encouragements to vice: while at the same time the earlier history may be admitted to have nothing of a crabbed and jejune virtue.

But this conclusion, with the minor events which lead up to it, is scarcely less remarkable as exhibiting in the original author, whoever he was, a sense of art, a sense of finality, the absence of which is the great blot on Romance at large, owing to the natural, the human, but the very inartistic, craving for sequels. As is well known, it was the most difficult thing in the[Pg 129] world for a mediæval romancer to let his subject go. He must needs take it up from generation to generation; and the interminable series of Amadis and Esplandian stories, which, as the last example, looks almost like a designed caricature, is only an exaggeration of the habit which we can trace back through Huon of Bordeaux and Guy of Warwick almost to the earliest chansons de geste.

But the intelligent genius who shaped the Arthuriad has escaped this danger, and that not merely by the simple process which Dryden, with his placid irony, somewhere describes as "leaving scarce three of the characters alive." We have reached, and feel that we have reached, the conclusion of the whole matter when the Graal has been taken to Heaven, and Arthur has gone to Avalon. Nobody wants to hear anything of the doubtless excellent Duke and King Constantine. Sir Ector himself could not leave the stage with more grace than with his great discourse on his dead comrade and kinsman. Lancelot's only son has gone with the Graal. The end is not violent or factitious, it is necessary and inevitable. It were even less unwise to seek the grave of Arthur than to attempt to take up the story of the Arthurians after king and queen and Lancelot are gone each to his and her own place, after the Graal is attained, after the Round Table is dissolved.

It is creditable to the intelligence and taste of the average mediæval romance-writer that even he did not yield to his besetting sin in this particular instance. With the exception of Ysaie le Triste, which deals with[Pg 130] the fortunes of a supposed son of Tristan and Yseult, and thus connects itself with the most outlying part of the legend—a part which, as has been shown, is only hinged on to it—I cannot remember a single romance which purports to deal with affairs subsequent to the battle in Lyonesse. The two latest that can be in any way regarded as Arthurian, Arthur of Little Britain and Cleriodus, avowedly take up the story long subsequently, and only claim for their heroes the glory of distant descent from Arthur and his heroes. Meliadus de Lyonnois ascends from Tristram, and endeavours to connect the matter of Britain with that of France. Giron le Courtois deals with Palamedes and the earlier Arthurian story; while Perceforest, though based on the Brut, selects periods anterior to Arthur.[60]

There was, however, no such artistic constraint as regards episodes of the main story, or romans d'aventures celebrating the exploits of single knights, and connected with that story by a sort of stock overture and dénoûment, in the first of which an adventure is usually started at Arthur's court, while the successful knight is also accustomed to send his captives to give testimony to his prowess[Pg 131] in the same place. As has been said above,[61] there is a whole cluster of such episodes—most, it would seem, owing their origin to England or Scotland—which have Sir Gawain for their chief hero, and which, at least in such forms as survive, would appear to be later than the great central romances which have been just noticed. Some of these are of much local interest—there being a Scottish group, a group which seems to centre about Cumbria, and so forth—but they fall rather to the portion of my successor in this series, who will take as his province Gawaine and the Green Knight, Lancelot of the Laik, the quaint alliterative Thornton Morte Arthur, and not a few others. The most interesting of all is that hitherto untraced romance of Beaumains or Gareth (he, as Gawain's brother, brings the thing into the class referred to), of which Malory has made an entire book, and which is one of the most completely and perfectly turned-out episodes existing. It has points in common with Yvain,[62] and others in common with Ipomydon,[63] but at the same time quite enough of its own. But we have no French text for it. On the other hand, we have long verse romances like Durmart le Gallois[64] (which both from the title and from certain mystical Graal passages rather connects itself with the Percevale sub-section); and the Chevalier as Deux Espées,[65] which belongs to the Gawain class. But all these, as well as the German romances to be noticed in chap. vi.,[Pg 132] distinguish themselves from the main stories analysed above not merely by their obvious and almost avowed dependence, but by a family likeness in incident, turn, and phrase from which those main stories are free. In fact the general fault of the Romans d'Aventures is that neither the unsophisticated freshness of the chanson de geste, nor the variety and commanding breadth of the Arthurian legend, appears in them to the full. The kind of "balaam," the stock repetitions and expletives at which Chaucer laughs in "Sir Thopas"—a laugh which has been rather unjustly received as condemning the whole class of English romances—is very evident even in the French texts. We have left the great and gracious ways, the inspiring central ideas, of the larger romance.

It may perhaps seem to some readers that too much praise has been given to that romance itself. Far as we are, not merely from Ascham's days, but from those in which the excellent Dunlop was bound to confess that "they [the romances of the Round Table] will be found extremely defective in those points which have been laid down as constituting excellence in fictitious narrative," that they are "improbable," full of "glaring anachronisms and geographical blunders," "not well shaded and distinguished in character," possessing heroines such as "the mistresses of Tristan and Lancelot" [may God assoil Dunlop!] who are "women of abandoned character," "highly reprehensible in their moral tendency," "equalled by the most insipid romance of the present day as a fund of amusement." In those days even[Pg 133] Scott thought it prudent to limit his praise of Malory's book to the statement that "it is written in pure old English, and many of the wild adventures which it contains are told with a simplicity bordering on the sublime." Of Malory—thanks to the charms of his own book in the editions of Southey, of the two editors in 12mo, of Wright and of Sir Edward Strachey, not to mention the recent and stately issues given by Dr Sommer and Professor Rhys—a better idea has long prevailed, though there are some gainsayers. But of the originals, and of the Legend as a whole, the knowledge is too much limited to those who see in that legend only an opportunity for discussing texts and dates, origins and national claims. Its extraordinary beauty, and the genius which at some time or other, in one brain or in many, developed it from the extremely meagre materials which are all that can be certainly traced, too often escape attention altogether, and have hardly, I think, in a single instance obtained full recognition.

Yet however exaggerated the attention to the Quellen may have been, however inadequate the attention to the actual literary result, it would be a failure in duty towards the reader, and disrespectful to those scholars who, if not always in the most excellent way, have contributed vastly to our knowledge of the subject, to finish this chapter without giving something on the question of origins itself. I shall therefore conclude it with a brief sketch of the chief opinions on the subject, and with[Pg 134] an indication of those to which many years' reading have inclined myself.

The theories, not to give them one by one as set forth by individual writers, are in the main as follows:—

I. That the Legend is, not merely in its first inception, but in main bulk, Celtic, either (a) Welsh or (b) Armorican.

II. That it is, except in the mere names and the vaguest outline, French.

III. That it is English, or at least Anglo-Norman.

IV. That it is very mainly a "literary" growth, owing something to the Greek romances, and not to be regarded without error as a new development unconnected, or almost unconnected, with traditional sources of any kind.

The first explanation is the oldest. After being for nearly half a century discredited, it has again found ardent defenders, and it may seem at first sight to be the most natural and reasonable. Arthur, if he existed at all, was undoubtedly a British hero; the British Celts, especially the Welsh, possess beyond all question strong literary affinities and a great literary performance, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, the father of the whole story, expressly declares that he took it from a book written in the British tongue. It was natural that in comparatively uncritical ages no quarrel should be made with this account. There were, even up to the last century, I believe, enthusiastic antiquaries who affirmed, and[Pg 135] perhaps believed, that they had come across the very documents to which Geoffrey refers, or at worst later Welsh transcripts of them. But when the study of the matter grew, and especially when Welsh literature itself began to be critically examined, uncomfortable doubts began to arise. It was found impossible to assign to the existing Welsh romances on the subject, such as those published in the Mabinogion, a date even approaching in antiquity that which can certainly be claimed by the oldest French texts: and in more than one case the Welsh bore unmistakable indications of having been directly imitated from the French itself. Further, in undoubtedly old Welsh literature, though there were (v. supra) references to Arthur, they were few, they were very meagre, and except as regards the mystery of his final disappearance rather than death, they had little if anything to do with the received Arthurian story. On the other hand, as far as Brittany was concerned, after a period of confident assertion, and of attempts, in at least doubtful honesty, to supply what could not be found, it had to be acknowledged that Brittany could supply no ancient texts whatever, and hardly any ancient tradition. These facts, when once established (and they have never since been denied by competent criticism), staggered the Celtic claim very seriously. Of late years, however, it has found advocates (who, as usual, adopt arguments rather mutually destructive than mutually confirmatory) both in France (M. Gaston Paris) and in Germany (Herr Zimmer), while it has been passionately defended in England by Mr Nutt, and with a[Pg 136] more cautious, but perhaps at least equally firm, support by Professor Rhys. As has been said, these Neo-Celticists do not, when they are wise, attempt to revive the older form of the claims. They rest theirs on the scattered references in undoubtedly old Welsh literature above referred to, on the place-names which play such an undoubtedly remarkable part in the local nomenclature of the West-Welsh border in the south-west of England and in Cornwall, of Wales less frequently, of Strathclyde and Lothian eminently, and not at all, or hardly at all, of that portion of England which was early and thoroughly subjected to Saxon and Angle sway. And the bolder of them, taking advantage of the admitted superiority in age of Irish to Welsh literature as far as texts go, have had recourse to this, not for direct originals (it is admitted that there are none, even of parts of the Legend such as those relating to Tristram and Iseult, which are not only avowedly Irish in place but Irish in tone), but for evidences of differential origin in comparison with classical and Teutonic literature. Unfortunately this last point is one not of technical "scholarship," but of general literary criticism, and it is certain that the Celticists have not converted all or most students in that subject to their view. I should myself give my opinion, for whatever it may be worth, to the effect that the tone and tendency of the Celtic, and especially the Irish, literature of very early days, as declared by its own modern champions, are quite different from those of the romances in general and the Arthurian Legend in particular. Again, though the other two[Pg 137] classes of evidence cannot be so ruled out of court as a whole, it must be evident that they go but a very little way, and are asked to go much further. If any one will consult Professor Rhys's careful though most friendly abstract of the testimony of early Welsh literature, he will see how very great the interval is. When we are asked to accept a magic caldron which fed people at discretion as the special original of the Holy Grail, the experienced critic knows the state of the case pretty well.[66] While as to the place-names, though they give undoubted and valuable support of a kind to the historical existence of Arthur, and support still more valuable to the theory of the early and wide distribution of legends respecting him, it is noticeable that they have hardly anything to do with our Arthurian Legend at all. They concern—as indeed we should expect—the fights with the Saxons, and some of them reflect (very vaguely and thinly) a tradition of conjugal difficulties between Arthur and his queen. But unfortunately these last are not confined to Arthurian experience; and, as we have seen, Arthur's fights with the Saxons, except the last when they joined Mordred, are of ever-dwindling importance for the Romance.

Like the Celtic theory, the French has an engaging appearance of justice and probability, and it has over the Celtic the overwhelming advantage as regards texts. That all, without exception,[Pg 138] of the oldest texts in which the complete romantic story of Arthur appears are in the French language is a fact entirely indisputable, and at first blench conclusive. We may even put it more strongly still and say that, taking positive evidence as apart from mere assertion (as in the case of the Latin Graal-book), there is nothing to show that any part of the full romantic story of Arthur, as distinguished from the meagre quasi-historical outline of Geoffrey, ever appeared in any language before it appeared in French. The most certain of the three personal claimants for the origination of these early texts, Chrestien de Troyes, was undoubtedly a Frenchman in the wide sense; so (if he existed) was Robert de Borron, another of them. The very phrase so familiar to readers of Malory, "the French book," comes to the assistance of the claim.

And yet, as is the case with some other claims which look irresistible at first sight, the strength of this shrinks and dwindles remarkably when it comes to be examined. One consideration is by itself sufficient, not indeed totally to destroy it, but to make a terrible abatement in its cogency; and this is, that if the great Arthurian romances, written between the middle and end of the twelfth century, were written in French, it was chiefly because they could not have been written in any other tongue. Not only was no other language generally intelligible to that public of knights and ladies to which they were addressed; not only was no other vernacular language generally known to European men of letters, but no such vernacular, except Provençal, had attained to anything[Pg 139] like the perfection necessary to make it a convenient vehicle. Whatever the nationality of the writer or writers, it was more likely that he or they would write in French than in any other language. And as a matter of fact we see that the third of the great national claimants was an Englishman, while it is not certain that Robert de Borron was not an English subject. Nor is it yet formally determined whether Chrestien himself, in those parts of his work which are specially Arthurian, had not Map or some one else before him as an authority.

The last theory, that the Legend may be almost if not quite sufficiently accounted for as a legitimate descendant of previous literature, classical and other (including Oriental sources), has been the least general favourite. As originally started, or at least introduced into English literary history, by Warton, it suffered rather unfairly from some defects of its author. Warton's History of English Poetry marks, and to some extent helped to produce, an immense change for the better in the study of English literature: and he deserved the contemptuous remarks of some later critics as little as he did the savage attacks of the half-lunatic Ritson. But he was rather indolent; his knowledge, though wide, was very desultory and full of scraps and gaps; and, like others in his century, he was much too fond of hypothesis without hypostasis, of supposition without substance. He was very excusably but very unluckily ignorant of what may be called the comparative panorama of English and European literature during the Middle Ages,[Pg 140] and was apt to assign to direct borrowing or imitation those fresh workings up of the eternal données of all literary art which presented themselves. As the theory has been more recently presented with far exacter learning and greater judgment by his successor, Mr Courthope,[67] it is much relieved from most of its disabilities. I have myself no doubt that the Greek romances (see chap. ix.) do represent at the least a stage directly connecting classical with romantic literature; and that the later of them (which, it must be remembered, were composed in this very twelfth century, and must have come under the notice of the crusaders), may have exercised a direct effect upon mediæval Romance proper. I formed this opinion more than twenty years ago, when I first read Hysminias and Hysmine; and I have never seen reason to change it since. But these influences, though not to be left out of the question, are perhaps in one respect too general, and in another too partial, to explain the precise matter. That the Arthurian Romances, in common with all the romances, and with mediæval literature generally, were much more influenced by the traditional classical culture than used at one time to be thought, I have believed ever since I began to study the subject, and am more and more convinced of it. The classics both of Europe and the East played a part, and no small part, in bringing about the new literature; but it was only a part.

[Pg 141]

If, as I think may fairly be done, the glory of the Legend be chiefly claimed for none of these, but for English or Anglo-Norman, it can be done in no spirit of national pleonexia, but on a sober consideration of all the facts of the case, and allowing all other claimants their fair share in the matter as subsidiaries. From the merely a priori point of view the claims of England—that is to say, the Anglo-Norman realm—are strong. The matter is "the matter of Britain," and it was as natural that Arthur should be sung in Britain as that Charlemagne should be celebrated in France. But this could weigh nothing against positive balance of argument from the facts on the other side. The balance, however, does not lie against us. The personal claim of Walter Map, even if disproved, would not carry the English claim with it in its fall. But it has never been disproved. The positive, the repeated, attribution of the MSS. may not be final, but requires a very serious body of counter-argument to upset it. And there is none such. The time suits; the man's general ability is not denied; his familiarity with Welshmen and Welsh tradition as a Herefordshire Marcher is pretty certain; and his one indisputable book of general literature, the De Nugis Curialium, exhibits many—perhaps all—of the qualifications required: a sharp judgment united with a distinct predilection for the marvellous, an unquestionable piety combined with man-of-the-worldliness, and a toleration of human infirmities. It is hardly necessary to point out the critical incompetence of those who[Pg 142] say that a satirist like Map could not have written the Quest and the Mort. Such critics would make two Peacocks as the simultaneous authors of Nightmare Abbey and Rhododaphne—nay, two Shakespeares to father the Sonnets and the Merry Wives. If any one will turn to the stories of Gerbert and Meridiana, of Galo, Sadius, and the evil queen in the Nugæ, he will, making allowance for Walter's awkward Latin in comparison with the exquisite French of the twelfth century, find reasons for thinking the author of that odd book quite equal to the authorship of part—not necessarily the whole—of the Arthurian story in its co-ordinated form.

Again, it is distinctly noticeable that the farther the story goes from England and the English Continental possessions, the more does it lose of that peculiar blended character, that mixture of the purely mystical and purely romantic, of sacred and profane, which has been noted as characteristic of its perfect bloom. In the Percevale of Chrestien and his continuators, and still more in Wolfram von Eschenbach, as it proceeds eastwards, and into more and more purely Teutonic regions, it absorbs itself in the Graal and the moonshiny mysticism thereto appertaining. When it has fared southwards to Italy, the lawlessness of the loves of Guinevere and Iseult preoccupies Southern attention. As for Welsh, it is sufficient to quote the statement of the most competent of Welsh authorities, Professor Rhys, to the effect that "the passion of Lancelot for Guinevere is unknown to Welsh literature." Now, as I have tried to point[Pg 143] out, the passion of Lancelot for Guinevere, blended as it is with the quasi-historic interest of Arthur's conquests and the religious-mystical interest of the Graal story, is the heart, the life, the source of all charm and beauty in the perfect Arthur-story.

I should think, therefore, that the most reasonable account of the whole matter may be somewhat as follows, using imagination as little as possible, and limiting hypothesis rigidly to what is necessary to connect, explain, and render generally intelligible the historical facts which have been already summarised. And I may add that while this account is not very different from the views of the earliest of really learned modern authorities, Sir Frederic Madden and M. Paulin Paris, I was surprised to find how much it agrees with that of one of the very latest, M. Loth.

In so far as the probable personality and exploits, and the almost certain tradition of such exploits and such a personality, goes, there is no reason for, and much reason against, denying a Celtic origin to this Legend of Arthur. The best authorities have differed as to the amount of really ancient testimony in Welsh as to him, and it seems to be agreed by the best authorities that there is no ancient tradition in any other branch of Celtic literature. But if we take the mentions allowed as ancient by such a careful critic as Professor Rhys, if we combine them with the place-name evidence, and if we add the really important fact, that of the earliest literary dealers, certain or probable, with the legend, Geoffrey, Layamon, and Walter Map were[Pg 144] neighbours of Wales, and Wace a neighbour of Brittany, to suppose that Arthur as a subject for romantic treatment was a figment of some non-Celtic brain, Saxon or Norman, French or English, is not only gratuitous but excessively unreasonable. Again, there can be no reasonable doubt that the Merlin legends, in at least their inception, were Celtic likewise. The attempt once made to identify Merlin with the well-known "Marcolf," who serves as Solomon's interlocutor in a mass of early literature more or less Eastern in origin, is one of those critical freaks which betray an utterly uncritical temperament. Yet further, I should be inclined to allow no small portion of Celtic ingredient in the spirit, the tendency, the essence of the Arthurian Legend. We want something to account for this, which is not Saxon, not Norman, not French, not Teutonic generally, not Latin, not Eastern; and I at least am unable to discover where this something comes from if it is not from the Celtic fringe of England and of Normandy.

But when we come to the Legend proper, and to its most important and most interesting characteristics, to its working up, to that extraordinary development which in a bare half-century (and half a century, though a long time now, was a very short one seven hundred years ago) evolved almost a whole library of romance from the scanty faits et gestes of Arthur as given by Geoffrey,—then I must confess that I can see no evidence of Celtic forces or sources having[Pg 145] played any great part in the matter. If Caradoc of Lancarvan wrote the Vita Gildæ—and it is pretty certainly not later than his day, while if it was not written by him it must have been written by some one equally well acquainted with traditions, British and Armorican, of St Gildas—if he or any one else gave us what he has given about Arthur and Gildas himself, about Arthur's wife and Melvas, and if traditions existed of Galahad or even Percivale and the Graal, of the Round Table, most of all of Lancelot,—why in the name of all that is critical and probable did he not give us more? His hero could not have been ignorant of the matter, the legends of his hero could hardly have been silent about them. It is hard to believe that anybody can read the famous conclusion of Geoffrey's history without seeing a deliberate impishness in it, without being certain that the tale of the Book and the Archdeacon is a tale of a Cock and a Bull. But if it be taken seriously, how could the "British book" have failed to contain something more like our Legend of Arthur than Geoffrey has given us, and how, if it existed and gave more, could Geoffrey have failed to impart it? Why should the Welsh, the proudest in their way of all peoples, and not the least gifted in literature, when they came to give Arthurian legends of the kind which we recognise, either translate them from the French or at least adapt and adjust them thereto?

On the other hand, the supposition that the fashioning, partly out of vague tradition, partly it may be[Pg 146] out of more definite Celtic tales like that of Tristram, partly from classical, Eastern, and other sources, belongs to the English in the wide sense—that is to say, the nation or nations partly under English rule proper, partly under Scottish, partly under that of the feudatories or allies of the English kings as Dukes of Normandy—has to support it not merely the arguments stated above as to the concentration of the legend proper between Troyes and Herefordshire, between Broceliande and Northumbria, as to MS. authority, as to the inveteracy of the legend in English,—not only those negative ones as to the certainty that if it were written by Englishmen it would be written in French,—but another, which to the comparative student of literary history may seem strongest of all.

Here first, here eminently, and here just at the time when we should expect it, do we see that strange faculty for exhibiting a blend, a union, a cross of characteristics diverse in themselves, and giving when blended a result different from any of the parts, which is more than anything else the characteristic of the English language, of English literature, of English politics, of everything that is English. Classical rhetoric, French gallantry, Saxon religiosity and intense realisation of the other world, Oriental extravagance to some extent, the "Celtic vague"—all these things are there. But they are all co-ordinated, dominated, fashioned anew by some thing which is none of them, but which is the English genius, that curious,[Pg 147] anomalous, many-sided genius, which to those who look at only one side of it seems insular, provincial, limited, and which yet has given us Shakespeare, the one writer of the world to whom the world allows an absolute universality.

---

Site Menu | Home | Guestbook | Religion Menu | You, A Real Christian? | Christian Cliches | Christian Family Values | Forum | Email