Le Morte Darthur
was in prison xl. winter, him to comfort,’ but does not mention its
earlier history.
When Caxton replied to the ‘noble and divers gentlemen of this realm of
England’ who urged him to print the history of Arthur, that many
persons held the opinion that there was no such Arthur, ‘one in
special’ insisted that this was mere blindness, since Arthur’s
sepulchre was to be seen at Glastonbury, Gawaine’s skull at Dover, the
Round Table at Winchester, as well as many other relics. And if this
noble gentleman had only known it, he might have added that the Holy
Grail itself was to be seen in the Cathedral Church of Genoa. There it
is still shewn. It is an hexagonal dish, about seventeen inches across,
and was long supposed to be a single emerald, which stone it resembles
in colour and brilliancy. It is called ‘Sagro Catino,’ with a tradition
which makes it to be the Holy Grail we have just described, and with
the addition that it was brought to Solomon by the Queen of Sheba. It
was taken, on the capture of Caesarea, by the Genoese under Guglielmo
Embriaco in 1101 A. D. Like the other plunder of Italian cities it was
taken to Paris by Napoleon I, and restored after the peace of 1815, but
was broken in pieces on the road from careless packing. It is now kept
together by a wire frame: and when I saw it in the Cathedral treasury a
few years since I was gravely told that it was broken in its return
from the Paris ‘Exposition’ of Napoleon III[13].
INFLUENCE OF THE BOOK ON ENGLISH LETTERS AND LIFE.
The influence of Sir Thomas Malory’s book upon English literature, and
so upon English life, upon our thoughts, morals, and manners, has been
great and important. I have spoken of its claims to be considered an
Epic poem; but it is not the less true, that it is our first great work
of English prose, the first in which the writing of prose was shown to
be one of the fine arts for England. Malory’s style is often
inartificial: he is not always able to master the huge masses of his
materials, and fails to fuse and mould them into a perfect whole. But
we must confess the like of Milton, whose grand periods of magnificent
English are often followed by others which are confused and cumbrous in
form, if not in thought. It has taken many workmen, through many
generations, to make our prose writing what it is: but there is an
infant beauty in Malory’s style which is full of promise of the perfect
manly form that is to be. The passages which I have already quoted are
instances of this inartificial beauty of style. The thoughts and images
spontaneously utter themselves in words without any attempt at
rhetorical balance and arrangement. Thus in the lament of Sir Ector
over Sir Launcelot, Malory does not ask himself whether there is a
logical connection between courtesy and bearing a shield, or between
true friendship and bestriding a horse, as a modern writer would have
done, and so brought those sentences into a more finished though more
monotonous correspondence with the rest. The flow of feeling is true,
direct, and simple, and that is enough. Dr. Sommer, in his notes on the
language of ‘Le Morte Darthur,’ points to the indications, in grammar,
spelling, and other usages of words, of its transitional place between
the language of Chaucer and that of Shakespeare; while Southey says
that it was composed in the best possible time for making it what it
is: and Mr. J. A. Symonds (whom I am permitted to name) says:—‘The
Morte Darthur was written at a lucky moment in our literary history,
when the old Saxon fountain of speech was yet undefiled, and when
printing had not introduced stereotyped forms or enforced the laws of a
too scrupulous grammar; at the same time the language is truly
English—rich in French and Latin words, as well as Saxon, and not so
archaic as to be grotesque or repulsive[14].
And if in these things Malory was happy in the opportuneness of the
times in which he wrote, not less was he so in that he lived in a day
in which (as we see from Caxton’s Preface) men could still believe in
the marvellous adventures of knight-errantry. A hundred years later,
the spirit of chivalry had so departed from the old forms that Spenser
could only use them as materials for allegory, while Cervantes, himself
full of the old spirit, could only treat the belief in knight-errantry
as the fantasy of a crazed though generous mind. But Malory was still
able to embody the ideals of chivalry in actual and serious personages,
and so to influence the national character and manners of his
countrymen in the best way. His book is a possession for all times. The
old stock is still putting out new leaves and fruits for ourselves.
THE MORALITY OF THE BOOK.
In morals as well as in language (though more obscurely, since the
subject of morals is so much more complicated than that of philology),
we may find signs of a transition from the times of Chaucer to those of
Shakespeare, and of progress no less than transition. The suppression
of the Lollards—hated alike by the Church and the feudal lords, the
War of the Roses, and the licentiousness of the court and courtiers,
must, in the days of Edward IV, in which Malory wrote, have cut the
moral and social life of the country down to its roots. Yet even in
Malory’s book there are signs of the new moral life which was coming,
and which in the days of the Reformation reached a power and expansion
never before known. It would be absurd to pretend that Malory had
greatly advanced in morality from the position of Chaucer and his age
towards that of the Elizabethan period. Roger Ascham, indeed, while
admitting that ‘ten Morte Arthurs do not the tenth part so much harm as
one of these books made in Italy and translated in England,’ protests
against the demoralising effect of the literature of which he takes
this book as the example, ‘the whole pleasure of which,’ he says,
‘standeth in two special points—in open manslaughter and bold bawdray.
In which book those be counted the noblest knights that do kill most
men without any quarrel, and commit foulest adulteries by subtlest
shifts[15].’ I remember Dante’s story of the sin and doom of Paolo and
Francesca—
‘Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse’—
and recognise a real though only half truth in Ascham’s strictures. But
he greatly over-states the evil, while he altogether omits to recognise
the good in the book. Caxton’s estimate of the moral purport of the
whole book, gives not merely the other side, but both sides of the
case. Much more than half the ‘open manslaughter’ is done in putting
down cruel oppressors and bringing back kingdoms from anarchy to law
and good government; and the occasions call forth all the knightly
virtues of gentleness, forbearance, and self-sacrifice, as well as
those of courage and hardihood. And though it is far from possible to
deny the weight of Ascham’s other charge, yet we must not, in forming
our estimate of the book, forget the silent yet implied judgment which
is passed upon lawless love by its tragic end, nor the ideal presented
in the lives of the maiden knights, Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale. For
the purpose of a due estimate of Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur,’ we may
fairly take Caxton’s Preface as an integral part of the book. The
Preface gives the tone, the motive, to the whole book. The morality of
‘Morte Darthur’ is low in one essential thing, and this alike in what
it says and in what it omits: and Lord Tennyson shows us how it should
be raised. The ideal of marriage, in its relation and its contrast with
all other forms of love and chastity, is brought out in every form,
rising at last to tragic grandeur, in the _Idylls of the King_. It is
not in celibacy, though spiritual and holy as that of Galahad or
Percivale, but in marriage, as the highest and purest realisation of
the ideal of human conditions and relations, that we are to rise above
the temptations of a love like that of Launcelot or even of Elaine; and
Malory’s book does not set this ideal of life before us with any power
or clearness. In no age or country has the excellence of marriage, as
the highest condition of man’s life, been wholly unknown: but Luther
and the Reformation brought it first into the full light of day, when
he, a monk, married a nun, and thus in the name of God, declared that
the vows of marriage were more sacred and more binding than those of
the convent, and that the one might be lawfully set aside by the other.
And we know how this ideal of love in marriage is worked out by
Shakespeare. With Shakespeare it is marriage which explains, justifies,
forgives, glorifies, and blesses every prosperous and happy condition
of life, and gives an abiding peace as well as dignity to the closing
scenes of his deepest tragedies. Marriage not only sheds its radiance
upon the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda, and of Rosalind and Orlando,
but on all around them: marriage justifies the boldness of Helena as
the love of Elaine, touching as its self-surrender is, cannot do: it
secures forgiveness to the weak and foolish Leontes, and even to the
worthless Angelo; it is to the husband of Desdemona that we find
ourselves constrained to accord the pardon and the sympathy which she
herself had given him. And no one will know Hamlet as he is, nor fully
understand his tragic destiny, unless he sees what it might have been,
as his mother saw it, when she exclaims:—
‘Sweets to the sweet, farewell!
I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife;
I thought thy bridal bed to have deck’d, sweet maid,
And not have strew’d thy grave.’
But this is Shakespeare’s Ophelia, not the preposterous misconception
of Tieck and Goethe, who should have been warned by Polonius not ‘to
cast beyond themselves in their opinions.’
If Morte Arthur does not deserve the unqualified denunciation of the
learned Ascham, it cannot be denied that it exhibits a picture of a
society far lower than our own in morals, and depicts it with far less
repugnance to its evil elements, on the part either of the author or
his personages, than any good man would now feel. Still—with the
exception of stories like those of the birth of Arthur and Galahad,
which show not only another state of manners from our own, but also a
really different standard of morals from any which we should now hold
up—the writer does for the most part endeavour, though often in but an
imperfect and confused manner, to distinguish between vice and virtue,
and honestly to reprobate the former; and thus shows that his object is
to recognize and support the nobler elements of the social state in
which he lived, and to carry them towards new triumphs over the evil.
And even where, as in the story of Tristram, there is palliation rather
than reprobation of what Sir Walter Scott justly calls ‘the extreme
ingratitude and profligacy of the hero,’ still the fact that such
palliation, by representing King Mark as the most worthless of men, was
thought necessary in the later, though not in the earlier, romance on
the same subject, shows an upward progress in morals; while a real
effort to distinguish virtue from vice is to be seen in the story of
Launcelot, with his sincere though weak struggles against temptation,
and his final penitence under the punishment of the woes which his
guilt has brought on all dear to him as well as to himself. Or if we
look at the picture which Chaucer’s works give us of the co-existence
in one mind—and that one of the noblest of its age—of the most
virtuous Christian refinement and the most brutish animal coarseness,
and then see how in the pages of Malory, inferior as we must hold him
to be to Chaucer, the brutish vice has dwindled to half its former