Le Morte Darthur
he only gives the main results. With the exception of the story of
Beaumains, which is an enlarged narration of that of La Cote Male
Taile, and subject to the changes made by Malory’s own genius, all the
adventures and incidents of Malory’s Morte Darthur are now shown to be
found in one or more of these ‘sources,’ often translated literally
from French, or transferred word for word from the English, yet still
oftener so compressed and fused into a new shape that the finished work
is but a tenth of the bulk of the original matter. Dr. Sommer arranges
these sources into the four groups of the Merlin, the Lancelot, the
Tristan, and the Prophecies of Merlin, and shows the relations of each
group to the corresponding portions of Malory. He thinks, with M.
Gaston Paris, that Malory had a now lost form of the ‘Lancelot,’
comparable to the ‘Suite de Merlin’ discovered only fifteen years
since; and indeed believes that he has found some pages of this missing
‘Lancelot’ imbedded in a ‘Tristan’ MS. in the British Museum. But the
work of this learned critic must be studied in itself, not in a
summary. Of the light which these investigations throw upon the genius
of Malory, and on the character of his art, I have already spoken.
There is no title-page, as I have already mentioned, to the Caxton,
that which is given by several bibliographers being only an extract,
not very critically selected, from Caxton’s preface. But it is stated
in Caxton’s colophon that the book was ‘entytled le morte Darthur,’ and
he explains that it was so ‘entitled’ notwithstanding it treated of
Arthur’s birth, life, and acts as well as death, and also of the
adventures of his knights of the Round Table. And the concluding words
of Malory, ‘Here is the end of the death of Arthur,’ taken with their
context, point to the same title. It was indeed before Malory’s time,
and has been ever since, the traditional title of this story. We have
Mort Artus and Morte Arthure in the earlier times; Ascham, in Henry
VIII’s reign, calls this book La Morte d’Arthure; Tyrwhitt, Mort
d’Arthur; and Walter Scott and Southey, Morte Arthur, which last
probably many of us are familiar with as the old name which we heard
from our own fathers.
§3. AN ESSAY ON CHIVALRY.
St. Augustine replied to the enquiry, What is time? by saying, ‘I know
when you do not ask me:’ and a like answer suggests itself to us if we
try to find an adequate reply to the question, What is Chivalry? For
chivalry is one of those words, like love, duty, patriotism, loyalty,
which make us feel their meaning, and the reality of what they mean,
though their ideal and comprehensive character hinders us from readily
putting it into the forms of a definition. When the alchemist in the
Eastern tale compounds, with all the resources of his art, the
universal solvent before the expectant eyes of his pupil, the pupil,
seeing the mysterious fluid lie quietly in the crucible, exclaims, with
not unreasonable doubt, ‘O Sage, be not deceived: how can that which
dissolves all things be itself contained in a ladle?’ And how shall
chivalry, sparkling and flashing everywhere as it runs through that
great complicated tissue of human life which we call modern
civilisation,—how shall chivalry, the humaniser of society, be brought
within the limits of a definition?
Chivalry, indeed, exists for us in spirit rather than in outward and
visible form. It no longer comes to us with the outward symbols of
war-horse, and armour, and noble birth, and strength of arm, and
high-flown protestations of love and gallantry; yet we never fail to
know and feel its presence, silent and unobtrusive as it now is: we
recognise the lady and the gentleman not less surely now than they did
in old times; and we acknowledge their rights and their power over us
now no less than then. And if the spirit of chivalry does live among us
still, we may read its past history by its present light, and say in
Spenser’s words,—
‘By infusion sweete
Of thine own spirit which doth in me survive,
I follow still the footing of thy feete,
That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete.’
Let us then look back to those times when chivalry had an outward,
visible form, and was embodied in its own proper institutions, with
orders, and statutes, and courts of its own jurisdiction, and rituals,
and customs, like those of other great social institutions and members
of the body politic.
The deluge of the Teutonic nations which broke up the old Roman
civilisation threatened for some centuries to overwhelm Europe with
mere barbarism. We know now that the germs of a far higher and better
civilisation were everywhere ready to burst into life as soon as the
fury of that deluge had spent itself; but for a long period the evil
seemed mightier than the good. From time to time the clear head, the
noble heart and conscience, and the strong arm of an Alfred, a
Charlemagne, or an Otho, might bring a temporary calm and order into
the storm; but when the personal influences of such great men were
withdrawn, society relapsed again and again into ever new anarchy, and
war—at once the effect and the cause of anarchy—savage, cruel war
became the business of all men throughout Europe. The selfish, the
rapacious, and the unscrupulous fought for power, and plunder, and love
of fighting; and while violence could only be resisted by violence, and
each man had to defend himself, his family, and his possessions as best
he could, with no effectual aid from law and government, there was a
constant tendency to increasing barbarism and brutish, or worse than
brutish, instead of human, existence.
But man differs from the brutes in this, that while he can fall lower
than they, he can also rise higher, and that even the passions and the
impulses which he has in common with them may be subdued, and refined,
and modified, till they become the servants and instruments of his
human life, and the means by which all that is properly spiritual in
his being may be reflected and symbolised upon this earth in outward,
visible form. The nobler races of men—the historical races, as they
have been called—constantly show this aptitude for contending with
these downward tendencies of our nature, and for advancing, through the
conquest of them, to new and higher life.
And so it was in the Middle Ages. The Church was, no doubt, the great
civiliser of the nations: still, whatever aid the State derived from
the Church, it then, no less than now, had a position and processes of
its own, by which it did its own work of civilisation too. And its
first great work for controlling the universal anarchy of which I have
spoken was the extension and firm establishment of that
half-patriarchal, half-military organisation which we call the Feudal
System. Every man who was not rich and powerful enough to be a lord
became—willingly or unwillingly—a vassal; and all men, from the king
downwards, were bound to each other for reciprocal service and
protection—a service and protection partly military, but partly
patriarchal, since they were rendered not by men strangers to each
other except for what Mr. Carlyle calls ‘the nexus of cash payment,’
but united by ties of family, and neighbourhood, and clanship, and by
the interests and sympathies that grow out of these. But the protector
of his own vassals easily became the invader of the rights and ravager
of the possessions of his neighbour and his vassals; and so the old
evils of anarchy and violence grew afresh out of the remedy which had
been devised to meet them. The ‘monarchies sank into impotence; petty,
lawless tyrants trampled all social order under foot,’ says a learned
historian of this period, ‘and all attempts after scientific
instruction and artistic pleasures were as effectually crushed by this
state of general insecurity as the external well-being and material
life of the people. This was a dark and stormy period for Europe,
merciless, arbitrary, and violent. It is a sign of the prevailing
feeling of misery and hopelessness that, when the first thousand years
of our æra were drawing to their close, the people in every country in
Europe looked with certainty for the destruction of the world. Some
squandered their wealth in riotous living, others bestowed it for the
good of their souls on churches and convents; weeping multitudes lay
day and night around the altars; some looked forward with dread, but
most with secret hope, towards the burning of the earth and the falling
in of heaven. Their actual condition was so miserable that the idea of
destruction was relief, spite of all its horrors[39].’
The palliatives with which men tried to meet the evils of the times
indicate the greatness of the evils, but also the moral feeling which
was the promise of better things. Such was the so-called ‘Peace of the
King,’ by which private wars were not to be entered on till forty days
after the committal of the alleged crime which was to be avenged; and
the ‘Truce of God,’ by which all these acts of private hostility were
suspended from Thursday to Monday in each week. And at the Council of
Cleremont, held by Urban II in November, 1095, a severe censure was
pronounced against the licence of private war; the Truce of God was
confirmed; women and priests were placed under the safeguard of the
Church; and a protection of three years was extended to husbandmen and
merchants, the defenceless victims of military rapine. We are reminded
of the law of Moses, which provided Cities of Refuge for the man who
accidentally and without malice killed his neighbour, but who could not
look for protection from the vengeance of the family of the slain man
except within those special safeguards. In each case there is the same
unreasoning rage of the half-civilised man brought face to face with
the demands of religion and civil law: and each is obliged to yield
something to the other till the better cause has had time to prepare
and strengthen itself for a more complete triumph.
Chivalry, then, was the offspring of the same spirit which dictated the
Peace of the King, the Truce of God, and the decrees of the Council of
Cleremont. Chivalry has another name—Knighthood—and the two are
wanted to express all that we mean by either[40]. The chevalier was the
soldier who rode the war-horse: he whose birth entitled him, and whose
wealth gave him the means, to ride at the head of his vassals and
retainers to the war: all ideas of lordship, and mastery, and outward
dignity and power, are here embodied before us. But this ‘chevalier,’
this ‘ritter,’ or rider of the war-horse, was also to be a ‘knecht,’ or
servant: ‘He that will be chief among you, let him be your servant.’
The knight was to obey, no less than to command; he was to exert his
strength and power, not for selfish ends, but in the service of others;
and especially in the service of the poor, the weak, and the oppressed,
who could not help or defend themselves. It was, indeed, no new
discovery in the world, that such are the duties of him who possesses
power, and above all the power of the sword; and they who have tried to
trace the origin of chivalry to some particular place and time have had
to go to the Germans of Tacitus, to the Crusaders, to the Saracens, to
the Romans, the Greeks, the Trojans, the Hebrews, only to come to the
conclusion that chivalry belongs in its spirit to man as man; though
the form in which that spirit was clothed in Europe in the Middle Ages
has an individuality of which some of the sources may be ascertained,
and though from that time forward its power has been established, and
extended, in a manner, and with a greatness unknown to the ancients.
In those days society was essentially military. In this our own time