Le Morte Darthur
cannot doubt is a picture of actual life and manners. ‘Oriana,’ says
the old book, ‘was about ten years old, the fairest creature that ever
was seen; wherefore she was called the one “without a peer”.... The
child of the sea (that is, Amadis) was now twelve years old, but in
stature and size he seemed fifteen, and he served the queen; but, now
that Oriana was there, the queen gave her the child of the sea, that he
should serve her, and Oriana said that “it pleased her;” and that word
which she said, the child kept in his heart, so that he never lost it
from his memory, and in all his life he was never weary of serving her,
and his heart was surrendered to her; and this love lasted as long as
they lasted, for as well as he loved her did she also love him. But the
child of the sea, who knew nothing of her love, thought himself
presumptuous to have placed his thoughts on her, and dared not speak to
her; and she, who loved him in her heart, was careful not to speak more
with him than with another: but their eyes delighted to reveal to the
heart what was the thing on earth that they loved best. And now the
time came that he thought he could take arms if he were knighted; and
this he greatly desired, thinking that he would do such things that, if
he lived, his mistress should esteem him.’
Such was the beginning of the loves of Amadis and Oriana, so famous in
romance, and so generally held by knights and ladies to be a model for
themselves. Constancy, such as that of Amadis, was a virtue of the true
lover which those times of long inevitable separations and absences
demanded in forms hardly known in our days; and in proportion was it
insisted upon, and held in honour. So Spenser says:
‘Young knight whatever, that dost arms profess,
And through long labours huntest after fame,
Beware of fraud, beware of fickleness,
In choice and change of thy dear loved dame;
Lest thou of her believe too lightly blame,
And rash misweening do thy heart remove;
For unto knight there is no greater shame,
Than lightness and inconstancy in love.’
The peerless Amadis passed with more than ordinary rapidity to the rank
of knighthood. The youth more usually remained an esquire—the next
step to that of page—till he was twenty. He attended the knight to
whose person he was attached, dressed and undressed him, trained his
horses, kept his arms bright and burnished, and did the honours of the
household to the strangers who visited it; so that Spenser takes the
squire as the type of such courtesy. Here is Chaucer’s description of
the squire:
‘With him there was his son, a youngé squire,
A lover and a lusty bachelor,
With lockés curl’d as they were laid in press;
Of twenty years of age he was, I guess.
Of his statúre he was of even length,
And wonderly deliver, and great of strength;
And he had been some time in chevachie (military expeditions),
In Flanders, in Artois, and Picardie,
And borne him well, as of so little space,
In hope to standen in his lady’s grace.
Embroider’d was he, as it were a mead
All full of freshé flowers, white and red;
Singing he was, or fluting, all the day;
He was as fresh as is the month of May;
Short was his gown, with sleevés long and wide:
Well could he sit on horse, and fairé ride;
He couldé songés make, and well indite,
Just, and eke dance, and well pourtray and write:
So hot he lovéd, that by nightertale
He slept no more than doth the nightingale.
Courteous he was; slowly and serviceable;
And carv’d before his father at the table.’
I have already spoken of the religious rites with which the esquire was
admitted into the order of knighthood, and of the solemn and noble
engagements into which he then entered. He had next to ‘win his spurs,’
as it was called; a phrase happily illustrated in the story of Edward
III and the Black Prince, which Froissart thus relates:—
‘This battle between Broy and Cressy, this Saturday, was right
cruel and fell, and many a feat of arms done that day came not to
my knowledge.... In the morning, the day of the battle, certain
Frenchmen and Almagnes perforce opened the archers of the prince’s
battle (_division_ as we should now say), and came and fought with
the men of arms, hand to hand. Then the second battle of the
Englishmen came to succour the prince’s battle, the which was time,
for they had as then much ado. And they with the prince sent a
messenger to the king, who was on a little windmill hill: then the
knight said to the king, “Sir, the earl of Warwick, and the earl of
Oxford, Sir Reynold Cobham, and other, such as lie about the prince
your son, are fiercely fought withal, and are sore handled,
wherefore they desire you that you and your battle will come and
aid them, for if the Frenchmen increase, as they doubt they will,
your son and they shall have much ado.” Then the king said, “Is my
son dead, or hurt, or on the earth felled?” “No, sir,” quoth the
knight, “but he is hardly matched, wherefore he hath need of your
aid.” “Well,” said the king, “return to him, and to them that sent
you hither, and say to them, that they send no more to me for any
adventure that falleth, as long as my son is alive: and also say to
them, that they suffer him this day to win his spurs; for, if God
be pleased, I will this day’s work be his, and the honour thereof,
and to them that be about him.” Then the knight returned again to
them, and showed the king’s words, the which greatly encouraged
them, and repented in that they had sent to the king as they did.’
Brave knights, to be ‘greatly encouraged’ by such stern though
manly words. We are reminded of the not less brave and knightly
demeanour of Sir Colin Halket and his men at Waterloo, when the
Duke of Wellington rode up and asked how they were, and the general
replied that two-thirds of the brigade were down, and the remainder
so exhausted that the relief of fresh troops, for however short a
time, was most desirable. But when the duke said that no relief was
possible, that all depended on _them_, the answer which the officer
made for himself and his men was, ‘Enough, my lord, we stand here
till the last man falls.’
Thenceforth the knight’s career depended, he would not have said on
himself, but on God and his lady: and if we may judge by the ordinary
language of the romances, his lady was often the object of actual
adoration, little differing from that he would have addressed to the
saints in the hour of danger or of triumph. Philosophic divines teach
us that although the worship of the saints may become in practice a
gross and degrading superstition, it has in it an element of true, and
in itself ennobling, faith in ideals of humanity more or less perfectly
revealed in human form: and so while we smile at the fictions of
extravagant fancy in which the mediæval knight was wont to clothe his
love, and his professions of love, for his mistress, we cannot
reasonably doubt that in the main, and for that time of youthful
imaginations rather than of sober reasonings, the knight was right.
When I think of what society was, and what it would still be, without
the humanizing influences of womanhood and ladyhood, and what it is by
means of these, I say that the tree may be judged by its fruits, and
that it is from a right noble stock, rightly and wisely cultivated in
the main, in those old days, that we are still gathering such noble
fruits. Much evil there was along with the good; and, what is worse,
much confusion between good and evil. I need not tell the reader of
chivalry romances, or of Lord Tennyson’s reproductions of some of their
incidents in modern form of thought as well as language, how painfully
this confusion defaces many of the fairest characters and most
interesting tales of chivalry, while the historical records of the
times in which those romances were written and read show that the
actual state of morals and manners exhibited the like confusions of
good and evil, in the ideals as well as in the conduct of life. But, as
I have already observed, we see, at least in the romance before us, the
good contending with, and mastering the evil, and this not least in the
end of the story of the guilty loves of Guenever and Launcelot, the
knight whose fame in romance perhaps surpasses that of Amadis, though
even mediæval morality was obliged to censure the constancy of
Launcelot’s love, while it might unhesitatingly extol that of Amadis.
Lord Tennyson has, I may assume, made every one familiar with the
retirement of queen Guenever to the nunnery of Almesbury, and with the
death of Arthur; and I venture for the completion of this sketch to
show, though from the present volume, how the old story which the poet
chiefly follows relates the death and draws the character of Launcelot.
Launcelot, when he heard of those events, went to Almesbury, and after
taking leave of the queen, resolved to follow her example; and became a
hermit and penitent, taking up his abode in a forest where was an
hermitage and a chapel that stood between two cliffs; and there he
served God day and night with prayers and fastings. Thus he, and other
knights who followed his example, ‘endured great penance six years, and
then Sir Launcelot took the habit of priesthood, and a twelvemonth he
sang mass.’ At the end of that time a vision directed him to take the
body of queen Guenever, now dead at Almesbury, and bury her with king
Arthur at Glastonbury. Then the story goes on:—‘And when she was put
in the earth Sir Launcelot swooned and lay long still, while the hermit
came out and awaked him, and said, Ye be to blame, for ye displease God
with such manner of sorrow making. Truly, said Sir Launcelot, I trust I
do not displease God, for He knoweth mine intent, for my sorrow was
not, nor is not, for any rejoicing of sin, but my sorrow may never have
end. For when I remember of her beauty, and of her noblesse, that was
both with her king and with her; so when I saw his corpse and her
corpse so lie together, truly mine heart would not serve to sustain my
careful body. Also when I remember me how by my default, and mine
orgule, and my pride, that they were both laid full low, that were
peerless that ever was living of christian people, wit ye well, said
Sir Launcelot, this remembered, of their kindness and mine unkindness,
sank so to my heart, that all my natural strength failed me, so that I
might not sustain myself.’ The story goes on to say that there he
wasted away, praying night and day at the tomb of the king and queen.
He died, and was taken to his own castle of Joyous Gard to be buried.
‘And right thus as they were at their service there came Sir Ector de
Maris, that had seven year sought all England, Scotland, and Wales,
seeking his brother Sir Launcelot. And when Sir Ector heard such noise
and light in the quire of Joyous Gard he alight, and put his horse from
him, and came into the quire, and there he saw men sing and weep. And
all they knew Sir Ector, but he knew not them. Then went Sir Bors unto
Sir Ector, and told him how there lay his brother Sir Launcelot dead.
And then Sir Ector threw his shield, sword, and helm from him; and when
he beheld Sir Launcelot’s visage he fell down in a swoon; and when he
awaked it were hard for any tongue to tell the doleful complaints that
he made for his brother. Ah, Launcelot, he said, thou were head of all
Christian knights! And now, I dare say, said Sir Ector, thou Sir
Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly
knight’s hands; and thou were the courtiest knight that ever bare