^TENNYSON'S IDYLLS OF THE KING AND ARTHURIAN STORY FROM THE XVIth CENTURY . BV <» M. W. MACCALLUM, MA. PROFESSOR OF MODERN LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OK SYDNEY GLASGOW JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS ittbiishers to tht ®nibcrsiifi 1894 P^ SSUO ^A 3 > DEDICATED TO D. M C C IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF LIFE-LONG KINDNESS 210032 PREFACE The collection of Arthurian story elaborated during the Middle Ages was too notable and impressive to be forgotten in the sixteenth century, when the distinctively modern epoch of history began. At the same time, the world had changed, and the feeling that the subject was a great one was for long unaccompanied by insight into where its greatness lay. Hence for three centuries it rather tantalised than satisfied the demands of the poetic imagination ; and its history during that period is very largely the record of tentative and irresolute efforts to enter into its spirit once more. It has found really sympathetic treatment only within the last sixty or sixty-five years, and, in its collective aspect, only at the hands of Tennyson. These later fortunes of the legend are, of course, much less important than its development during the Dark and the Middle Ages, but they are in- teresting and instructive in their own way. At any rate, it seemed worth while to give a more VI 11 PREFACE detailed account of them than, to my knowledge, has hitherto been attempted. My difficulty in the historical portion of my book (Chapters I. to V.) has been that, working to a great extent without predecessors, I have had for the most part to gather my data from chance hints and general reading. In the circumstances, I cannot hope to have avoided grave omissions with respect both to minor writers at home and abroad, and to the minor works of important continental writers. I shall be grateful for criticisms and suggestions. With the chapters on Tennyson (VI. to IX.) the case is very different. Here there is certainly no reason to complain of any lack of material, and the danger is rather of saying over again what has been said already. My apology for adding another criticism to the many that already exist, is that, so far as I know, my interpretation is somewhat different from those that have hitherto been offered. And 1 cannot but think that much of the disparag- ing comment on the Idylls of the King which we have lately heard, is due to the neglect of their allegoric character, or to the adoption of a false allegoric clue. Rightly understood, they seem to me to solve the problem of modern Arthurian poetry, and to represent the climax of at least the later development. To the essay which forms the proper substance of the book I have prefixed an introduction on the earlier growth of the legend. Of course, the more one makes oneself acquainted with Arthurian literature, whether it be the romances themselves or the dissertations of scholars, the more disinclined PREFACE ix one must feel to express a decided opinion about the matter. Clear knowledge of the subject is still in the making. The experts are by no means in agreement with each other, and their most luminous researches often serve chiefly to show how much remains dark. Moreover, since the publication of Mr. Nutt's Studies on the Holy Grail, in 1888, the problem has shifted to the region of Celtic philology, and my knowledge of Celtic literature, even in translated form, is not wide enough to entitle me to share in that part of the discussion. Two reasons, however, have decided me, with much reluctance and diffidence, to insert the preliminary sketch. In the first place, it seemed right to state the presuppositions on which my treatment of the later development to a great extent rests. In the second place, I did not know where else to refer readers who are not Arthurian students for some general idea of elder Arthurian story. I have therefore endeavoured, so far as possible, to keep to points on which the chief authorities are agreed or at least in regard to which their views are not irreconcilable, and clearly to mark as conjec- tural what is not yet passed as proven. My most important assumption is that there was a Brythonic nucleus of largely mythic material for the amplifications of romance. This theory, so far as the Grail is concerned, has in later years been revived and brought into prominence by Mr. Nutt in his laborious and brilliant essay ; and after a careful study of what a somewhat boisterous criticism has urged on the other side, it seems to me that, though some details ma)' need to be revised, and x PREFACE though a very complex legend may not have existed among the Celts, Mr. Nutt's main con- tention still holds the field. A similar view for a larger range of stories has been maintained with immense knowledge and fertility of suggestion by Professor Rhys. Whatever the ultimate decision may be, it is difficult to see how some of the cases of filiation he adduces can be controverted ; and they would suffice to prove some sort of Celtic connection. For the rest, I do not think I have said anything that cannot easily be reconciled with the hypotheses of a British or of a Breton origin, of the existence or the non-existence of an Anglo- Norman literature, of the relative priority of the verse, or, in a more primitive form, of the prose romances. In the Introduction, especially in Section IV., I have made use with many modifications of an essay on The Three Cycles of Medieval Romance, published by me in 1883. My book as a whole is the outcome of many years' occupation with the subject, and more immediately of a course of lectures delivered by me in the University of Sydney in 1 890-91. The pleasant duty remains of acknowledging the assistance which I have received from many friends. My colleague, Professor J. T. Wilson of Sydney University, Professor E. Caird, now Master of Balliol, Professor John Nichol, formerly of Glasgow / University, Professor Henry Jones of St. Andrews University, Professor W. Paton Ker of University College, London, have read the manuscript or PREFACE xi proofs, altogether or in part, and I owe them many valuable suggestions. To the two last I am especially indebted for criticism, both general and minute, that has been of the greatest service. I have also to thank Professor Ker for procuring me information which at the time was inaccessible to me, and for putting me on the track of things which I should have missed. Other friends, too numerous to mention, have laid me under deep obligations by help of various kinds. M. W. MACCALLUM. 2nd January, 1894. CONTENTS Page Introduction — I. Plan of the Essay i II. Arthur among the Celts .... 3 III. The Romantic Historians . . . . 21 IV. Chivalry and its Requirements . . 38 y V. The Verse and the Prose Romances . 58 / VI. Malory's Compilation and the English Ballads 85 CHAPTER I From the Reformation to the Puritan Revolution 109 CHAPTER II From the Restoration to the French Revolution 146 CHAPTER III The Romantic Revivai 179 xiv CONTENTS < Page CHAPTER IV Tennyson's Contemporaries on the Continent . 214 CHAPTER V Tennyson's Contemporaries at Home . . . 248 CHAPTER VI v' Tennyson as Arthurian Poet 289 CHAPTER VII y General Meaning of the Idylls . . . . 321 CHAPTER VIII J The Idylls as a Series 355 CHAPTER IX The Idylls as a Series (Continued) . . .382 Appendix— I. Blackmore's Epics on Arthur . . . 4'4 II. Sebastian Evans' Arthurian Poems . . 419 III. The Time Occupied by the Idylls . . 423 Index 429 TENNYSON'S IDYLLS OF THE KING AND ARTHURIAN STORY FROM THE XVIth CENTURY INTRODUCTION PLAN OF THE ESSAY TN modern literature the story of Arthur occu- pies a somewhat peculiar position. On the one hand, it is among the themes, consecrated by a popularity long and wide, that the world cher- ishes and will not willingly let die. Having its first source in remote Celtic tradition, it worked a channel to medieval France, where, fed by tributary streams, it rose and swelled till it spread into Britain and the Empire, and even more dis- tant lands. Then, no doubt, it dwindled and almost disappeared ; but, in the present century, it flows once more, somewhat scantily, indeed, in its old French bed, but all the more freely in Ger- many and England. Nor among ourselves has it ever been long lost from view. It has been ab- solutely neglected only when the poetic spirit was languishing ; in periods of imaginative energy it has never wanted its witnesses, and has never failed to attract great minds. In so far, it might be compared with con- ceptions like the medieval visions of a future A 2 INTRODUCTION state, or the Reformation legend of Dr. Faustus, or the typical embodiments in sculpture of the various Greek divinities, all of which were similarly dear to generations of men and passed through a development in which many successive minds co-operated. But, on the other hand, the Arthur- ian story has never produced an entirely perfect fruit, or, to put this in a slightly different way, no quite supreme genius has ever dedicated himself to its treatment. It has not found its Dante or its Goethe or its Pheidias. It is noticeable that Chaucer and Shakespeare, chief among our poets for broad and realistic humanity, pass it by with- out ever seeming to think of using it, save for casual allusions, mostly of a humorous kind. Spenser borrows Arthur's name, but profoundly alters the Arthurian legend. Milton, like Dryden, takes it up to let it fall. Only when we come to Tennyson do we find a poet of acknowledged power busying him- self in earnest with the stories of the Table Round. And though none would deny that Tennyson is a very great poet, and few that the Idylls are very noble poetry, still he and they hardly occupy a first place in the literature of the world like Dante and Goethe with their greatest works. Nevertheless, in the Idylls is probably t© be found the finest development that the cycle of Arthurian story has as yet attained, or will for long attain. Perhaps it might even be said, that they deliver the classic version of that story as a whole, and present it in the highest perfection of which it is capable. It may be maintained that its peculiar merits and defects correspond so PLAN OF THE ESS A Y 3 closely with the inherent limitations and excel- lences of Tennyson's genius, that in him it found its unique predestined interpreter. It is from this point of view that the present essay is written, and it aims at tracing the history of the legend after it had crystallised into its typical form, discussing its characteristic peculiarities, noting the more significant instances of its acceptance, its modification and its neglect, and showing how these in a manner lead up to a truer comprehen- sion of its spirit, till in the fulness of days Tenny- son comes to make the heritage his own. II ARTHUR AMONG THE CELTS SHORTLY after the publication of Lady Char- lotte Guest's collection of Welsh tales, which she entitled the Mabinogion (i 837-1 849), Renan made it the chief basis for a very interesting and sympathetic article on the Poetry of the Celtic Races. Recognising the comparative lateness of the stories in their existing form, Renan was yet more impressed with the primitive character of much that they narrate. " Christianity hardly ap- pears " ; he writes, " not that one is not occasion- ally aware of its vicinity, but it in no wise alters the purely naturalistic medium in which every- thing occurs." Further on he explains what he means by the term naturalistic : " Among the Cymry, the idea of the marvellous lies in nature herself, in her secret processes, in her inexhaustible 4 INTRODUCTION productivity. It is a mysterious swan, a pro- phetic bird, the sudden apparition of a hand, a giant, a black tyrant, a magic mist, a cry that is heard and makes men die for frieht, an object with extraordinary attributes. There is nothing of the monotheistic conception, according to which the marvellous is only a miracle, a dero- gation from established laws. Here, there is the perfect naturalism, the undefined faith in the pos- sible, the belief in the existence of independent beings that bear in themselves the principle of their own mysterious power." 1 A dozen years later, Matthew Arnold expressed himself to the same effect in his lectures on The Study of Celtic Literature? After enumerating some of the strange agents in the Mabinogion, he exclaims : " These are no medieval personages ; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological world. The first thing that strikes one in reading the Mabinogion is how evidently the medieval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret : he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus ; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by glimmer- ing tradition merely : stones ' not of this building,' but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical." Such were the impressions which the Welsh stories left on the minds of two men of genius, both of them scholars, and both with a singularly 1 Revue des Deux Mondes, 1854. ■ Published in 1867. ARTHUR AMONG THE CELTS 5 wide range of literary knowledge and culture. Their testimony shows that the world of ancient belief submerged in the medieval narrative is not perceptible to the philological specialist alone, but is visibly present for such as have eyes to see. The tenacious character of the race that owned the legends, and its seclusion from the outer world, have preserved much of its ancient lore, slightly disguised but perfectly recognisable under a more recent form. Meanwhile, the specialist, too, had already been busy with these and other data, and in subsequent years has exploited them on more scientific prin- ciples, to reconstruct, if it be possible, the edifice of Welsh and of Celtic heathendom. Nor for this is there any lack of material, though it can be utilised only by those who are thoroughly equipped in Celtic scholarship, and by them only with ex- treme caution and after laborious research. Thus there are the statements of Latin and Greek ob- servers, and the votive inscriptions on temples and altars ; but both are rendered dubious by the tend- ency which then prevailed to seek everywhere for bar- barous counterparts of the classic pantheon, and to romanise the national gods. Then there are the possibly primitive elements, embedded in the litera- ture of Wales and Ireland, which was committed to writing during the earlier or later Middle Ages, and also perhaps in medieval histories like those of Nennius and Geoffrey, and even in the chival- rous romances that profess to deal with the matter of Britain. But in all these cases it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to say whether a thing 6 INTRODUCTION belongs to the original stock, or whether it is a later addition ; and the difficulty is, of course, in- creased when recourse is had to the utterances of modern folklore, with its innumerable possibilities of further contamination. Last and chief is the evi- dence of scientific philology, which presides over the whole inquiry, and, by the analysis of Celtic names and words, makes large contributions of its own ; but though many of its results are established, many, too, are still conjectural. The materials are thus ample enough, but the task of examining them is beset with doubts and dangers, and those whose knowledge is most are least dogmatic in their as- sertions. Some points in these investigations that bear on the story of Arthur may be illustrated from Pro- fessor Rhys's Lectures on Celtic Heathendom, and Studies in the Arthurian Legend ; but it should be premised that the illustrations lose a great deal of their cogency when the arguments are curtailed and deprived of the cumulative support supplied by the whole body of his researches. One of the most interesting inscriptions which he cites, mentions a Mercurius Artaius} in which, according to a usual practice, the proper noun gives the god under his Roman name, and the adjective preserves one of his Celtic designations. Now the epithet Artaius admits of being derived from the Aryan root, which, indeed, exists in the word Aryan, meaning to plough, so that Mercurius Artaius would be equivalent to the pure Latin, Mercurius Cultor, as he is termed in another inscription. Can any 1 Celtic Heathendom, page 6. Arthurian Legend, page 40. ARTHUR AMONG THE CELTS (^ 7) personage be found in Celtic legend with a similar name or function ? In old Irish story a certain Airem occurs whose name has the same etymology and who learned from watching the fairies how to yoke oxen at the neck and shoulders. In the very primitive Welsh story of Kulhwch and Olwen y Arthur, whose name is possibly equivalent to the Latin arator (or artor, if there were a strong verb arere), is associated with the clearing, trenching, ploughing of a vast hill, and with the processes of agriculture generally. So this would suggest his identification with the mysterious Gallic Mercury, who presided over culture. Further, the wife of the Airem mentioned above was known as Be Find, the white woman, and Arthur's wife as Gwenhwyvar, the white shadow or phantom. Each lady is carried away from her husband : the Irish one by Mider, king of the fairies, who were considered the denizens of Hades; the British one by Medrawd, the Welsh form of Modred and a derivative from the same root as Mider ; and in both cases the husband makes war against the ravisher. This was not the only ab- duction of which Guinevere was the victim. In the Life of Gi/das, she is carried away by Mel was, the Meleaguanz or Mellyagraunce of later romance, where the place of her captivity is said to be the country " whence no stranger ever returns," a trans- parent description of the world of the shades. 1 She would thus seem to be one of the numerous goddesses of the dusk or the dawn, who, like Helen of Greece, were considered now on the 1 Arthurian Legend, pages 51-52. 8 INTRODUCTION side of the deities of light, now on the side of the deities of darkness ; and war is waged on her account between the rival powers. A reminiscence of this hostility survives elsewhere. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his account of Arthur, makes him not only rescue Britain from the Saxons, but lead victorious expeditions into Scandinavia and other foreign realms ; and this has often been considered one of the historian's most shameless inventions. But there seems good reason to suppose that such conquests originally had a mythic sense, and referred to the invasion by the culture-hero of the world of the shades. This was often associated by the Celts with a tract of waters, and was some- times placed beyond the sea. Thus the well-known story of Procopius tells how Brittia was regarded by the Gauls as the abode of the dead, and how the souls of the departed were ferried across in a phantom boat to its misty cliffs ; and there is ground for believing that Ireland, Spain, the Western Isles, the far side of some river, were all in various ways identified with the home of Hades. In earlier times, however, this fabulous country seems to have been placed not beyond but beneath the waters. The memory of it survives in the famous sunken land of Lyonesse, which would mean the land of Llion, or, as she is called in Irish, Liban, I noted personage, who was afterwards to become the Lady of the Lake, and was probably at first a goddess of the Nether World. It survives, too, in the stories of submerged cities and villages so common in modern Wales ; and a hostile mythic race of early Ireland, with whom the Aryan colonists had ARTHUR AMONG THE CELTS 9 to contend, are called the Fomori, the Submarine Ones. Now, the name for Norway in Welsh and Irish is Llychlyn and Lochlann respectively ; but " before it came to mean the home of the Norsemen it denoted a mysterious country in the lochs or the sea." 1 A flood of light is thus thrown on the conquest by Arthur, not only of Scandinavia, but of Ireland and Scotland, which seem to have a similar meaning. Thus he makes Arawn king of the latter, and Arawn is known in Welsh story only as the Head of Hades. The under world was conceived in many myth- ologies as a realm of wealth and knowledge, and the object of the culture-hero, in invading it, was to procure some of its blessings for men. And there are traces of this conception in the tales of Arthur ; for in one story he is represented as bringing back a cauldron of money from Ireland, and in the book of Taliessin he succeeds in carrying away the cauldron of Hades. This cauldron, which will not cook for a coward, and from which mysterious utter- ances issue, is one of a numerous class in Celtic legend that are highly prized and are endowed with wonderful properties. Thus the Irish tales have a cauldron from which no company, however large, went away unsatisfied ; and there are many allusions in Gaelic folklore to basins with strange nutritive and healing powers. Professor Rhys interprets this as a reference " to some primitive drink brewed by the early Aryan " ; and the sacred vessel, supposed, like other boons, to be derived from the other world by the medicine man, would be regarded as the 1 Celtic Heathendom, page 355. See, too, Arthurian Legend, it. IO INTRODUCTION source of ecstasy, of poetry, of renewed vigour and life. And there is a kindred story, into connection with which the stories of the cauldrons have been brought, the very early Mabinogi of Branwen. A British saint of gigantic size, called Bran the Blessed, wades across to Ireland, his followers accompanying him in ships, and afterwards makes his body a bridge over a river, on which they pass to the other side. Eventually he is wounded with a poisoned dart in a contest that is very unequal ; for all his slain foes are every night restored to life by being thrown into a wondrous cauldron. Feeling his death approach, he bids his followers cut off his head and bear it with them to Britain ; they will want for nothing while it is in their company. And the promise comes true. For seven years they sit feasting at Harlech, for eighty years in Gwales, oblivious of all else amid the good cheer and enter- tainment that the presence of the friendly head provides. It is in these fancies that we probably have the origin of the Holy Grail. The cauldron of Hades, like the Sacred Cup, is associated with Carbonek, and its peculiarity that it would not cook for a coward may be considered a rough draught of the conception that the Grail is only to be attained by the pure in heart. Further, Bran, who, from his association with Ireland, may be taken as one of the dark divinities (for he is like no other saint in the Calendar, and his epithet of Blessed possibly refers less to spiritual beatitude than to the plenty of the under world), seems identical with the Bron, 1 who, in 1 This, of course, is only one explanation among several ; for in no portion of this subject is there complete agreement among ARTHUR AMONG THE CELTS II some later stones, is one of the early guardians of the Grail, and who also conducts a miraculous expedition across the sea. No mention is made of a dish in connection with the head of Bran ; but Professor Rhys remarks that it must have been carried about in some vessel, and suggests that Bran's head on a dish and the poisoned spear with which he was wounded formed the originals of the Bleeding Lance and the head in the dish which appear in the Grail Legends. And the strange virtue which Bran's head possessed of feeding those around with the choicest delicacies, just as the Irish cauldron sent none away unsatisfied, remained a characteristic of the Grail down to the time of Malory. " Thenne ther entred into the halle the Holy Graile, couerd with whyte samyte, but ther was none myghte see hit nor who bare hit. And there was al the halle fulfylled with good odoures, and every knyght had suche metes and drynkes as he best loued in this world ; and whan the Holy Grayle had be borne through the hall, thenne the holy vessel departed sodenly that they wyste not where hit becam." 1 But the culture-hero, besides his own exploits for the benefit of men, is generally associated with a younger sun-god who is his protege and dependent, and very often his son. Is there any such person in Arthurian story ? Malory's compilation, late as it is, scholars. But the theory of the Celtic origin of the Grail, so ingeniously maintained by Mr. Nutt, and afterwards, on rather different lines, by Professor Rhys, seems to the present writer very hard to refute. 1 Morte Darthur, xiii. 7. 12 INTRODUCTION answers the question, in the account it gives of the fight between Sir Marhaus and Sir Gawain, the latter one of Arthur's nephews and principal knights. " And therwith Syr Marhaus sette his spere ageyne a tree and alyghte, and tayed his hors to a tree, and dressid his shelde, and eyther cam unto other egerly, and smote togyders with her swerdes that her sheldes flewe in cantels, and they brysed their helmes and hauberkes and wounded eyther other. But Syre Gawayne, fro it passed ix of the clok, waxed euer stronger and stronger, for thenne hit cam to the houre of noone, and thryes his myghte was en- creaced. Alle this uspyed Syr Marhaus and had grete wonder how his myghte encreaced, and so they wounded other passynge sore. And thenne whan it was past noone, and whan it drewe toward even-songe, Syre Gawayn's strengthe febled and waxt passynge faynte, that unnethes he myghte dure ony lenger, and Syr Marhaus was thenne bigger and bigger." 1 Now Gawain's relation with the sun which reaches its meridian at noon is here unmis- takable ; and the name of Marhaus, who gets bigger and bigger with the evening as the gloom prevails against the light, is from the same root as that of King Mark of Cornwall, who had horse's ears, and of Margg, the leader of the Irish Fomori or submarine shades ; a root that means horse, with reference to the half-equine, centaur-like shapes of the powers of darkness. There are other grounds too for asserting that Gawain was at first a sun-hero, but the odd thing is that the primitive trait of his waxing and waning strength should have lasted so 1 Morte Darthur, iv. 18. ARTHUR AMONG THE CELTS 1 3 long, quite in isolation as it is, and even in con- tradiction of many of his adventures ; for as Arthur's Knight he had victorious contests at all times of the day. But in some kindred mythologies there is, besides the various later impersonations of the solar hero, an older god associated with light and the sun, the Zeus, Jupiter, Father Sky of the classical races. And of him, too, in an undifferentiated form, there are traces to be discovered among the Celts. Pro- fessor Rhys identifies him with the enchanter Merlin or Myrddin, whose name he would explain as Mori- dunjos, him of the sea-fort, with reference to his sinking from sight in the western waters. Further, some Welsh stories of his disappearance represent him as going to sea in a glass-house, which connects him with Aengus, a mythic character in Irish story, also explained as the god of light, who went about with a portable crystal bower. The stories of Merlin's betrayal by the Lady of the Lake thus receive their explanation, and in some of the versions his prison strikingly resembles the inaccessible trans- parency of Aengus' abode. It is "A tour withouten walles or with-oute eny closure .... a clos .... nother of Iren, ne stiell, ne tymbir, ne of ston, but .... of the aire withoute eny other thinge be enchauntment so stronge, that it may never be vn-don while the worlde endureth." No wonder that Professor Rhys, after quoting this passage, proceeds : " These pictures vie with one another in transparent truthfulness to the original scene in nature, with the sun as the centre of a vast expanse of light, which moves with him as he hastens to the 14 INTRODUCTION west. Even when at length one saw in Merlin but a magician, and in his pellucid prison but a work of magic, the answer to the question what had become of him and it, continued to be one which the store- house of nature-myths had supplied. Where could Merlin have gone but whither the sun goes to rest at night, into the dark sea, into an isle surrounded by the waves of the west, or into the dusk of an impenetrable forest? So it came about that legend sends Merlin to sea in his house of glass, never more to be heard of, or dimly moors him in the haze of Bardsey, or else leaves him bound in the spells of his own magic in a lonely spot in the sombre forest of Brecilien, where Breton story gives him a material prison in a tomb, at the end of the Val des Fees, hard by the babbling fountain of Baranton, so be- loved of the muse of romance " 1 Nor is this the only appearance of the Celtic Zeus. Inscriptions mention a Nodens, identified by Professor Rhys with an Irish Nuada who lost his arm in fight with a malign race, and had to retire from the sovereignty till a silver hand was constructed for him. This recalls the Tyr of the Eddas, who in name, as we see from the English Tiu, corresponds exactly with Zeus, and who had his arm bitten off by Fenri the Wolf — a reference to the conflict between light and darkness. And Nuada is the same with a Welsh mythic king called Lludd of the silver Hand, whose name is traced back to Lodens, a modification for phonetic reasons of Nodens, which would have yielded Nudd. Now this Lludd is the Lud of Ludgate Hill, and 1 Celtic Heathendom, 158. ARTHUR AMONG THE CELTS i5 the Lot or Lothus of romance, the famous brother- in-law of Arthur. 1 But just as the Northern races deposed their old supreme divinity to make room for Woden, so some of the Celts deposed their counterpart of Zeus to make room for the culture-hero. " They worship Mercury," says Caesar, " above all others." 2 And Mercury (of whom Professor Rhys finds many reminiscences in the Welsh Gwydion, a name that he would connect with Woden), may be supposed, / as has been shown, to be the original of Arthur. But the culture-hero, in displacing the elder sky- god, inherited some of his characteristics and func- tions. Thus the classical Zeus was fabled to have married his sister, and the same story was pro- bably told of his Celtic congener, and transferred to the culture-hero, who succeeded him. Such a marriage became impossible as civilisation ad- vanced, and, therefore, is effaced in later times ; but there is a trace of it in the medieval tales that Arthur was united in unholy love with his father's daughter, the wife of King Lot. The horror of the idea, however modified and extenu- ated in these adaptations, seems out of place among the fanciful conceptions of romance, and has its origin in a remote and alien world. In a similar way Arthur became the protagonist in the perpetually recurring warfare of Zeus with the powers of darkness, from which, as the winter ap- proached, he withdrew wounded and faint, to return strong and glorious in the spring ; and an 1 Celtic Heathendom, 125 and following page. 2 Bellum Gallicum, vi. 17. 1 6 INTRODUCTION echo of this has survived in the British King's departure from the battle in the West to be healed of his hurts in the Isle of Avalon. These examples, which might be multiplied in- definitely, will serve to show that much in later Arthurian fiction had its germ in the myths of the Celts, and, more particularly, of the Brythonic Celts. It is not, however, to be supposed that they were developed in a consistent or continuous history. It is inevitable that the modern mind should read more system into the conceptions of early religious belief than in point of fact they possessed. A floating tradition of detached stories, bringing into relief this or the other characteristic of the various objects of their worship, and har- monised rather in general feeling than in definite thought, was the most that the primitive races were likely to attain. And thus the vague and shifting figures were apt to pass into each other's places, to be multiplied, to divide, and to coalesce. Mercury assumes the rank of Zeus, and absorbs his attributes ; and there must have been tales of many impersonations of the sun-hero. But if there were tendencies to confusion before, the ad- vent of Christianity was bound to increase the entanglement, and altogether blur the significance of the myths. It dislocated the whole system and deprived it of such order and cohesion as it may k have had. The teaching of the new faith was that the deities were not divine. At one stroke they were degraded to a lower level, where, though they were far from appearing as ordinary men, they had ceased to be the great gods ; and much ARTHUR AMONG THE CELTS IJ that formerly had its importance, became mere unintelligible lumber. Perhaps the story of Kul- hwch and Olwen, though it belongs to a later date, may illustrate the sort of change that was pro- duced. \ After a description of Kulhwch's birth and breeding, it tells how he sets out for Arthur's court to get the king to cut his hair, that he may demand the royal help in gaining Olwen as his wife. The household of Arthur is largely composed of persons whose meaning has been lost, and even those who are otherwise known to us, are presented in an unfamiliar and much more primitive aspect. Kai is a mighty warrior, as tall as a forest tree, who can keep his breath under the water for nine days and nights, and has such inward heat that he can dry everything a hand- breadth above and below his hand. He performs prodigious feats, and the final ruin of Arthur seems attributed to the want of his help. For enraged at a sarcasm of the king's, he withdraws, and " thenceforth neither in Arthur's troubles nor for the slaying of his men, would Kai come forward to his aid for ever after." Among the remaining courtiers are many with very queer characteristics. There is one on whose knife no haft would re- main, so that he dies of vexation. There is one who owned a short broad dagger, which, when laid on the water, became a bridge for armies. Of one it is said : " When he carries a burden, whether it be large or small, no one will be able to see it before him or at his back " ; of another " On the day when he was sad, he would let one of his lips drop down below his waist, while he B 1 8 INTROD UCTION turned up the other like a cap on his head " ; of a third, " When he came to a town, though there were three hundred houses in it, if he wanted any- 1 thing, he would not let sleep come to the eyes of any one whilst he remained there." This quality was doubtless invaluable to its owner if not to his | neighbours, and the peculiarities of his fellows are extremely interesting; but what Professor Rhys says j of one, may be applied to most of them, that they are " hardly calculated to grace a court," and they are very different from the British and Armoric \ knights with whom the king is ordinarily begirt. With some of these companions Kulhwch sets out on his search for Olwen, and eventually gains ac- cess to her giant father, Yspyddaden Pencawr, the Epinogras of romance, 1 who, having his eye- j lids raised that he may see his future son-in-law, assails his visitors with a dart, which, on three occasions, is caught up and thrown back, wound- ing himself. In truth, he is in no hurry to have his daughter wedded, for he knows that that will mean his own death. In the end, however, he agrees to the suit on condition that his head should first be shaved. But the procuring of the necessary implements prescribes as long a series of apparently impossible tasks as Shibli Bagarag had to achieve before he could operate on Shag- pat. The adventures involved, which occupy the bulk of the story and lead up to the hunt of the wondrous boar called the Twrch Trwydd as their chief, are exclusively of a supernatural kind. In the end, the giant is shaved and his head cut off. 1 Arthur ion Legend, page 3. ARTHUR AMONG THE CELTS 19 Here it is interesting to observe the confused conglomeration of myths, to which the key has in most cases been lost, and the mythical character of the exploits, untouched by a trace of history, that are attributed to the prowess of King Arthur. In contrast, too, with the continental romances, he is an active personality and one of the chief performers, not a mere roi faineant, under whose auspices his more heroic knights do all the work. 1 These are probably early traits ; on the other hand, the massing of so many figures and adventures round him as their centre is an indi- cation that in its present form the story is com- paratively late. Meanwhile, if there was not much system about the original myths, and if the conversion of the Britons further disorganised them, another element of confusion had probably been added from a purely historic source. In the struggles of the Cymry against the Teutons, the exploits of their famous leaders were sure to become the theme of story, and to lose nothing in the celebrations of their grateful countrymen. There is ground for believing that one of these leaders may, in fact, have borne the name of Arthur, or one of similar sound, and ingenious attempts have been made to discover some incidents of his life. Sometimes he has been localised in a particular part of the island, and the preference is now for the region formerly known as Cumbria. Thus Mr. Skene has endeavoured to find in the north the scenes 1 Prof. Zimmer's criticism of Mr. Nutt's Holy Grail. Got- tingische gelehrte Anzeigen, 1890. 20 INTRODUCTION of his battles, as enumerated by Nennius ; while Professor Zimmer explains the selection in con- tinental romance of Carduel for his royal seat as a reminiscence of the actual Carlisle. Sometimes he is considered to have had a wider range of activity, and Professor Rhys would make him, if historical at all, a Comes Britanniae " with a roving commission to defend the province wherever his presence might be called for." x This, as the \ Count of Britain was the chief officer in the land, would explain why Arthur is always called Emperor in Welsh, and would tally with the account of Nennius, which represents him as the war-leader of the various British kings. Even his death, at the hands of his nephew, may have a basis in fact, if he is to be identified with the uncle of Maelgwyn, whom Gildas accuses the latter of murdering. And not only he, but some of his knights may have been champions of the Romanised Britons in their patriotic war, not necessarily the contemporaries of Arthur at the outset, but after- wards attached to his group. Thus, Professor Zimmer would derive Geraint from an historical Gerontius, and Owen from an historical Eugenius. But the enormous fame of the later Arthur, as con- trasted with the meagre records of his actual career, cannot be explained from history alone. It must be supposed, and this theory is corroborated by innumerable instances of the kind already cited, that in the gradual growth of national tradition, a person not originally of first-rate importance 1 Arthurian Legend, page 17 ; see also Celtic Britain, chap. 6. Zimmer would make him Dux Brittamiiarum (Nennius Vindi- cates, \%). ARTHUR AMONG THE CELTS 21 entered into the position of an earlier divine hero. And it is easy to see how, if the historic leader had a name like Arthur, much in the later story becomes clear. His identification with the god would secure his own pre-eminence and immortality; for his exploits against the Saxon invaders would be combined with the exploits of the Celtic Zeus, and of the culture-hero who took his place, in their perpetual warfare against the powers of darkness and the foes of man. On the other hand, the identification of the elder deity with an actual personage called by a name like Arthur, would explain why he should survive to fame under this rather than any other of his appella- tions. Ill THE ROMANTIC HISTORIANS The first mention of Arthur's name outside the Welsh sources occurs in the History of the Britons attributed to Nennius, which according to the learned and ingenious argument of Professor Zimmer 1 be- longs in its original form to the last years of the eighth century. In it few borrowed splendours eke out the glory of the historic hero, if such there were, who led the islanders against the Teutons; and these are mostly of an ecclesiastical kind. He is described as fighting along with the kings of the Britons against the invaders, but he himself was their war-leader (sed ipse dux erat bellorum) in twelve successful battles. In one of these, at Castle Gurnion, he bore the image of the Holy Virgin on 1 Nennius Vindicatus. i8q^. 22 INTRODUCTION his shoulders, and the pagans were routed and put to great slaughter by the virtue of our Lord Jesus Christ and St. Mary his mother. At Mount Badon nine hundred and sixty men perished through Arthur's onset, and he alone overthrew them without any aid. In all his wars he emerged triumphant. This is the statement of the most summary manu- script. In some versions there are other details on similar lines. Thus he is described as the "magnani- mous Arthur," and it is said of him that, though many were more noble than he, he was twelve times chosen leader and was as often victorious. In an interval of quiet he has time for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem ; there he has a cross made of the size of the Saviour's, and after three days' fast before the true cross, has this counterfeit consecrated that " the Lord, by this sign, should give him victory over the heathens " ; fragments of the image of St. Mary, which he bore, " are still preserved with great veneration " ; his prowess at Mount Badon is ascribed to a higher power, nine hundred and forty fall by his hand alone, " none but the Lord assist- ing him." " In all these engagements the Britons were victorious, for no strength can avail against the strength of the Almighty." This is practically all that Nennius records in the fullest paragraph devoted to Arthur's career. 1 There is indeed the prophecy of Merlin Ambrosius ; but it refers rather to the future expulsion of the Saxon white dragon than to the actual achievements of the red dragon of Britain in the days of Arthur. Yet an isolated passage in another connection shows that the blend- 1 Nennius, § 56. THE ROMANTIC HISTORIANS 23 ing of history and myth had already begun when the earliest version of Nennius was composed. 1 Arthur's name is associated with some of " the wonders " of Britain ; with a sepulchral mound where his son Amir lies buried, and especially with a cairn of stones, the topmost cum vestigio cams, which, even if displaced, returns to its position on the morrow. It was the hound Cabal which made this impression on the stone when Arthur was chasing the boar I Troynt." 2 Thus, already in the days of Nennius, the individual whom he celebrates as an actual warrior, was connected with the mythic hunt of the Twrch Trwydd, commemorated in Kulhwch and Olwen. Popular imagination had thus begun to amplify the career of the hero, and stray notices prove that the process continued as the years went by. In the Annates Cambriae, which may belong to the second half of the tenth century, the entry for 537 records the battle of Camlan, "in which battle Arthur and Medrawt perished," and thus presents the mythic foe in an altogether historic aspect. We have no further definite information till the appear- ' ance of Geoffrey ; but about 1 1 2 5 William of Malmesbury, after mentioning the prowess of Arthur, proceeds : — " This is the Arthur, of whom nowadays the frivolous tales of the Britons babble, (de quo Britonum nugae hodieque delirant), but who evidently deserved celebration not in the dreams of fallacious fable but in the declarations of authentic history." 3 This shows that when William wrote much improbable legend had gathered round the 1 Zimmers Nennius Vindicatus, 8. 2 Nennius, § 73. 3 Gesta Regum Angliae, i. 8. 24 INTRODUCTION British king, though the historian does not con- descend to mention .what precisely it was. In another respect, too, his statement is vaguer than might be desired. Who were the Britons whose babble excites his scorn ? Professor Zimmer brings arguments to show that they were the Celts not of Wales but of Brittany. It may well be that the latter, being more remote from the scene of the actual struggles, began earlier and proceeded further in the confusion of historic and mythical tradition than their kinsfolk on the island. And there is some indication of this in the great and epoch- making version of Arthur's story, to which we now- pass, the account of him in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain , completed about the year 1 1 3 5. According to Geoffrey's own statement he used for his compilation " a certain most ancient book in the British tongue," 1 which Walter, arch- deacon of Oxford, had procured. Now the form of some of the names that he mentions, above all that of Gawain, is rather Breton than Welsh, though the native variants were long familiar to his countrymen. So it seems likely that a portion at least of his material was actually derived from an Armorican source. And it is quite possible that a new stimulus may have been transmitted from Brittany to Britain, in the work of combining the Arthur of myth and the Arthur of fact. Geoffrey's narrative may be abridged as follows: To Uther Pendragon, the King of Britain, Merlin prophesies the greatness of his house, and, since Uther loves Igerne, the wife of Gorloi's, the wizard, 1 Quendam Britannici Sermonis vettistissimiun librum, i. THE ROMANTIC HISTORIANS 25 to fulfil the prophecy, lends him the semblance of her lord, and he becomes the father of Arthur. Afterwards, on the death of her first husband, Uther takes Igerne as his queen, and thus Arthur, despite his doubtful birth, succeeds to the throne as rightful heir. Hardly is he crowned when he is called to face the Saxons, whom he repeatedly engages, and, with the aid of Hoel of Brittany, smites from shore to shore. Encouraged by his victories, he extends his operations, and in a series of campaigns subdues Ireland, the Orkneys, and the Continent from Nor- way to Aquitaine. Gaul is the spoil of his own hand, for he wins it in single combat on an island of the Seine, while the hostile armies look on from opposite banks. His success in war is only equalled by his magnificence in peace, and Geoffrey lays stress on his liberality in distributing the conquered lands, the state he keeps with his queen Guanhumara at Caerleon-upon-Usk, the grand assemblage of kings and knights by whom he is surrounded, the gallantry of the court, where the ladies give their love only to such as have approved themselves in three combats. In the midst of all this pomp and circumstance envoys arrive with a demand for tribute from Lucius Tiberius of Rome. In full assembly it is refused; and Arthur, leaving his nephew Modred in charge of queen and kingdom, sets out with his knights and vassal kings to enforce his counter- claim. On the way he is visited with a premonitory dream which is satisfactorily fulfilled in Normandy, where, in single fight, he slays a lustful giant who has carried off Helena, the niece of Hoel. Looking at the carcase, he exclaims, " I have found none of 26 INTRODUCTION so great strength since that Retho who challenged me to fight on Mount Aravius," a giant who had the foible of making himself fur with the beards of the kings he vanquished. Resuming his march, Arthur leads his hosts against the Romans. He carries all before him, for the Grecian and Eastern allies of Lucius avail little when confronted with the chivalry of the West. In its ranks Gawain takes the first place, and for some time he is almost the chief person of the story, his prowess obscuring that of Arthur himself. Nothing seems able to prevent the Britons from capturing Rome, when they are suddenly checked in mid career. News arrives that Modred has seized the kingdom, married Guan- humara, and strengthened himself with heathen auxiliaries. Arthur must leave his conquest in- complete, and return to take vengeance on the traitor. A great battle is fought, in which Gawain is slain, but the rebels are put to flight. Guan- humara, losing heart, flees to the cloister, and becomes a nun of the order of Julius the Martyr ; but Modred rallies in the West, whither Arthur follows him in grief and wrath. In another battle the multitudes on both sides perish, Modred is defeated and slain ; " even the renowned King Arthur himself was mortally wounded, and, being carried to the isle of Avallon to be cured of his wounds, he gave up the crown of Britain to his kinsman Constantine." 1 Such is the career of Arthur according to Geoffrey,, and under the elaborate superstructure the possible basis in fact is almost lost from view. Some of his. 1 Bk. viii. 15 to Bk. xi. chap. 2. ! THE ROMANTIC HISTORIANS 2*J additions do not seem to be of specially Celtic origin, but either invented by himself or borrowed from current literature, like the stories of Charle- magne and Alexander. But there is also a large accretion of popular myth. Arthur, no longer a mere leader, but a king, has for his wife Gwenhwyvar or Guanhumara, who deserts him for his enemy Modred of the Shades ; Gawain, the sun-hero, and others of the same type, appear in his train ; and the mythical conquest of Hades or Llychlyn has become the conquest of the Scandinavian countries. .- Sometimes circumstances of more recent history may have determined the selection of particular items. Thus in the war with Ireland, in the alliance of Hoel of Brittany, in Arthur's distribution of his conquests, Professor Zimmer detects respectively reminiscences of the troubles with the Dublin vikings, of the Breton auxiliaries who helped the Normans against the hated Saxon, and of William the Conqueror's gifts of land to his favourite followers. 1 It is probably, too, the historical exi- gencies and the tradition of what happened to the actual leader that make Geoffrey represent Arthur as fatally wounded in the final battle, even while in the same sentence he sends him to Avalon to be healed. The death of the mortal man disturbs the myth which told of the return of the sky-god to triumph over the powers of darkness ; yet a reserved and partial acceptance of the elder story betrays Geoffrey into a certain inconsistency of statement. On the continent, however, the historical factor 1 Article on Gaston Paris, Gottingische gelehrte Anseigen. i8qo. 28 INTRODUCTION was of less account and the original conception would be apt to prevail more easily and soon. A canon of Laon, named Hermann, who visited Corn- wall in 1 1 13, mentions a scene that was caused by a Breton insisting that Arthur still lived. 1 Henry of Huntingdon, writing in 1139, represents Arthur as slaying Modred in the last fight, and himself succumbing to the wounds he received ; but he adds that the Bretons deny that he died and " solemnly expect " his return. This belief lingered on for centuries, if we may judge from a ballad cited by Villemarque, but in the lapse of years it underwent a change, and Arthur, with his phantom hosts, was conceived as leading the men of Brittany to the fight. This seems the meaning of the stirring war song translated by Mr. Tom Taylor : — " Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp, to battle din ! Tramp son, tramp sire, tramp kith and kin ! Tramp one, tramp all, have hearts within. The chieftain's son his sire addrest As morn awoke the world from rest : ' Lo ! warriors on yon mountain crest — Lo ! warriors armed, their course that hold On grey war-horses riding bold, With nostrils snorting wide for cold ! Rank closing up on rank I see, Six by six, and three by three, Spear-points by thousands glinting free. 1 "Ein Laoner Zeugniss," etc. Zimmer, Zeitschrift fiir franzos. Sprache mid Literatur, bd. xiii. THE ROMANTIC HISTORIANS 2Q Now rank on rank, twos front they go, Behind a flag which to and fro Sways as the winds of death do blow ! Nine sling casts' length from van to rear— I know 'tis Arthur's hosts appear ; — There Arthur strides — that foremost peer ! ' ' If it be Arthur — Ho, what, ho ! Up spear ! out arrow ! Bend the bow ! Forth, after Arthur, on the foe ! '" x Meanwhile, when such stones were current among the Bretons and persons of Breton de- scent, it was natural that Geoffrey's history, on passing to the continent, should absorb new ele- ments of tradition into itself. And this it has done, at least in the version of Wace (1155), which was the most influential and significant. The name by which this work is generally known, Li Romans de Brut, if not minutely accurate, at any rate brings into relief one of its most essen- 1 tial characteristics, for it is romantic in metre ' and language, and emphasises the romantic side of Geoffrey's narrative. Wace, it is^true, does not add much to his authority. His iniportance lies rather in the fact, that writing in a vernacular, and that the leading vernacular of Europe, he was able by his fluent verse and vivifying touches to commend the story to a larger audience than would feel at home with Geoffrey's Latin. His variations for the most part are matters of de- tail. Yet, to some extent, he employs, and to a far larger extent he knows, the assumptions of 1 Ballads and Songs of Brittany. 30 INTRODUCTION popular fancy. Thus, in reference to Arthur's end, he writes : "Arthur, if the story lies not, was wounded fatally in the body ; he had himself taken to Avalon to heal his wounds. Still is he there ; the Bretons expect him, as they say and believe ; thence will he come, yet may he live. Master Wace, who made this book, will not say more of his end than said the prophet Merlin. Merlin said of Arthur, and he was right, that his end would be doubtful. The prophet spoke sooth ; ever since, men have doubted concerning it, and, believe me, they always will doubt whether he be dead or quick. He had himself conveyed to Avalon six hundred and forty-two years after the incarnation .... but never since has Arthur returned." 1 In this matter, however, Wace had been anticipated by others. His most original contribution to Arthur's story is the men- tion of the Round Table, which, in so far as it was a fellowship, may have been suggested by the peerage of Charlemagne, but, in so far as it was a table, had probably a more primitive and mythic origin. And in this case, too, Wace is more in- teresting for what he does not tell us than for what he says. For the barons, each of whom thought himself the best, "Arthur made the Table Round, of which Bretons tell many a fable"; 2 and there is a similar reference to the marvels and adventures recounted of Arthur, which are not wholly lies or truth, fable or fact ; such has been the activity of the story-tellers in embellishing their narratives, that they have made all seem fabulous. 1 13683. 2 9999- THE ROMANTIC HISTORIANS 3 1 Wace, amplified from Geoffrey, became in turn the basis for further amplification. The son of Leovenath, our own Layamon, writing about the close of the twelfth century, tells in his simple way how he journeyed wide over land to get the books ; how he laid them down and turned the leaves : " he beheld them lovingly : may the Lord be merciful to him : pen he took with fingers and wrote a book skin." The book skin that he wrote was the Brut, and of the books that he loved, the most important was Wace ; but he enriches the story with additions from various quarters. Probably an Englishman by descent, and, at all events, writing, in the English language in a modification of the old English measure, a chronicle which he partly drew from foreign sources, he can- not be considered to have obtained all his loans from uncontaminated Celtic tradition. In point of fact, some of them have an unmistakably Teutonic ring, and others seem of a generally romantic char- acter. Still, in the western shires where he lived and wrote, there is a large Cymric admixture in the population, and it is reasonable to suppose that he levied some contributions on the legends that were current among them. As a rule he follows in the track of Wace, but he lingers over the journey and plucks the wild flowers by the way. Thus, as soon as Arthur is born, he is entrusted to the elves, who bring him up and bestow on him various graces and gifts. His wars are described in greater detail than with Wace, and more stress is laid on his personal prowess. Great attention is paid to his equipment : 32 INTRODUCTION Rone, his spear, was made by Griffith of Caer- marthen ; on Pridvven, his shield, was engraved in gold tracing a precious image of God's Mother ; " he put on his burney, broidered with skill, which made an elfish smith — he was called Wygar, the witty wight ; Calibeorn, his sword, he hung by his side ; it was wrought in Avalon with magic craft." 1 A much fuller account is given of the origin of the Round Table. A quarrel for precedence has arisen, when a strange smith comes to the king with the offer : " I will make thee a board ex- ceeding fair that thereat may sit sixteen hundred and more, all by turn, so that none be left out; and, when thou wilt ride, thou mayst carry it with thee and set where thou wilt after thy pleasure, and never fear to the world's end." 2 When it is ready and the trial is made, the equality is indeed perfect : " One measure was for all ; high and low had the same ; none might boast other kind of drink than his comrades." 3 In the advice to carry it about, though (unless it had other strange qualities than those mentioned) it must have been rather an unwieldy piece of furniture, and in the abundance and equality of the diet for so large a company, may there not be an echo from folklore of some myth, such as those already described, of magical apparatus for the feeding of multitudes ? Layamon's comment, enlarged from that of Wace, implies his knowledge of many fabulous tales, not necessarily about the knights of the Round Table, but about the table itself and the King who owned it. "This x Sir F. Madden's edition, line 21 130. 2 Line 22910. 3 Line 22946. / THE ROMANTIC HISTORIANS 33 was that same table of which the Britons boast, and say many leasings of Arthur the King : so doth every man that loves another. If he is dear to him, he will lie and say worship of him more than he is worth: . . . The Britons loved him greatly, and often lied of him, and said many things of Arthur the King that never happened in the kingdom of this world." 1 Most of these popular stories, Layamon, perhaps out of respect for his written authorities, refrained from setting down, but we must be grateful for what he has given. He inserts a picturesque dream, somewhat in the tone of the prophetic literature of the day, which comes to Arthur just before the news of Modred's and Guinevere's treason. He sits astride on the roof of his hall, viewing his realm, and Gawain sits before him bearing his sword. Then Modred comes with numberless folk and with Guinevere, dearest of women, and hews the posts that bear the hall. The fall breaks both arms of Gawain and the right arm of the king ; he seizes his sword in his left hand, strikes off Modred's head, cruelly wounds the Queen, 2 and puts her in a dark pit. But all his people are dispersed, and he knows not under Christ what has become of them. He himself wanders alone on a moor among griffins and grisly fowls, till a golden lion, made by the Lord, catches his middle and bears him off to the sea. But the driving floods tear them apart, and a fish carries him wet and weary to the land, when he wakes and begins to shiver and to burn as with fire. 3 But probably the most inter- 1 22987. 2 Tosnadde, cut in pieces. 3 28017. c 34 INTRODUCTION esting passages in Layamon are those that refer to Arthur's return. He mentions it twice — once in the body of the story, 1 and again with fuller detail when he describes the end of the last battle. " Slain were Arthur's warriors, high and low, and all the Britons of Arthur's board, and all his fosterlings of many a kindred. And Arthur was forwounded with a broad spear of slaughter ; fifteen cruel wounds had he, in the least one might thrust two gloves. Then in the fight there were left no more of twenty thousand men, that there lay mangled, but only Arthur the King and two of his knights ; and Arthur was wondrously sore for- wounded. Then came to him a child that was of his kin ; he was son of Cador, Earl of Cornwall ; the boy was called Constantine ; he was dear to the King. Arthur, as he lay on the earth, looked on him and said these words, with sorrowful heart : — " Constantine, thou art welcome ; thou wast Cador's son, and here I betake thee the kingdom. Watch thou my Britons well to thy life's end, and keep them the laws that have stood in my days, and all the good law that stood in Uther's days. And I will fare to Avallon, to the fairest of all maidens, to Argante the Queen, a right fair elf. She will make my wounds all sound again, all whole will make me with healing draughts ; and then will I come to my Kingdom and dwell with my Britons in mickle joy." Even with the words came wending from the sea what was a little boat, driven by the waves, with two women therein wondrously clad ; and they took Arthur, they took him quickly, laid him down softly, 1 23052. THE ROMANTIC HISTORIANS 35 and departed away. Then was fulfilled what Merlin said of yore, that there should be measureless sorrow at the passing of Arthur. Still the Britons ween that he yet lives and dwells in Avallon with the fairest of all elves ; and still the Britons ever look for Arthur's coming. Never was man born of any fair lap!y who can say more of the truth about Arthur: but once was a prophet, erewhile was Merlin ; he said with words — and his sayings are sooth — that Arthur should yet come to succour his Britons." Layamon's narrative, besides being vivid and forcible throughout, contains passages of high poetical beauty. His version, too, is important, as showing how the story of Arthur became more and more legendary as the years went by. Moreover the Brut has for us the grand interest that it is the first celebration of the British King in the English tongue. For all these reasons it claims a detailed notice. Yet, in a certain sense, it was a mere eddy in the stream of literature, out of the current and leading to nothing. At any rate it was by no means so influential as the chronicles of Geoffrey or even of Wace. It is difficult to exaggerate, though it is easy to misconceive, the importance of Geoffrey's book. In a certain sense its appearance is the literary incident of the twelfth century. The repeated translations of it into French attest the eager wel- come it received from imaginative writers and from the general public. Its lasting popularity is proved by the denunciations which were launched against it, even at the close of the century, by exact historians 3^ INTRODUCTION and by historians who were not exact William of Newbury thus gives voice to the indignation of experts : — " A certain writer has come up in our times to wipe out the blots on the Britons, weaving together ridiculous figments about them, and raising them with impudent vanity high above the virtue of the Macedonians and the Romans. This man is named Geoffrey, and has the by-name of Arthur, because, laying on the colour of Latin speech, he disguised with the honest name of history the fables about Arthur, taken from the old tales of the Britons with increase of his own." 1 Even Gerald de Barri, Geoffrey's own countryman and himself a lover of the adventurous, tells of a Welshman possessed by unclean spirits : — " If the evil demons oppressed him too much the Gospel of St. John was laid on his bosom, when like birds they immediately vanished away ; but when that book was removed, and the history of the Britons by Geoffrey-Arthur, for the sake of experiment, substituted in its stead, they settled in far greater numbers and for a much longer time than usual, not only upon his entire body but upon the book that was placed on it." 2 These ebullitions of wrath are very intelligible, for no doubt Geoffrey by his credulity and inventive- ness had troubled the waters of history for many a century to come. But there is as little doubt that his book is the well-head of a living stream of poetry that has not yet ceased to flow. The Elizabethan dramatists, with Shakespeare at their head, Spenser and Milton, Wordsworth and Swin- 1 His tor ia Rerum Anglicarum : procemium. 2 Itinerarium Cambriae, i. 5. THE ROMANTIC HISTORIANS 37 burne, to mention only a few of the chief, have alike drawn inspiration from his story. And more particularly he is the pioneer and sponsor, if not the father, of Arthurian romance. His narrative, either directly or through the medium of Wace and Wace's adapters, is the archetype of the romantic histories of Arthur. In them the British worthy, represented as an actual King of Britain, is the flos regum, the Christian warrior, the incarnation of knightly valour, the champion of female honour, who attains a European empire and renown ; the tragedy of his career comes from the betrayal of his religion, his love, and his vows, and the invasions of the Christless heathen from over sea. This, with omissions of one or another par- ticular, and with additions from legend and romance, is the conception of chronicles like those of Robert of Gloucester, of Peter Langtoft, of Robert of Brunne, of the alliterative Morte Arthure, of the fifteenth century rhymed Arthur, and in the main of Boccaccio in his collection De casibus Virorum Illustrium, of Lydgate in his Falls of Princes, and of Nichols in the Winter Wight's Vision, the supple- ment to the Mirror for Magistrates, as late as 1610. In our own day it has been revived with a difference by Lord Tennyson. And, though the Arthurian Romances, strictly so called, are for the most part to be traced to other sources, the appearance of so authoritative and popular a book was nothing less than mo- mentous for their development. The historical mould in which it is cast, and which we are never suffered to forget, engaged attention for its narratives, 3» INTRODUCTION and ensured their being taken more or less seriously. But within this setting Geoffrey had found room for so much fiction from various sources, which he ac- commodated so admirably to the taste of the time, that the whole had the charm of an imaginative work composed on the lines of contemporary tendency. As it became known in the original or in Norman-French adaptations, the result was in- evitably to give prominence and vogue to the store of Celtic tales, some of which doubtless had already a wide circulation. It supplied the lofty figure of Arthur as centre, round which many stories, in- cluding some that originally may have had nothing to do with him, could be grouped ; and it gave as background for the several incidents the splendour of his reign and court. IV CHIVALRY AND ITS REQUIREMENTS One of the strangest phenomena in the history of literature is the outburst of Arthurian romance in the second half of the twelfth century. A few years suffice to lift the hero of obscure and half-subjugated tribes into unrivalled popularity and fame, and the exploits of his followers, a little while before unknown to the world at large, be- come all at once the engrossing topic for the imagination of Europe. Whatever circumstances may have contributed to this sudden success, it cannot be fully explained save by supposing that the new matter was exceptionally suitable to the CHIVALRY AND ITS REQUIREMENTS 39 spirit of the time. It must have met a deep-felt want, and shown itself capable of receiving the stamp of the medieval spirit and expressing the medieval modes of life and thought more per- fectly, than any previous theme. And in the history of the typical and international' fiction of the Middle Ages there are indications that this was the case. The imaginative activity of these centuries seems to attempt the satisfaction of cer- tain spiritual demands, but till the Arthurian stories become available, the attempt has only partial success. The nearest approach to a typical and inter- national fiction is to be found in the literature of France. Not that in its remoter origins it always belongs to that country. The raw materials are contributed by German and by Celtic tribes, by the new and by the ancient world, but the)' obtain completion and currency only when transmuted in the crucible of Romance thought. Their recog- nition is quite local till they receive the seal of the French spirit ; thereafter, they pass at once into European circulation. Something of the same kind has happened more than once since then. France has often been the instructor and law-giver of Europe ; but not last century, when its "illumin- ated" led the fashions in philosophy, not a hun- dred years earlier when its dramas invaded every stage, had its literature so universal a sway as at the zenith of the Middle Ages. For then it penetrated into every neighbouring land and was adopted by every neighbouring people ; and though modified by the genius and language of each in- 40 INTRODUCTION dividual nation, retained its birth-marks to the end and could always be described as Romance. And this term is important for another reason. It is not unparalleled to have an international scientific literature, and, in so far as this genus existed at all in the Middle Ages, it belonged to all Western Europe. But the strange thing is that these times also possessed a common stock of imagina- tive work, of poetry and fiction, which, in its great narrative type 7 , always elaborated on the lines laid down in France, appropriately received the \ above designation, and was generally called the Romance. This, of course, was possible only when the literary classes of Europe were impelled by a common spirit to a common ideal, when this ideal was more clearly realised in France than elsewhere, and when certain stories were found to express it in special perfection. Now the ideals that swayed the higher classes in those days were almost summed up in what is styled Chivalry. It would be wrong to call all the romances chivalrous, for only one group of them fully answers this description ; but, at least, they are all of chivalrous tendency and aim at embodying its conceptions. And these concep- tions were essentially ideals. It has once and again been shown that there never was an actual age of chivalry, and that when in later times people tried, as they thought, to restore it, they were attempting to import into practical life what was in truth a minstrel's dream. Nevertheless, as it was a dream that flitted before the eyes of many generations, it was in its way a very sub- CHIVALRY AND ITS REQUIREMENTS 41 stantial reality. There never was a time when the feudal knights were exactly knights errant, but there was a time when the best of them wished that they might be such, eagerly attaching themselves to any hazardous enter- prise that had been set on foot for more politic objects ; and that time was practically over when the semblances and outward trappings of knighthood were most in vogue for spectacle and pageantry. The real m eaning of chivalry lay deeper. It had arisen as a kind of compromise between the ascetic theology of the medieval church and the un- sanctified life of the world which that church re- jected as wholly bad. It is sometimes described as the projected shadow of feudalism, and so it is, but only because in the upper feudal ranks there was most need felt of a modus vivendi between practice and belief. The masses of the people are never much swayed by theoretical doctrine. The exigencies of their position keep them near a course of life that may be rude, but is not unnatural. In the present case, with a certain varnish of Christian theology, and some real education by the spirit of the Christian faith, in the main they acted on traditions of conduct, the heritage of the race from heathen times. But this stubborn placidity was not within the reach of the upper classes. They had the same heritage, but could not have the same rest in it. They were taught to consider the religious life as the highest, but what could be more opposed to their ancestral habits and lawless passions than the three monastic vows of poverty, 42 INTRODUCTION chastity, and obedience ? They gained wealth by plundering, they freely gratified their desires, it was hard to limit their fierce self-assertion, as the remains of old English, old German, and especially of Icelandic literature abundantly prove. No doubt this society, even in its wildest phase, contained the germs of a higher life. Classical observers remarked among the northern barbarians profound respect for the sanctities of wedded and / family life, and unshrinking loyalty among the pledged companions of a prince ; nor was the acquisitive impulse sanctioned at the expense of feelings like these. And when the popular mind was enlightened and elevated, however gradually, by the new faith, its nobler principles received new stimulus, and shone forth in stories that grew up scarce brushed by a dogma of the schools, but not, therefore, quite destitute of Christian sentiment. /Faithful service, unselfish virtue, chaste constancy in Jove, are celebrated in several popular poems especially of England and Germany, which are all more modern, though more rude in feeling, than the international romances. But for that very reason they are less representatively medieval. They attained only a local, or at most a national, but never an international success ; and not till our own day have they begun to enjoy a European reputation. The comparatively healthy ethics of lay life which they expressed, lacked, in truth, all basis in and all reference to the received theological standards. They could obtain the sanction of religion only if they were baptised into it and were modified in the direction of its code. Since CHIVALRY AND ITS REQUIREMENTS 43 they lack that sanction, they fail to exhibit the spirit of their age : had they obtained it, they would have ceased to be what they are, and would have lost a portion of their native vigour. But the adaptation of lay ethics to clerical ethics was the problem of the higher classes, and its solution was found in chivalry. The transition from the primitive to the medieval state of things is marked by the picturesque trait r that the hero becomes a knight. This short state- ment implies a very important change, which is symbolised in the complicated ceremonies of knightly investiture, very different from the few simple rites that used to accompany the Teutonic youth's as- sumption of arms. The young candidate spends the time with priests and receives the sacrament ; he is led to the bath and endued with a white robe to signify his change of life ; his sword is blessed and his vows are taken. Thus the knight, if belonging to lay life, partakes in the character of a monk, as medieval writers clearly saw and frequently ex- plained. His admission to the order is a religious service, and brings with it duties which, though of course different from those inculcated by the three monastic vows, have some analogy with them. Thus r if he is not pledged to poverty and retains his share of the world's possessions, it is on the understanding that he may be called at any moment to relinquish them. He is required to swear that he will always be ready to fight for the Church against the infidel ; at mass, when the Gospel is read, he must point his sword to the book to show that he is its sworn soldier ; and especially he must give up all for the 44 INTRODUCTION defence and recovery of the Holy City. 1 Lands and lordships must be forsaken when the Church has a crusade on foot, all material interests sacrificed for a visionary religious quest. Again, it would have been impossible to exact complete obedience from men of such aggressive personality as the feudal knights ; but neither are they left to their isolated and uncontrolled self-will. The principle of honour is introduced, which appeals to the individual's desire for pre-eminence and mastery, but which gratifies it only if he submit to a certain code of conditions. His valour must be carried to an extravagant pitch ; he must seek out adventures, and face the greatest odds ; he must refuse advantages and show mercy to the suppliant and courtesy to all ; his quarrel must be just, and he must succour the poor and the distressed. Far removed is the knight from the old heathen who fought and fled, waylaid and slew, precisely as it pleased himself. And in the third place, while only some of the knightly orders were pledged to celibacy, they were all bound to uphold the honour of women ; and gradually, without oath, they submitted themselves to that strange kind of gallantry known as the Service of Love, which at this distance of time strikes one almost as the most obvious feature of the chivalrous character. This fantastic fashion, in which the relation par amour usurped the place of marriage, at once gave scope for the devotion of the knight, and suited a society in which the highest minds regarded marriage as at best but a necessary evil. If the attempts to harmonise the demands of lay 1 See Hallam's Middle Ages, chap, he, pt. 2. CHIVALRY AND ITS REQUIREMENTS 45 Teutonic life and Latin ecclesiastical theory originated these ideas, it is easy to see why they were specially developed in a nation to which Teuton and Latinised races have given its mingled blood. Nowhere else was there such a fusion of the Germanic conquerors and the conquered provincials as in Gaul. It is just a sign of this that it puts off its old name, and, taking the new name of Fran ken from the invaders, modifies it to suit the pronunciation of the elder population, as France. There was nothing like this in the German fatherland where the connection with Rome was confined to politics and religion, without ever becoming a matter of daily social life. There was nothing like it in England, where, though to some extent they may have intermarried with the provincials, the new settlers practically cleared the ground, and began again at the beginning. Things were as different in Italy, where Ostrogoth and Lombard succumbed to the traditions of Rome, and were lost among the original inhabitants ; and in Spain, where the Visigoths long maintained them- selves as a supreme alien caste, separated by a deep gulf from the natives. In these latter countries the difference of race was accentuated by the difference of religion. The Teutons were Arian heretics, the provincials were orthodox Catholics ; it was impos- sible to mediate between them ; quarter was given to the antagonist only on condition that he should give up all that was characteristic. But the Gauls, like the Franks, were of the Catholic Church ; they could meet on a middle ground, to barter and com- promise their peculiarities. It is just this compromise between Teutonism and Latinism, this duality of 46 INTRODUCTION principles, that is the note of the Middle Ages. And therefore, it is just as we should expect, that in France we find the prerogative phases of medievalism, the feudal, the scholastic, and, among others, the chi- valrous ; and there the earliest, the most persevering, the most effective efforts were made to express the last in successive cycles of Romance. Three such groups, French in fabrication, but European in circulation and development, are progressive attempts to exhibit the life of chivalry : the Charlemagne romances, the Classical romances, and the Arthurian romances. If chivalry sprung from the union of medieval religion and secular morality, the relation of these cycles to each other may be formulated as follows : The Ecclesiastical predominates in the lays of Charlemagne, the Secular in the lays of Greek and Roman content ; only in the stories of Arthur do both sides, as it were, come to their rights. The earliest poems of the earliest group give the knightly ideal on its monastic side. From the first, Charlemagne is emphatically the hero of the Church. He and his house and his race owed a great part of their success to their championship of the Catholic faith against Arian heretics on the one hand, against heathens and Mohammedans on the other. In the old poems he is a notably religious personage, a soldier of the Cross, a crusader in the best sense of the word. Now- a-days, we are apt to look for the Charlemagne of poetry in such romances as Huon of Bordeaux. But these are of a later growth. In them he is no longer the chief person ; when introduced at CHIVALRY AND ITS REQUIREMENTS 47 all he figures as a wilful tyrant. Such tales arose when chivalry was finding other channels of ex- pression ; they employed the great emperor's name, but he himself no longer suited their wants ; he was thrown into the background and criticised. But in the early stories he is the proper hero, and, whenever hero at all, he is an ecclesiastical one. To see him at his most characteristic and his best, we must go to the Chanson de Roland, which is based on an actual occurrence, the destruction of his rear-guard by Gascon robbers in the passage of the Pyrenees. In the legend, however, the enemies are transformed into Saracens, that the emperor may be shown at war with the infidel, and his slaughtered soldiers exhibited as martyrs of the faith. This change gives the clue to the whole poem. The peers are hardly knights, but mere fighting monks. Both Charlemagne and his nephew Roland are the favourites of heaven, who receive miraculous gifts and enjoy the intercourse of angels. The French champions are like Crom- well's Ironsides. When not in the fight they are on their knees, and, conscious of their divine mission, are instant in exhortation and have a tendency to preach. Strong and fearless, they slay their thousands ; but they do not joust for the pleasure of it ; they do not crave adventures for the honour to be gained ; they want the splendid courtesy of the chevalier, and, above all, have no sense for the service' of women. Roland does not spare his lady a thought. At his death he thinks of God and fatherland, of the emperor and his former conquests, and the men of his line ; he bids his 48 INTRODUCTION sword a tender farewell ; but he is undisturbed by any grief for the woman who holds him dear. Neither he nor his fellows know the meaning of earthly love. Only at a later day does Roland, the soldier of the Church, become Orlando Innamorato under the hands of an Italian, who no longer believes in the story but mocks at it. When the French engaged in a religious war of their own, and took part in the great crusading movement of the Middle Ages, one result was to widen their acquaintance with the world, and bring before their notice many realms of feeling, of imagination, and of knowledge that had hitherto been hid from them. In so far, the campaigns in the East, which beg an i n a spirit of devotion. but could not fail to foster a spirit of curiosity? and culture, had rather a secularising tendency. This is reflected in their literature, which takes a freer sweep in choice of subjects and liberality of treatment. " The Crusades," says Professor Forster, " introduced much new material, including the story of Alexander, who is now celebrated in the style of the Chansons de'&este, so that he appears as a French conqueror surrounded by the paraphernalia of oriental magic." A legendary biography of the Hellenic hero, compiled in By- zantium from many sources and the contributions of many races, had been made accessible in Latin to the nations of the West. From this are ul- timately derived the numerous vernacular versions of the story. In several respects Alexander was more suitable to the requirements of chivalry than the clerical warriors who preceded him. He has CHIVALRY AND ITS REQUIREMENTS 49 a store of adventures in love and war ; his respect for his female captives has something of a knightly colour ; his triumphant marches, enlarged by eastern imagination into miraculous expeditions into fabulous lands, have points of contact with the fantastic quests of errantry. Nevertheless, and the remark is true of other heroes of classical antiquity who were afterwards medievalised in similar fashion, he could never be thoroughly accommodated to the changed civilisation into which he was imported. On the one hand, he was too j i ealthv and humane : on the other, he had not religion enough for a knight of the Middle Ages. The grand figures of Hellenic heathenism might be approximated to the chivalrous ideal on its mundane side, but they could never embody it altogether. Chivalry, therefore, whether seeking its expression in German or in antique story, had failed to achieve a complete success. In each case the hero, whether the great statesman and warrior of the Catholic West or the champion of Greek ideas amid the populations of the East, had a character too obstinately representative of another age and another code of life, thoroughly to submit to a change that would make him merely a chivalrous knight, neither more nor less. It was at this juncture that Arthur became known, and it was immediately felt that the problem was solved. The British leader who fought for the Christian faith against the invading pagans, was well suited to fulfil the ecclesiastical demands of the chivalrous ideal : the culture-hero of the heathen myths was no less fit to reflect its secular aspect ; and his D 50 INTRODUCTION story had been recast in accordance with the spirit of the day. Physiology teaches that the human embryo passes through a series of phases like this or that order of the lower animal kingdom before it assumes its I ultimate shape. Something similar may be observed 1 * in the previous development of, the Arthurian legend. At first this hero of the Bretons and the Welsh is vague and formless as the mists on their own hills, but additions are made to his story in such an order and in such a way that he suggests now Charlemagne and now Alexander, before he appears as the Arthur of romance. In Nennius there is little to distinguish him from the /great Frankish emperor. Both are quite ecclesiastical, fighting for faith and fatherland, bearing sacred armour in a sacred cause, perform- ing prodigies of valour through miraculous aid. Both represent races fabled to have sprung from I ancient Troy. Indeed, it is possible that the one set of legends may have directly borrowed from the other, for the journey to Jerusalem is common to both. In the versions of Geoffrey and Wace some of the new traits help In the first place to increase Arthur's resemblance to Charlemagne. He wages not only a defensive, but an offensive religious war. He is not alone, but is surrounded by worthies soon to be as famous as the paladins themselves, and Wace, when he describes the institution of the table, may have had in his mind the peerage of France. The exploits of the Briton extend from the island to the mainland ; he breaks the power of Rome and grasps at the crown of the L CHIVALRY AND ITS REQUIREMENTS 5* world. Yet, on the whole, this set of additions is more suggestive of Alexander than of Charle- magne. The mighty continental kingdom is com- mon to both, but Nennius' hint of Arthur's disadvantage of birth, Geoffrey explains away with a tale of magic exactly like that which made Nectanabus the father of Alexander. With the help of Merlin's prophecies the greatness of Arthur is not less clearly prefigured before his birth than that of Alexander. Like Alexander, he avenges a# insulting demand for tribute and wins kingdoms in single fight. But the new episodes contain much, also, that has the genuine stamp of chivalry. The single-handed strife with giants, the suppression of evil customs, the vindication of female honour, the acquisition of love by prowess, were all typical of the knightly character, in so far as they went. All that was needed was a further elaboration on the same lines. And this was not difficult. Arthur's story, con- genial in ^all' essential respects to the spirit of the day but without the rigidity of a fixed historical tradition, was still plastic in the hands of the medieval poets and lent itself to all their desires. His exploits and feats could be made to reflect the adventurousness, the sense of honour, the courtoisie in love which were the dream of knight- hood in the twelfth century. There were only two limitations to the perfect adequacy of the material. In the first place no single person could completely exhaust the possibilities of chivalry ; the biography of Arthur was insufficient to portray its whole fulness and wealth, and though it might 52 INTRODUCTION fulfil the requirements in little, it could not bring out the various developments of the one scheme. Arthur's career invited supplements from the careers of his followers, and even in the Romantic historians, as we have seen, Gawain comes prominently to the \ front during the war with Rome. But in the second place, these personages were in some ways even more suitable for chivalrous treatment than their chief. For they were knights while he was king. His exploits were necessarily on the large public scale, while they had leisure for the private ad- ventures of errantry. They offered themselves for the illumination of the knightly character in the individual, which was the more important side, in all its various aspects. It was natural, therefore, that medieval poetry should occupy itself with/a them rather than with the king. To make room for them he is thrust aside, as Charlemagne had been by the peers, and his historical significance is altogether forgotten. There were circumstances that considerably facili- tated this process. Some, if not most, of these tales were derived from Brittany rather than from Wales, and in Brittany the tradition of the national struggle with the Saxons was probably never of capital importance. Prominence would be given to the mythic at the expense of the historic element from the first, and many of the persons would originally have no connection with Arthur. In some cases there are even indications that circumstances, not of British but of Breton history, have left their trace in later romances. Thus Professor Zimmer derives the name of Erec of Destregales from a Gothic Eoricus CHIVALRY AND ITS REQUIREMENTS 53 of Dextra Gallia, and the name of Lancelot from one or both of two Lantberts, who played a conspicuous part in the ninth century. 1 If this be so, though it would explain the origin of the names rather than of the adventures ; or even if the stories are purely mythic, without a trace of history, it is not surprising that they should not be subordinated to the person- ality of Arthur, and that in them all reference to the strife with the Saxons should be wanting. The notoriety procured for his royal hero by Geoffrey would emphasise the tendency to group other traditions round his court ; but if these were very different in origin or development they would retain a great measure of relative independence. Such narratives, in the versions of conteurs, early ^enjoyed a wide popularity possibly in England and certainly in France. It is easy to understand their attraction. In the first place they would have the inalienable charm of style which seems the heritage of Celtic literature. It fascinates us now ; it could not fail to fascinate people so quick-witted as the Normans and the French of the Middle Ages. Contrast the monotonous tirades of the Chanson de Roland with the delicate variety of a primitive Arthurian story like Kulhwch and Ohuen. Here is the well-known description of the heroine : — " The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold, on which were precious emeralds and rubies. More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, 1 " Beitrage zur Namenforschung," etc. Zeitschrift fiir franzos. Sprache und Lit. 1891. 54 INTRODUCTION and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the mewed falcon was not brighter than hers. Her bosom was more snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheek was redder than the reddest roses. Who so beheld her was filled with her love. Four white trefoils sprung up wherever she trod, and therefore was she called Olwen." Scarcely less beautiful is the description of Kulhwch : — " And the youth pricked forth upon a steed with head dappled gray, of four winters old, firm of limb, with shell-formed hoof, having a bridle of linked gold on his head, and upon him a saddle of costly gold. And in the youth's hand were two spears of silver, sharp, well tempered, headed with steel, three ells in length, of an edge to wound the wind and cause the blood to flow, and swifter than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed- grass to the earth when the dew of June is at the heaviest. A gold-hilted sword was upon his thigh, the blade of which was of gold, bearing a cross of inlaid gold of the hue of the lightning of heaven ; his war horn was of ivory. Before him were two brindled, white-breasted greyhounds, having strong collars of rubies about their necks, reaching from the shoulder to the ear. And the one that was on the left side bounded across to the right side, and the one on the right to the left, and like two sea- swallows sported round him. And his courser cast up four sods with his four hoofs like four swallows in the air about his head, now above, now below. About him was a four-cornered cloth of purple, and CHIVALRY AND ITS REQUIREMENTS 55 an apple of gold was at each corner, and every one of the apples was of the value of an hundred kine. And there was precious gold of the value of three hundred kine upon his shoes and upon his stirrups, from the knee to the tip of his toe." ' It is not wonderful that the imagination of the Middle Ages turned from the rude celebrations of Frankish warriors or the distorted reproductions of classic antiquity to stories that came from the same pure fountain of literature as this. And not only had the Celtic tales a universal witchery that is as potent now as it could be then. They had other qualities that especially appealed to medieval feeling. There is " a Celtic air," says Matthew Arnold, " about the extravagances of chivalry." 2 At any rate, as it expressed rather an aspiration than an actual condition of things, and was a dream that contrasted with the rude realities of life, it may be described as 1 It may be said that these passages are of later origin, but this is unlikely. At any rate the same virtuosity in style is to be found in the earliest Irish remains. For example, the Voyage of Brian MacFebail, which belongs to the seventh century, thus describes the abode of the departed : — " Fair is that land to all eternity beneath its snowfall of blossoms. The gleaming walls are bright with many colours, the plains are vocal with joyous cries. Mirth and song are at home on the plain, the silver- clouded one. No wailing there for judgment, nought but sweet song to be heard. No pain, no grief, no death, no discord. Such is the land." Or, again, this is a picture of the same country from the Wooing of Etain : — " A magic land and full of song : primrose is the hue of the hair, snow-white the fair body, joy in every eye, the colour of the fox-glove in every cheek." Both passages quoted by Mr. Nutt in Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition. 2 Celtic Lite7'ature. 56 INTRODUCTION a " reaction against the despotism of fact," and such reaction, Arnold, quoting from Henri Martin, considers peculiarly characteristic of Celtic races and of Celtic poetry. Renan, too, finds a subtle affinity between the conceptions of chivalry and the stories of Wales, because the latter possess " L'element romantique, par excellence, l'aventure ; cet entraine- ment d'imagination qui fait courir sans cesse le guerrier breton apres Finconnu." 1 What is mys- terious and undefined, what refuses to be formulated and is best seen in half-lights, attracts the Celt, and he is enabled by his sensibility to anticipate and divine it. The same sensibility reveals to him the distinctive notes of female character, and makes him delight in portraying the ways, the beauty, the power of women. And how this would influence a society that was in the state of youthful exaltation implied in the Service of Love, when men were occupied with the same questions, and were awaking to the same experiences ! Not that the importance of these stories is to be exaggerated, at least to the disparagement of what was contributed by the French poets who afterwards made use of them. " Sensibility gives genius its materials," says Arnold in another con- nection, when talking of the Celtic temperament and its deficiency in patience and the capacity for architectonic. Probably the native soil produced only series of short stories (such as have been versified in some of the lays of Mary of France), and little attempt had been made to work them together into an artistic whole. " Only the first 1 La Podsie des Races Celtiques. CHIVALRY AND ITS REQUIREMENTS 57 steps had been taken towards a unifying concep- tion," says Professor Zimmer of the early Arthurian saga : "It was rather the hero of the narrative who was the connecting element of the several parts ; hence the addition and insertion of new episodes under the hands of each narrator." 1 It was the French trouveres who appropriated the un- cemented cairns and used the stones for their own elaborate edifices. Professor Forster insists that only the machinery of the verse romances is Celtic, " while the content, the soul, the treatment, are purely French " ; and elsewhere says that they show the French spirit in foreign costume just like the classical tragedy of the seventeenth century. 2 Perhaps an exacter illustration of his view might be found in the fashion in which antique themes are treated in romances like Clelie or the Grand Cyrus. The gist of the whole matter is summecT up in the words : " The knights of Arthur appear above all as genuine figures of romance that were produced by the activity of the poetic fancy. They do not vanish in the mists of Celtic philology." 3 Which, of course, does not mean that a great many mythical traits have not survived in their adven- tures. 1 " Gottingische gelehrte Anzeigen." Article on Mr. Nutt's Holy Grail. 1890. 2 See the introductions to his edition of Chrestien. 3 Golther, Zeitschrift fur franzos. S fir ache una 1 Lz't., 1891. 58 INTRODUCTION V THE VERSE AND THE PROSE ROMANCES THUS round the story of Arthur as nucleus, especially after the appearance of Geoffrey's his- tory, many others were gathered, which became the property of Europe through the medium of Bretons, and possibly of Welshmen, who were bi- lingual or had altogether laid aside their mother- tongue. Such was the prestige of Arthur's Court that almost everything belonging to Brythonic tra- dition, and a good deal that was not Celtic at all, mingled and discharged in the Arthurian miscellany. The historical conditions may have aided the process. " The spread of a national heroic," says Mr. Nutt, " is mainly determined by political considerations. Thus the spread of Arthurian romances through- out Europe coincides with the establishment of an Angevin empire, of which the centre of gravity was in England." l Such influences, however, must have been very indirect, for it was chiefly the French who seized upon the new material. Even the theory of Gaston Paris, that lost Anglo-Nor- man poems dealing with the matter of Britain delivered their material to the French trouveres, has recently been called in question. Probably, indeed, it will survive the assaults made on it, for the form of some of the romantic names seems to be derived not only from Welsh, but from Welsh 1 " Development of the Ossianic or Fenian Saga." Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition, ii. VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 59 as it was written, not as it was spoken ; * and it seems more natural to suppose that the manu- scripts thus postulated were Anglo-Norman than that they were Welsh. But even granting the existence of Anglo-Norman'* romances, to all in- tents and purposes they have disappeared, and therefore would seem to have had less permanent merit than the French versions that superseded them. If we take the literature just as we find it, it falls into the following groups :--— First, the Metrical Romances, which describe the biographies of the Knights of the Round Table, or isolated episodes in their careers. In them Arthur himself achieves little, the wars with the Saxons disappear, and the final catastrophe is un- known. The great representative of this class is Chrestien de Troyes, whose literary career begins not earlier than shortly before 1150 and con- cludes not later than 1 1 90. 2 It was he who gave the grand impulse to the whole movement, "which, however, both in form and content, after culminat- ing in Chrestien himself, soon grows vapid." 3 His best successors are to be found not among his own countrymen, but in the minnesingers of Germany. Further, the three Welsh Arthurian stories of Geraint, Owen, and Peredur, stand in some sort 1 See the article of M. Loth in the Revue Celtique, Oct., 1892, summarised by Mr. Nutt in his Celtic Myth and Saga, Folk- lore, Sept., 1893. 2 These are the limits suggested by Forster. Paris makes him begin later and stop earlier. 3 Forster. 60 INTRODUCTION of relation, cognate or derivative, with Chrestien's poems on Erec, Yvain, and Percivale. Second, the Prose Romances, most of which have undergone a constant process of editing, combina- tion, and enlargement, so that their order, pedigree, and mutual relations, are among the most compli- cated problems of literature. 1 In their present form they must be later than the metrical stories, which have influenced their conceptions ; but they are not renderings from the verse, and frequently take a different view of things. Moreover, like the romantic histories, they celebrate the deeds of Arthur, his victorious combats with enemies and monsters, and his fatal strife with Modred. But there is also much in them that the romantic his- torians do not mention, for example, the criminal relation of Arthur with his sister. Professor For- ster, therefore, thinks that some of them contain, though with many interpolations and much elabor- ation, a deposit from the original Armorican stories. 2 If the metrical narratives had most influence in Germany, these, on the other hand, had most in- fluence in the South. " Generally speaking, the Romance nations hardly knew the poetic forms, and only translated the prose." 3 But the foreign ver- 1 For a sketch of their conjectural development, see the chapter on British Romance in G. Paris' Littdrature Fran- caise au Moyen Age. 2nd edition. 2 Edition of Chrestien. 3 G. Paris, Hist. Lit. de France, vol. xxx. He is, of course, referring to the Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese, not to the Provencals. VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 6l sions are not so interesting in this as in the other case, being much less independent. There is not in Italy a new development of the Arthurian as of the Carolingian cycle. Indirectly it was of great im- portance, for it inspired Boiardo with the idea of adding the ingredient of love to the stories of Charlemagne, and transforming them by means of it. 1 Directly, it furnished Italian literature not with entire poems, but only with episodes and subordinate passages, like the incidental celebration of Tristram and the intervention of Merlin and of Morgan (the latter very much disguised) in the Orlando Inna- morato and the Orlando Furioso. Thirdly, the huge accumulation of diverse ad- ventures that were constantly overlapping, and yet had no consistent connection, seemed to demand reduction . to some kind of system. The initial attempts in this direction were made in the prose stones themselves. " It was a pronounced tendency of the Romance-writers of the later thirteenth century to unite the three principal branches of Arthurian Romance — the ' Merlin/ ' Tristan,' and 'Lancelot' to the 'Quest del Saint Graal.'" 2 There was work for the summarist and the compiler, and the task was undertaken in French by the Italian, 1 Contrasting the Courts of Britain and of France, he says of the latter : " Perche tenne ad amor cbiuse le porte E sol si dette a le battaglie sante, Non fu di quel valore et quella stima, Qual fu quell' altra, ch' io contava in prima." Orlando Imiamorato, ii. 18. 2. 2 Sommer's Malory, vol. iii., page 289. 62 INTRODUCTION Rusticien of Pisa, about 1270; in German, for the German versions, by Ulrich Fiiterer or Fiirterer towards the close of the fifteenth century, and in English by Sir Thomas Malory about the same time. Fourthly, there is a bulky Arthurian literature in English derived from all these sources, from the romantic historians, from the romances in verse and in prose, from Malory's compilation ; and part of it perhaps of independent origin. In its present form most of this is comparatively recent, and little can be attributed to the twelfth or even to the thirteenth century. As late as 1338, when Robert of Brunne's Chronicle appeared, he could say : " In allelandes wrot men of Arthur Hys noble dedes of honur ; In Ffrance men wrot and yit men wryte But herd haue we of hym but lyte, Therefore of hym more men fynde In farre bokes, als is kynde, Than we haue in thys lond." * And elsewhere he speaks of " Thyse grete bokes so faire language Writen and spoken of Ffraunces usage That neuere was writen throw Englischemen. Swilk stile to speke kynde ne can But rTrenschemen wry ten hit in prose." 2 It is with the third quarter of the fourteenth century that the stream of Arthurian romance begins to flow at all abundantly in English. One result of this late origin is that, except when they 1 10607. * 1 097 1. VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 63 closely follow the French, the English versions are apt to be more popular in treatment, and to lose a little of the chivalrous medieval colour. Interesting to the scholar for the questions of origin they involve, and to the critic for beauties of their own, their specific contribution to the story of Arthur is a certain national robustness of treatment. Char- acteristically they issue in a long series of ballads, and in the ballads are to be found not the most excellent, but the most distinctive specimens of English Arthurian romance out of Malory. In the verse romances, the heroes are repre- sented as knights of the Round Table, and the story tells either of some particular quest they undertake, or of their career as a whole. In the episodic romances, Gawain commonly is the chief person. He is represented as the mirror of knighthood and courtesy ; the false report of his death fills the wicked with insolence and the good with grief; ladies fall in love with him on hearsay ; he is practically invincible, and it is honour enough for the other knights not to be overcome by him ; 1 he undertakes the quest in which others fail, and brings it to a triumphant conclusion. In the typical biographical romances, an unknown youth arrives at court ; an apparently impossible task solicits his prowess ; he accomplishes it and many others, and wins the hand of a lady, who is somehow involved in them, and who brings him a lordship or kingdom for dowry. 2 1 G. Paris, Hist. Lit. de France, vol. xxx. See also Romania, vol. x. 2 G. Paris, as above. 64 INTRODUCTION And if there is a general sameness in the plots, there is also a general sameness in the machinery, which is perfectly accommodated to the fanciful and unreal taste of the time. Descriptions of ceremonies and combats, of palaces and decorations, magical fountains and nameless cities, revolving or vanishing castles, swords that cannot be unsheathed or ungirt save by the predestined knight, ships bearing dead men, whose murderers can only be slain with the truncheon of the lance which dealt the blow ; these and the like form the romancer's ordinary stock-in-trade. Gaston Paris quotes Jodel's line — " Li conte de Bretaigne sont si vain et plaisant," and proceeds to comment on it. " This vanity, this complete absence of seriousness and conse- quence, this confused succession of unmotived adven- tures, of which the extravagance sometimes goes the length of utter absurdity, was what gave pleasure in those days. It is what wearies us now in the perusal of these poems. Their factitious world, des- titute alike of probability and of variety (for all the adventures have a mutual resemblance, and are often copied from each other), soon affects us with weari- ness, and, at the same time, with the desire to refresh ourselves with some living reality." l From this vast, complicated, and, with all its charm, most monoton- ous literature, it will be enough to select one or two of the more famous specimens, and briefly indicate a few of their salient features. Leaving aside Gawain, who already in the roman- 1 Hist. Lit. de France, vol. xxx. VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 65 tic historians has a prominence that prefigures his popularity in the later verse romances, the first knight of the British cycle who engaged the atten- tion of poets was Sir Tristram. 1 That may be one reason why his story was, and always remained, but loosely connected with the main series, which was composed when the centripetal attraction of Arthur's court was fully felt. On the other hand, in its relative isolation, it had perhaps more in- 1 Everything connected with the origin and development of his story is very obscure. On the one hand, Professor Zimmer ("Beitrage zur Namenforschung, etc." Zeitschrift fiir franzbs. Spr ache unci Lit., 1890) thinks that his name is Pictish, traces the saga to an historical origin, and would localise its birthplace in Scotland at the time when there were dealings with the vikings of Ireland. This would explain the Irish tribute, several of the names, notably that of Isolt, which is said to be non-Celtic, and the absence of the legend in Welsh literature. > According to Professor Zimmer, it became known to Breton auxiliaries, who went north with the Normans in 1072, and they changed the localities and setting to suit themselves. On the other hand, Mark is undoubtedly mythical, being one of the centaur-like powers of darkness, and a Welsh triad describes Tristram as watching his swine, while Arthur tries to get some of them (Rhys, Arthurian Leg-end, page 13, 378). Professor Rhys pertinently asks those who absolutely sever him from Arthur to say what they make of this. In its further develop- ment, the story was eked out with many non-Celtic additions (Golther, Sage von Tristan una 1 Isolde, 1887), and these were so loosely appended that the order of them greatly differs in the various versions that we know, and one or other often drops out. This of itself shows that the story, as a whole, is not to be traced to an ancient Celtic saga with an organic unity of its own. The existing forms show many variations, too, in other respects, and their mutual relations cannot as yet be regarded as entirely explained. 66 INTRODUCTION dependent life : it was not a flower in the nosegay, but won the prize for itself. Probably it was the best known and most cherished of all the romantic subjects ; certainly it had an earlier and a longer popularity than any of the others. In the Middle Ages, the knowledge of it penetrated to the Slavs and the Greeks; in our own day it has renewed its fascination for poets of every kind and degree of genius. It has survived in many versions, but the following traits, in some order or other, are, for. the most part, common to the best. Tristram is the child of love as well as its votary and its victim. Born on the battlefield, he is left an orphan of both his parents, and is bred by his foster father in ignorance of his descent. His beauty makes him the prey of pirates, but they fear their own crime, and leave him free but an outcast on the Cornish shore. His skill in hunting and minstrelsy commends him to his Uncle Mark, and when his birth is declared he becomes the acknowledged heir of Cornwall. Then follows his rejection of the Irish claim for tribute, his slaughter in single fight of the Irish champion who demanded the surrender of a number of Cornish youths and maidens, and his voyage to Ireland disguised as a minstrel to be healed of the wound he has received. He returns full of the praises of Isolt, the fair princess who has wrought his cure, and readily undertakes to procure her as wife to King Mark. He sets out on his second voyage, gains his point by the slaughter of a dragon, is recognised and all but murdered by Isolt as the slayer of her kinsman. Nevertheless, he fulfils his task, and bears her VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 67 back to Cornwall. Now comes the fatal mishap with the philtre. It is intended for Isolt and 'Mark, but accidentally drunk by Isolt and Tristram, and henceforth the fate is laid upon them of a mutual and undying passion. For this they sur- render all else, name, happiness, and virtue, and become the medieval types of what true love should be. And if dangers faced, hardships endured, sacrifices joyfully made by each for the other are enough, they are entitled to all praise. Their deception of King Mark is only the inventiveness of love, their defiance of all obligations only its daring, their flight to the forest only its enterprise, which is also its exceeding great reward. Tristram's marriage with another lady, Isolt of the White Hands, is palliated by her suggestion of her absent namesake, and is visited with a bitter expiation. In passionate revulsion to his true feeling, which in his heart he has never forsaken, he sends for his early mistress to heal another wound he has received ; but told that the sails of the returning ship are black, he thinks he is unforgiven, and his heart breaks for grief before she arrives to die by his side. We must be careful not to read into the medieval poem the misgivings of modern thought. To our way of looking at things there is a dis- crepancy between the premises and the conclusion. Is slavery to a headlong passion, however long con- tinued, a subject of praise ? If the lovers are to be admired rather than condemned, stress must be laid on the fatal agency of the philtre. On the other hand, if the philtre is emphasised, they 68 INTRODUCTION can claim no credit for their faithfulness in love. These are questions which the poets of the nine-* teenth century cannot ignore, and which they seek in various ways to answer : but for a poet of the twelfth century they never arose, and we must forget them for the time, would we see his story eye to eye. For his own age Tristram was the ideal of a particular kind of chivalry. Even in his outward appearance he is the very image of a knight, tall, strong, and beautiful. In all courtly accomplish- ments, from hunting to harping, he excels the experts in the craft. He gives away lands as other men give alms, he is tender to his friends, his bravery is without a flaw. And above all, he sacrifices his powers, his prospects, his virtues to the service of love, to the lady of his heart. No wonder that his was the favourite story of chivalry, and that he was the darling of romance. To compare a man to Tristram was the highest honour that could be paid him, and grave seniors recommended Tristram as model to the youth of the day. It has been said that his relation to Mark is a coarse doublet of Modred's relation to Arthur. The coarseness is a matter of opinion, but if it be a doublet, it is one in which our sympathies are inverted. It takes the side not of the uncle but of the nephew, not of the husband but of the lover, and thus represents the point of view most natural to a society that exalted such gallantry at the expense of marriage. If Tristram commits a fault, it is not by loving another man's wife, but by obeying in VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 6g a moment of weakness a criminal impulse to wed one for himself. This, however, is a temporary lapse, and, despite the brief eclipse of his virtue, he remains the great type of love. The subject of Tristram was treated about i 1 50 by Beroul in a poem, part of which sur- vives. This poem already connects him, though loosely, with the story of Arthur. In a certain way he was well fitted to supplement the chival- rous conception embodied in the British king of romantic history. In the Arthur of Geoffrey, though one of his exploits is for the vindication of female honour, and though love plays a part in his career and in his court, stress is laid on the knightly pursuit of honour. In Tristram, though he is mighty in single combats and has his fight with the dragon, stress is laid on the knightly sur- render to love. But both were parts of the chival- rous character, and might claim to be portrayed together in one person. Even then, however, it was possible to represent them in harmony or in collision. Chrestien, who soon before or soon after Beroul, 1 composed a poem on Tristram, which has unfortunately been lost, proceeded to treat the subjects of EreCy of Lancelot \ and of Yvain, all of which may be viewed as dealing with this ques- tion. 2 And their relation may be put thus : In Erec, love is in excess of honour ; in Lancelot, they are exactly balanced ; in Yvain, honour is in 1 The former theory is that of G. Paris : the latter has been suggested by Forster. 2 1 have left aside Cliges, which seems to contain almost no Celtic material. 70 INTRODUCTION excess of love. And the moral, in so far as Chrestien can be said to have a moral, is that neither can be neglected without danger to the other. The story of Erec, Tennyson adapts from the Welsh version, in which the hero is called Geraint, for his famous Idyll. In the romance, much as in the modern poem, the hero rides unarmed from the hunt to avenge the insolence of the strange knight and his dwarf; chances on Enid when seeking for arms and a lady ; overcomes his antagonist in the tournament ; brings his bride in mean attire to the court where she is royally arrayed by the Queen herself. Afterwards at her side he forgets his prowess and yields himself to a life of uxorious fondness till it becomes the general talk and Enid herself is bitterly ashamed. Overhearing her regret- ful words he is roused to energy and wrath, and bids her make ready to ride with him on the quest of strange adventures. On the way, though enjoined to silence, she warns him of attack and ambuscade ; and bears every hardship without complaint, though she cannot suppress the sense that it is she who has urged him to these dangerous tasks. At length he is wounded and they are borne to a castle, where he awakes from his swoon at the right moment to save Enid from the solicitations of her pertinacious host In the sequel Erec acknowledges her constancy and love, and after other adventures from which he emerges victorious, returns to be applauded by the court ; whence by and by he withdraws in honour to his own land, his faithful wife at his side. As we are apt to fill in this sketch from Tenny- VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 7 I son's poem, it may he worth while to point out that the modern idyll is a good deal subtler and more pathetic than the medieval romance. Chrestien does not clothe Enid during her wander- ings with the faded silks of their first interview. Erec merely surrenders himself to a life of luxuri- ous ease, he does not quit the court in suspicion of an atmosphere grown foul ; he takes the road in resentment of adverse criticism rather than in mistrust of his wife's faith ; and with less motive for estrangement than Geraint, he has also fewer movements of remorse. But the main idea of the poem is clearly and delicately brought out ; the knight leaves the world of adventure for his lady's love, and then drags her forth to face its cruellest probations. In Lancelot or The Knight of the Cart, Chrestien on the one hand completes the theory of the amour courtois, " the ennobling virtue of a love which is considered incompatible with marriage." * On the other hand he shows that its dictates and the dictates of true honour are the same, however they may violate the external decorum of knight- hood. The Queen, accompanied by Sir Kay alone, is surprised by Meleaguant, who has long been waiting to gain possession of her. He has been restrained by fear of Lancelot, but now that Lancelot is not on the spot, he carries her off to the land of Goire, " whence no stranger ever re- turns." Lancelot, however, comes on the scene soon after the capture, and gives chase. Arrived at the castle of Meleaguant (originally Melwas, A 1 G. Paris, Litterature Francaise au Moyen Age. 72 INTRODUCTION King of the dead), he finds there are only two modes of access, the water-bridge and the sword- bridge. Gawain, who also takes part in the pursuit, unsuccessfully attempts the former. Lancelot, with infinite pains and much loss of blood, works his way across the blade of the sword. He rescues the Queen and other captives, and finally in single combat cleaves the skull of Meleaguant, who has aspersed her reputation. Thus love and honour co-operate in him to the knightly ideal. But in one episode he is hard pressed. Having lost his horse he is compelled to persist on foot. A dwarf appears with a cart and proposes to carry him. Technically it is a suggestion to his dishonour. To ride in a cart was a derogation from his knightly dignity. But he accepts the disgrace in order that he may carry his point and deliver the Queen, and she is angry with him because he hesitated for a moment as to what he should do. 1 Arthur and his knights, however, hail his action as the triumph of inward over outward honour, and celebrate it by having themselves carried in carts through the city, much as in Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight they all wear the scarf which was to have been the badge of Sir Gawain's shame. In Yvain or the Knight oj the Lion, again, we see how honour, followed at the expense of love, interferes with knightly perfection, and is itself sure 1 For suggestions as to the survival and alteration of traits from an original mythic story in Christien's narrative, see Rhys, Arthurian Legend, chap, vi.; and for a discussion of the legend, Gaston Paris in Romania, x. VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 73 to suffer from the divorce. Yvain, whose story in this portion is probably of mythic origin, and re- sembles one told of the Irish hero Diarmait, 1 under- takes the adventure of the enchanted fountain of Baranton. He splashes water about it till, as he was told would be the case, a storm bursts on him and a warrior spurs against him. This champion he slays, and eventually succeeds in winning the hand of the lady who is thus left a widow. But his love cannot keep him from his career of errantry, and he resumes his adventurous life with the promise to return to her side within the year. But in the excitement of action the time slips by unnoticed, he passes his day, and his lady denounces him as a traitor. His misery and contrition are now more than he can bear, and he loses his senses. On his recovery, he goes about in company with a lion that he has saved, redressing wrongs and slaying monsters, till his broken faith is expiated, and it is given him to regain his lady's favour. Here, after the equipoise of Lancelot, there is a disturbance of the balance similar, but opposite to that which is presented in Erec. Yvain, by zeal for honour, soils his honour, as Erec in following love affronts it. Erec, however, jauntily overlooks his offence, but Yvain realises the sacred duties of a knight, and the grief at violating them drives him mad ; nor is he absolved without long penance. There is here a far more serious view of the situation than in the earlier poem. And this seriousness is deepened in Chrestien's last surviving work, the un- finished story of the Grail, which represents the very 1 Rhys, Celtic Heathendom, 187. 74 INTRODUCTION opposite pole of romance from the lost Tristram with which he commenced. Chivalry, as we have seen, was a compound of the code of the Church and the code of the world ; but this did not entirely settle the question. It was still possible to fulfil its obligations in a secular or in a spiritual way, to a profane or a religious end. There was room within it, it has been said, for knights of the Holy Ghost and for knights of a lady's garter. This divergence could not be better expressed than by the romance of Tristram and Isolt on the one hand, and by the romance of the Holy Grail on the other. Though the Grail was, in all probability, one of the magic vessels of heathen tradition, and was in some way connected with the fabulous world of the dead, like other portions of Celtic myths it was baptised and transfigured when pressed into the service of Christian chivalry. 1 With Chrestien's successors it becomes, through the influence of ecclesiastical legend, the cup from which Christ partook of the Last Supper ; and it symbolises the sacrament of the Eucharist, or, more generally, the union of man with the Divine. It is, however, im- possible to say how far this was the conception of Chrestien himself. From artistic motives, he re- served his explanation for the climax of his narrative, meanwhile describing the Grail only in such indefinite terms as should increase its mystery; 1 For an admirable statement of the various theories as to the origin of the Grail up to the date of publication, and summary of the different stories about it, see Mr. Nutt's Legend of the Holy Grail, Folklore Society, 1888. VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 7$ but he did not live to get to the denoiunent. Further, as his French continuators were of much less genius than he, it is advisable to go for the completed story to the German version of Wolfram von Eschenbach. It is indeed doubtful whether Wolfram did or did not use Chrestien's fragment for his basis, and it is certain that in many respects his conception seems original to himself. Nevertheless, if he does not precisely show what Chrestien's poem would have been, his Parzival at least represents the highest and deepest development of which the Grail legend in that particular phase was capable. Something of definiteness it doubtless seems to lose in crossing the Rhine. Wolfram is not very sure about the precise nature of what he likes to call " the wondrous thing." " He never speaks of the form of the Grail, but only of its material ; it is a stone of noblest properties, a stone that supplies all that is asked of it, that imparts the full enjoyment of life and immortality as well." 1 But, though he knows its virtues, he does not know, perhaps because Chrestien's fragment did not tell him, exactly what it is ; and his ignorance seems to increase his reverent awe. It is strange to find that, just as the German mystics arose in re- action from the dogmatic systems of the Church, so the great mystical poet of chivalry does not recognise the doctrinal bearing of his theme. With him the Grail is something like the Divine Presence, but not in any technical ecclesiastical sense ; and while this circumstance gives rather a new direction to the story, it does not make it the less fit to illustrate the religious side of knighthood. 76 INTRODUCTION The Grail is tended on the Savage Mountain by an order of spiritual knights who are vowed to the monastic life. Only their king is allowed to w r ed, and even he must give love the lower place in his heart. The last of them cried ** Amour " in battle, and for this was wounded well nigh to death. He lingers on from year to year, kept in life by the sight of the Grail, and often wishing he were dead. But when a wandering knight comes to the castle and asks the meaning of w T hat he sees, Anfortas shall be healed and the stranger made king in his stead. It is Percivale who is predestined to this quest. In his boyish years there is little promise of his future achievement, for his mother, widowed of her lord, has fled to a lonely wood and there brings up her son in solitude, determined that he at least shall be kept from the perils of knighthood. He knows nothing of arms and war : he can only make rough weapons for kill- ing the birds, and their woodland melody makes him leave even this. His mother tells him that their song is the gift of God. " What is God ? " asks the child. " Son " ; she replies, " I will tell you true. He is brighter than the day, who took on Him the shape of man : son, pray to Him at need ; His truth is still the succour of the world. And one is called the Lord of Hell, who is black and full of guile : from him turn thy thoughts, and from the fickleness of doubt." In later years, in the time of trial, Percivale forgets this counsel ; but now his heart is full of the brightness of God. One day he / VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 77 sees a party of knights in shining armour ride through the forest glades : he thinks they are divine beings, and falls on his knees before them. When he learns the truth his fancy is fired with the thought of arms and chivalry and the life at Arthur's court. He runs to his mother and demands leave to go. Her first answer is a distracted denial, and at last she only consents to send him forth in the livery of a fool, think- ing that ridicule will send him back to her side. She understands his sensitive pride, but she has not taken the measure of his unflinching resolve. His fool's dress sorts well with his awkwardness and inexperience, and he makes many blunders rich in comedy and pathos ; but he does not rest until he has the outward polish as well as the inward worth of chivalry, and sets himself to learn from an ancient knight all courtly usages and noble manners. Such gains often imply a corresponding loss, and Percivale, in acquiring the accomplishments of the world, forfeits something of his open sense for all that is great and wonderful. Among other things he is told that he asks too many questions ; a knight should be able to see strange sights without always inquiring about them ; an instruction of fatal result Meanwhile, he goes out on adventures, rescues and weds the Queen Condwiramur, but immediately passes on to new enterprises. He comes to the Savage Mountain and sees all the mystic pageant, the wounded king, the bleeding lance, the Grail itself borne behind a procession of maidens : but mindful of his lesson goes to INTRO D UCTION rest without question asked. His sleep is vexed with dreams, and he wakes to find the castle empty : only one serving-man lets him out, who curses him for his clownish silence. Thus Per- civale, by his schooling in the great world, has lost his triumphant innocence and wonder, his power to feel the grand mysteries of life. At first no ill overtakes him for his neglect of the grace that was offered him, and he returns in safety and honour to Arthurs Court. But there he is appealed of treason by an ill-favoured damsel, who says he has played the churl on the Savage Mountain. Gawain, too, is attainted on another charge, and the two knights must avoid the fellowship till their fame be cleared. Gawain is careless and confident ; he knows his cause is just, and bids his friend the cheerful farewell greeting : " God give thee luck ! " But Percivale is in despair. " Alas ! " he returns, " What is God ? Were He of power, would He have suffered this reproach to us twain. I gladly followed His service, but now such service I renounce. If He bears hate, I will endure it." Gawain is now the chief person for a large portion of the story. He is, in most respects, such as the elder romances depict him. His prowess is stainless, but it is the prowess of the world ; his religion is sincere, but it is the religion of the practical knight. His faith suffers no eclipse, and honours fall thick upon him. But through his bright career of gallant adventure we have glimpses of Percivale, gloomy and reckless, forgetting God or defying Him. At length, after five years, during which he has never VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 79 crossed the door of a religious house, he meets an old man and his family in the garb of penitents, and is rebuked by them for bearing arms on Good Friday. Percivale's heart is softened, and turns back to God. " If this indeed be the day of His grace," he thinks, " let Him help me and guide me on the right way." He suffers his horse to go where it will, and it brings him to a lonely her- mitage. Here the worldly lessons of his former instructor are corrected by the religious lore of the aged anchorite. Percivale is reproved for his errors, and sent back into the world with his sins forgiven. Restored to simplicity and meekness, he is also restored to all that he has lost. Once more he is welcomed to his seat at the Round Table. Once more he comes to the Grail Mountain, and this time he puts the question, heals Anfortas, and is made king in his room. Once more he is united with his long-lost wife Condwiramur, whom he has never ceased to love. Wolfram's poem, though it does not transgress the limits of the chivalrous compromise, yet accen- tuates the spiritual side. Percivale is by no means insensible to human affection and the summit- of his bliss is reunion with his wife, yet the drift of his career is to holiness and religion. He alone of the Grail knights is allowed to wed, but precisely this exception on behalf of their chief, who should be the saintliest of all, is unintelligible. Surely in those days, if the highest life were the goal, the monastic vows must be observed by the Grail King, instead of which he has a special exemption. If the Quest of the Grail, the search for absolute union with God 8o INTRODUCTION were described in real earnest, it would have for its hero one who did not yield to the compromise of chivalry, who knew no earthly love, and would not rest in the half-hearted compliances of the Round Table. And thus in later romance Galahad sup- plants Percivale in the achievement of the Grail. Similarly, Tristram, the earliest type of chivalrous love, is the pattern of other virtues as well. But here, too, there is some inconsistency. Though at first sight he seems the flower of medieval knight- hood, he does, no doubt, show faithlessness to the most sacred ties and prostration before a criminal passion. If such unconditional surrender to love were pictured in its native truth, it would be shown as over-riding, but not with impunity, all other knightly duties of honour and religion, and leading to the dismemberment of chivalry, and therefore to the destruction of the Round Table, in which chivalry was symbolised. In this respect the Lancelot of the prose romances, who, for the sake of his queen, betrays his king, who is not worthy of the Grail for which he yearns, and who ruins the knighthood that he adorns, is the characteristic creation of later Arthurian story. The search for the Grail leaves Arthur's fellowship a wreck ; in the war between Arthur and Lancelot the remnant is divided against itself, so that it can stand no longer. And meanwhile Arthur, who at first had gathered up in little all that was good and great in chivalry, was changed and desecrated. In the old myths, as we have seen, he was probably identified with the Celtic Zeus, who, like the Hellenic, was husband of his sister. This primitive trait was now resumed VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 8 1 from popular tradition, except that marriage being out of the question between such kinsfolk in Christian lands, the relation was conceived as one of unlawful love. The horror of the story, only less than that of Oedipus or Gregory, is somewhat mitigated by making the chief part of their sin unconscious, and by representing the Queen of Orkney as only half-sister to King Arthur. Enough remains to change the bright adventurous tale, with its mingled light and shade, into a tragedy of guilt and doom. Arthur becomes the author of his own ruin, the father of that nephew who draws off a half of the few knights left by the Quest of the Grail and by Lancelot's secession, who seeks to possess himself of Queen and kingdom, and in the end accomplishes the fall of the K^ing. Thus Arthur, who begins in the romantic histories as champion of the faith, ends in the prose romances under the imputation of unhallowed passion. In him, as in the fellowship of the Table, there is that strange proximity of natural impulse and exalted devotion which is characteristic of chivalry ; the two elements could not blend, and their disruption meant the overthrow of the old ideal. These are the last significant accretions to Arthurian romance in the Middle Ages, and con- sidered roughly and in the mass they show in several respects the increased importance of the ecclesiastical element. The story of the Grail almost entirely loses its old mythic traits, and is elaborated on hints from apocryphal gospel and saintly legend till scarcely a trace of its original character is left. Compara- F 82 INTRODUCTION tively early the Grail had become the symbol of the Eucharist, and was represented as the cup of the Last Supper. Then it received further expansions in the same sense. In it was treasured the blood that flowed from the wounds of the Crucified, a clear reference to the doctrine of Transubstantia- tion. 1 After a long previous history that traces back the origins of the Grail to the times of Solomon, and even of the Creation, we are told how Joseph of Arimathea was imprisoned by the Jews on account of his adherence to Jesus ; how he was miraculously fed by the sacred vessel in his captivity, which lasted till the fall of Jerusalem ; how it worked wonders among the early Christians, and was seen by the pure in heart, guarded by angels and illumined with the visible presence of Christ ; how it was brought with them by the apostles of the West who converted Britain to the new faith. It is handed down from father to son till the land becomes too corrupt for its abode : then it disappears, but in Arthur's time the quest for it may not be impossible. Now, this identification of the Grail with the deepest mysteries of medieval religion involved the qualifications of absolute chastity and unworldliness on the part of him who achieved it. In the first place, therefore, the love adventures disappear from 1 The German poem on the contest in the Wartburg (belonging to the end of the thirteenth century) describes it as a stone which fell from the crown of Lucifer, when Michael struck it from his head. This carries the same idea further. By the Sacrament man was fitted to obtain the heavenly throne which the fallen angel had forfeited. \ VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 83 the story of Percivale, and in the prose Percivale the change is emphasised by contrasting his com- plete success with the partial success of the love- stained Lancelot, while, to show how worldly prowess is no claim at all to spiritual fruition, the mundane Gawain, who, in one German poem, achieves the quest, is introduced as entirely failing. But Percivale, even when his earthly love had been effaced, was not quite ethereal enough for the new conception ; many of his feats which could not be excluded from the story savoured of ordinary knighthood, so he is finally ousted by the saintly and stainless Galahad. But Percivale was so closely connected with the legend that he could not be summarily dismissed ; he was, therefore, retained to occupy the second place, while Lancelot fell back a step, and Gawain was reserved for " the role of dreadful example." " By this time," says Mr. Nutt, " the Arthurian legend was fully grown, and the mention of these knights called up the names of others with whom they were invariably connected by the romance writers. Well-nigh every hero of importance was thus drawn into the magic circle, and the mystic quest assumed almost inevitably " a new shape. 1 At first it had been an individual adventure, now it is shared in by the whole Round Table. In some ways the conception of Percivale's solitary and personal enterprise is not so grand as that of all " Arthur's court, laying aside ordinary cares and joys, given wholly up to one over- mastering spiritual aim." 2 It recalls the wave of 1 Nutt, Legend of the Holy Grail, page 245. 2 Ibid. 244. 84 INTRODUCTION religious enthusiasm that carried the nations of Europe into the early crusades. But meanwhile, when it was generally undertaken, the Quest of the Grail acquired its new and tragic significance. It became the test whether a man's heart were right to God. Galahad and Percivale, Lancelot and Bors, could achieve it more or less completely according to the measure of their spiritual aspiration and attainment : but to most it was fraught with disaster, and they perished in the search. As the religious view becomes dominant, there is a tendency to turn round and criticise the earlier heroes of the Table. Percivale is thrown into the shade by Galahad, the knight by the saint. Arthur, instead of being the blameless king, is branded with a sin that excites the horror naturalis of all. But perhaps Sir Gawain has most right to complain. What a contrast between the pictures of him in the verse and in the prose romances, especially the prose romances that deal with Sir Tristram ! In the poem of the Green Knight, for example, which follows the earlier conception, he is of all but flawless valour ;* he has the true nobility that can confess and expiate a fault; and he is genuinely religious as well. His trust is in the Virgin, who is limned on his shield, his pentacle has reference to the Five Wounds, the Five Joys, and the like ; his great grief in his toil- some wanderings is that he cannot be present at Mass on Christmas. How different from the per- fidious, cruel, envious knight he becomes in later story, where he appears as a voluptuary and assassin, saved from utter worthlessness only by some physical daring and some surface courtesy ! This would seem VERSE AND PROSE ROMANCES 85 to mean that to the earnest authors of these prose romances the conceptions of chivalry, when weighed in the balance, were found wanting. They had no new form in which to express their new ideas ; they kept the old framework of chivalrous romance, only with the characteristic change that from poetry it has become prose, and has lost the splendour and inspiration of verse ; but in the old framework they insert new thoughts, and are antagonistic to those of the personages who most fully embodied the chiv- alrous ideal. VI MALORY'S COMPILATION AND THE ENGLISH BALLADS Thus there is a discrepancy between the earlier and the later Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages, and since besides they had grown up in very different ways, taking their first suggestions from different Celtic legends, their increments from different stories that were in the air, their form from different minds, and their tone from different times and from different impulses of doctrinal Christianity, they present a very tangled and com- plicated appearance. Their differences amount often to direct contradiction, their mutual independence goes the length of incompatibility. Yet through it all there is a certain unity of theme, and the persons are, to a great extent, the same. Could not the loose threads be gathered together, and each of the adventures be assigned its proper place in one grand scheme? That was a task that might engross the best powers of the loftiest genius. But there was 86 INTRODUCTION no genius in the Middle Ages who was fitted or inclined to take it up. Dante indeed always shows profound appreciation of the Arthurian story. In the Inferno, among the shades "whom love had separated from our life," he gives Tristram a sove- reign place by the side of Paris. He describes Modred as " him in whom were broken breast and shadow at one and the same blow by Arthur's hand," and the phrase shows how minutely he was impressed. The shadow as well as the breast is broken, for the romance tells how, after the King's final stroke, " by the opening of the lance, through the midst of the wound, there passed a sunbeam so manifestly that Griflet saw it." 1 Above all, the story of Lancelot and his first kiss of Guinevere has, besides a reference in the Paradiso? inspired some of the most exquisite lines in one of the most exquisite passages of the Inferno, the description of Francesca di Rimini and Paolo Malatesta who were slain for their love. Francesca, telling their story at the poet's " affectionate appeal," concludes : ** One day we twain were reading for delight Of Lancelot, how love did him enthral ; Alone we were, and void of any fear. Full oft that reading drew the eyes of each To other, and drove the colour from our cheeks, But 'twas one only point that vanquished us. We read how those glad lips for which he longed Were kissed at last by such a noble lover : 1 " Et dit l'histoire que apres louerture de la lance passa parmy la plaie vng ray de soleil si cuidamment que girflet le veit." — Prose Lancelot. 2 xvi. 13-15. MALORY AND THE ENGLISH BALLADS 87 Then this man here who ne'er shall be from me Divided, kissed me on the tremulous mouth ; Procurer both the book and he who wrote ! ' That day no further did we read therein." 1 But Dante, despite his deep sympathy with the Arthurian romances, could not occupy himself with them chiefly or wholly. They represented only one section or aspect of medieval life, and he was summoned by his genius, his circumstances, and his time to be the supreme exponent of the Middle Ages in their widest range, summing up their politics, their philosophy, their science, their art, and their religion. Fifty years later than Dante lived Chaucer, perhaps next to Dante the chief literary genius of the Middle Ages. And it might have been expected that the adapter of knightly stories like Palamon and Arcite or Troilus and Cressida would above all be attracted to the prerogative romances of chivalry. Nor, certainly, would the poet of the Canterbury Tales have wanted the required capacity for compilation, combination, and arrange- * ment. But England was never the chosen home of chivalry, and always showed a certain callous- ness to many of the ruling principles of the Middle Ages ; and Chaucer, the first great poet of the England that we know, was a humorist, a man of affairs, a citizen of the world, a foe of falsetto extravagance. Nor was his time, a time of parliaments and Lollardry and of the Renaissance dawn, specially apt to stimulate the stagnant medievalism of his countrymen or himself. The 1 Longfellow's translation, with some alterations. 88 INTRODUCTION two romances that he did write are, characteristically, classical in subject-matter, being adapted from versions of the tales of Troy and Thebes, and are directly derived from the arch-heathen Boccaccio. His nearest approach to an Arthurian story is in the Wife of Bath's Tale, which handles the same theme as the ballad of Sir Gawain's marriage, but beyond putting it in King Arthur's days Chaucer does not connect it with the Matiere de Bretagne, and suitably to the narrator's character he gives it a somewhat cynical setting. For the chivalrous romance proper he has nothing but ridicule, cleverly parodying its style in his burlesque fragment of Sir Thopas. To Arthurian fiction he is particularly supercilious, though he can borrow a comparison from Sir " Gawayn with his olde curteisye." 1 But while Dante is full of admiration for the story of Guinevere and her lover, Chaucer speaks contemptuously of " The book of Launcelot de Lake That wommen holde in ful greet reverence," 2 implying that men like himself have done with it. In this, however, as in much else, Chaucer was much more fastidious than his contemporaries. Not to speak of Gower's occasional draughts from British romance, which are not exhilarating, in Chaucer's lifetime and in the succeeding years there are' several English versions of Arthurian stories, of which probably one of the best as well as one of the earliest is the charming alliterative and rhymed romance of Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight. 1 Squires Tale. 2 Nonne Prestes Tale. MALORY AND THE ENGLISH BALLADS 89 Moreover, Chaucer's time was premature in its de- velopment. In the fifteenth century there was a reversion to the Middle Ages in several important respects ; the Lollard heresy was repressed, the real authority of Parliament declined, the Wars of the Roses restored the anarchy of feudalism. In that atmosphere the interest in Arthurian stories ran high, and at last the task of compilation was seriously set about in the reign of Edward IV., that king who rose to power with the help, and recovered power by the fall, of the " Last of the Barons," and under whom the new principles of society began obviously to declare themselves. It is characteristic that just at the final gasp of the Middle Ages, the work of welding the mass of Arthurian story was undertaken. And the Morte Darthur shows traces of this in the circumstances of its authorship and its literary position. The concluding words of the book are framed on the well-known medieval formula ; " I praye you all, Ientyl men and Ientyl wymmen, that redeth this book of Arthur and his knyghtes from the be- gynnyng to the endyng, praye for me whyle I am on lyue that God sende me good delyueraunce, and whan I am deed, I praye you all praye for my soule ; for this book was ended the ix yere of the reygne of Kyng Edward the Fourth by Syr Thomas Maleore, knyght, as Jhesu helpe hym for his grete myght, as he is the seruaunt of Jhesu bothe day and nyght." There is a medieval ac- cent in these devout words of the knightly author. On the other hand, it is no less typical that his book proceeded from Caxton's press at Westmin- 90 INTRODUCTION ster, and was among the first fruits of that art of printing that has done so much to make the new times what they are. And Malory in style and dictation is very near ourselves, in some aspects having a good claim to be considered the father of modern English prose. 1 Earlier prosaists like Tre- visa wrote in another dialect than the now dominant East Midland ; or like Wiclifs, their books were under the ban as heretical and ceased to affect the literary classes ; or at least, like Mandeville's, they were intended to serve some other extrinsic pur- pose, and hardly belong to " belles lettres " pure and simple, or aim at beauties of expression. Malory's language is in prose the direct descen- dent of Chaucer's in verse ; his book was still popular and influential in the latter half of the sixteenth century ; and even now with all its ap- parent artlessness and want of rule, his style has a quaint and stately charm that school boy and critic can feel and respect. Indeed, Malory has a claim to be called a genius, though a minor one, in virtue of his graphic narratives, especially of tour- naments and fights ; his swift descriptions, as of the coming of the Grail ; his appeals to the feelings, as in his famous encomium on Sir Lancelot. The following passage is of a kind less frequent in his book but not less characteristic. Arthur is holding his court at Carlisle, when there is brought to him Sir Urre, with seven great wounds, three on his head, and four on his body and upon his left hand, and these will never be whole till they have 1 In his book of specimens Mr. Saintsbury very fitly assigns him the first place. MALORY AND THE ENGLISH BALLADS 9 1 been searched by the best knight in the world. The King and all the fellows of the Table who [ are present attempt in succession to heal the wounded man, but without success. At this junc- ; ture, Sir Lancelot, who has been away, comes riding towards them. The sick man at once feels : " ' My hert yeueth vnto hym more than to al these that haue serched me.' Thenne sayd Arthur vnto Syr Launcelot, ' Ye muste doo as we haue done ' ; and told Syr Launcelot i what they hadde done, and shewed hym them alle that had serched hym. ' Jhesu defende me,' sayd Syr Launcelot, ' whan soo many kynges and knyghtes haue assayed and fayled, that I shold presume vpon me to encheue that alle ye, my lordes, myghte not encheue.' ' Ye shalle not chese,' sayd kyng Arthur, ' for I will commaunde yow for to doo as we alle haue done.' ' My most renoumed lord,' said Syr Launcelot, ' ye knowe wel I dar not nor may not disobeye your commaundement, but and I myghte or durste, wete yow wel, I wold not take upon me to touche that wounded knyghte, in that entente that I shold passe alle other knyghtes ; Jhesu defende me from that shame.' ' Ye take it wrong,' sayd kyng Arthur, ' ye shal not do it for no presumcyon, but for to bere us fellaushyp, in soo moche ye be a fellawe of the table Round ; and wete yow wel,' sayd kyng Arthur, ' and ye preuayle not and hele hym, I dare say there is no knyghte in thys land may hele hym ; and, there- for, I praye yow doo as we haue done.' And thenne alle the kynges and knyghtes for the moost 92 INTRODUCTION party prayd Sir Launcelot to serch hym, and thenne the wounded knyghte, Syr Vrre, sette hym up weykely, and praid Sir Launcelot hertely, sayeng, ' Curtois knyght, I requyre the, for goddes sake, hele my woundes, for me thynketh, euer sythen ye came here my woundes greuen me not.' ' A my fayre lord,' sayd Syr Launcelot, ' Jhesu wold that I myghte helpe yow ; I shame me sore that I shold be thus rebuked, for neuer was I able in worthynes to doo so hyghe a thynge.' Thenne Sire Launcelot kneled doune by the wounded I knyghte, sayenge, ' My lord Arthur, I must doo your commaundement, the whiche is sore ageynst my herte.' And thenne he helde up his handes and loked in to the eest, sayenge secretely unto hym self : { Thow blessid Fader, Sone, and Holy Ghoost, I byseche the of thy mercy, that my symple worshyp and honeste be saued, and thou, blessed Trynite, thow mayst yeue power to hele this seke knyght, by thy grete vertu and grace of the, but, good Lord, neuer of my self.' And thenne Sir Launcelot prayd Sir Urre to lete hym see hys hede, and thenne, devoutely knelyng, he ransaked the thre woundes, that they bled a lytyl, and forth with alle the woundes fair heled, and semed as they had been hole a seuen yere. And in lykewyse he serched his body of other thre woundes, and they heled in lykewyse. And thenne the last of all he serched, the which was in his hand, and, anone, it heled fayre. Then kyng Arthur and alle the kynges and knyghtes kneled doune and gaf thankynges and lovynges unto God and to His blessid Moder, and euer Syr MALORY AND THE ENGLISH BALLADS 93 Launcelot wepte as he had ben a child that had ben beten? 1 Even in his subject matter, Malory, however closely he follows his sources, is entitled to the credit of independence, and, it might be said, of originality ; for a compiler must select and connect ; in selecting he must use his judgment, and in connecting he must appeal to his own imaginative presentiment. Moreover, the mere con- , ception of a unity in the straggling wilderness of Arthurian romance was genial and large-hearted. ■ Besides, in a matter of this kind, the judgment ' must, to a great extent, depend on the results. Malory's predecessor, Rusticien of Pisa, and his later contemporary, Ulrich Fiirterer, have apparently, to all intents and purposes, been without influence on literature, 2 but the Morte Darthur is both a landmark and a fountain-head of literature. Of course Malory's work is by no means beyond criticism. He is capricious 3 in his insertions and in his omissions; we well could spare the story of Alisander and Anglides to find room for Erec. He often leaves a history half told, notably in the case of Sir Tristram, where besides he follows a poor version of the legend. His dexterity in mosaic is so small that he frequently contradicts himself in detail, and his arrangement is very con- fused. But he "means right," and he has succeeded 1 Book xviii. 12. 2 This statement is made at second hand, for neither seems be accessible in a modern edition, which is not without significance. 3 Capricious, however, rather in view of the whole field to choose from, than of the authorities that he actually follows. .to its 94 INTRODUCTION in the grand lines of the history. He has told the tale of Arthur, so that none of the pathos and terror is lost. The son of the devout Uther and the chaste Igraine, he is yet the fruit of a lawless amour. Though chosen and hallowed by heaven, in his youthful passion he violates the common instincts of mankind, and, ruthlessly but vainly, by an attempted massacre of children, seeks to escape the consequences of his guilt. Nevertheless for long all seems to go well with him. He weds the fair Guinevere, who brings him Uther's Rounds Table as her dowry. He fills its seats with knights of unmatched prowess, some of whom even excel himself; and he and they do their part manfully to purge the world from ill. Yet, amid all his pomp and magnificence, his weird is slowly ful- filling itself. Lancelot, his best knight, his best friend, is but his dearest foe. As Arthur's truant passion has its fruit in Modred born to be the scourge of the order by his villainy, so Lancelot, in his involuntary breach of faith to the Queen, becomes the father of Galahad, born to be its scourge by his holiness. For this holiness attracts once more the Holy Grail to the haunts of men; and the fellowship wrecks itself on the quest that is only for the virgin knight. Soon the discovery of Lancelot's guilt ensues to divide it against itself. While Arthur is warring with him over sea, Modred seizes the kingdom and Queen, aveng- ing his origin with equal wrong. And, though Arthur returns to take vengeance on this baser treason, vengeance does not mean redress. In the ruinous battle that takes plaice through a mere MALORY AND THE ENGLISH BALLADS 95 accident and blunder, the great king and his nephew son fall at the hands of each other. Thus the Arthurian stories, after expressing the beauty and fulness of chivalry, ended by express- ing its dissolution, and the tragic catastrophe is what gives its name and unity to the Morte Dar- tkur, the cyclic work composed at the end of the fifteenth century. That this ultimate phase was necessary both in the ideal and in its literary reflection we may see, if we recall what chivalry was and how it found utterance in song. It sought to establish a compromise or equipoise between the opposing forces of religious monastic theory and irreligious lay life. The scales dip to the clerical side in the song of Roland, and to the mundane in the lay of Alexander. Only in the career of Arthur, supplemented in the adven- tures of his knights, do we find anything like an exact balance. But since in chivalry there was mere adjustment and no real fusion of the opposing elements, it was at best in unstable equilibrium, difficult to attain and liable at any moment to be destroyed. It begins in the Romance of Tris- tram with an over-accentuation of the secular, it proceeds in the Romance of Percivale to an over- accentuation of the spiritual. In the reconstruc- tion of the story, which makes Arthur in his own ^ person represent the conflicting forces, and Lance- lot and Galahad follow them out to the uttermost, the whole contrivance breaks up. And this was the fate of chivalry, because, as a guiding principle, it was unequal to the problem which it undertook, and men soon saw that it 96 INTRODUCTION merely professed to give the answer. Yet, like every great attempt to reconcile the two sides of man's nature, it retains a perennial interest for mankind ; and the fictions which were fostered under its shadow possess a certain capability of meaning that not only makes them immortal, but endows them with a living inspiration and chal- lenges the world to treat them anew. And Malory's compilation, which supplies as it were the last word and classic form to the medieval conception, has justly enjoyed most popularity and exercised most influence in after times. Later writers may draw here on a Welsh story and there on a separate romance ; but generally and essentially it is to Malory, with or without supple- mentary hints from Geoffrey, that the greatest English poets have recourse. And this is speci- ally true of Tennyson, chief of the subsequent singers of Arthur, and the only one on whom falls Malory's mantle, in so far as the encyclopaedic character of the work is concerned. Tennyson so obviously hews most of his material from this quarry, that comparisons be- tween the Morte Darthur and the Idylls of the King are inevitable. Further, as Tennyson's in- debtedness is at first sight very great, such com- parisons have often led to his being described as a copyist, and even a bad copyist, under whose hands the grand features of the story are weakened or obliterated. The examination of Tennyson's work belongs to a later portion of this essay, but it may be well to protest in advance against such views. Tennyson has often followed Malory very MALORY AND THE ENGLISH BALLADS 97 closely in plot, in idea, even in expression, but in the same way as he has followed Raleigh for his Revenge. Many of his excellences are annexed, but they gain new lustre from their new position, they are heightened and strengthened under his touch ; and the most and the finest are his own ; white the method of treatment is entirely original. A most instructive comparison may be made be- tween the fifth chapter of Malory's twenty -first book and the Passing of Arthur. The general course of the story is the same in both, and the similarity extends even to minute details. Malory's Arthur says to Bedivere : " But yf thou do now as I byd the, yf euer I may see the, I shal slee the with myn owne handes " ; where but if means unless. Tennyson keeps the expression, though it has now a different force and he must give a new turn to the sentence to make it relevant : — " But, if thou spare to fling Excalibur, I will arise and slay thee with my hands." It is not often, however, that Tennyson's loans are merely verbal. Generally we are struck quite as much by the difference as by the resemblance between them and the original. " Syr," says Bedivere in the prose, " I sawe no thynge but the waters wappe and the wawes wanne " ; which in the poem becomes the famous couplet : — " I heard the water lapping on the crag, And the long ripple washing in the reeds." When the king is put on board the barge, Malory says: "And there receyued hym thre quenes wyth G 9$ INTRODUCTION grete mornyng " ; which is to Tennyson's lines as a diagram is to a picture : — "And from them rose A cry that shiver'd to the tingling stars, And, as it were one voice, an agony Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come, since the making of the world." The description of the place, the broken chancel with a " broken cross " upon " the strait of barren land " between the two expanses of water, and of Sir Bedivere striding over the ice-bound cliffs, is all Tennyson's own, with hardly a hint from Malory. It is the same if we consider the psychological motives. The adapter leaves his authority far behind. In Malory, Sir Bedivere on his first errand " behelde that noble swerde that the pomel and the hafte was al of precyous stones, and thenne sayd to hym self; ' Yf I throwe this ryche swerde in the water, therof shall neuer come good, but harme and losse.' " And the same idea is repeated on his second expedition. Tenny- son does not neglect this hint : — " There drew he forth the brand Excalibur, And o'er him, drawing it, the winter moon, Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt : For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks, Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work Of subtlest jewellery." But this is preliminary. On the second occasion MALORY AND THE ENGLISH BALLADS 99 it is care for the king's own honour that makes him fail :— " What record, or what relic of my lord Should be to aftertime, but empty breath And rumours of a doubt ? But were this kept, Stored in some treasure-house of mighty kings, Some one might show it at a joust of arms, Saying, ' King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, Wrought by the lonely maiden of the Lake. Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps Upon the hidden bases of the hills.' So might some old man speak in the aftertime To all the people, winning reverence. But now much honour and much fame were lost." Or, again, for profundity of conception, compare the king's last words in the two versions. In Malory it runs : " Comfort thyself and doo as wel as thou mayst, for in me is no truste to truste in. For I wyl in to the vale of Awylyon to hele me of my grevous wounde. And yf thou here neuer more of me, praye for my soule." Contrast with this the farewell greeting in Tenny- son: — " The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." Surely there is a depth of meaning in these and the following lines for which we should vainly look in Malory's ringing prose. And significance combined with workmanship cannot fail to bring with them artistic arrangement. In this respect, Malory, as we have seen, hardly succeeds in carrying out what was in his mind. IOO INTRODUCTION A glance at Tennyson's Idylls shows that he has cut and carved and reconstructed the order of Malory's stories. Malory tells of the birth of Arthur, of Balin and Balan, of the king's marriage and acquisition of the Round Table, of Merlin's fate, of Pelleas and Ettard, of Arthur's expedition against Rome, of Gareth, of Tristram, of Lancelot and Elaine, of the Sangrail, of the Maid of Astolat, of the discovery of Guinevere's infidelity, and of the death of Arthur. \Tennyson, on the other hand, begins with the coming of Arthur, his wars with the Saxons and the rebels, his founding of the Table, his marriage and his contest with Rome, in the introductory poem. Then he proceeds to Gareth and Lynette, to the companion poems which he interpolates from the Mabinogion on Geraint and Enid, to Merlin and Vivien, to Lancelot and Elaine, and thus reaches the Holy Grail : then come in order Pelleas and Ettarre, the Last Tournament with Tristram for centre, Guinevere, and the Passing of Arthur. Even before the exact meaning of this arrangement has disclosed itself, it is obvious that the order is no haphazard one, but is adopted intentionally on a plan that is distinct from Malory's. And further, it is evident that here there is a gradual transition from light to dark as the guilt of Lancelot and Guinevere deepens and works out its bitter fruits. There is no hint of such an artistic sequence in Malory's fortuitous jumble ; and this, as we shall find, is only one indication of Tennyson's reorganisation of the story accord- ing to the requirements of contemporary thought. MALORY AND THE ENGLISH BALLADS IOI It was to wait four centuries, however, ere it was to be thus united by means of a deeper interpre- tation. Meanwhile, before leaving the Middle Ages, we must note that just as the romances received a partial unification at the hands of I Malory, so there were tendencies in the English J Arthurian literature, most fully expressed in the ballad poetry, in accordance with which the romances undergo a partial disintegration. This literature is well worth a special and detailed study, whether in connection with the British cycle as a whole, or separately for its independent merits. The variations from the current con- tinental stories, notably in the case of Percivale, open up difficult and interesting questions as to its origins. Its freshness of presentment, especially in the poems which, with a totally different metre from the short couplets of romance necessarily adopt a very different treatment, gives it a charm of its own. At the same time it does not materially alter the fund of ideas on which elder Arthurian fiction drew : at most it makes them | more national, more human, and more popular. 1 Take, for example, the delightful story of Sir I Gawayne and the Grene Knight, one of the earliest \ and best in the series. Whether it be a fabrication on hints from Chrestien's Lancelot, or the adaptation of a lost French romance, the peculiar structure of its verse, an alliterative stanza with an appendage in rhyme, implies that the author treated his sources with great freedom and independence. 1 But even in it, it is not the plot or the chivalrous setting that takes hold of the memory and gives 102 INTRODUCTION its character to the poem, but the description of the three days' hunting, or of the grim landscapes through which Gawain wanders, or of the wild valley with the Green Chapel where the devil might say his matins. In the alliterative Morte Arthure, again, which in the main continues the current of romantic history, though a certain back- water from genuine romance is to be perceived, the grand passages are those that deal with war and scenery, or, above all, that affect the heart by their purely human pathos. 1 Thus, it is a fine touch to put the eulogy of Gawain in the mouth of Modred, and to represent the author of all the ruin as stung to penitence at the sight of the slaughtered knight. He turns to his ally King Frederick with the words — "'This was sir Gawayne the gude, the gladdeste of othire, 2 And the graciouseste gome 3 that vndire God lyffede, Mane 4 hardyeste of hande, happyeste in armes And the hendeste in hawle 5 vndire heuene riche ; 6 The lordlyeste of ledynge qwhilles he lyffe myghte, Ffore he was lyone allossede 7 in londes inewe ; 8 Had thou knawene hym, sir Kynge, in kythe 9 thare he lengede His konynge, his knyghthode, his kyndly werkes, His doyng, his doughtynesse, his dedis of armes, Thou wolde hafe dole for his dede 10 the dayes of thy lyfe ! ' Yit 11 that traytour alls tite 12 teris lete he falle, Turnes hym furthe tite, 1:5 and talkes no more, ^ee introduction by Mr. E. Brock to the E. E. Text Soc. Edition. 2 Of all. » Man. 4 Man. 5 Most courteous in hall. 6 The kingdom of heaven. 7 Renowned. 8 Enough, many. 9 In the county where he dwelt. 10 Death. u More over. 12 Alls tite — immediately. 13 Turns away quickly. MALORY AND THE ENGLISH BALLADS 10 Went 1 wepand a-waye, and weries 2 the stowndys 3 That euer his werdes 4 were wroghte sich wandrethe 5 to wyrke : Whene he thoghte on this thynge, it thirllede his herte ; Ffor sake of his sybb blod 6 sygheande he rydys ; When that renayede renk 7 remembirde hym seluene Of reuerence and ryotes 8 of the Round Table He remyd and repent 9 hyme of alle his rewthe 10 werkes."* So too, Le Morte Arthur\ in rhymed stanzas, which recounts the story of the maid of " Ascolot," of Lancelot's duel with Mador on behalf of the Queen, and of the final catastrophe, is generally inferior to the prose version and to Malory, but often it is brought near to us by a chance touch of simple tenderness. Thus, Gawain and the King enter the boat that bears the body of the maiden — " Whan they were in, wyth-outen lese n Fulle Richely aRayed they it founde, And in the myddis a feyre bed was For Any kynge of Cristene londe. Than as swithe, 12 or they wold sese, 13 The koverlet lyfte they up wyth hande, A dede woman they sighe u ther was, The fay rest mayde that myghte be founde. To sir Gawayne than sayd the Kynge, 1 Goes. 2 Curses. 3 The hours. 4 Destinies. 5 Woe. 6 Kindred blood. 7 Renegade man. 8 Dignity and revels. 9 Cried and repented him. 10 Sorry deeds. 11 Without lies, truly. 12 At once. 13 Ere they would cease, without stopping. 14 Saw. * Line 3876 and following. t Ed. J. F. Furnivall, with essay on Arthur, by H. Coleridge, 1864. 104 INTRODUCTION 1 For sothe, Dethe was to vn-hende 1 Whan he wold thus fayre a thinge Thus yonge oute of the world do wende : 2 For hyr biaute, wyth oute lesynge, I wold fayne wete of hyr kynde, What she was, this swete derelynge, And in hyr lyff where she gonne lende." 3 * Sometimes, again, there is an effectiveness of situation that would be sure to appeal to an unsophisticated audience, as in the passage which describes how the brand Excalibur is cast away : — " The kynge tornyd hym there 4 he stode To syr Bedwere, wyth wordys kene, ' Have Excalaber, my swerd good, A better brond was neuyr sene, Go, caste it in the salt flode, And thou shalt se wonder, as I wene ; Hye the faste, for crosse on Rode, And telle me what thou hast ther sene.' The knyght was bothe hende and free ; To save that swerd he was mile glad, And thought, whethyr I 5 better bee Yif neuyr man it After had : ' And 6 I it caste in to the see, Off mold 7 was neuyr man so mad.' The swerd he hyd undyr A tree, And sayd, ' Syr, I ded as ye me bad.' — ' What saw thou there ? ' than sayd the Kynge, Telle me now, yiff thow can ; ' — 1 Sertes, syr,' he sayd, ' nothynge But watres depe, and wawes wanne.' — 1 Ungentle. 2 Do wende, cause to go. 3 Gonne lende— did dwell. 4 Where. 6 Read i/(?) 6 And = if. 7 Of earth. * Lines 992 and following. MALORY AND THE ENGLISH BALLADS 105 1 A, now thou haste broke my byddynge ! Why hast thou do so, thow false man ? A-nother bode 1 thou must be brynge.' 2 Thanne careffully the knyght forthe Ranne, And thought the swerd yit he wold hyde, And keste the scauberke 3 in the flode ; — 1 Yif Any Aventurs shalle betyde, There-by shalle I se tokenys goode." In-to the see hee lette the scauberke glyde ; A whyle on the land hee there stode ; Than to the Kynge he wente that tyde And sayd, ' Syr, it is done by the Rode.' — ' Saw thow Any wondres more ? ' — 1 Sertys sir, I saw nought.' — ' A ! false traytor/ he sayd thore, 4 1 Twyse thou haste me treson wroght ; That shalle thow rew sely 5 sore And be thou bold 6 it shalbe bought." 7 The knyght than cryed, ' Lord, thyn ore ! ' 8 And to the swerde sone he sought. Sir bedwere saw that bote 9 was beste And to the good swerde he wente ; In-to the see he hyt keste ; Than myght he see what that it mente ; There cam An hand, wyth-outen Reste, 10 Oute of the water, and feyre it hente, 11 And brandysshyd As it shuld braste, 12 And sythe, 13 as gleme, 14 Away it glente." 15 * As a whole, this is not equal to Malory's account, :>ut the throwing away of the scabbard is good. 1 Report. 2 By-bring or bring hither. 3 Scabbard. 4 There. 5 Strangely, very. 6 Sure. 7 Expiated. 8 Mercy. 9 Amends, obedience, w Without delay. n Caught. 12 Break. 13 Then. 14 Like a gleam. 15 Flashed. * Line 3446 and following. 106 INTRODUCTION It doubtless springs from the same desire to avoid a naked repetition which in a more artistic way makes Tennyson vary the motive of Bedivere's ^ disobedience. But such merits as have been signalised are not distinctive of romance ; they are the common property of popular poetry. Indeed the style and metre of the Morte Arthur comes very near the ballad type, and its chief defect is that they get to be monotonous in so long a poem. This bears out the statement that the ballads may be considered the most distinctive, though by no means the most valuable, contribution that England has made to Arthurian romance. There are some nine or ten of them, and their sources are as various as their subjects. The marriage of Sir Gawain, the prowess of Sir Lancelot, the magic properties of the mantle that only the chaste can wear, are among the more prominent themes. They are also of very different dates, some belonging to the fifteenth century, and some as recent as the end of the sixteenth. But, however late they may be, they in no essential respect pass beyond the circle of medieval ideas. They are for the most part mere fragments of romance, that in them has lost its shapeliness and polish. Few belong to the best ballad type ; in most of them chivalrous fiction seems dispersed as in petty rivulets before it loses itself in the sand. What a difference, for example, between the account of King Arthur's end in Malory's prose, or even in I the rhymed Morte Arthur, and in the ballad on the same subject : — MALORY AND THE ENGLISH BALLADS 10T u Then bespake him noble king Arthur, These were the words sayd hee, Sayes, 'Take my sword Escalberd From my side fayre and free, And throw itt into this riuer heere, For all the use of weapons lie deliuer uppe Heere underneath this tree.' " The duke to the riuer side he went, And his sword in threw hee, And then he kept Escalberd, I tell you certainlye. " And then he came to tell the king ; The King said, ' Lukin, what did thou see ?* ' Noe thing, my leege,' then sayd the duke, I I tell you certainlye.' " ' O goe againe,' said the king, c For loue and charitye, And throw my sword into that riuer, That neuer I itt see.' " The Duke to the riuer side he went, And the king's scabberd in threw hee, And still he kept Escalberd For vertue sake faire and free. " He came again to tell the king, The king sayd, ' Lukin, what did thou see ? r ' Noe thing, my leege,' then said the Duke, ' 1 tell you certainlye.' " ' O goe againe, Lukin,' said the king, 1 Or the one of us shall dye.' Then the duke to the riuer-sid went, And the king's sword then threw hee. " A hande and an arrae did meete that sword, And nourished three times certainlye. He came again to tell the king, But the king was gone from under the tree. 108 INTRODUCTION " But to what place he cold not tell, For neuer after he did him see, But he see a barge from the land goe, And heard ladyes houle and crye certainlye." x Doubtless this version is very corrupt, but, making every allowance, there is a great descent from Malory's lofty prose to such uncouth and helpless verse. This ballad, however, illustrates a kind of interest that the flattest English versions often possess. Where did the writer get the idea of Arthur vanishing from under the tree ? Was it from romance, or from popular lore, or from his own invention ? Some of the variations, like Lukin's throwing away his own sword before he throws away the scabbard of Excalibur, have the air of being original to the ballad. This is not exactly an improvement, but at least it introduces more life and movement into the narrative ; and, by showing the same action thrice with a variation of details, gives a complete series of parallels and contrasts such as ballad poetry loves. Even in this rude ditty, then, the popular imagina- tion has been at work, and not wholly in vain. It shows at any rate how the people tried to make the stories of Arthur their own. And precisely this is the significance of the ballads. They did for the lower orders what Malory did for the aristocratic and Geoffrey for the learned classes. In all these ways the Arthurian legend, Celtic in origin and French in development, if it did not pass into the life blood of the English nation, became at least a part of its imaginative inheritance. 1 Percy Folio, i. 497. CHAPTER I FROM THE REFORMATION TO THE PURITAN REVOLUTION ATTENTION has often been drawn -to a certain flatness in the vernacular literature of the West in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Of this there were many causes, the absorption of the more gifted in classical study, the preoccupation of the more earnest with religious controversy, the temporary vulgarisation of letters that came with the invention of printing. In Germany especially these tendencies had full play, and the most char- acteristic poetry that it then produced arose from the ranks of artizans and tradesmen in the asso- ciations of the master-singers. Among these, by far the most attractive and notable figure is Hans Sachs, the " cobbler-bard " of Niirnberg, who lived from 1494 to 1576, and spent the most of his long life in sedulous cultivation of " the benignant art." Of course, from such a man in such sur- roundings at such a time we must not look for any supreme masterpiece of beauty. In flights of fancy he as a worthy citizen could not indulge ; at excess of passion he looked askance ; of grace HO ARTHURIAN STORY of form he has but a dim and distorted presenti- ment. He is at his best when he is recounting some homely story that can be treated with quiet humour or pathos, and that can be made to serve for profit and edification. At the same time the life of the city was alert and multiple, many interests came within its sweep, and to satisfy these Hans Sachs had recourse to some subjects that he was hardly qualified to treat with perfect tact or sympathy ; contemporary Italian novels, stories from classical antiquity, and stray frag- ments from the medieval store. There were two reasons why the last-named should bulk largely in his repertory. In the first place, the most thorough-going revolutions remain dependent on what they displace ; it takes generations before the new principle, despite the most prohibitive protection in matters spiritual, can develop home industries for all its needs ; till which time it must consent to some reciprocity with the alien. And accordingly, even after Europe had broken with the Middle Ages, a good many of the prose romances, generally altered for the worse, were printed and reprinted in France and Germany : they were in such universal circulation that they could not escape attention. And, besides, as the art of the bourgeois master-singers was descended from that of the knightly minnesingers, and in- herited the traditions of their lyric poetry, there was an actual bond between the two that might easily be extended to narrative as well. But the mention of the lyric suggests the treatment the romance was likely to receive at the hands of its REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION III new practitioners. The form of the master-song was at once laboured and rude ; the measures of the old court-poets were attempted, but their melody was lost ; their silken net-work of sound became a tangled yarn, and their celebration of chivalrous love gave place to theological disquisi- tion. It was not very different with medieval ' romance, when Hans Sachs recast the story of Tristram and Isolt in the form of one of his humble little dramas. He had so much gentle- I ness of feeling, so true a poet's heart, that he could not but treat his subject with a certain , homely sympathy, which gives it a quaint and pathetic attraction. But the evangelic and muni- cipal creed frowned on such perilous stuff, and the shoemaker who celebrated the " Nightingale of Wittenberg," as he- called the great reformer, was too good a Lutheran and too good a citizen to be carried away by the inmost spirit of his theme. The Tristram of the worthy master- singer is apt to leave the same sort of impression on the mind as that other love drama of the " hempen homespuns " of Athens in the Midsum- mer Nights Dream. The romantic fable seems strangely out of place in the plain-spoken and formless little play, with its abrupt transitions, its seven unconnected acts, its matter-of-fact simplicity of language. Isolt and " Brangel " come to look for Tristram, who lies exhausted after his struggle with the dragon. He unwit- tingly reveals his whereabouts in a way that is more effective * than poetical. " Your Grace," says Brangel, " there among the brushwood I hear a 112 ARTHURIAN STORY man snoring in his sleep." x When Isolt dis- covers who the dragon-slayer really is, and de- mands his death, she is assailed with many peti- tions for mercy, but it is Brangel's argument that prevails : " Yea, it is just that you forgive him, for His Royal Majesty has issued a decree : 'Who so takes the dragon's life, to him will the king give his daughter.' This must be obeyed." 2 In a moment her mistress is appeased. These, however, are incongruities of detail. The grand incongruity of the play is that Hans hardly knows whether he should admire or condemn the chief persons. In one aspect he regards Tristram as the benefi- cent hero of Kurneval's anticipation : " Perhaps you are chosen to contest with people and poison- ous dragons, to fight and struggle with them, and clear away the vermin" 3 So too Isolt of Brit- tany breaks out in admiration of Isolt of Ireland : "Oh ! but now is my sorrow of heart renewed, 1 " Gnedige Fraw, dort in den Stauden, Hor ich ein Menschen schlaffent schnauden." Tristan und Isolde. Act ii: H. Sachs, Sehr herrliche, scheme, und warhaffte Gedicht &c, 4 Bd. Kempten, 1612-16. 2 " Ja billich thut ihr ihm vergeben Dieweil kungliche Majestat Hat ausgeschrieben ein Mandat, Wer dem Trachen neme sein Leben, Dem woll der Kong sein Tochter geben. Demselben muss man kommen nach." — Act ii. 3 " Vielleicht seit ihr zum Streit erwehlt Mit Leuten und den giffting Wurmen, Mit ihn zu kampffen und zu stiirmen Das Unzifer hiweg zu raumen." — Act ii. REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION U3 because I see the great love and faithfulness of this royal lady, who thus, in high confidence, forsook her royal rank, her husband and her fatherland, and travelled far over sea to my lord, since she knew him in the pains of death, to heal his red wounds. When, alas ! she finds him dead, she may live no more without him, and has given up the ghost." 1 But when the play is over, < the herald makes his appearance to warn the audience against this " irregulous love," (unordliche Lieb), a pernicious thing, " which hazards soul, body, hon- our, and estate, and henceforth regards neither morals nor virtue," " from which follows poverty, sickness, shame and hurt to body and soul, and the displeasure of God." 2 The moral is to keep one's love for marriage, 3 which is under the divine 1 " O erst ist mir mein hertzleyd new Weil ich sich die gross Lieb und Trew An diser kiinigklichen Frawen, Die also in hohem Vertrauen Veriest ihrn kiiniglichen Standt, Ihrn Gmahel und ihr Vaterlandt, Raist meim Herrn weit nach liber See Weil sie ihn weist in Todtes Wee, Zu heylen ihm sein Wunden rot. So sie ihn leyder findet todt, Mag weiter sie ohn ihn nicht leben, Und hat da ihren Geist auffgeben." — Act vii. 3 " Schlegt Seel, Leib, Ehr, Gut in die Schantz, Acht fiirbass weder Sitten, noch Tugent. . . . Aus dem folgt , Armuth, Kranckheit, Schand unde Schaden An Leib und Seel, Gottes Ungnaden." — Epilogue. " Spar dein Lieb bis in die Eh." — Epilogue. 1 14 ARTHURIAN STORY protection. And the whole concludes with the devout ejaculation ; — " That love and faith may ever wax In bonds of wedlock, prays Hans Sachs." x Such was the treatment which was dealt out to the " matiere de Bretagne " by the adherents of the Reformation. The persons seem to have reached the Hell in which Rabelais (1495-1553) a few years earlier had found them. In his burlesque extravagance he pictures Gawain as a swineherd, and Lancelot as a flayer of horses in the world below. "And all the knights of the Round Table were poor day-labourers employed to row over the rivers of Cocytus, Phlegeton, Styx, Acheron, and Lethe, when my lords the devils had a mind to recreate themselves upon the water, as in the like occasion are hired the boatmen at Lyons, the gondoliers of Venice (and oars at Lon- don). But with this difference, that these poor knights have only for their fare a bob or flirt on the nose, and in the evening a morsel of coarse, mouldy bread." 2 This literally describes the behaviour to old 1 " Das stete Lieb und Trew aufwachs Im Ehlingstand, das wiinscht H.S." — Epilogue. 2 Urquhart's Translation, vol. i., page 267. — "Touts les chevaliers de la table ronde estoient pauvres gaigne-deniers, tirans la rame pour passer les rivieres de Cocyte, Phlegeton, Styx, Acheron, et Lethe, quand messieurs les diables se veu- lent esbatre sur l'eau, comme font les basteliers de Lyon et gondoliers de Venise. Mais pour chascune-passade ils n'en ont que une nazarde et sur le soir quelque morceau de pain chaumeny." — Rabelais, ii. 30. REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION 1 15 romance in many quarters during the first half of. the sixteenth century. It was vulgarised in the popular versions, and men of the Reformation were I too ready to bestow on it a fillip on the nose. Thus Ascham (15 15-1568), in his Scholemaster, has I a well-known passage in which his objections against medieval fiction are mingled with those against , medieval religion. " In our forefathers' tyme, whan Papistrie, as a standyng poole, couered and ouer- flowed all England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, sauyng certaine bookes of cheualrie, as they said, for pastime and pleasure ; which, as some say, were made in Monastries by idle monkes or wanton chanons. As one, for example, Morte Arthur, the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open mans slaughter and bold bawdrye. In which booke those be counted the noblest Knightes, that do kill most men without any quarrell, and commit foulest aduoulteries by subtlest shiftes." x Ascham, however, in this passage bears witness to the continued favour in which such literature was held in the high society of the day. It is clear, indeed, that the tales of chivalry could hardly fail to suit an audience that took pleasure in passages of arms and the pageantry of medieval knighthood ; and most European monarchs of the sixteenth cen- tury rejoiced in such gallant spectacles to the height. It was, however, less the chivalry of the Middle Ages that was in request, though that has thrown a richer afterglow on a few like Bayard without fear and without reproach, than its gay and gorgeous 1 Arber's Reprint, page 80. 1 1 6 ARTHURIA N STOR Y accompaniments, the pomp and circumstance of its externals. Its splendour and colour were dear to men, whom the revival of antiquity had rilled with the joy and the pride of life, and whose senses drank in all that the world had to offer. Such tendencies were concentrated in the court of Francis the First of France, the hero of errant campaigning, the patron of classical culture. It is not wonderful, therefore, that under his auspices Arthurian story should appear in a new guise as servant to the spirit of the Renaissance. He commissioned the Italian refugee, Luigi Alamanni, to render his favourite romance of Giron le Courtois into "Tuscan rhymes " ; and the result was Gyrone il Cortese, completed in 1548, when, as Francis was now dead, the author dedicated it to Henry the Second. Alamanni (1495- 1556) had won reputation by his version of Antigone, and still more by his di- dactic poem La Coltivazione, " the work of a ripe scholar and melodious versifier." In it he " resolved to combine the precepts of Hesiod, Virgil, and Varro, together with the pastoral passages of Lucre- tius, in one whole, adapting them to modern usage, and producing a comprehensive treatise on farming." 1 A man like this was hardly able to enter into the secrets of a romantic theme. He keeps anxiously close to his authority, and confines himself almost entirely to pruning the luxuriance of the episodes, and to keeping watch over his easy verse. But more is required for an original reproduction, and all that Alamanni achieved was a slavish copy, more fluent indeed and less disconnected than the original, but 1 J. A. Symonds' Italian Literature, vol. ii., page 237. REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION 117 for these very reasons a great deal more monoton- ous. He had, however, been shown the way to Arthurian romance; and he returns to it in a much more confident and heroic mood, for his little known but very curious epic LAvarchide, which appeared only after his death. This is as characteristic of the Renaissance as Hans Sachs's drama is of the Reformation, and is an even more extraordinary travesty of all the true feeling of the story. It is the Iliad disguised in the nomenclature of Romance, the Siege of Troy presented in terms of medieval chivalry. Clodasso, in whom we recognise King Ban's enemy Claudas, is besieged like Priam in the town of Avaricum or Bourges, which he holds against the knights of the Round Table. The most conspicuous persons are King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, and Galahaut of the Far Isles, who play the parts of Agamemnon, Achilles, and Patroclus respectively, and that with such exactitude that Lancelot, offended by Arthur, withdraws a while from the war. In the same way, Vivien (Niniana) stands for Thetis, " but," says Gaspary, " there is no Helen." One cannot help wondering that Ala- manni, if he were going to attempt such a per- formance, should not rather have Homerised the story of Guinevere captive in the hands of Melea- guant ; for that would have brought the poem nearer his model, while leaving it nearer the tradition. But, in truth, his very project shows that he was far from feeling the real beauty of the Greek, and he was too much of a classicist to have a genuine interest in romance. The whole strange experiment is merely the formal exercise of a pedantry, that Il8 ARTHURIAN STORY reproduces some speeches and situations from the old heroic, regardless of the circumstance that they are quite unmeaning in their new frame, and that the frame is hacked into disfigurement to hold them at all. So much for Arthur as hero of a classical epos. He next appears as hero of a classical tragedy, but in this case the conditions were much more favour- able for a satisfactory result. There was a good deal of correspondence between the subject and the form ; and the adapter, an Englishman of the Elizabethan period, was disposed to deal tenderly with what he regarded as in some sort a national legend. The ballads had kept King Arthur's figure familiar to the people, Malory's Morte U Arthur had made him a favourite at the Court, Geoffrey's mendacious record, even if called in question, had given a certain air of circumstantial history to the outlines of his career. Moreover, there was a tendency to forget the relations of the English and the Welsh, and to regard the British stories as stories of Britain, the common fatherland of the existing races. For these reasons the Celtic legends, a blend of invention, history, and myth, were known almost as widely and in as many versions, and excited almost as much interest in Elizabethan society in the days of the Armada, as the Greek legends, also a blend of invention, history and myth, the stories of Tantalus, and Oedipus, and Ilium, in the society of Athens, in the days after Salamis. Among the Greek legends, the Athenian dramatists found the subjects for their mightiest works, when REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION 1 19 " Gorgeous Tragedy In sceptered pall" went "sweeping by, Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line, Or the tale of Troy divine." Just in the same way those early Elizabethan play- wrights who took the classical drama, the Senecan adaptation of the Greek tragedy, for their model, naturally recurred to early British legend. Thus Sackville, who led the way, and employing blank verse for the first time in a dramatic composition, wrote the first regular tragedy in English, found in the story of Ferrex and Porrex something very analogous to the classical story of the mutual hatred of the Theban brothers. And the greatest of those who followed Sackville in the vain attempt to naturalise the ancient drama in England found an even grander theme in the story of Arthur. Nothing in the tale of Thebes, not even the woes of Oedipus ; nothing fabled of Pelops' line, not even the treason of Clytemnestra ; nothing in the story of Troy, not even the destruction of the sacred city, could be more full of tragic terror than the history of Arthur's sin and its punishment, of Guinevere's infidelity, of the ruin that ensued to the reputed scions of old Troy in Britain. The Misfortunes of Arthur, written by Thomas Hughes in 1587,1s the single master- piece of the Senecan tragic style in Elizabethan literature, and it sums up in itself all the appeals to pity and terror of which the Senecan tragedy was capable. Nor can we put it aside as an anachronism or dismiss it as an aberration of genius from the true path of the English drama, as we do some of the later classical plays, like those of Daniel and 1 20 ARTHURIAN STOR Y Lord Brooke. The date of its composition is the plea for it. It was not a mistake for Hughes to adopt the Senecan model as it was for his successors to do so, for when he wrote Shakespeare had done nothing, and Marlowe hardly anything ; so that the capabilities of the new drama were still unrevealed, and it was possible even for a man of genius to doubt if the new drama had capabilities at all. On the other hand Gorboduc was at least a dignified tragedy, and it was only natural that Hughes should take Gorboduc as his model. He has done this without reserve, and, following close on Sackville's heels, has in the end outstripped his master. Like Gorboduc, the Misfortunes of Arthur was presented by the members of Gray's Inn, for the entertainment of the Queen. Like Gorboduc, it is supplied with a plentiful apparatus of " dumb shows" — which for us have an extrinsic interest from the fact that Francis Bacon had a share in their invention — and with a chorus that provides the necessary comments and explanations. Unlike Gorboduc, however, it does not take its plot from Geoffrey unchanged, but draws on later story as well. From the romances, probably in the version of Malory, it has borrowed the idea that Modred is not only the nephew but the son of Arthur, and that the final ruin of the king is the punishment of his sin ; and this is the central conception of the play. But in all the rest it closely follows Geoffrey's account, without a trace of ro- mantic episode or colour, and omitting even the character and amour of Lancelot. It is the bare story of the chronicle propelled by Arthur's forbidden passion as its spring ; and in this way the tragic awe REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION 121 is increased and an ethical explanation supplied. The play opens with the appearance of the ghost of Gorlois, Earl of Cornwall, who rises from the Infernal Regions to curse the royal house of Britain as Tantalus in the Thyestes rises to curse the house of Argos ; but not with the reluctance of Tantalus, for Gorlois has a wrong to avenge against Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon, who robbed him of wife and life, and ruined his happiness and honour. Arthur, himself the fruit of lawless love, has, while he hurries from conquest to conquest in the Empire, left his queen and his kingdom in the charge of Modred, the offspring of a more unlawful passion ; and Modred, true to his origin, has won the heart of Guinevere, his father's wife. The sudden and unexpected return of the king now throws them in confusion. Guinevere, passing with the quick transi- tions of a Senecan heroine, from hope to despair, from wrath to terror, ends by abandoning her guilty life and retiring to a convent. This only inflames the ambition of Modred, for, since his love is lost, he thinks but of dominion. In vain the aged Arthur offers him favour and forgiveness : he allies himself with the heathen and the Irish to wage war against the king's invincible arms. Arthur seeks first to avoid and then to stay the contest, for he is still passionately attached to the rebellious ingrate. "O Modred, blessed son ! " he addresses him in fond apostrophe ; and, besides, his fiery patriotism makes him recoil from the thought of civil war. He bursts out : — " Thou soil which earst Diana did ordain The certain seat and bovver of wandering Brutus, 122 ARTHURIAN STORY Thou realm which aye I reverence as my saint, Thou stately Britain, th' ancient type of Troy, Bear with my forced wrongs ; I am not he That willing would impeach thy peace with wars." But when the herald surprises him in his tears, weeping amidst his veteran knights, with Modred's summons to the decisive fight, his offended pride restores him to himself: — " Display my standard forth ; let trump and drum Call soldiers near to hear their sovereign's hest" ; and he rushes with his troops against his son, " Nearer than all (woe's me !), too near, my foe." We learn from the nuntius how the very elements take part in the portentous battle, tempest, hail and thunder affrighting the combatants alike ; how the fight drags along in weird confusion ; how the father and son at last meet face to face : — " Anon they, fierce encountering, both concurr'd With grisly looks and faces like their fates, But dispar minds and inward moods unlike ; The sire with mind to safeguard both or one, The son to spoil the one or hazard both." Modred, hungry as a wolf for his father's life, repeatedly beaten off by Arthur's more heroic strength and more knightly skill, at length grows reckless : — " Forth he flings, And desperate runs on point of Arthur's sword . . I Whereon engored, he glides, till near approached With dying hand he hews his father's head." The King is victorious, but he has received his REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION 123 death-wound. He enters, leaning on the shoulder of his follower Cador, and utters his last farewell. " This only now I crave (O Fortune ! erst My faithful friend) : let it be soon forgot, Nor long in mind nor mouth, where Arthur fell ; Yea, though I conqueror die and full of fame, Yet let my death and parture rest obscure. No grave I need (O Fates!) nor burial rites, Nor stately hearse, nor tomb with haughty top, But let my carcase lurk ; yea, let my death Be aye unknowen, so that in every coast I still be feared and looked for every hour." So he passes out to his end, and the triumphant spectre reappears to exclaim : — " Ye furies black . . . Thou Orcus dark, and deep Avernus nook, Receive your ghostly charge, Duke Gorlois' ghost. Make room : I gladly, thus revenged, return." It is a terrible and tragic theme, and Hughes has treated it with a sombre emphasis that is often grandiloquent and overwrought, but that seldom fails to be impressive. The characters of Arthur and Modred, as Collier remarks, are drawn with distinctness and vigour ; " the fiery and reckless ambition of the son is excellently contrasted with the determination and natural affection of the father." Faults there are of plot and execution, notably the sudden and final disappearance of Guinevere in the first act, and the inexplicable absence of remorse on the part of Arthur for the sin which is the head and fount of all his woes. But, on the whole, this is certainly the best of the 1 24 AR THURIAN STOR Y English plays produced in the sixteenth century on the pattern of Seneca. It is less celebrated than Gorboduc, only because Gorboduc was the first of them, while the Misfortunes of Arthur had pre- decessors by whose example it profited. But though the story of Arthur has thus furnished material for a remarkable drama in the Elizabethan period, the Elizabethan drama properly so-called has been quite unaffected by it. The Misfortunes of Arthur is the best of the academic plays, but it is only an academic play, and Arthur remained a stranger, or all but a stranger, to the popular stage. The most important theatrical piece that has any connection with his career is the miserable fabrica- tion called The Birth of Merlin, though it might quite as well be called by several other names, and included among Shakespeare's doubtful plays, though the attribution of it to Shakespeare is about as wise as the attribution of Shakespeare to Bacon. In so far as it deals with Merlin it degrades the weird story of his origin to an indecent burlesque, and the connection with Arthur is very slight, being confined to prophecies, like the following, of his future glory : — " He to the world shall add another worthy, And, as a load-stone for his prowess, draw A train of martial lovers to his court." But, with the great gods of the English drama, the story does not find even this measure of ac- ceptance. Shakespeare, if the passage really is Shakespeare's, makes the Fool in Lear utter some dozen lines of oracular gibberish and conclude : REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION 125 ■ " This prophecy shall Merlin make ; for I live before his time." 1 Nor are Shakespeare's references to Arthur himself much more serious. Most of them occur in connection with Sir John Falstaff, which gives a hint of their character. Fal- staff comes into the Boar's Head singing the first line of the ballad : " When Arthur first in court"; 2 in conversation with him, Justice Shallow i recalls, "When I lay at Clement's Inn — I was then Sir Dagonet in Arthur's show"; 3 and at the close, the quondam Quickly is sure that her patron " is in Arthur's bosom if ever man went to Arthur's bosom." 4 All these references bear witness to the general popularity and widespread knowledge of the subject, and this makes it doubly remarkable that neither Shakespeare nor any of Shakespeare's great dramatic contemporaries should have felt the attraction. In Swinburne's pretty and pathetic rhymed tragedy of Locrine (the subject of which, also taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth, after in- adequate treatment by an Elizabethan playright, furnished Milton's Comus with the episode of Sa- brina), the Dedication has a notice of those British traditions which partly explains their neglect by the great Elizabethan dramatists. Such stories are like fragile blossoms — " with faint strange lines their leaves are freaked and scored " — that can scarcely bear transference to another soil than their own. " The fable-flowering land wherein they grew Hath dreams for stars and gray romance for dew : Perchance no flower thence plucked may flower anew. 1 King Lear, iii. 2. 95. 2 Henry IV., Bk. II. ii. 4. 36. 3 Henry IV., Bk. II. iii. 2. 299. 4 Henry V., ii. 3. 10. 1 26 ARTHURIAN STORY " No part have these wan legends in the sun Whose glory lightens Greece and gleams on Rome. Their elders live ; but these, — their day is done ; Their records written of the winds, in foam Fly down the wind, and darkness takes them home. What Homer saw, what Virgil dreamed, was truth And died not, being divine ; but whence, in sooth, Might shades that never lived win deathless youth f " The fields of fable, by the feet of faith Untrodden, bloom not where such deep mist drives. Dead fancy's ghost, not living fancy's wraith, Is now the storied sorrow that survives Faith in the record of these lifeless lives. Yet Milton's sacred feet have lingered there, His lips have made august the fabulous air, His hands have touched and left the wild weeds fair." This view, reduced to an argument in prose, would seem to run : These British stones are merely the phantoms of Geoffrey's brain : they are his shadowy creations, which have never had the reality of pop- ular belief, and never been nourished by the im- agination of a whole nation ; so they are without the life and body of the classic legends, and for that reason have failed to attract the highest genius, except to linger with them for a passing moment. But, as we have seen, there is good ground for believing that they, like their elders, contain a large element of myth and something of history ; they are no mere marionettes invented by the ingenuity of Geoffrey. And though they are less plastic and vivid than their Hellenic kindred, they have had the power of attracting the mightiest genius, and under the breath of inspiration some of them have received into their nostrils the intensest dramatic life. For REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION \2J not only Milton, but a greater than Milton, felt their charm, and not only lingered but dwelt among them. From Geoffrey come the stories of Lear and Cytn- beline, which have furnished Shakespeare with the plot for one of his most terrible tragedies, and with hints for one of his sweetest romances. We return then to the question : why was precisely the most elaborate and most magnificent and most tragic story of the group left untouched by Shakespeare and his fellows? Swinburne's answer is correct in the substance, and a very slight change makes it correct to the letter. The defect of the Arthurian stories was the defect of truth and reality, but this was due to the circumstances of their development rather than to the circumstances of their origin. At the out- set a blend of myth and history, they had been worked and kneaded not by the realistic spirit of native popular imagination, but by the fantastic spirit of foreign chivalrous romance. They had been appropriated to express the unreal and un- tenable ideal of an alien class : the class was gone, the ideal was superseded, but they were steeped in the artificial tints, were attenuated into sympathy with the airy views, and were unfit for common human actuality and fact. The strange geography of Arthurian story, the unbritish Britain, the un- breton Broceliande, the waste lands and savage mountains, the incredible bridges over impossible rivers ; its strange inhabitants, giants, fays, en- chanters ; the strange creatures that infest it, the questing beast, the hart with golden horns, young serpents that bring lions by the neck ; the strange 128 ARTHURIAN STORY customs of its persons, unlike those of ancient Briton or feudal lord, are typical of the remote- ness of its spirit from the world of living men. Such characteristics unfit it for the realistic art of the dramatist, but realism is only one direction of poetry, and a deficiency in this respect did not mean that it was unworthy of the treatment of poets. On the contrary, " The mightiest chiefs of British song Scorn'd not such legends to prolong." 1 And first in the trio that Scott proceeds to mention is the name of Edmund Spenser (15 5 2-1 599). These themes were bound to have a special attraction for his mind, in so far as it faced toward the splendour of the Renaissance, just as they had an attraction for Francis the First. And in like manner as Francis passed them on to a classicising poet of Italy, so Spenser mingled with them such classical mythology arid Italian ornament .as were com- patible with their fantastic framework. But Spenser was a man of the Reformation as well as a man of the Renaissance, and, if not a Puritan in dogma or discipline, had the moral earnestness of the Puritans and their preoccupation with the unseen. His conscience, therefore, led him to reject as transitory illusions the shows in which his eye and imagination took such delight. In his youth he sings how "All that in this world is great or gaie Doth as a vapour vanish, and decaie." 2 1 Marmion, Intro, to Canto i. 2 Ruines of Time. REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION 1 29 At the very close of his days he tells us how the speech of Mutabilitie " Makes me loath this state of life so tickle, And love of things so vaine to cast away : Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle, Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle." l x/ 1 The solution of this contradiction between his joy in appearances and his contempt for them, he found, so far as his principles were concerned, in an idealistic symbolism ; he viewed the vanishing beauty of the senses as garb of the eternal beauty of the spirit, " for of the soul the bodie forme doth take." 2 So far as his art was concerned, he found the solution in allegory ; he made his romantic pageant the veil for ethical truth. The treatment of Arthurian story which this brought with it, was the very opposite of that which had commended itself to the Senecan dramatist. Hughes has kept true to the incidents of the pseudo-history, but recast them by borrowing from romance the idea of Arthur's incestuous guilt. Spenser, on the other hand, retains the machinery of romance, but transforms it by borrowing from the chronicles the idea of Arthur as the flower of princes. In the preface to the portion that has come down to us, of which the first three books were published in 1590 and the remaining three in 1596, he says, " I labour to pourtraict in Arthure before he was king, the image of a brave knight, 1 Faerie Queene, vii. 8. 1. 2 An Hymne in Honour of Beau tie. I 130 ARTHURIAN STORY perfected in the twelve private morall vertues " ; and again, " In the person of Prince Arthure I sette forth magnificence in particular ; which vertue, for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all, therefore in the whole course I mention the deedes of Arthure applyable to that vertue, which I write of in that book." Thus Arthur rescues the Red-cross knight and Sir Guyon, and vanquishes vices that are peculiarly opposed to their nature, like Orgoglio and Maleger. Thus in his likeness to Britomart, he slays the lustful Corflambo ; in his likeness to Artegall, he maintains the cause of Beige ; in his likeness to Calidore, he fights the base Turpin and overcomes Disdain. But a con- ception of this kind involved a wide departure from the medieval legends. As Scott says, " They gleam through Spenser's elfin dream," but it is not much more than an occasional glimmer. Flori- mell's girdle is perhaps a reminiscence of the romantic test of chastity. 1 The mantle of Ryence, trimmed with beards of kings, is exaggerated in that of Crudor, " with beards of knights and locks of ladies lynd." 2 The blatant beast is equated with the questing beast, and we are told (though the knights mentioned are contemporaries of Arthur in the romances), that " Long time after Calidore The good Sir Pelleas him tooke in hand, And after him Sir Lamoracke of yore." 3 1 Faerie Queene, iv. 5. 15-20. 2 Faerie Queene, vi. 1. 15. 3 Faerie Queene, vi. 12. 39. REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION I 3 I Tristram's courtesy is suggested when he is repre- sented as following Sir Calidore, nor is his skill in venery forgotten at his first appearance ; " All in a woodmans jacket he was clad Of Lincolne greene, belayd with silver lace " : l and he thus describes his former pursuits ; — " My most delight hath alwaies been To hunt the salvage chace, amongst my peres, Of all that raungeth in the forrest greene, Of which none is to me unknowne that ev'rwas seene." 2 Nor was Spenser insensible to the charms of Geoffrey's legends, as we see from the poetic summary of British history from the days of the giants to the reign of Uther, which Prince Arthur reads in the Castle of Alma. 3 And the passing references to Merlin are quite in keeping : for instance, the explanation of the noises about the cave " emongst the woody hilles of Dynevowre " ; — " The cause, some say, is this : A litle whyle Before that Merlin dyde, he did intend A brasen wall in compas to compyle About Cairmardin, and did it commend Unto these Sprights to bring to perfect end : During which worke the Lady of the Lake, Whom long he lov'd, for him in hast did send : Who, thereby forst his workmen to foresake Them bownd till his retourne their labour not to slake. " In the meane time through that false Ladies traine He was surprisd, and buried under beare, Ne ever to his worke returnd againe : Nath'lesse those fiends may not their work forbeare, 1 Faerie Queene, vi. 2. 5. 2 Faerie Queene, vi. 2. 31. 3 Faerie Queene, ii. 11. 132 ARTHURIAN STORY So greatly his commandement they feare, But there doe toyle and traveile day and night, Untill that brasen wall they up doe reare : For Merlin had in Magick more insight Than ever him before, or after, living wight^' l But these are mere details : in plan and substance Spenser's poem has little connection with romantic tradition. If the totality of virtue personified in Arthur was to be broken up and distributed among the various knights, the fellows of the Table with their medieval habits and aptitudes were no longer suitable. They were summarily and necessarily dismissed because they were none of them fit to stand for a particular virtue ; and not one of them save Tristram — for whom there is no Isolt — is introduced even as a subordinate character. Further, if the allegory sets forth the universal war of good and evil and the inevitable triumph of the good, Arthur had to be represented as practically invincible. The superhuman ideal of excellence, his arms are superhuman as well. His sword Morddure is a much more wonderful weapon than Excalibur, for it will not wound its master ; 2 and even his sword is a mere child's toy in comparison with his shield, which is like the shield of Atlas in Orlando Ftirioso. It is one diamond, and he always bears it closely covered, keeping it in reserve as his chief weapon of offence. " The same to wight he never wont disclose, But whenas monsters huge he would dismay, 1 Faerie Queene, iii. 3. 10. 2 Faerie Q?ieene, ii. 8. 21. REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION 133 Or daunt unequall armies of his foes, Or when the flying heavens he would affray : For so exceeding shone his glistring ray, That Phoebus golden face it did attaint, As when a cloud his beames doth over-lay : And silver Cynthia wexed pale and faynt, As when her face is staynd with magicke arts constraint. " No magicke arts hereof had any might, Nor bloody wordes of bold Enchaunters call : But all that was not such as seemd in sight Before that shield did fade, and suddeine fall ; And when him list the raskall routes apall, Men into stones therewith he could transmew, And stones to dust, and dust to nought at all ; And when him list the prouder lookes subdew, He would them gazing blind, or turne to other hew." 1 In the same way in this marvellous land of Faerie, where nothing of him fades, but all is allegorically altered " into something rich and strange," his love is given not to the faithless Guinevere but to Gloriana, the type of heavenly glory : for the nar- rative is to conclude, not with the disastrous battle of the West, but with his marriage and the consummation of his bliss. Arthur, says Spenser in the prefatory letter, " I conceive after his long education by Timon, to whom he was by Merlin delivered to be brought up, so soone as he was borne of the Lady Igrayne, to have seene in a dream or vision the Faery Queen, with whose excellent beauty ravished, he awaking resolved to seeke her out ; and so being by Merlin armed, and by Timon throughly instructed, he went to seeke her 1 Faerie Queene^ i. 7. 34. 134 ARTHURIAN STORY forth in Faerye land." Thus though the furniture of Spenser's allegory is mostly after the romantic pattern, of the Arthur of romance there is little left, save the story of his origin and bringing up, and a distorted reminiscence of his dealings with i! the elves, and perhaps with the Lady of the I Lake. Spenser's choice of theme may have been partly I dictated by regard for one who was held in some I sort to be the national hero ; just as his allegory has a reference to national politics as well as to ethical theory. This patriotic note predominates in Michael Drayton (i 563-1631), as we should expect of a poet, whose interest in his country urged him to write so largely on its annals and its j localities. It is in connection with the latter that t he finds an opportunity for touching on the story of Arthur. His Polyolbion (first edition, 161 3, second edition, 1623) is a poetised description of the counties of England and Wales ; and when he comes to a river or town associated with Arthur's name, he seizes the opportunity to celebrate his renown or to retell some local legend. Thus the winding course of the Camel suggests to him that she neglects her proper bed — "As frantic ever since her British Arthur's blood By Mordred's murtherous hand was mingled with her flood." And he remembers how the " conqueror " was born as well as slain in her immediate neighbourhood — " As though no other place on Britain's spacious earth Were worthy of his end, but where he had his birth. " 1 1 Book I. REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION 135 Similarly in connection with Carmarthen, he recalls, like Spenser, the fable of Merlin and his elfin paramour, giving it, however, a pleasanter close : " She captive him convey'd into Fairy land." * Or again he describes the songs of the Britons ; — I With Arthur they begin, their most renowned knight : The richness of the arms their well-made worthy wore, The temper of his sword (the try'd Excalibur), The bigness and the length of Rone, his noble spear, With Pridwin his great shield and what 2 the proof could bear, His baudrick how adorn'd with stones of wondrous price, The sacred Virgin's shape, he bore for his device." Next they celebrate his prowess in war, in general agreement with Geoffrey's account, but altering the order ; — " Then sing they how he first ordain'd the circled board, The knights whose martial deeds far fam'd that table round, Which truest in their love, which most in arms renown'd : The laws which long upheld that order they report, The Pentecosts prepared at Carleon in his court, That table's ancient seat ; her temples and her groves, Her palaces and walls, baths, theatres, and stoves : Her academy then, as likewise, they prefer : Of Camelot they sing, and then of Winchester, The feast that underground the faery did him make, And there how he enjoy'd the Lady of the Lake." 3 In his attitude to the legend Drayton is neither a fanatic nor an infidel as regards either history or romance. One of Selden's notes, indeed, comes very near the theory of modern mythologists, in com- menting on the magic wile by which Uther be- came the father of Arthur. " Here have you a 1 Book IV. ' i.e. which. 3 Book IV. 136 ARTHURIAN STORY Jupiter, an Alcmena, an Amphytrio, a Sosias, and a Mercury ; nor wants their scarce anything but that the truth-passing of poetical bards have made the birth an Hercules." 1 Generally, however, Dray- ton, making use of local folklore which he jumbles together with more dignified material, is disposed to regard the story as a genuine national tradition, raised on a basis of historic fact. He breaks out — " I cannot choose, but bitterly exclaim Against those fools that all antiquity defame, Because they have found out, some credulous ages lay'd Slight fictions with the truth, whilst truth on rumour stay'd ; And that one forward time (perceiving the neglect A former of her 2 had), to purchase her respect, With toys then trim'd her up the drowsy world to allure, And lent her what it thought might appetite procure To men, whose mind doth still variety pursue : And, therefore, to those things, whose grounds were very true Though naked yet and bare (nor having to content The wayward curious ear) gave Active ornament." Tradition thus blended fiction with fact, and so was able to give " Sure colour to them both : From which as from a root this wonder'd error grow'th At which our critics gird, whose judgments are so strict, And he the bravest man who most can contradict." 3 To Drayton himself the celebrity of Arthur is a subject for national gratulation, and redounds to the national honour. " As some soft-sliding rill, which from a lesser head (Yet, in his going forth, by many a fountain fed), Annotation to Book I. 2 i.e. of antiquity. 3 Book VI. REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOIUTION 137 Extends itself at length into a goodly stream : So almost through the world his fame blew from this realm." 1 The poet's only grief is that the matter has not been utilised, and he, in his love for Britain, is indignant that no native Homer has grasped the occasion to extol the British name ; " For some abundant brain, oh, there had been a story, Beyond the blind man's might to have enhanced our glory ! " 2 A few years later it seemed as though the cause of these regrets were to be removed. The subject which the patriotic Drayton commended with such hearty good-will was sure to appeal to the more fervid patriotism of a grander poet than Drayton. John Milton (1608- 1674), when still a youth, had resolved that a great poem should be his life-work, for which he would equip himself by noble action and earnest study and lofty thought ; and by his thirty-first year he had taken Arthur for his hero. " May I find a friend like thee," he writes to Manso in January, 1638-39, "when, if ever, I shall recall to song our native kings, and Arthur devising war even below the earth, or shall sing the great-hearted heroes of the unvanquished Table in their bond of fellowship, and when (if only inspiration give me aid) I shall break the Saxon bands beneath the prowess of the Britons." 3 And again, about a year 1 Book III. 2 Book III. 3 " Si quando indigenas revocabo in carmina reges, Arturumque etiam sub terris bella moventem, Aut dicam invictae sociali foedere mensae Magnanimos Heroas, et (O modo spiritus adsit) Frangam Saxonicas Britonum sub Marte phalanges." Mansus, 80. 1 3§ ARTHURIAN STORY later, he has a similar passage in the Epitaph of Damon; but now there is no uncertainty in his words ; he announces a definite plan. " I myself shall sing the Trojan craft traversing the narrow seas, and the ancient realm of Imogen, daughter of Pandras, and Brennus and Arviragus, the leaders, and old Belinus, and then the Armorican settlers beneath the dominion of the Britons ; then Ierne pregnant of Arthur by fatal fraud, and the deceptive features and assumed arms of Gorlois ; 't was a wile of Merlin." 1 It is natural to ask, and the question is neither idly curious nor wholly unanswerable ; on what lines would Milton have treated the Arthur story? On the basis of medieval history or of medieval romance ? Probably it was romance that first attracted him. For this speaks the circumstance that the stately illustrations, supplied by the legends which, in the phrase of Scott, " mix in the heavenly theme" of both the Paradises, are evidently drawn from chivalrous fiction. Thus, in his description of the splendid hosts of hell his thought recurs to — " What resounds In fable or romance of Uther's son, Begirt with British and Armoric knights." 2 1 " Ipse ego Dardanias Rutupina per aequora puppes Dicam, et Pandrasidos regnum vetus Inogeniae, Brennumque Arviragumque duces, priscumque Belinum, Et tandem Armoricos Britonum sub lege colonos ; Turn gravidam Arturo fatali fraude Iogernen : Mendaces vultus, assumptaque Gorlo'is arma, Merlini dolus." — Epitaphium Damonis, 162. 2 Paradise Lost, I. 579. REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION 1 39 And in the picture of the banquet in the desert the memories roused by the attendant spirits are exclu- sively classical and romantic. " Distant more, Under the trees now tripped, now solemn stood, Nymphs of Diana's train, and Naiades With fruits and flowers from Amalthea's horn, And ladies of the Hesperides, that seemed Fairer than feigned of old, or fabled since Of faery damsels met in forest wide By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore." 1 In the vindication of his character in the Apology for Smectymnuus, he expressly avows his youthful prefer- ence for this kind of literature. " Hear me out now, readers, that I may tell ye whither my younger feet wandered ; I betook me among those lofty fables and romances, which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from thence had in renown over all Christendom." Moreover, in a biographical passage in the Paradise Lost, which will presently be quoted, he contrasts the epic which he is ultimately com- posing with chivalrous romance, and here he seems to return to his former dream and compare it with his present achievement. And considering the abundant proof of his early reverence for the " sage and serious Spenser," 2 showed now in direct state- ment, now in the more convincing way of imitation, we may suppose that his first aspirations would be to a poem on the Spenserian pattern, an allegoric 1 Paradise Regained, II. 354. 2 Areopagitica. 140 ARTHURIAN STORY romance of the kind he himself has described, like those that great bards "In sage and solemn tunes have sung, Of turneys, and of trophies hung, Of forests and enchantments drear, Where more is meant than meets the ear." This might please him at the stage when he was writing // Penseroso^ and when he was soon to write the Covins. But in Milton's time, a time of political and religious controversy, and also in Milton's mind, which was so open to influences of that description, there is a curious insistence on fact, a disposition to take things literally and to look at their positive aspects. Besides, he was too great a poet to rest in the theory of allegory, however that might satisfy Spenser, who sometimes uses the poetry as a stalking-horse for the doctrine. All Milton's, later works concern themselves with what to him are real occurrences; and though they bear a moral, and though perhaps they may have attracted him by their ethical or religious content, yet his im- mediate interest is not the didactic one. Now, of course, the aggregate of Arthurian tradition was still regarded among the uncritical with the utmost seriousness. Heywood, for example, considered the prophecies of Merlin, at which the good sense of Shakespeare had laughed, not only as genuine but as accurate, and in 164 1 treated the entire history of England as the fulfilment of the wizard's vaticinations, in a strange book with the explanatory title : — " The Life of Merlin, surnamed Ambrosius : His prophecies and predictions inter- REFORM A TION TO P URITA N RE VOL UTION 1 4 1 preted, and their truth made good by our English Annals ; Being a chronographical history of the kings and main passages of this kingdom from Brute to the reign of our Royall Sovereign King : Charles." This was doubtless the craze of an ; eccentric, and Heywood, we may hope, was read | only by such people as would nowadays believe in the Great Cryptogram, or the Israelitish origin of the English. But an instance, of the tendency to take Arthurian fiction literally is furnished by a man of authority in a notable book, the Vray Theatre d'Honneur et de Chevalerie, by the Sieur de la Colombiere, which in 1648 was dedicated to Mazarin for the behoof of the youthful Louis XIV. It is partly a collection of heroic examples, partly a ! treatise on Heraldry. In the portions on Arthurian I adventure the romances are certainly called fabulous, j but nevertheless^their authenticity is taken for ! granted; and, as has happened in more important 1 departments, inferences are drawn from them as j though they were historical. It is amusing to find I the author giving, with every appearance of credence, a list of the armorial devices of all the knights of the Round Table. But this was a kind of puzzle-headed inconse- quence for which Milton's mind was far too pene- trative and logical. He could not but see that later Arthurian tradition was absolutely fictitious, and he thirsted for truth of fact. At this stage we may imagine him turning from the unsubstantial romance to the supposed chronicle, from Malory to Geoffrey; at least, in his Latin utterances, most of his data, save the references to the magnanimous heroes of 142 ARTHURIAN STORY I the unconquered table and to Arthur moving wars beneath the earth, are taken rather from the History of the Kings of Britain than from the Morte Darthur. The romances may have charmed his young fancy, and may have left on his mind the deepest impression, as would seem likely from their recrudescence in the similes and references of his veteran works ; but it is the pseudo-history that supplies the gist of his actual and definite project. Even with Geoffrey, however, Milton was not long to linger. In 1639 he seems either to have begun his Arthurian poem, or at least to have made up his mind about it; by 1642 he is at work on his tragedy of the Fall ; in 1641 he jotted down a list of possible subjects for his muse, and of these sixty-one are scriptural, thirty-eight early English or British, but Arthur is not included. What is the meaning of this change? First and chiefly, it may have been that in busying himself with the material, he did not find it sufficiently authenti- cated ; his appetite for fact made him both keen to see the hints of fabrication, and disinclined for the fare when it was proved to be fictitious. He was soon to denounce Sydney's Arcadia as "a vain amatorious poem " ; how then was he to occupy himself with matter of the same description ? It is certain, at least, that in his later years he was with the sceptics as to Arthur. In his History of Britain (1670), he writes: "Who Arthur was and whether any such reigned in Britain hath bin doubted here- tofore, and may again with good reason. But he who can accept of legends for good story, may quickly fill a volume with trash ; and had need REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION 143 be furnished with only two necessaries, leisure and belief, whether it be the writer or he that reads." 1 Besides, as Milton with his growing Puritanism looked askance even at fictions, " where more is meant than meets the ear," and with austerer veracity demanded the truth and nothing but the truth ; as with maturing genius, he discarded alle^ gory, which is usually the hybrid birth of poetry and prose ; so the circumstances of the community and of himself turned his eyes on what he considered the well-vouched narrative of man's religion. This was a subject that came home to the heart of all the nation as nothing in the authentic or in- vented history of the realm could do. The scrip- tural record was felt by almost all his countrymen to be the surest of truths, divinely inspired and divinely preserved. And, not in parable but in fact, it had the most momentous spiritual signifi- cance that the devoutest poet could require. Beyond it he need not and would not go. In certainty and dignity it was far ahead of any other imagina- tive subject. And in this spirit he reviews his youth- ful fancies and finds them immeasurably below his present enterprise. The story of the Fall is not less but more heroic than any of ancient song ; " If answerable style I can obtain Of my celestial Patroness , who deigns Her nightly visitation unimplored, And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated verse, Since first this subject of heroic song Pleased me, long choosing and beginning late, x History of Britain, Bk. III. 1 44 ARTHURIAN STOR Y Not sedulous by nature to indite Wars, hitherto the only argument Heroic deemed, chief mastery to dissect With long and tedious havoc fabled knights In battle feigned (the better fortitude Of patience and heroic martyrdom Unsung), or to describe the races and the games, Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields, Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds, Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights At joust and tournament ; then marshalled feast Served up in hall with sewers and seneshals ; The skill of artifice or office mean, Not that which justly gives heroic name To person or to poem ! Me, of these Nor skilled nor studious, higher argument Remains." 1 Scott looks back wistfully on the lower that was rejected, and exclaims : " What we have lost in his abandoning the theme can only be estimated by the enthusiastic tone into which he always swells, when he touches on the ' Shores of old Romance.' The sublime glow of his imagin- ation which delighted in painting what was beyond the reach of human experience ; the dignity of his language, formed to express the sentiments of heroes and immortals ; his powers of describing alike the beautiful and terrible ; above all, the jus- tice with which he conceived and assigned to each supernatural agent a character as decidedly peculiar as lesser poets have given to their human actors, would have sent him forth to encounter such a subject with gigantic might. Whoever has ventured, undeterred by their magnitude, upon the old ro- 1 Paradise Lost, IX. 20. REFORMATION TO PURITAN REVOLUTION 145 mances of Sir Lancelot du Lac, Sir Ti'istrem, and others, founded on the achievements of the knights of the Round Table, cannot but remember a thou- sand striking Gothic incidents worthy of the pen of ' Milton. What would he not have made of the I adventure of the Ruinous Chapel, the Perilous Manor, | the Forbidden Seat, the Dolorous Wound, and many i other susceptible of being described in the most | sublime poetry ? " 1 All this is very true, and Scott | has sympathetically enumerated the points in which ; Arthurian fiction and Milton's genius would have had J affinities with each other. But it is only in isolated > points that they coincide ; in essence they are widely different; and Milton doubtless obeyed a true in- stinct when he swerved aside from figurative ro- mance or fabulous heroic to pursue his " heavenly theme." Tn the religious narrative he felt that he I could give direct expression to the deepest interests ! of himself and his fellows, and do this with the most rigorous observance of truth. Scott's Dryden, Introduction to King Arthur. CHAPTER II FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION >1V/T ILTON had sought for truth of fact in the story of Arthur, and had not found it It suited the positive spirit of the next generation, >also, to require an historical basis for an epic poem ; but the demands for verity were less highly pitched in a poet of the Restoration than in the poet of the Puritan Revolution. A little authority could go a long way. It need not, therefore, sur- prise us to find Dryden thinking of what might at first seem the uncongenial story of Arthur as the subject of a national heroic. The composition of an epic, he says, " I had intended chiefly for the honour of my native country, to which a poet is particularly obliged. Of two subjects both relat- ing to it, I was doubtful whether I should choose that of King Arthur conquering the Saxons, which being further distant in time gives the greater scope to my invention, or that of Edward the Black Prince in subduing Spain and restoring it to the lawful prince, though a great tyrant, Don Pedro the Cruel." 1 It is evident from this equation of 1 Essay on " Satire," Scott's Dryden, vol. xiii. , page 32. RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 147 Arthur with the Black Prince that Dryden, had he carried out his purpose, would have leaned rather on Geoffrey than on Malory, rather on pseudo-history than on genuine romance, and would have aimed chiefly at the glorification of national prowess. Noticeable too is the selection, not of Prince Edward's achievements in France, but ; of his Spanish campaign, which resulted in the restoration of " a great tyrant," though " the lawful prince " — an escape of Restoration legitimacy which seems to show that Dryden would have laid less stress on the wider ideal significance of his subject than on the temporary political reference ; 1 but so I treated, Arthurian legend would have been apt to lose all its typical characteristics. And of this there is further evidence. The alternative of Arthur he seems to prefer as giving " greater scope i to his invention." Such free additions of the ! imagination may harmonise with the traditional story, or they may not. In the case of Dryden they hardly would have done so. In that age I machinery " was imperatively demanded for an epic, but exception was taken against mythology and superstitions discarded by the Christian world, and therefore beyond the pale of ordinary belief. Dryden proposed to get out of the difficulty by introducing " the guardian angels of kingdoms," mentioned in the book of Daniel, and the idea does credit to his ingenuity. But how ill could 1 In the same way, though he dwells on "the magnanimity of the English hero, opposed to the ingratitude of the person he restored," he talks of " the greatness of the action and its answerable event? i.e. a legitimist restoration. 1 48 ARTHURIAN STOR Y we have spared for such extraneous powers the fays and enchanters indigenous to the romance, like Merlin and the Lady of the Lake ! Circum- stances, however, were against the production even of such an epic as Dryden would have written. Scott in the well-known lines l tells how " Dryden in immortal strain Had raised the Table Round again, But that a ribald King and Court Bade him toil on to make them sport ; Demanded for their niggard pay, Fit for their souls, a looser lay, Licentious satire, song, and play ; The world defrauded of the high design, Profaned the God-given strength and marr'd the lofty line." Dryden with all his superb genius, and even superb poetical genius, was yet a child of the times, as is shown by his submitting to their influence, and the end of the seventeenth century was not a favour- able period for the highest imaginative work. De- spite the regrets of Scott, epic poetry has probably lost little, and the Arthurian epos not at all by Dryden's desertion to the satiric muse. The subject was not, however, dismissed to ab- solute neglect. A worse fate was in store for it. Richard Blackmore, physician and knight, " the everlasting Blackmore," as Pope calls him with reference to his fluency, not to his fame, rushed in when Dryden had turned away, and seized the suggestion which its author shrank from follow- ing. The worthy doctor, like some members of 1 Marmioii) Intro, to Canto i. RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 1 49 his profession before and since, had the foible of omniscience. He had his degree from Padua, " a learned and eminent university," explains Sir Walter Scott, " which, like some in my own coun- try, is supposed not to be over-scrupulous in con- ferring honours of this nature." He made parade of his scholarship, which, Dr Johnson thinks, must have been small ; he knew all about philosophy, and was " fallen out " with it ; he was a great politician, and boasted that he had a larger share in the Revolution than was generally known. Evi- dently he was the sort of man who would then be an oracle among the Whigs, and would now be mighty on boards and in congresses. He set up for a wit, as he might now set up, say, for an educationist ; and being unequipped by nature or training for literature, much less for poetry, and least of all for romantic poetry, he easily per- suaded himself and his party that he was called to sing the exploits of Uther's son. He began his career of "interloping" in 1695 with Prince Arthur, which was followed two years later by its sequel, King Arthur. In his preface to the latter he tells us of its predecessor, that it was composed " by such catches and starts, and in such occasional uncertain hours as the business of my profession would afford me ; and therefore for the greater part that poem was written in coffee- | houses and in passing up and down the streets, j because I had little leisure elsewhere to apply to it." This is the authority for Dryden's famous . sneer, too well justified by the movement of the verse — 1 50 ARTHURIAN STORY " At leisure hours in Epic song he deals, Writes to the rumbling of his coach's wheels.' x Such methods facilitate the labour of authorship, and Blackmore was able to endite two more epics, as well as a lengthy poem on the Creation which has once or twice been praised, and, among his productions, has had the unique honour of passing through later reprints. Dryden, who besides belonged to the opposite political camp, and had figured in Prince Arthur as Laurus, "An old, revolted, unbelieving bard," did not like Blackmore's presumption in taking up a subject that he had once looked upon. He ] avenges himself in a short criticism on " the city bard or knight physician," which he interrupts with a Parthian shot : " But I will deal the more civilly with his two poems, because nothing ill is to be spoken of the dead ; and therefore peace be to the Manes of his Arthurs." 2 Elsewhere he says, in the same sense, " All the former fustian stuff he wrote Was dead-born doggrel or is quite forgot." 3 Nowadays, we are apt to take Dryden's sneers too literally, and to regard Blackmore's epics as dead poetical mammoths that never were alive. But this ^>is only half true, and the real facts of the case are a good deal more instructive. At so late a date -as 17 1 2, and by so great an authority as Addison, 1 Prologue to the Pilgrim. 2 Preface to the Fables, Scott's Dryden^ vol. xi. 3 Prologue to the Pilgrim. RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION I5 1 he was praised in the Spectator. x Dr. Johnson says in his life of Blackmore : " Of his four epic poems, the first had such reputation and popularity as enraged the critics ; the second was, at least, known enough to be ridiculed ; the two last found neither friends nor enemies." This testimony to the success of Prince Arthur is not at all exaggerated. On the contrary, even critics admitted that it had merits. Thus Dennis, who devotes a good-sized volume to examining it, expressly states : " I believe Prince Arthur to be neither admirable nor contemptible ; , for if I had either the one or the other opinion, I should certainly never have written against him." As a matter of fact, both the Arthurs possessed qualities that were bound to commend them, and, perhaps, entitle them to some temporary favour. There is point in the author's own remark : " These gentlemen (the critics) pretend to be displeased with Prince Arthur, because they have discovered so many faults in it, but there is good reason to believe they would have been more displeased if they had discovered fewer." 2 Professional wits were vexed be- cause Blackmore had succeeded in hitting the taste of the hour among certain classes, whose approval, according to our ideas, is not at all to be despised. And he had done this in quite a legitimate way, by appealing to predilections that were eminently char- acteristic of the time. No doubt his poetical claims are very slender, despite the occurrence of some tol-, erable passages in the ten books of the first epic and the twelve books of the second ; but these are short and far between. It must be admitted that 1 No. 339. 2 Preface to King Arthur. 1 52 ARTHURIAN STORY ^7his thought is generally obvious and his diction conventional, and if for a moment he escapes trite- ^ness, it is too often by drawing muddy conceits from the lees of the metaphysical brew. 1 Possibly an audience of Whig citizens, unwilling to be perplexed or startled, and not quite abreast of literary fashion, may have thought none the worse of him for either demerit. And if Blackmore had not much poetry to give, neither was very much poetry desired. It was on other grounds that he won his succes d'estime. He had a decent constituency that above all de- manded moral pabulum, and this Blackmore could give them to their heart's content. His aim is ^didactic ; he is convinced that " the business of poetry is to instruct," and he wishes his fellow citizens to have "a useful, at least a harmless enter- tainment." He is justly indignant with » the " ill poets " of the time ; " Against their country they their wit engage, Refine our language but corrupt our age." 2 " I was willing," he writes in his preface, " to make an effort towards rescuing the muses out of the hands of these ravishers, to restore them to their sweet and chaste mansions, and to engage them in an employment suitable to their dignity." But in carrying out this programme he shows himself, " interloper " though he is, in essential agreement >with the literary tendencies of the period. However great the difference may be between the splendid 1 For fuller illustration of these statements, see Appendix I. - King Arthur, Book I. RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 153 eloquence of Dryden and the insipid fluency ofe' Blackmore, it is interesting to note that their pre- suppositions are the same, and that they found on the same principles. Hence Blackmore's poem on Arthur may be regarded as giving a blurred and distorted suggestion of what Dryden's might have been. There is, of course, an impassable gulf be- tween the work of a bungler and the work of an artist. Still, in the present instance, the two men look at the subject from almost the same point of view, it appears to them in a similar light ; and Blackmore's epics will at least illustrate certain fundamental traits in the conception of Arthurian U story that then prevailed. In the first place it is as an historical person that L the hero is regarded. The preface to King Arthur contains the following passage : — " That there was about the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century a King of Britain named Arthur, a prince of extraordinary qualities and famous for his martial achievements, who succeeded his father, Uter Pendragon, all our historians agree, and the eminently learned Bishop of Worcester, in his Origines Britannicae, does acknowledge it. And though . . . Geoffrey of Monmouth is indeed a fabulous author, yet his authority, especially considering that there was such a war-like prince as Arthur, is a sufficient foundation for an epic poem." But most of Geoffrey's statements, if taken as history, make demands that it is difficult for a sober age to meet. In point of fact Blackmore borrows from him a few names which he misapplies ; that of Modred, for instance, who is represented as a 154 ARTHURIAN STORY King of the Picts overcome by the youthful Arthur ; and (a worse perversion !) that of " The Pagan Briton Merlin, that of late For his dire art, driven from the British State, Did with the Pagan Saxons safely dwell, And kept his correspondence up with hell." 1 But otherwise Blackmore does not care to make use of Geoffrey's authority, except for the circumstances that at the outset Arthur had to wage war against the Saxons, which forms the subject of the first poem, and that afterwards he led an expedition into Gaul, which forms the subject of the second. Such a residuum of the Historia Britonum could scarcely offend common sense ; at the same time it was "> scanty matter for two stout epics. Blackmore has need as well as " scope, for his invention." But the inventions, too, must have an air of matter-of-fact reality about them, and must lean on historic truth. Blackmore, therefore, has recourse to political allegory. Just as Dryden's epic on the Black Prince would have celebrated the triumph of legitimacy, Blackmore's Arthurs celebrate the > triumph of the Revolution and the achievements of the new King at home and abroad. Arthur, of course, is William himself, who fights against Octa the Saxon (James II.) and Clotar the Frank (Louis XIV.), and marries the Saxon princess Ethelina. The Christians represent the Protestants and the Pagans the Catholics. Almost all the important personages of the time are introduced, and are described as they mirrored themselves in 1 Prince Arthur, Book VII. RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 155 the mind of an undoubting Whig. Marlborough is easily recognisable in Malgo, " Whose courteous manners and deportment won No less applauses than his sword had done." 1 It might be more difficult to read the interpretation of Caledon — " The finest clay and pure ethereal fire Dispensed with double bounty did conspire To make a man that should the world surprise, A genius near the kindred of the skies " ; 2 but a long sermon that he delivers, which would certainly have needed more than one turn of the hour-glass, unmistakably reveals Bishop Burnet. 3 It cannot be said that Blackmore often leaves us in doubt of his meaning, such as it is. He hangs out the flag of his allegory whenever occasion offers, as when he announces the purpose of his second epic — " Indulgent heaven, by Arthur's hand, has broke Britannia's fetters and tyrannic yoke ; His pious arm shall ease Lutetia's pains, Release her sons and break their pondrous chains ; x King Arthur \ Book I. 2 King Arthur, Book IX. 3 " In the pulpit the effect of his discourses, which were delivered without any note, was heightened by a noble figure and by pathetic action. He was often interrupted by the deep hum of his audience; and when, after preaching out the hour-glass, which in those days was part of the furniture of the pulpit, he held it up in his hand, the congregation clamorously encouraged him to go on till the sand had run off once more." — Macaulay's History of England, Chap. vii. 1 56 ARTHURIAN STOR Y This great deliverer shall Europa save, Which haughty monarchs labour to enslave ; Then shall Religion rear her starry head, And light divine through all the nations spread." 1 With these materials Blackmore concocts his poems 'y according to the recipes then in vogue. He has a touching faith in rules and models, and he holds especially fast to the construction of the Aeneid. The storm, the hospitable reception of the wan- derers, the narrative of preceding events, the prophecies, battles, descriptions of armour, are pale reproductions of the Virgilian pattern. Of course the supernatural machinery could not be omitted, and here Blackmore found himself in the same quandary as Dryden, and hit on a similar ex- pedient. " The guardian angels of kingdoms " he did not indeed employ ; they, as Dryden says, " were machines too ponderous for him to manage." 2 \ But he misapplied a hint from Milton and intro- duced the Deity and the angels as the patrons of Arthur, and Lucifer with his hosts as the allies of the heathen. All these personages are very active and eloquent, and their interposition gives the story a theological or quasi-religious cast. Hoel of Brit- tany, hastening against Arthur, is struck down by a tempest, and, like St. Paul, converted on the way. A voice tells him — " Go meet my servant Arthur, he shall show At large, what thou hast to believe, what do." 3 1 King Arthur, Book I. 2 Preface to the Fables, Scott's Dryden, vol. xi. 3 Prince Arthur, Book I. RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 1 57 The oracle is punctually fulfilled. In the two following books Arthur runs through the history of the world, from the creation till the last judgment. In the beginning of the fifth, Hoel still lingers near, in order as he tells his friend, to be " with your pious conversation blessed " ; and the good- natured monarch has already promised, " all seasons offer'd I'll improve." Merlin comes at the sum- mons of Octa to curse the Christian armies, but like Balaam, he is overmastered by a higher power, and altogether blesses them — 11 How beautiful the Briton's tents appear, How goodly heads his tabernacles rear." 1 Arthur the champion and favourite of heaven, ex- periences the perils as well as the advantages of such a distinction. On one occasion Lucifer visits his former seats, and the Eternal asks him, " In all thy tedious journeys far and wide Hast thou observed my servant, Arthur's ways ?" " Does the pious monarch serve for nought ?" 2 is the reply ; and Arthur, like Job or Faust, is handed over to the fiend for a fortnight's pro- bation, " his sacred person " only being secured. But his consequent tribulation is not so great as we are led to expect. Lucifer uses the concession with great moderation. He only exposes his charge to the danger of a storm, and to temp- tations of fear and pleasure, and even so, he is not allowed a perfectly free hand. An angel 1 Prince Arthur, Book VII. 2 King Arthur, Book VI. 158 ARTHURIAN STORY keeps interfering, in open violation of the bond, and lays the tempest, warns Arthur, and admonishes him at the critical moment. If this is his ex- perience in the hour of trial, his career, when things go well with him, can easily be conjectured. >He has no serious obstacles to surmount, for they all melt from his path. In the one epic he wins his throne, and in the other he captures Lutetia, inevitably and as a matter of course. The record of his miraculous successes and illusory dangers can no longer quicken the pulse of any mortal ^> reader ; it is as dull a fabrication as literature has to show. Such are the adventures of Arthur in the epics of Blackmore. The effort to take his career as sober \ history, and then to poetise it, in them defeats itself. In the first place the two campaigns are chosen which least affront probability, but which also are of least \importance for romance, and contain little material for the poet. These have been supplemented with \the furniture of contemporary politics and misapplied religion. But the result is ephemeral fiction that is none the less fictitious for its formal and pompous gait. Translate such a conception from the dignity of an epic into the liveliness of a stage spectacle, divest it of its pretensions to solemnity, and it will show itself in its true colours as a casual "invention," not as an elaboration of traditional matter. And this had already occurred. Dryden, on surrendering his hopes as an epic poet, had worked up the subject for the play-house in his King Arthur \ which, first conceived in the reign of Charles, and intended, like its unlucky prelude, Albion and Albanius, to glorify RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 1 59 that monarch, was only acted in a modified form in 1 69 1. It would be manifestly unfair to draw analogies as to the character of the projected epic from this play, which is really a kind of opera, and owed some of its attractions to the music composed by Purcell and the ballet-dances devised by Priest. The supernatural agents, instead of being angels of the book of Daniel, are akin to the Rosicrucian spirits of earth and air, and probably this merely illustrates a shrinkage in the heroic character of the whole idea. Still the fact that Dryden could trifle with a theme of which he felt the grandeur is not without its significance. " There is no attempt," says Scott, " to avail himself of any fragments of Arthur's romantic renown. He is not in this drama the formidable possessor of Excalibur, and the superior of the chivalry of the Round Table. Nor is Merlin the fiend-born necromancer, of whom antiquity related and believed so many wonders. They are the Prince and Magician of a beautiful fairy-tale, the story of which, abstracted from the poetry, might have been written by Madame D'Aulnoy." The King overcomes the Saxons, but the names of their leaders are unknown to history or romance. His love is given not to Guinevere, but to Emmelina, the blind princess who miraculously obtains her sight. Sprites with their wild-fires, borrowed from the Tempest and the Midsummer Night's Dream, seek to lead him astray. Bathing sirens and woodland nymphs tempt his virtue as they tempt Sir Guyon's in the Faerie Queene. In the enchanted wood that grows from seedlings brought from the Italian epics of the Renaissance, 160 ARTHURIAN STORY he strikes a tree, and from the bleeding trunk the likeness of his lady emerges. In short, we have only an artificial farrago, taken from almost all sources except the Arthurian legend itself, and un- blended by the might of any pervading idea. The only special meaning that Dryden's play ever pos- sessed was the political reference to Charles II. — a sufficient profanation of the Flos Regum — and when that was obliterated there remained only, as Scott says, a fairy tale. How much Arthur's dignity is degraded may be illustrated from the stage direction which refers to his single combat with the Saxon leader. " They fight with sponges in their hands, dipped in blood ; after some equal passes and closing, they appear both wounded : Arthur stumbles among the trees, Oswald falls over him ; they both rise ; Arthur wounds him again, then Oswald retreats." Nothing is more meretricious in the whole course of Arthurian story than these two bloody sponges. Here there is a touch of involuntary and un- conscious burlesque, and in the next generation the scanty loans from British legend are almost always made with a farcical intention. It was an age of prose, which exalted common sense as the idol of culture, and paid no great heed to the spiritual or the picturesque. Hence everything with the cachet of the Middle Ages was remote from its sympathies. Their dim religious half-lights were yielding to a glare of Illumination. Gothic, the description of their noble architecture, had the secondary meaning of barbarous, and romantic was used as a term of reproach. The best imaginative work of the period is to be found in the novel, and the best eighteenth RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION l6l century novels limit themselves to the truths of common human nature, and to the ordinary vicis- situdes of human career. The pity and terror of Arthur's story, which filled even Hughes with awe in presence of the shadowy wraiths, would have been as uncongenial in the saeculum rationalisticum as the apparition of Earl Gorloi's' ghost in a company of bewigged and bepowdered beaux. The typical hero of imaginative fiction is not now King Arthur, but Tom Jones. And contrast the way in which the two stories treat the theme of passion within the forbidden degrees. Malory is terribly in earnest about it ; with him it is the fountain and justification of the whole tragedy. Fielding introduces it as an episode, but presently dispels the horror, and explains that it was all a mistake. It seems natural that to such a time, on account of its strength no less than of its weakness, the personages of Arthurian tradi- tion, if they were recalled at all, should present themselves in a ludicrous light. Already Pope and Swift had made fun of Merlin and his prophecies, but it was Fielding who, in 1730, gave the typical example of the tendency in his Tragedy of Tragedies, or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great. In this play, which amusingly travesties the high dra- matic style then prevalent, Tom Thumb is re- presented as begotten by Merlin's art to be the glory of Arthur's court and the defender of the realm. " When Goody Thumb first brought this Thomas forth, The Genius of our Land triumphant reigned ; Then, then, O Arthur, did thy genius reign ! " Tom has been absent on a campaign against the L 162 ARTHURIAN STORY giants, and at the opening of the play he returns in triumph, to the unmeasured delight of the king— " Let nothing but the face of joy appear ! The man that frowns this day shall lose his head, That he may have no face to frown withal." Tom asks for the hand of the king's daughter as reward, and Arthur consents in consideration of the heroic soul in his tiny frame, which makes one of the characters exclaim : — " As a mountain once brought forth a mouse, So does this mouse contain a mighty mountain." But things go badly. Dollalolla, who takes the place of Guinevere, has fixed her affections not on Lancelot but on Tom. One is glad that this burlesque passion does not profane the great legendary queen, but is attached to an absurd name that is treated as an absurdity. " Come, Dollalolla," cries Arthur in one passage — " Come, Dollalolla ! Curse that odious name, It is so long, it asks an hour to speak it. By heavens ! I'll change it into Doll or Loll, Or any other civil monosyllable That will not tire my tongue." Meanwhile she is determined to prevent the match, and instigates Tom's rival in love and war to rouse the people and head a revolt. The ghost of Tom's father announces to Arthur that his subjects are up in arms — " So have I seen the bees in clusters swarm, So have I seen the stars in frosty nights, So have I seen the sand on windy days, So have I seen the ghosts on Pluto's shore, RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 1 63 So have I seen the flowers in Spring arise, So have I seen the leaves in Autumn fall, So have I seen the fruits in Summer smile, So have I seen the snow in Winter frown." I D — n all thou'st seen," interrupts the King, not unreasonably, " Dost thou beneath the shape Of Gaffer Thumb come hither to abuse me, With similes to keep me on the rack ? Hence, or by all the torments of thy hell, I'll run thee thro' the body, tho' thou'st none. Ghost. Arthur, beware ; I must this moment hence, Not frightened by your voice but by the cocks. Arthur, beware, beware, beware, beware ! Strive to avert thy yet impending fate, For, if thou'rt killed to-day, To-morrow all thy care will come too late. {Disappears. Arthur. Oh ! stay and leave me not uncertain thus ; And whilst thou tellest me what's like my fate, Oh, teach me how I may avert it too. Curst be the man who first a simile made, Curst every bard who writes .... The Devil is happy, that the whole creation Can furnish out no simile to his fortune." For a while, however, it seems as though events would give the lie to the prophetic ghost. Thumb marches against the rebels, slays their leader, and disperses their hosts. But Merlin had met him on the way, and foretold that he would be devoured by the " expanded jaws of a red-cow," and now amidst the joy of the court Noodle rushes in — " Oh, monstrous ! dreadful ! terrible ! Oh ! Oh ! Deaf be my ears ! for ever blind, my eyes ! Dumb be my tongue ! Feet lame ! all senses lost ! Howl wolves, grunt bears, hiss snakes, shriek all ye ghosts ! 1 64 ARTHURIAN STOR Y Arthur. What does the blockhead mean ? Noodle. I mean, my liege, Only to grace my tale with decetit horror." And his tale is the destruction of Tom Thumb. Arthur, at the news of victory, had proclaimed — " Open the prisons, set the wretched free, And bid our treasurers disburse six pounds To pay their debts." But now he countermands his orders — " Shut up again the prisons, bid my treasurer Not give three farthings out — hang all the culprits, Guilty or not, no matter — Go bid the schoolmasters whip all their boys, Let lawyers, parsons, and physicians loose To rob, impose on, and to kill the world." On this the end soon follows, a burlesque of tragic terror as the play throughout is a travesty of tragic diction. The persons dispose of themselves in mutual slaughter, wholesale and unmotived, and lie scattered like the kings and queens and knaves of cards, Arthur exclaiming as he succumbs — " All our pack upon the floor is cast, And all I boast is, that I fall the last." Fielding thus, in his mock-heroic tragedy, makes use of Arthur in connection with the children's story of Tom Thumb. The association is sig- nificant. If at this time the name of Arthur still held a place in the national consciousness and remained to become something more than a name when the fitting day should dawn, it is chiefly the literature of the nursery that we RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 165 have to thank for it. Already Chaucer had laughingly asserted — " In tholde dayes of the Kyng Arthour, Of which that Britons speken greet honour, All was this land fulfilled of fairye : The Elf queene with her joly compaignye Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede." And this humorous theory as to the date of fairy-tale adventures is the residuum left when Arthurian story is at its lowest ebb. In France Anthony Hamilton had introduced into his Contes a magician who at least has the name of Merlin, though he shows few of Merlin's traditional characteristics ; and the eighteenth century chap- books (assigned conjecturally to 1750), which deal with the exploits of Tom Thumb, Jack the Giant- killer, and the like, choose by preference the age of Arthur as the period of their narratives. Thus one begins — " When good King Arthur he did reign With all his knights about him, Tom Thumb he then did entertain, He could not be without him." And in another the reminiscences are more explicit — "In Arthur's court Tom Thumb did live, A man of mickle might, Who was the best of the Table Round And eke a worthy knight. . . . Thus he at tilts and tournaments Was entertained so That all the rest of Arthur's knights Did him much pleasure show, 1 66 ARTHURIAN STOR Y And good Sir Lancelot du Lake, Sir Tristram and Sir Guy ; Yet none compared to brave Tom Thumb In acts of cavalry." Probably for many of us, the first introduction to the pathetic figure of the legendary king was contained in some such lines as these. And it might be maintained that there was no other kind of com- position in the first half of the eighteenth century so fit to embalm his memory. It was the opinion of the soundest and most discriminating critic of that generation and one of the greatest in the whole history of English letters, that Arthurian romance was produced in the childhood of the people, and was fit only for the entertainment of children. " Nations like individuals," says Dr. John- son in his introduction to Shakespeare (1764), " have their infancy " ; and he proceeds : " What- ever is remote from common appearances is always welcome to vulgar, as to childish credulity ; and of a country unenlightened by learning, the whole people is vulgar. The study of those who then aspired to plebeian learning was laid out upon ad- ventures, giants, dragons, and enchantments. The Death of Arthur was the favourite volume." It was thus the deliberate verdict of the most competent authority that such themes were unworthy of the attention of educated adults. They were dismissed to the purveyors for juvenile amusement. But per- haps they were better off than if they had been handled by the professional poets of the day. Bouterwek, speaking of the Frenchwomen who adopted the fashion of writing fairy tales, remarks, RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 167 " Those ladies had at least the feeling for true poetry, while the men who expressed sensible but prosaic thoughts and ideas in well-turned verses, had but a feeble conception of the essential charac- teristics of poetic invention." 1 It would be ob- viously incorrect to apply these words without modification to the condition of things in Britain. On the one hand, our fairy-tale writers were not nearly so good, and, on the other, our poets by vocation were considerably better. Still there is point in the view that finds as much charm in these unpretending favourites of the nursery as in the more ambitious efforts of a poetry that might be witty, correct, sententious, with many other ad- mirable qualities besides, but that somehow, save in one or two of its less typical representatives, had missed the one thing needful and failed to be poetical. Thus King Arthur was laid up in the humble Avilion of juvenile fiction, the best he could find, till he should be healed of the grievous wound that the rationalism of the period had dealt him, and return once more to gladden the hearts of his Britons. Time, however, wore on, and as the fashions of the eighteenth century began to wane, it became possible to find an audience for less doubtful remini- ^'Jene Damen trugen wenigstens die Anlage zur wahren Poesie in sich, wahrend die Manner, die verniinftige aber pro- saische Gedanken und Einfalle in zierlichen Versen schrieben, von den wesentlichen Grundzligen einer poetischen Erfindung nur eine schwache Ahnung hatten." — Geschichte der franzos- ischen Poesie und Beredsamkeit, 3 tes Buch, 3 tes Capitel. 1 68 ARTHURIAN STOR Y scences of Arthurian lore. The appearance of Macpherson (i 760-1 763) and of Chatterton (1764- 1770), and the attention they excited, showed at least that the taste was reviving for the spontaneous, the medieval, the Celtic, in the national storehouse of song ; and Percy's Reliques of English Poetry (1765) secured a dole of interest for the stories of King Arthur. Of course, it was only in the ballads, not in the prose of Malory or the verse of earlier romance, that he was thus introduced into the circles of elegant readers. But there was as great a difference between the ballad of a contemporary chap-book and the ballad exhumed from the strata of the past, as there is between some existing forms of life and the mighty remains of their fossil congeners. It was not, however, the unsophisti- cated ballad that Bishop Percy offered to his public. That would in many cases have been too much for the taste of the day. Just as Macpherson's rhetoric affected a society that would have found small pleasure in the unvarnished Irish tales, just as Chat- terton's forgeries excited a sensation when the genuine Chaucer was taken with the utmost cool- ness, so Percy had to exercise some " economy of truth " in seasoning the old materials to the liking of his company and himself. But at any rate the tide had turned, and a few years more would see it in full flow. In 1764, Evans' Specimens of the Ancient Welsh Bards also appeared and won the attention of Thomas Gray, whose poem of The Bard was already composed and who was always inter- ested in literary origins. This collection of Evans introduced the series of translations from Welsh RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 169 and Breton antiquities that was afterwards to be of such importance, and that, especially through the various versions of Villemarque, and even more through the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest, has left an ineffaceable mark on European poetry. Meanwhile, though the formal Illumination was now, perhaps, at its height in France, the reaction was already setting in with much more violence than in England. The three chief works of Rous- seau (La nouvelle Heloise, 1760; the Contrat Social, 1762 ; Emile, 1764) belong to the same lustre that Percy's Reliques brings to a close. Rousseau's protest was doubtless lodged in the in- terest of a return to nature, and Paul et Virginie is its most direct expression in fiction other than his own. But return to nature involved a rehabili- tation of the fancy, and therefore of the fantastic compositions of the Middle Ages. The tendency in this direction did not, it is true, last very long or reach very far. The impulse to the medieval was stunted by the impulse to the primitive, and the Revolution intervened to choke it altogether. Only long afterwards did the Romantic movement proper begin in France, on suggestions that were derived from Teutonic and English rather than from the native literature. At the same time, from the beginning of the seventh decade of the eighteenth century there is for some ten or twelve years a distinct leaning towards the fictions of chivalry, and this to some extent precedes and affects the corresponding fashion among the Germans and ourselves. Towards the end of this period comes Le Grand d'Aussy, whose verse selections had consider- I/O ARTHURIAN STORY able vogue even in England, and were translated by Way under the auspices of the " amiable and elegant " George Ellis, who did something similar for the earlier literature of his own country. But the movement was initiated by a more important and more interesting figure, Count Louis-Elisabeth de la Vergne de Tressan. 1 Born in 1705, and bred under the Regency, he escaped the baser influences of the time and learned from it only its gaiety and grace. He treated orthodox literary fashions with light, respectful indifference, and was willing to call Cinna and Polyeucte wonderful creations, if he were not obliged to read them. On the other hand, old romance was a delight to him in early manhood, and during a visit to Italy in 1732 he escaped from dissipations which he disliked, to spend his days among the Knights of the Round Table. In his own nature there was something of kindred chivalry, which he displayed conspicuously on the field of Fontenoy as well as in private life. But with it all, he was a child of the time, the friend of Voltaire, a scientific amateur, a follower of the Encyclopaedists. Such was the man who in his old age began a series of adaptations from medieval romance, which enjoyed the greatest popularity, and had very important results. The time was well chosen. In certain circles there was a revulsion from previous license, and the tales of Crebillon were losing their charm : the opportunity was come for a renovation of old 1 The substance of the next few sentences is derived chiefly from the chapter on Tressan in Haureau's Histoire UtUrairt du Maine, vol. 4. RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 17 1 romance. Not that what Tressan purveyed was of a very genuine character. He neither used nor knew the more ancient texts, and confined himself to the prose versions of a later day. Why should he not ? " He did not aim at reproducing literary monuments, but at accommodating to the taste of the time the chivalrous legends of the Middle Ages." This, the peculiar mixture in the nature of the man well enabled him to do. As soldier of Fontenoy he felt the inspiration of knightly honour ; as academician and friend of Voltaire he could not but write with elegance and ease. Sometimes his simplicity is a little falsetto ; " Tressan's style was naif as the garb and bearing of a shepherdess in the opera." But this tinge of mannered artless- ness in the diction just suits with the sentimental recast of the romances, and the romances them- selves are sweetened to the palates of a public whose ancestors used to find pleasure in Clelie. Perhaps the saccharine decoction of Tristram's story is the one that shows Tressan's mode of work most amusingly. Tristram and Isolt journey to Joyous Guard through a veritable " Pays de Tendre," and the mighty harper shows himself an adept in verses of gallantry — " La purete" du jour, le calme de l'air, le chant des oiseaux, l'email d'une prairie qu'ils traversaient, invitant l'ame a se repandre, Tristan chanta ce triolet : " Avec Yseult et les amours, Ah, que je fais un doux voyage ! Heureux qui peut vivre toujours Avec Yseult et les amours ! Elle est maitresse de mes jours, Pres d'elle ils sont tous sans nuage. 172 ARTHURIAN STORY Avec Yseult et les amours, Ah, que je fais un doux voyage ! " It is not Tristram alone who suffers from expansion of soul. Even the truculent Palamedes only utters the " lepidum et urbanum," and becomes quite plaintive when he takes leave of his rival : — " Heureux Tristran, je vous quitte ! Vos vertus, votre generosite vous rendent digne de votre sort : puisse-je bientot finir le mien dans les combats ! Puisse ma mort etre honoree des larmes d'Yseult et des votres ! Regrettez-moi tous deux comme celui qui vous aima le plus tendrement." Even the tragic loves of the Arthurian heroes and heroines become quite a la mode in Tressan's pages. When talking of the intercourse between Joyous Guard and Camelot, he says with obvious self-restraint/! " Nous ne voulons point parler de quelques soupers secrets qu'il y eut entre la belle Genievre, Lancelot, et ces deux amans : et quels delicieux soupers ! " We believe him when he con- cludes that in the end the relations between Tristram and Isolt had ceased to be matter of offence, and had become blamelessly platonic ; " Ce que ces deux personnes sentaient encore l'une pour l'autre, n'etait plus qu'une tendre amitie." l It was from this French literature of adaptations and selections that the stimulus was transmitted to Germany where the great poetical period was just commencing. And naturally it was Christoph Martin Wieland in whose mind it found the best conducting medium. Among the many peculiarities 1 Bibliotheque universelle des dames, Romans, vols, ix., x , xi. RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 173 of his strange and multiple nature, none is more strongly marked than his hankering at once for enlightenment and romance, for a by-gone setting to contemporary doctrine ; and these versions of Arthurian story were bound to have for him a double charm. Twice he was drawn to make use of them himself, first in 1 77 1 for his Summers Tale, The Mule without the Bridle, and again in 1778 for his Giron the Noble / both of which in the annals of minor poetry occupy a tolerably distinguished place. Arthurian story is always a little unsubstantial, and is apt to withdraw itself alike from humorous and emotional treatment. But Wieland manages to vivify the first of his poems with more polite persiflage than his French authorities, and the second with at least as strong a dash of sentiment ; and in both he tells his tale with dexterity and grace, keeping the reader's attention fixed from start to finish. The Mule without the Bridle begins by describing the very idyllic mood of Arthur and his household on a fair summer morning. " They stood with open breast Inhaling free, But lightly dressed, The air, perfumed with balm, Of morning calm ; And found It sweet to see Around How twig and twig were lying 1 Sommermarchen, des Maulthiers Zaum and Gei'on der Adelige. 174 ARTHURIAN STORY Bent down with flowers, And these went flying With every breath in showers : — Those were good times when people at the court, Dear reader, found in such like things their sport." l The appearance of a maiden riding an unbridled mule, her request that the bridle should be recovered for her, the failure of the seneschal and success of Sir Gawain in the task, which involves the encounter of many oppositions of magic and the suppression of many natural desires and fears, are described very pleasantly ; and especially the portion that treats of Sir Gawain's experiences in the enchanted castle is enlivened with a good deal of gay worldly wif, In the second, Giron the Courteous is rightly rechristened Giron the Noble, for the episode of his passion for his friend's wife, his noble self-restraint, and equally noble remorse for a momentary slip that has no bad result, is freed from its cumbrous trappings and is recounted 1 " Sie standen da und sogen Mit offner Brust, Halb angezogen, Den frischen Balsamduft Der Morgenluft, Und fahn So ihre Lust Daran, Wie Zweig und Zweig gebogen, Voll Bliithen hing, Und wie sie flogen So oft ein Liiftchen ging : Da war noch gute Zeit, ihr liebe Leute, Da man bei Hofe sich an so was freute." RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION 1 75 in peculiar unrhymed verse that is sometimes a little heavy, but is not without its charm. Even here, however, Wieland finds an opportunity for his satiric vein. Giron's story is placed in the time not of Arthur but of Uther, and is narrated at Arthur's court, with some shrewd girds at the change of view as regards a friend's w T ife, by aged Branor, who was once Giron's companion in arms. Neither of these poems is very long, and neither, despite the interest they both possess, can be classed among Wieland's most individual productions. His nature was romantic but hardly chivalrous, and the Arthurian adventures are too much permeated with the spirit of chivalry to lend themselves to a treat- ment like his. He is at his best in Oberon, where, like Boiardo or Ariosto, he takes a theme from the more accommodating cycle of Charlemagne, and steeps it in his irony, his susceptibility, his love of the wonderful, till the dust of ages is washed off, and it is redolent of his own time and mind. Mean- while it is noteworthy to find him making use of Arthurian subjects at all, for in those days so little was known in Germany of the Round Table that he refers his readers for further information to the Sieur de la Colombiere's Vray Theatre d'Honneur et de Chevalerie, in which, be it remarked, they would not find very much. Scholars, however, had been working in the rediscovered field, and ampler materials were becoming available. In our own country Dr. Thomas Warton in especial had discussed the origin of Arthurian romance in the dissertation prefixed 176 ARTHURIAN STORY to his History of English Poetry (vol. i., 1774), as well as some separate romances in the body of the work. The disposition was to insist on the dis- tinction between the Arthur of history and the Arthur of legend. And, indeed, this inspired Warton with a poem on the Grave of King Arthur ( l 777)i which, despite its conventional ornaments, is one of the best that he ever wrote. He tells how King Henry II., on his way to Ireland, was enter- tained at Pembroke with the effusions of the bards. The battle of Camlan is the subject of their lays, and one, after singing of Arthur's fall, proceeds ; " Yet in vain a Paynim foe Arm'd with fate the mighty blow ; For when he fell, an elfin queen, All in secret and unseen, O'er the fainting hero threw Her mantle of ambrosial blue ; And bade her spirits bear him far In Merlin's agate-axled car To her green isle's enamelled steep, Far in the navel of the deep. O'er his wounds she sprinkled dew From flowers that in Arabia grew ; On a rich enchanted bed She pillowed his majestic head ; O'er his brow, with whispers bland, Thrice she waved an opiate wand, And to soft music's airy sound Her magic curtains closed around." Scarce has the singer ended the description of Arthur's present state and the prophecy of his future return, when another bard strikes in ; — RESTORATION TO FRENCH REVOLUTION iff " When Arthur bowed his haughty crest, No princess, veiled in azure vest, Snatched him, by Merlin's potent spell, In groves of golden bliss to dwell, Where, crowned with wreaths of mistletoe, Slaughtered kings in glory go. But when he fell, with winged speed His champions, on a milk-white steed, From the battle's hurricane Bore him to Joseph's tower'd fane In the fair Vale of Avalon. There, with chanted orison And the long blaze of tapers clear, The stoled fathers met the bier. Through the dim aisles, in order dread Of martial woe, the chief they led And deep entombed in holy ground Before the altar's solemn bound." There the king may still find the body ; which Henry, losing all thought of Ireland, in reverent homage to the past, at once resolves to do. Here the difference of the bards merely repeats the distinction between history and romance common among the Elizabethans, and adopted by Selden in his notes to Drayton's Polyolbion. Indeed, Warton may have got his suggestion from a passage in that poem, and the accompanying note which cites in evidence the Chronicle of Glastonbury. But while in the seventeenth century, as we have seen, romance was postponed to history, it is now the turn of history to be postponed to romance. Warton, as rhetorical poet, may seem still to give the preference to what has the air of positive fact, but Warton as literary critic strikes another note — a note which was more in tune with the romantic movement that M 178 ARTHURIAN STORY was presently to begin. In talking of La Mort Arthure, he complains 1 that "English literature and English poetry suffer when so many pieces of this kind remain concealed and forgotten in our manu- script libraries"; and, after indicating their import- ance, he censures former times for preferring to them " uninteresting history," and overlooking or rejecting these " valuable remains which they de- spised as false and frivolous." When Arthurian story is recognised to be fiction, and yet has its dignity and worth acknowledged, a new period in its development is come. 1 History of English Poetry, vol. i., section 5. CHAPTER III THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL T^HE whirligig of time had thus brought in his revenges, and Arthurian romances were rein- stated in a position of interest and honour. And as the leaven of things new and old worked in the literary revival of the day, it came more and more to be seen not only that they claimed a scholarly veneration in their bygone forms, but that they were rich in suggestions for the imagination of the present. They awoke the enthusiasm of the rustic genius, 'John Leyden (1775-1811), whose twin gifts for poetry and for research, never, alas ! to mature to perfect fulness, admirably qualified him to feel the inspiration of such legendary themes. The verses of his Scenes of Infancy, published in 1803, are mere poetical splinters of his many-sided activity, that perhaps might never have been gathered from his workshop but for the pressure of pecuniary need. But how bold and lofty a tone the memories of Arthur and his fate breathe into these celebrations of the scenery and folklore of Leyden's native border-land ! l 1 Poetical Works of John Leyden, 1875. 1 80 ARTHURIAN STOR Y " Such strains the harp of haunted Merlin threw, When from his dreams the mountain sprites withdrew While trembling to the wires that warbled still, His apple-blossoms waved along the hill. Hark, how the mountain echoes still retain The memory of the prophet's boding strain ! ' Once more begirt with many a martial peer Victorious Arthur shall his standard rear, In ancient 1 pomp his mailed bands display While nations wondering mark their strange array, Their proud commanding port, their giant form, The spirit's stride that treads the northern storm. Where fate invites them to the dread repast, Dark Cheviot's eagles swarm on every blast ; On Camlan bursts the sword's impatient roar, The war-horse wades with champing hoof in gore, The scythed car on grating axle rings ; Broad o'er the field the ravens join their wings, Above the champions in the fateful hour Floats the black standard of the evil power." But Leyden, with all his poetical verve, was still more a scholar and a linguist ; he wanted the repose, the self-control, the sense of form that are necessary for sustained creation ; and, with a recognition of his limitations, not too frequent in such dual natures, he left an enterprise he foreshadowed to a mightier inspiration than his own. " Say, who is he, with summons strong and high, Shall bid the charmed sleep of ages fly ; Roll the long sound through Eildon's caverns vast, While each dark warrior rouses 2 at the blast ; The horn, the falchion grasp with mighty hand, And peal proud Arthur's march from Fairyland ? 1 Some editions read " aged." 2 Some editions read " kindles." THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL l8l Where every coal-black courser paws the green, His printed step shall ever more be seen : The silver shields in moony splendour shine. — Beware, fond youth ! a mightier hand than thine. With deathless lustre in romantic lay Shall Rymour's fate and Arthur's fame display. Scott ! with whom in youth's serenest prime 1 wove with careless hand the fairy rhyme, Bade chivalry's barbaric pomp return And heroes wake from every mouldering urn ! Thy powerful verse to grace the courtly hall Shall many a tale of elder time recall, The deeds of knights, the loves of dames proclaim, And give forgotten bards their former fame ! " This appeal to Sir Walter Scott was not mis- placed and was not unheeded. Scott's medievalism was a master passion in his nature, that made him rejoice at once in its broadest dramatic effects and its minutest antiquarian details. The labours of scholars for three generations have doubtless made it possible to correct and supplement his recon- struction of the past even as a picturesque pre- sentment of the times with which he dealt ; but precisely this is the condemnation of critics who talk disparagingly of his attainments in this domain. For he more than any other single man created the interest that has led to further researches, and even as researcher he achieved proportionally more than most of those who lift up the heel against him. He not only had a large vision of the field of inquiry that has since been parcelled out to a crowd of day labourers, but with relatively scanty materials and defective apparatus he obtained re- sults on which later specialists have built. It was 182 ARTHURIAN STORY inevitable that such a man should feel the power of the Arthurian romances in which so much of the medieval spirit had found its peculiar shrine. It was inevitable that he should do something to enlighten Europe as to their salient characteristics, and treat them not from a modern point of view or in vague generality, but with keen appreciation of their specific colour. We have seen how his allusion in M amnion to the later literary history of the stories just hits the mark ; and that passage is only one among many of sympathetic recogni- tion that are scattered up and down his writings. Nor does he confine himself to references. In 1805 he edited the old metrical romance of Sir Tristrem, and, since the manuscript was defective, he supplied the final episode himself with the delicate tact that springs from love. Of course, nowadays there is more known about historical accidence and metric than was within the reach of Scott ; but despite some slips, his stanzas have not the air of being interpolated ; they are quite of a piece with the rest of the poem. " Ysonde of Britanye With the white honde, The schip sche can see Seyling to londe, The white seyl tho marked sche ; 'Yonder cometh Ysonde For to reve fro me Miin fals husbonde : Ich sware For il tho it schal be That sche her hider bare. THE ROMANTIC RE VIVAL 1 8 3 "To Tristrem sche gan hye O bed thare * he layne : 'Tristrem, so mot ich thye, 2 Heled schalt thou bene : Thi schippe I can espye, The sothe for to sain ; Ganhardin is comen neighe To curen thi paine A plight.' "What seyl doth thare nain, Dame, for God almight ? " Sche weneth to be awrake 3 Of Tristrem, the trewe ; Sche seyth, 'Thai ben blake, As piche is thare hewe.' Tristrem threw hym bake, Trowed I sonde untrewe, His kind herte it brake And sindred in tuo ; Above Cristes merci him take, He dyed for true love "When Ysonde herd that, Fast sche gan to gonne, At the castle gate Stop hir might none ; Sche passed in thereat, The chaumbre sche won ; Tristrem in cloth of stat Lay stretched thare, as ston So cold. Ysonde looked him on And fast gan biholde. " Fairer ladye ere Did Britannye never spye Swich murning chere 1 Where. 2 Prosper. 3 Avenged. 1 84 ARTHURIAN STORY Making on heighe. On Tristremes bere Down con sche lye : Rise ogayn did she nere But thare con sche dye For woe. Swich lovers als thei Never schal be moe." It was much to edit and complete an old fragment so interesting and typical as Sir Tristrem, but Scott did more. He sought in Arthurian story for original inspiration, and once the grand old legend passes into the framework of one of his rhymed romances. In 1 8 1 3 he published anonymously his Bridal of Triermain or The Vale of St. fohn, which tells how the young baron, daring the dangers and resisting the enticements of the elder magic, wins for his bride Gyneth, the daughter of King Arthur and the fay Guendolen, who for ages has been awaiting her deliverer in the fairy castle. And the tale of the aged Lyulph, which tells of the birth of Gyneth, and first explains to Triermain the nature of his task, occupies a large portion of the whole poem and introduces us once more to the feats and persons of the Round Table. On leaving the enchantress Guendolen, Arthur has sworn on behalf of their child ; "A summer-day in lists shall strive My knights, — the bravest knights alive, — And he, the best and bravest tried, Shall Arthur's daughter claim for bride." 1 Fifteen years have elapsed, years during which Arthur has vanquished the Saxons, the Pictish 1 Bridal of Trier main^ Canto II. vii. THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 185 Gillimore, the Roman Lucius, and has made his court the centre of succour to the weak and of glory to the brave, when Gyneth appears to claim from him the performance of his vow. Fired by her beauty and by her dowry, the knights of the Round Table forget the ladies of their love and prepare to do battle for her hand, " The champions, arm'd in martial sort, Have throng'd into the list, And but three knights of Arthur's court Are from the tourney miss'd. And still these lovers' fame survives For faith so constant shown, — There were two who loved their neighbours' wives, And one who loved his own. The first was Lancelot de Lac, The second Tristrem bold, The third was valiant Carodac, Who won the cup of gold, What time, of all King Arthur's crew (Thereof came jeer and laugh), He, as the mate of lady true, Alone the cup could quaff. 1 Soon the knights warm to the work, and Arthur seeks in vain to dissuade Gyneth from claiming the literal fulfilment of his pledge, as they change the mimic contest to one of cruel earnest, and strike each other dead. " Seem'd in this dismal hour, that Fate Would Camlan's ruin antedate, And spare dark Mordred's crime ; Already gasping on the ground Lie twenty of the Table Round, Of chivalry the prime. 1 Bridal of Triermain, Canto II. xviii. 1 86 ARTHURIAN STOR Y Arthur, in anguish, tore away From head and beard his tresses gray, And she, proud Gyneth, felt dismay, And quaked with ruth and fear ; But still she deem'd her Mother's shade Hung o'er the tumult, and forbade The sign that had the slaughter staid, And chid the rising tear. Then Brunor, Taulas, Mador fell, Helias the white, and Lionel, And many a champion more ; Rochemont and Dinadam are down, And Ferrand of the Forest Brown Lies gasping in his gore. l At last, Vanoc, a youth of Merlin's race, is slain ; and the wizard, rising from the ground in whirl- wind and earthquake, stops the carnage and pro- nounces sentence of doom on her who has caused it : she shall sleep a magic sleep in the Valley of St. John till she be awakened by a knight as famous as any of the Table Round. This knight is Triermain, the hero of the larger poem. But even in view of this production, the wonder is that Scott should have done, not so much but so little, with the Arthurian stories. The Bridal of Triermain was published anonymously, and Scott contrived to suggest that his friend Erskine was the author, nor has popular opinion ever equalled it with the best of his acknowledged efforts in verse. Moreover, the Bridal is not so much an Arthurian poem as a poem that contains an Arthurian episode. And even that episode is less an elaboration of the traditional material than a ^Bridal of Triermain, Canto II. xxv. THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 1 87 loose appendage. Though many of the old names and much of the old mechanism are retained, the story of Gyneth is a free invention, of which there is not a hint in old romance, except in so far as she represents the Unknown Lady, who appears in some of the loveliest tales. There was, however, no reason why there should not be a " restoration " of Arthurian story executed on the same lines that Scott had observed in his addition, and, in point of fact, two attempts in this direction were made by his friend and follower Reginald Heber. Heber (born in 1783) was already as a boy drawn to tales of knighthood and errantry. Spenser's Faerie Queene was his favourite reading at school, and he held the attention of his companions fixed when he " narrated some chivalrous history or re- peated some ancient ballad," or told some similar tale half from memory and half from imagination. Such themes were congenial to his nature. An in- cident of his school days, which his biographer notes as characteristic, was a fight, in which, though worsted, he fought manfully, for the purpose, as he said, of showing his opponent " that tyranny should not be practised upon him with impunity." At the univer- sity his poetical abilities won him academic distinc- tion, and his piety the esteem of his intimates. After the then considerable adventure of a journey in Russia, he married and settled down in a quiet parish to pastoral work, theological study, and poetical composition. But he was not allowed to remain in seclusion. Summoned to the bishopric of Calcutta, he obeyed the mandate in a spirit of chivalrous self- I o* ARTHURIA N STOR Y consecration, and devoted himself to the apostolic discharge of his new duties till his death in 1826. 1 As poet, Heber was possessed of a true but not very keen and not very copious inspiration. The well-known story tells how Scott, to whom he read his prize-poem on Palestine, observed that in his verses on Solomon's temple, " one striking cir- cumstance had escaped him, namely, that no tools were used in its erection," and how Heber, after a brief consideration, returned with the best lines in the piece — " No hammer fell, no ponderous axes rung ; Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung." 2 The anecdote, if it shows Heber's swiftness in re- sponding to a hint, shows also his need of receiving a hint for one of the most characteristic traits in his subject. All his religious and missionary enthusiasm was required to quicken his cultured imagination into efficacy, and probably a few hymns like " From Greenland's Icy Mountains " will do most to keep his memory fresh in the history of letters. Such an inspiration was not given to him for his romantic poems. They were undertaken, ere he found his true sphere, only for pastime and re- laxation, and at least one of them as a relief from the burden of theological controversy. "The streams of divinity," he writes in 18 12, "are nothing less {i.e. anything rather) than Hippocrene ; and 1 Life of R. Heber, by his wife (1830); also Heber, Notice biooraphique et litte'raire, par. L. Audiat (1859). 2 Lockhart's Life of Scott, chapter iii. THE ROMANTIC RE VIVA L 1 89 till I have rinced my mouth with Morte Arthur, I hardly look to be my own man again." The fragment to which he refers bears witness to the circumstances of its origin. The grander and profounder possibilities of Arthurian story are left unimproved. Heber was drawn to it, as Scott had been in Triermain, for its romantic colouring ; not, so far as can be judged from the three cantos that he completed, for its tragic and still less for its mystical and symbolic qualities. We are treated to a full diet of enchantments and quests, of magic rings and enchanted swords, which, though assuredly they are justified by the authority of the elder versions, Heber seems to retain rather because of their natural fitness for a " roman d'aventures." As might be expected of one who had loved the Faerie Queene from his early years, there are traces of Spenserian influence in his work, which is written in the Spenserian stanza. Heber leaves the allegory alone and keeps far closer to the medieval framework than Spenser, but, like Spenser, he was attracted by the marvels and errantry of Arthurian story, not by the quintes- sence of its spirit. In accordance with those easier tendencies, perhaps also with the clerical leanings of the author, the darker and more criminal aspects of the tradition are omitted or toned down. Modred is one of the persons, but though cruel and vindictive, he is no treacherous dastard but a bold and ambitious warrior ; and he has to avenge on Arthur the death of his father and his own disappointment at losing Guinevere. For the story of his origin and the story of Guinevere's guilt are 190 ARTHURIAN STORY completely altered. Arthur, the great stern king, is freed from the imputation of unlawful passion : Modred is the son of Morgan the Fay and one of Arthur's early enemies who has been slain for his u unpermitted love." Lancelot's connection with Guinevere (or Ganora as she is called in agree- ment with one of the traditional forms of her name) was probably to be retained, but an excuse is found for both. She was not known as a great king's daughter, but as a. country maid, when Lancelot disguised as a forester obtained her love. Only the caprice of fate kept them apart, till she feared that her lover " despised the village flower," and when Arthur stoops to " cull that flower " she becomes his queen in injured pride. When she learns the truth she does not yield at once to any guilty longing ; " holier thoughts possess her " and she " clings to the cross with Magdalen em- brace." We are to understand that it is the wiles of Morgan, " once Albion's princess, now an elfin gray," that produce all the entanglement and woe. On the death of her lover Morgan threw herself from a cliff, but the winds bore her up and she heard a chorus of spirit voices proclaim, " With fays, thy- self a fay, come wander evermore ! " and henceforth she devotes her new powers and changed existence to the ruin of Arthur and the advancement of her son. Such is Heber's Morte Arthur, in which Malory's Morte Darthur seems to undergo a trans- formation like that which overtakes Morgan, and becomes little more than an elfin tale of glamour and enchantment. As a poem it never perhaps rises very high, but as a romantic fairy fantasia THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 191 on well-known names and themes, it is not with- out its merits, and we may regret that it was not completed. Here for instance are the stanzas that describe the advent of Morgan at Ganora's wed- ding-feast in the guise of a hunted hind that claims the Queen's protection. She is pursued by her " rival of the watery bower," the Lady of the Lake, who, with Merlin, would fain guard Arthur from harm ; and, but for Ganora's pity in saving the enchantress, none of the predicted evils would ensue. " (Then) in that sober light and sadness still Arose a maddening hubbub hoarse and rude, Like hunters on the brow of dewy hill And panting deer by nearer hounds pursued : And a cold shudder thrilled the multitude, As, at the breath of that mysterious horn, Each with inquiring gaze his neighbour viewed, For never peal on woodland echoes borne So ghastly and so shrill, awoke the spangled morn. " And through the portal arch that opened wide (How came she or from whence no thought could tell), The wedding-guests with fearful wonder eyed A hind of loveliest mould, whose snowy fell Was dyed, alas ! with dolorous vermeill ; For down her ruffled flank the current red From many a wound issued in fatal well, As staggering faint, with feeble haste she sped, And on Ganora's lap reclined her piteous head. " With claws of molten brass and eyes of flame, A grisly troop of hell-hounds thronging near, And, on her foaming steed, a damsel came, — A damsel fair to see, whose maiden cheer But ill beseemed the ruthless hunting spear, I9 2 ARTHURIAN STORY Whose golden locks in silken net were twined And pure as heaving snow her bosom dear ; Yet ceased she not her dreadful horn to wind, And strained a quivering dart for fatal use designed." x Along with the unfinished Morte Arthur, Heber has left a piece, entitled the Masque of Guendolen, a Frag7nent, though it is not strictly a masque but a drama, and seems fairly complete as it stands. Here he has combined the ballad of Sir Gawain's marriage with the history of Merlin, and worked up the materials into a picturesque and agreeable play. It opens with the spirits of the elements offering their nuptial gifts to Guendolen, a mortal maid, to whom Merlin has taught a portion of his wisdom, and whom he now requires to be his bride. But she, knowing his art " for most unholy," refuses him her love, and in despair bids him rather " scathe this fatal form " that has won her his unwelcome favour. He takes her at her word and dooms her to a degrading disfigurement that shall last till she be wedded by " a youth of royal race." Smitten with leprosy, she sees the wild beasts of the wood flee from her in fright, and when she would drown her sorrows in the flood, she recoils from the horror of her reflected image : only the fairies go about to comfort her distress. Soon, however, we learn from them that her persecutor is no more : — " She of the lake, his elfin paramour, Jealous of his late wanderings, in a tomb Enclosed the struggling wizard. Nine long nights Within the rock the fairies heard him moan ; The tenth was silence." 1 Heber 3 s Poetical Works, 1841. THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 193 It is now for her to use the wisdom she has learned of him ; her opportunity has come. Arthur in his wrath has condemned Llewellin, a Prince of Wales, to death for contumacy, unless Gawain discover what it is " that women mostly crave " : he repents his hasty sentence, but he cannot escape from his word. Guendolen, however, taught in Merlin's lore, though one would think there needed no revelation from below to tell her the secret, teaches Gawain that women like best to have their will, and receives his promise of marriage in return. The reluctant but honourable fulfilment of his pledge, till at last he bestows the transfiguring kiss, brings the bright little drama to a close. This is the less pretentious and probably the more successful of Heber's two fragments. For the Morte Arthur, he is entitled to the credit, and it is great, of having been the first in these latter days who seriously treated the Round Table and the death of Arthur as subject for an heroic poem. But though with happy inspiration he seized on the prerogative portion of the story, he hardly rose to the height of his own great argument. He does not see the text for the flourishes and marginal illuminations ; he is more taken up with the fur- niture and haberdashery of Arthurian romance than with its deeper significance. In the Masque of Guendolen this does not greatly matter, for the story of the Loathly Lady exists in independent form, and is possibly enough neither an integral part nor an early acquisition of the legend of Arthur. But it is otherwise when the grand catastrophe of the table is the theme. Doubtless this might be a fiction 194 ARTHURIAN STORY void of historic truth, which had to stand or fall according to its imaginative worth ; but that did not mean that a modern adapter had an unlimited right to recast it, so long as he preserved in some measure the romantic mise en scene. Even as fiction, it had received a certain typical bent that could not be thwarted or even ignored without violence to the indwelling spirit. To the lover of the elder romances there is something impertinent about Heber's whole procedure, however natural and necessary it may have been to a romantic poet of that day. It rouses the same kind of recalcitrance that is felt when well-known historic characters are distorted in novel or drama. The truth seems to be, that with all the medieval- ism and romanticism of Scott and his school, there was more interest in the facts and the externals than in the ideal and the spirit. Thackeray talks of the " good-humoured pageant" which Scott's tales of chivalry present ; and pageantry seems the right description of them in contrast with the deep, true life of his Scottish sketches. But this preference for the outer facts as opposed to the inner meaning of the Middle Ages, explains both the comparative neglect and the autocratic treatment of the Arthur- ian Romances. They embodied the aspiration, but hardly the actualities, of feudal life, and chose the scenes and persons for their poetic fabrications from the tradition of a remoter past ; but that tra- dition was otherwise completely transformed, and the manners of Arthur and his knights were represented not as primitive and British, but as chivalrous and artificial. Thus, in a certain sense, this whole litera- THE 'ROMANTIC REVIVAL 1 95 ture was not medieval and was not antique and was not of any date at all ; in its seclusion from the methods of the annalist and the gazetteer, it could be regarded as offering so much raw material for a romancer like Heber, but as useless for the purposes of the historical novelist or poet. It could not help to reconstruct a plausible picture of posi- tive things and real doings either in the twelfth century or in the sixth ; and such a plausible recon- struction was always the object of Scott when he treated of by-gone times. Taken, however, merely as a romance, Arthur- ian story received a cordial, if not a very sym- pathetic, treatment almost contemporaneously in France. Baron Auguste Creuze de Lesser (1771- 1837), who by birth belonged to the old nobility, had so far accepted the Napoleonic regime as to take the first steps to a diplomatic career ; but he offended the Emperor with the free comments which his Journey in Italy contained, and withdrew into private life. After the restoration he held in- fluential posts under the Government, in some of which his behaviour was a little arbitrary, but he could not be persuaded to retain or accept office under the " citizen king." Thus, De Lesser ap- pears as an aristocrat and legitimist with all the courage of his opinions, and it was natural that his mind should recur to the feudal ages and the fictions they had produced. He composed three bulky volumes of romance dealing respectively with the stories of Amadis, of Arthur, and of Charlemagne which he afterwards collected under the common title of La Chevalerie. In his Arthurian compila- 196 ARTHURIAN STORY tion he shows a respectable acquaintance not only with the prose, but with the verse romances, at least with the poems of Chrestien, and thus by his knowledge as well as by his prejudices would seem well qualified to do justice to his task. On the other hand, like so many of the French nobility of that day, his equipment of ideas was obtained chiefly from the arsenal of Voltaire. He was partly at- tracted to his subject because it afforded him oppor- tunity for a sometimes witty, but almost always frivolous cynicism ; and of its poetic beauty, quite apart from its spiritual depth, he had not the faint- est appreciation. The stock incidents of romance stir his mirth. When Meliadus crosses one of the slender bridges that are among the favourite con- trivances of romantic engineering, to De Lesser it suggests only comic associations. " Sur cette planche avouons qu'un hdros Avait un peu l'air d'un danseur de corde." 1 There is justice in his gibe at the extraordinary habit, which brought Arthur and his fellows into so many difficulties, of granting a boon before they knew what it was to be ; and his remark on the contrary practice of moderns has not yet lost its point. " Du bon vieux temps j'aime le souvenir, Toutefois je ne saurais pas admettre Cette fureur qu'on avait de promettre Sans que l'on sut ce qu'il faudrait tenir. Ce mal n'est plus ; de nos jours, par avance, On sait toujours fort bien ce qu'on promet, 1 Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, ix. THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 1 97 Et meme encor plus d'un esprit bien fait Ne le tient pas, par exces de prudence." 1 Sometimes, however, De Lesser condescends to al- together unworthy jests, for instance, on the un- familiar names of the knights. Dinadan, unhorsed by Sagramor or Sacremor, recognises his antagonist, and indignantly exclaims, " Sacremor ! Sacremor ! " " ' Eh, mon ami ! mon dieu, comme tu jures ! ' Lui dit Tristan, ■ Sais-tu que c'est fort mal ? ' — ' Moi je redis le nom de mon rival ; Ah, Sacremor ! ' II faut etre sincere ; Qui dit ce nom, a l'air d'etre en colere." a But naturally the story of the Holy Grail is most alien to the nature of such a man, and it has suffered the most impudent disfigurement at his hand, disfigurement that one resents the more as this is certainly the most amusing part of the book, and it is hard to restrain the smile that surprises one's righteous indignation. Conditions are at- tached to its acquisition and ownership that the knights find very burdensome, even w T hile they aspire to the glory of attaining it. The Fisher King willingly cedes it to Percivale ; — " Je l'avoue, a sa possession Je ne tiens guere, et, si je le respecte, Je l'aime peu." 3 Percivale indeed prays that it may for ever be his, but when he finds that by his prayers, and still more by those of his squire, the possession is irre- vocably assured to him, and becomes aware of all that it involves, he is far from satisfied : — Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, vii. 2 Ibid. xiv. 3 Ibid. xvii. 198 ARTHURIAN STORY " Ce chevalier regarde avec fureur, Le St. Gre*al, tresor qui le mine." 1 There is not much to be said for a writer, however entertaining and clever he may otherwise be, who substitutes for the spiritual rapture of attainment a wrathful longing for the worldly life that this attain- ment forbids. De Lesser professes to imitate the treatment which Ariosto employed in the romances of Charlemagne, but that is presumptuous as regards himself and unfair as regards his exemplar. In the first place, the Carolingian stories lend themselves much more naturally to ironical development than the stories of Arthur ; and, secondly, though irony is the dominant, it is by no means the exclusive note struck by the great Italian. He has many of the highest poetical qualities as well, which show themselves in the creation of noble characters like that of the maiden warrior, Bradamante, in stirring narrative and luxuriant description, in individual turns of forcible phrase. Of all these, Creuze de Lesser possessed nothing. The merits of his Table Ronde^ though it is described as an epic in twenty books, are so exclusively due to a malicious but not unpleasant vein of satire, that the metrical form seems a decided mistake. " C'est beaucoup de vers," says an apologist in what is intended to be a lauda- tory notice, " mais les siens, moins bons que bien d'autres, ont du moins le merite du naturel, et se lisent presque comme de la prose? 2 1 Les Chevaliers de la Table Roude, xvii. 2 Sarrut et St. Edme, Biographie des homines du jour. Paris,, 1835-42. THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 199 But unfrocked of its historic claims, regarded merely as a romance among romances, and not yet accepted for its deeper import, Arthurian story was still entitled to more respectful treatment than this. And it might seem to have another chance of revival with Robert Southey, poet and man of letters. His interest in such literature was as indubitable as his knowledge of it was extensive, and to him, moreover, the compilation of Malory was endeared by early associations. " When I was a school-boy," he writes, " I possessed a wretchedly imperfect copy, but there was no book except the Fairy Queen which I perused so often or with such deep contentment." 1 But Southey, as he grew up, became more, or shall we say, less critical- His opinions, moral and aesthetic, were too decorous and orderly to admit of his seeing the rather irregulous matiere de Bretagne with the inward glance of love. Romance he liked, and romance he would have, but romance in which the narrative was unperplexed and the proprieties were observed. In both respects the stories of the Round Table leave much to be desired. Of their structure he remarks that nothing could be " more unartificial," and proceeds : " Adventure produces adventure in infinite series, not like a tree whose boughs and branches, bearing a necessary relation and due proportion to each other, combine into one beautiful form, but resembling such plants as the prickly pear, where one joint grows upon another, all equal in size and alike in shape, and the whole making a formless and misshapen mass." 2 And 1 Introduction to Malory's Morte cT Arthur. 2 Introduction to Malory's Morte d' Arthur. 200 A R THURIA N S TOR Y elsewhere he talks with disgust of stories in which we find " one romance growing out of another as clumsily as a young oyster upon the back of its parent." 1 But if the construction of the Arthurian stories shocked his well-regulated mind, he was still more offended with their morality. He (quite rightly) censures Addison for his idealised descrip- tion of it, and only admits that it was perhaps the best these benighted ages had to show. His own attitude he makes sufficiently clear when he stig- matises as " vile" in the tale of Tristram the thought " of producing by a philtre that love upon which the whole history turns." 2 From these atrocities he escapes to the fictions that took their typical form in the Spanish Peninsula, and eulogises them to his heart's content. " Amadis," he says (of which he remarks elsewhere that it is " not the oldest of its kind, but the best" 3 ), " was the first romance in which the female character was made respectable." 4 And contrasting his favourite with the offenders of the British cycle, he sums up : " The skill with which his (Lobeira's) fable is constructed is not less ad- mirable than the beauty of the incidents and the distinctness with which the characters are conceived and delineated. Amadis infinitely surpasses every earlier romance in all these points." There is enough truth in this statement to make it intel- ligible, not enough to make it acceptable, after the lapse of three quarters of a century. But Southey 1 Introduction to Amadis of Gaul. 2 Introduction to Malory's Morte d y Arthur. 3 Introduction to Amadis of Gaul. 4 Introduction to Malory's Morte d 'Arthur. THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 201 had the courage of his opinions, and while he executed an excellent translation and abridgment of Amadis, he sanctioned without revision a very unsatisfactory edition of Malory} But Arthur had still another opportunity with Southey, in so far as the hero was remembered in the traditions of Wales ; for Southey took a real and lively concern in whatever was connected with mythology, folklore, and legend. And when he was looking about for materials for his Madoc (published in 1805), he was very "warm," to use the phrase of the children's game. But, probably, Celtic story also was too chaotic and too crude for him. He could neither find a satisfactory moral in its daring escapades nor bring into focus its shifting and nebulous masses. He was more attracted by the fables of a Welsh discovery of America and the fiction of a conversion of Mexico by the Cambrian Pilgrim Fathers than by the grand features of Arthurian story. The latter appears only incidentally in his ponderous bi-une epic, the most noticeable passage occurring as episode in the lay of a bard ; — " In his crystal ark Whither sailed Merlin with his band of bards ? Old Merlin, master of the mystic lore ? — Belike his crystal ark, instinct with life, 1 Criticisms, like curses and chickens, come home to roost. Southey, in his version of Palmerin of England, says of his predecessor Munday that he " sold his name to the booksellers." It is curious to find his successor, Dr. Sommer, saying of Southey's edition of Malory that he "gave his name to a bookseller's speculation."— Sommer's Malory, vol. ii. 202 ARTHURIAN STORY Obedient to the mighty master, reached The land of the departed. There belike They in the clime of immortality, Themselves immortal, drink the gales of bliss Which o'er Flathinnis breathe eternal spring ; Blending whatever odours make the gale Of evening sweet, whatever melody Charms the wood-traveller. In their high-roofed halls, There with the chiefs of other days, feel they The mingled joy pervade them ? Or beneath The mid-sea waters did that crystal ark Down to the secret depths of ocean plunge Its fated crew ? Dwell they in coral bowers With mermaid loves, teaching their paramours The songs that stir the sea, or make the winds Hush, and the waves be still ? In fields of joy Have they their home, where central fires maintain Perpetual summer, where one emerald light Through the green element for ever flows ? n 1 Those Welsh stories, however, which Southey employs only for scanty allusions, might well be more thoroughly exploited by a bolder and less conventional mind. Indeed, in a certain sense, they were better fitted than the romances to please the instincts of that day, in so far at least as they seemed to possess more local and historical colour- ing. A certain inclination to retain or invent a geographical position in Britain for the tales they narrate may be observed in all the writers that have been discussed. Leyden thinks of Arthur's resting-place as a cavern of Eildon, Scott situates the castle of Gyneth in the Vale of St. John, Heber makes Ganora grow up in " Derwent's mountain solitudes," Southey recalls the withdrawal 1 Modoc, Part I. THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 203 of Merlin to the Island of the Bards. All like to find a local habitation for their persons, which modern topographers would recognise ; and in this respect the versions of French manufacture were less satisfactory than Welsh tradition and the Chronicles to which it was supposed to have given rise. And just in the same way this British re- pertory might be imagined to contain reminiscences,, wanting in the other, of the actual condition of things that prevailed at the time to which Arthur, if his- torical at all, would have to be assigned. Alto- gether, then, these sources promised more than the romances for such a reconstruction of the past as the age preferred. No doubt the promise was very far from fulfilling itself. A slight examination of the material was bound to show that the ore was refractory to such methods, and would yield only a small residuum of plausible history. The effort might afford plenty of scope to scholarship and invention, and result in descriptions with some peculiar and characteristic, though not exactly local, colour ; but instead of furnishing an actual picture of bygone times, it could, even if a labour of love, be only an exercise of consciously satiric wit. And this being so, there was no reason why Welsh an- tiquities should not be supplemented by Welsh fantasies, or why conjectural history of doubtful value should not be amplified with acknowledged fable that had the grand credential of unfailing charm. It was in this spirit that Thomas Love Peacock (178 5- 1866) undertook the task, and pre- sented the Arthur story to the public in a guise it has never worn before or since. Peacock, a scholar <#. 204 ARTHURIAN STORY of the old school, was in some ways a heretic in regard to the age in which he lived, and treated it, its theories, its great men, with polite ridicule in a series of brilliant and ironical tales, beginning with Headlong Hall, that have their nearest analogues in some of the witty French Contes of the eighteenth century. \ He generally chose as his setting the higher society of contemporary England, but this did not give full opportunity for a vein of delicate imagination that was as characteristic of the man as his satire ; and in his Maid Marian he escapes to the more poetic atmosphere of Sherwood Forest, where perhaps his genius forfeits a little of its pungency. But in one of his stories he finds a vehicle for all his powers of sarcasm and all his grace of fancy, with a good deal of his scholarship as well : this is his Misfortunes of Elphin, which was published in 1829. Peacock, who had married a Welsh lady and had a great love for the Prin- cipality, saw some of the beauties of Welsh liter- ature at a time when these were not so generally acknowledged as they are at present ; and one object of his little book, as we are told by his grand-daughter, was to " introduce translations of Welsh poems and triads " l of ancient days. The plot he combines chiefly from the story of Taliessin, the probably mythic bard of Wales, and the abduc- tion of Guinevere by Melvas as told in the Life of St. Gildas ; and he ingeniously works into this framework his very considerable, if not very criti- cal, knowledge of British antiquities derived from 1 Biographical notice by Edith Nichols ; prefixed to his works, 3 vols. (1875). THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 205 both Welsh and classical sources. There is an un- deniable flavour of antiquarian research in his de- scriptions of the weirs of Elphin, the splendour of Caer Lleon, the general arrangements of so- ciety, that is in piquant contrast with his free use of popular legend and with the incredulous and bantering tone of the comment. For he makes no attempt to produce an illusion of the imagination : on the contrary, the skill with which he has dovetailed into their places the minutiae of his Cymric lore is a little obscured by his gracefully fantastic ornamentation and his running fire of flouts at the shibboleths of modern philosophy and politics. Thus Melvas maintains the ethics of might as right in a burlesque of self-destruc- tive sophistry that is all the more amusing when we remember the primitive and indeed mythical character of the speaker. To the argument, urged sociably over the wine-cup, that his wrongful detention of Gwenyvar will lead to the triumph of the Saxons, he answers with reference to his own case and these spoilers : " They have a right to do fill they do and to have all they have. If we can drive them out, they will then have no right here. Have not you and I a right to this good wine, which seems to trip very merrily over your ghostly palate ? I got it by seizing a good ship, and throwing the crew overboard, just to remove them out of the way, because they were troublesome. They disputed my right, but I taught them better. I taught them a great moral lesson, though they had not much time to profit by it. If they had had the might to throw me overboard, 206 A R THURIAN STOR Y I should not have troubled myself about their right, any more, or at any rate, any longer, than they did about mine." 1 So, too, Seithenyn ap Seithyn Saidi, the third of " the three immortal drunkards of the island of Britain," who has charge of the dyke that keeps out the sea from Gwaelod, and lets the wall fall into decay while he is busy with "" wine from the gold," is made to deliver a shrewd political gird. Prince Elphin and a subordinate on a tour of inspection are received by the reveller with the salutation, " You are welcome all four." Elphin answered, " We thank you ; we are but two." " Two or four," said Seithenyn, " all is one." 2 And when Elphin represents that the dyke is in a state of dangerous decay, the answer is a parody on a famous speech of Canning's against reform. " c Decay,' said Seithenyn, ' is one thing, and danger is another. Everything that is old must decay. That the em- bankment is old, I am free to confess : that it is somewhat rotten in parts, I will not altogether deny; that it is any the worse for that, I do most sturdily gainsay. It does its business well : it works well : it keeps out the water from the land, and it lets in the wine upon the High Commission of Embankment. Cupbearer, fill. Our ancestors were wiser than we : they built it in their wisdom ; and, if we should be so rash as to try to mend it, we should only mar it.' " ' The stonework,' said Teithrin, ' is sapped and mined : the piles are rotten, broken, and dislocated : the floodgates and sluices are leaky and creaky.' " ' That is the beauty of it,' said Seithenyn, ' some parts of it are rotten, and some parts of it are sound.' " ' It is well,' said Elphin, ' that some parts are sound : it were better that all were so.' 1 Misfortunes of Elphin, Chapter xiv. 2 Ibid. Chapter ii. THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 207 " ' So I have heard some people say before,' said Seithenyn ; \ perverse people, blind to venerable antiquity : that very un- amiable sort of people, who are in the habit of indulging their reason. But I say, the parts that are rotten give elasticity to those that are sound : they give them elasticity, elasticity, elas- ticity. If it were all sound, it would break by its own obstinate stiffness : the soundness is checked by the rottenness, and the stiffness is balanced by the elasticity. There is nothing so dangerous as innovation. See the waves in the equinoctial storms, dashing and clashing, roaring and pouring, spattering and battering, rattling and battling against it. I would not be so presumptuous as to say, I could build anything that would stand against them half an hour ; and here this immortal old work, which God forbid the finger of modern mason should bring into jeopardy, this immortal work has stood for centuries, and will stand for centuries more, if we let it alone. It is well : it works well : let well alone. Cupbearer, fill. It was half- rotten when I was born, and that is a conclusive reason why it should be three parts rotten when I die.' " Of course the Misfortunes of Elphin is very slenderly Arthurian— one feels inclined to say that the real hero is Seithenyn. Of course also Peacock had abandoned the more richly cultivated soil when he turned from romance to the antiquities and legends of Wales. But at least he had done one thing which might be an example to graver continuators of Arthurian story. He had shown that it was possible to treat the tradition in a modern spirit, and yet retain for it the ancient stage. And he did this with admirable delicacy and tact. His irony never becomes burlesque, and he is too much in love with his sources to think of handling them rudely. Later writers, as we shall see, sometimes try to give the old stories a jocular treatment, and cutting capers on the grave of the past, only make 208 ARTHURIAN STORY themselves and their subjects ridiculous. Peacock, with his satire and grace, really succeeds in raising a composite fabric of infinite charm, half modern, half primitive, in style. Doubtless, as his method was ironical, his task was comparatively simple, for a complete fusion of the new and the old was neither necessary nor desirable in such a work : incongruities were down in the bill. Doubtless too it was easier to awaken interest in the Cambrian setting than to freshen up interest in the familiar contrivances of medieval fiction. Still, what he had done half in jest for Celtic tradition, might be done in imaginative earnest for the romances of chivalry; they might be impregnated with new meaning for a new day, and utilised piously but freely for new re- quirements. This was the spirit in which Tennyson composed the Idylls ; but twelve years before the appearance of the Morte d' Arthur, and three years before the appearance of the Lady of Shalott y Wordsworth already held the clue. Only one entire poem, which is not among his most characteristic, and was composed when he was sixty years old, has Wordsworth dedicated to an Arthur- ian theme. The wonder is that he should have felt its power at all. His heart was with the infinities that lurk in common life, and mirror themselves in the sights and sounds of nature. From the very outset he disclaims for himself all share in the marvels of romance. In the prologue to Peter Bell, written in 1798, he draws up his own pro- gramme ; — " Long have I loved what I behold, The night that calms, the day that cheers ; THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 20g The common growth of mother-earth Suffices me — her tears, her mirth, Her humblest mirth and tears. " The dragon's wing, the magic ring, I shall not covet for my dower, If I along that lowly way With sympathetic heart may stray, And with a soul of power. " These given, what more need I desire To stir, to soothe, to elevate ? What nobler marvels than the mind May in lief s daily prospect find, May find or there create?" Yet he could at least use for illustration the machinery that he disowned, even in his early days of extremer naturalism, just as Milton used it for illustration in his later days of extremer puritanism. Since the famous similitude in the Paradise Regained for the attendant spirits at the banquet in the desert, there is nothing in literature that shows so intimate a feeling for the essence of romantic poetry as a famous similitude of Wordsworth's, which resembles the other also in its classical alternative. In the fourth of the Poems on the Naming of Places (writ- ten in 1 800) he tells how he, with Coleridge and his sister, " Paused, one now, And now the other, to point out, perchance To pluck, some flower or water-weed, too fair Either to be divided from the place On which it grew, or to be left alone To its own beauty. Many such there are, Fair ferns and flowers, and chiefly that tall fern, So stately, of the queen Osmunda named ; Plant lovelier, in its own retired abode O 210 ARTHURIAN STORY On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance." Indeed, beneath the surface of Wordsworth's naturalism, which it often penetrates with a magic charm, there lurked a strange wistfulness for roman- j tic themes. Already at Cambridge it made him hail as " brother" the poet of the Faerie Queene — " Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven, With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace." 1 In the Prelude (begun in 1799 and completed in 1805) it betrays him into honest enthusiasm for the adventurous, which contrasts oddly with the dis- claimer of Peter Bell. " Oh ! give us once again the wishing-cap Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood, And Sabra in the forest with St. George ! " 2 Such impulses were carefully restrained, especially in the earlier poems, so that they seldom find direct expression ; and in this Wordsworth shows himself wise in the knowledge of his true strength. His sympathies with romance winged him for his own career ; they were hardly strong or steady enough to make him a great romantic poet. But they were not to be controlled without a struggle. At intervals they rose to claim the chief place, and lead him within their circle from his determined path. " Sometimes the ambitious Power of choice, mistaking Proud spring-tide swellings for a regular sea, Will settle on some British theme, some old Romantic tale by Milton left unsung; * Prelude, BookV. THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 211 More often turning to some gentle place Within the groves of Chivalry, I pipe To shepherd swains, or, seated harp in hand, Amid reposing knights by a river side Or fountain, listen to the grave reports Of dire enchantments faced and overcome By the strong mind, and tales of warlike feats, Where spear encountered spear, and sword with sword Fought, as if conscious of the blazonry That the shield bore, so glorious was the strife ; Whence inspiration for a song that winds Through ever-changing scenes of votive quest, Wrongs to redress, harmonious tribute paid To patient courage and unblemished truth, To firm devotion, zeal unquenchable, And Christian meekness hallowing faithful loves." x The spring-tide swellings subsided, but the attraction grew. Wordsworth never forsook the true sun of his inspiration for any lesser light, but as the years advanced he suffered himself more and more to pause among the pale splendours of ancient fable. In I 8 I 5 he turned in "affectionate respect for the memory of Milton," to Geoffrey of Monmouth, and his " British record (long concealed In old Armorica, whose secret springs No Gothic conqueror ever drank)." The " particular flower " he transplants from this " ample field of old tradition" is the story of Artegal and Elidure ; but he passes in review its more famous stores — " There, too, we read of Spenser's fairy themes, And those that Milton loved in youthful years ; The sage enchanter Merlin's subtle schemes ; The feats of Arthur and his knightly peers ; : Prelude, Book I. 212 ARTHURIAN STORY Of Arthur, — who, to upper light restored, With that terrific sword Which yet he brandishes for future war, Shall lift his country's fame above the polar star.'' And these memories are still with him when, in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821), he recounts "the struggle of the Britons against the Barbarians." " Amazement runs before the towering casque Of Arthur, bearing through the stormy field The Virgin sculptured on his Christian shield." In passages like these Wordsworth draws rather from the history than from the romance, but it is from history on its romantic side. To his inde- pendent poem of the Egyptian Maid he gives the alternative title, The Romance of the Water Lily and in this instance it is a romance pure and simple on which he leans. Of the romantic spirit he has a glimpse true and clear, but his notice of such themes is due not to their antiquarian picturesque- ness, but to their ethical connection or content. Thus his Egyptian Maid is, in the first place, an allegory of the power of purity and an invention of his own ; as he says, the names and persons are derived from Arthurian story, " but for the rest the author is answerable." In the second place, how- ever, there breathes through some of the strange stanzas more of the old romantic feeling than can be traced in many professed imitations. This is especially true of the passage that tells how the knights approach in turn to waken the maiden from her sleep. " Abashed, Sir Dinas turned away ; Even for Sir Percival was no disclosure : THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL 213 Though he, devoutest of all Champions, ere He reached that ebon car, the bier Whereon diffused like snow the Damsel lay, Full thrice had crossed himself in meek composure." Gawain in his " high expectancy," Tristram " dis- encumbered of his harp," Lancelot, craving a sign, " tired slave of vain contrition," touch the corpse in vain, till at last Galahad draws near. " Now, while his bright-haired front he bowed, And stood, far-kenned by mantle furred with ermine, As o'er the insensate Body hung The enrapt, the beautiful, the young, Belief sank deep into the crowd That he the solemn issue would determine. " Nor deem it strange ; the youth had worn That very mantle on a day of glory, The day when he achieved that matchless feat, The marvel of the Perilous Seat, Which whosoe'r approached of strength was shorn, Though King or Knight the most renowned in story." This poem, written in 1830, was published in 1835. Two years earlier The Lady of Shalott had appeared. The connection between the two is more than chronological. Both have the same feeling for old romance while freely varying its material ; both breathe into it a deeper significance that belongs to the new time ; both are half lyric in their treatment, and tell their mystic tale in verse of strange and subtle structure. Tennyson may be said to begin where Wordsworth leaves off, but before proceeding to his achievement it will be well to notice the work of some of his con- temporaries at home and abroad. CHAPTER IV TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ON THE CONTINENT A MONG the ingredients of the medieval cycle of Arthur few were more daring and enig- matic than the story of Merlin. The almost blasphemous fiction of his origin, that he was con- ceived by the power of the Evil One and born of a maiden, to undo as Antichrist the work of Christ on earth ; the reversal of the diabolic counsels and his election to prepare the way for the return of the Sangreal ; the ambiguity that nevertheless clings to his work and character, so that the order he has founded is broken on the quest he has ordained, while he himself after many dubious feats, lies bespelled in the toils of his own magic ; all these form a complex, that exacts yet defeats an imaginative solution. Merlin is literally a Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, his double nature seems an epitome of all humanity ; like Faust, he might exclaim, "Two souls, alas! inhabit in my breast," 1 and his story like Faust's affects the heart with the power of a religious myth. x "Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach ! in meiner Brust." — Scene, Vor dem Thor. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 21 5 It is therefore only natural that at the date we have reached, when Goethe had completed, or all but completed, his great nineteenth century mystery, and when his influence was practically unchallenged on the minds of men, a mythic material of this kind should be rescued from oblivion and new- modelled, like the story-book of Dr. Faustus, as the mutations of time required. There was, in- deed, a difference between the two cases. Goethe's was the grand original deed, and a work under- taken in imitation or rivalry, just because so under- taken, would lack the epoch-making importance of the great example ; it would be the work of those who follow and do not set the fashions. And, again, Goethe was supported by a genuine national tradition, for the puppet-plays of Dr. Faust had kept the legend in living growth ; while, though the name of Merlin as arch-enchanter survived, the continuity of his story had suffered many a breach. Thus those who took him as their hero would have both less spontaneous inspiration of their own and less of the inspiration of popular imagination. The subject would be .apt to lay hold of men who with great aspirations had a certain amount of culture, and who were consciously on the look-out for a theme which might serve by its strangeness and unfamiliarity to give an impressive vastitude to their work. A feeling of its greatness, a dim sense of a meaning that it must possess, would lure them to the task. It would seem fit^to gratify their yearning to say deep things and give them the chance of posing as thinkers and poets — a role that was made popular by the treatment of art in 2l6 ARTHURIAN STORY German philosophy and by the example of Goethe in his principal work. To the man with a share of genius who would fain write as though he had more, the story of Merlin was a godsend. And such men, when put on their mettle, as happens when the theme is a noble one, often produce work that is of high historical and even literary interest. The present is a case in point. The subject of Merlin occurred almost simul- taneously to two distinguished writers, to Edgar Quinet (1803-1875) in France, and to Karl Leberecht Immermann (1796- 1 840) in Germany, and their works were and are among the most notable that British legend has evoked in modern times. They may be assigned to the year 1830, for by that date Quinet, according to his own statement, had already worked out the plan of his Merlin VEnchanteur, though it was not finished till i860; and Immermann's Merlin, Eine My the, appeared in 1832. ■ " My subject," says Quinet, " is the legend of the human soul till death and beyond." Merlin is sprung from Satan and Seraphina, the rebel and the saint, the principles of alienation from and of community with the Deity. He begins life with aspirations after the divine that give him his magical powers ; " my runes," he says, " are written in my heart " : he is able to see the invisible, and Viviane, the ideal of life, is revealed to him in the beauty of the earth. In his first enthusiasm he founds Paris to be the seat of civilisation and culture, and he sets over it Arthur, the King of the Just. Seized with TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 2\J the thirst of knowledge he starts on his travels, visiting the abode of eternal ideas where he revels in the future creations of art, venturing down into the realm of negations and presenting himself to his father in Hell. He makes friends with Jacques Bonhomme, the type of the French populace ; falls foul of the mercantile spirit in England ; and beats with his own weapons Faust, the genius of the Teutonic race. It is given him to found the Round Table, at which kings and peoples may feast, and the Holy Grail appears. Meanwhile, amidst these experiences, he has parted from Viviane and forfeited the gift of seeing the invisible. He sets out to rediscover his lost love, and, after many misfortunes, comes to the Emperor Lucius in Rome ; passes on to the outworn culture of Greece, where the gods have become dwarfs and are transformed to fairies ; and thence to the community of Prester John, where all religions are recognised and where Merlin worships the unknown God. Returning to France he enters on a time of disillusion, when he loses his powers of enchant- ment, hitherto retained in his worst distresses, and fears that his passion for Viviane has been a dream. And all around him are signs of collapse. The nations are disenchanted, and Arthur, slowly dying of an invisible wound, sinks into a death- like sleep. Merlin, rejected and depressed, unable any longer to prophesy, withdraws from men and becomes a comrade of the wolves ; fit Silvester homo. In his desolation, when he seeks solace in the Bible, he finds that everywhere the name of God has 218 ARTHURIAN STORY been erased ; he tries to restore it, but he has forgotten the word, and writes Nature instead of Jehovah. Yet in his oblivion and childishness there is comfort, for now Viviane returns. " So long," she told him, " as thou knowest things which I do not know, I shall feel myself divided from thee by worlds of magic." But now the time of separation is past, and feeling that they are to- gether, untroubled by all the world, the wizard falls asleep on her lap. " When she had made sure that he was dreaming of love, she rose gently, took her long veil and covered with it the branch under which the enchanter lay. Nine times she stepped round the circle she had traced ; nine times she repeated the magic words which he had taught her ; then she returned within the circuit, sat down again upon the flowers, and replaced the head of her beloved on her throbbing breast." l Thus she encloses him in his tomb ; but as he in his wisdom and knowledge of things had lost the fellowship and guidance of the ideal, so, in the ideal world of the grave, he sees all things in their place, and more than the old harmony is restored. He is blessed in his union with Vivi- ane— that is the first and best — and it is the be- ginning and centre of much other joy. His tomb extends invisibly into all kingdoms of the earth, and his voice goes out to the comfort of men. Nay, the realm of evil falls into nothingness : Hell is destroyed, and his father Satan is seen as part of the divinely ordered scheme. This fantasia may be described as a kind of 1 Merlin V Enchanteur, xxi. 2. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 219 Gallic Faust, and it was probably composed in more or less conscious emulation of Goethe. Quinet asks, with a touch of jealousy, why the French should be considered no longer capable of the larger inventions they produced in the times gone by. 1 His task is the development of what he considers a native legend, " qui plonge dans nos premieres origines " ; and he has a patriotic satisfaction in confronting the magician of the Celts with the magician of the Teutons, to the disadvantage of the latter. But rivalry is a kind of discipleship, and many of Quinet's changes and additions are sug- gested by the example of Goethe. Thus he sends his hero on his travels, much as Faust in the second part is transported to Hellas; and the change of denotement, of which perhaps he found a hint in Villemarque's Contes Populaires, so that Merlin gains his crowning bliss in the confinement of his tomb, is parallel with the ultimate salvation of Faust. Above all, the treatment of the principle of evil is very similar in the two stories. Mephistopheles is " Part of that power, That always wills the ill and does the good." 2 The self-contradictory spirit of denial, he helps Faust to win his own wager ; and in the second part, as cheat turned dupe, is the butt of general ridicule. The Satan of Quinet is the same spirit of negation, but is conceived in the ideal world as attaining 1 Merlin PEnchanteur, Introduction. 2 " Ein Theil von jener Kraft Die stets das Bose will, und stets das Gute schafft." 1st of the Scenes ; Im Studirzimmer. 220 ARTHURIAN STORY knowledge of his own function and transcending his dream of independence, in other words, as being at last reclaimed. Thus he can be regarded without hatred and almost without awe ; at a very early stage he becomes a humorous figure, and the comedy of which he is hero is perhaps the most original and successful part of the book. When Merlin visits him, he welcomes him as the "enfant prodigue." 1 He justifies his attempted seizure of Merlin's mother on domestic grounds ; " Lors meme qu'il y aurait quel- que incompatibility, tout doit ceder a l'interet des enfants": and when his marital instincts are thwarted he laments, " II ne me restera que le foyer desert." It is his hatred of even the semblance of devotion that brings about his conversion, the antagonism of defiant for subservient devilry. He complains that his subordinates have lost their truculence — " Nul n'a plus le courage de porter ses forfaits. Les miserables ! ils les nient ! ils sont devenus hypocrites, ils pratiquent, mon cher ! Je ne fais plus un pas dans cet enfer grimacier, degenere, sans entendre leurs oremus, car eux aussi parlent Latin. Ils ont appris a se frapper la poitrine, s'agenouiller, psalmodier ; ils obligent le serpent d'entonner le Gloria. Que sais-je? Ils sont devenus cent fois plus devots, plus patelins, qu'on ne Test dans le del." 2 He is ready to abdicate, and cites the conduct of Sulla and Diocletian in precedent : " Voila des examples dont je puis m'autoriser. . . . Moi aussi, je cultiverais en paix mon jardin de Salone, je vivrais ici de mes laitues." 3 These movements of penitence ripen to the act, and he retires to the 1 Merlin PEnckanteur, iii. 5. 2 Ibid, xxiii. 2. 3 Ibid, xxiii. 3. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 221 establishment of Prester John. He never indeed became an ideal of virtue, of abnegation, of sanctity, but he got to be more amenable in that philo- sophic brotherhood. " At all events," he says, " they make me a part here. It is true they don't occupy themselves much about my existence, but at least they don't dispute it. Have I ever asked anything more ? " * All this is very diverting but not very possible. Quinet might with advantage have re- membered some words which Satan speaks when Merlin urges him to a reconciliation : " Me demen- tir ! Moi ! Confesser que je me suis trompe ! Ce qui nous reste a nous autres demons, c'est le caractere. Ote-nous cela y nous ne sommes plus rien." 2 In this bantering description of the evil power, though its humour is undeniable, there is something of exaggeration and excess. Quinet, endeavouring to improve on Goethe, misses his severe self-restraint, and blurs the picture. The same thing appears in his whole treatment of the legend, to which he was far less faithful than was Goethe to the traditional Faust. In one passage he says of Merlin, " II creusait trop ce qu'il faut effleurer." We may say of him, " II effleurait trop ce qu'il faut creuser." He so alters and enlarges the story that it is no longer to be recognised, and he hardly gets to the idea of it. This is not his own opinion. He notes occa- sional coincidences between his independent inven- tions and elder romance, of which he was unaware when he wrote ; and this unintentional parallelism proves to him that he writes " dans l'esprit intime de la legende." 3 It also proves that he had gone 1 Merlin V Enchanteur, xxiii. 4. 2 Ibid, xxiii. 2. 3 Ibid. Note 1. 222 ARTHURIAN STORY about his composition somewhat at a venture and with a rather vague knowledge of the authorities. He could not indeed avail himself of the labours of Paulin Paris, who began only in 1868 to pub- lish his Romans de la Table Ronde, but he seems to have drawn but scantily on the resources at his disposal. He keeps the traditional story of Merlin's birth, and probably takes several important hints from Villemarque's genial interpretations of Breton song ; but more than this he does not seem to have done. This would be a small matter, except to the historians of the legend, if Quinet's own idea were adequate to the creation of a new myth. But this is not the case. It is neither very consistently nor very economically developed. And though Quinet flattered himself that he was working " dans l'esprit intime de la legende," it really seems smothered under incongruous accretions, and these accretions themselves are too often piled up without unity and without cohesion. He had made these additions, indeed, in conscious accordance with a far-reaching aim. "Corralier toutes les legendes en les ramenant a une seule, trouver dans le coeur humain le lien intime de toutes les traditions popu- lates et nationales, les enchainer en une meme action sereine, relier entre eux les mondes discord- ants que l'imagination des peuples a enchantes, c'est la ce que j'ai ose entreprendre." It was a grandiose scheme, but it may be doubted if the story of Merlin is the fit receptacle for matter so vast and various, and it cannot be doubted that Quinet's genius was unequal to the task of blending it to a harmonious whole. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 223 Immermann also makes Merlin the centre of a work, which is not exactly encyclopaedic, but in which various other stories are cursorily utilised in the development of the main theme. He pro- ceeds, however, with more deference to tradition and is less ambitious in his aims. On the whole he respects the limits of the medieval cycle of Arthur, only passing beyond, on the suggestion of the Grail, to the allied legend of Lohengrin. And he is far from undertaking so large an enterprise as the story of the soul till and after death. Hegel died in 1 831, Goethe in 1832, and Immermann's Merlin appeared at the latter date. It belongs to a time when the demigods had passed, or were pass- ing ; three years later Immermann was to write his satiric novel, Die Epigonen, and he himself is, in some sort, a citizen of the epigonous world he describes. The calm and security that characterise both the great thinker and the great poet were lost, a breath of dejection seems to pass over Germany, a sense of failure and the sentimental pang of Weltschmerz. A few years before this time Goethe had said to Eckermann of the Romantic school, " The poets all write as though they were sick, and the world were in hospital : true poetry should equip man to endure the battle of life." x It was among the writers whom Goethe criticised that Immermann made his preliminary studies ; and though he was of too sound and earnest a nature to remain a permanent member of their ranks, he worked his 1 " Die Poeten schreiben alle, als waren sie krank, und die Welt im Lazareth : die echte Poesie soil den Menschen ausriisten den Kampf des Lebens zu bestehen." 224 ARTHURIAN STORY way only by degrees, and chiefly by the help of satire, to a freer and healthier point of view. His Mystery of Merlin is one of his transition pieces. It is the tragedy of high aims and aspiring intellect breaking themselves on the inscrutable purpose of the divine ; but though it speaks the language of despair, it ends with a sigh of faith. The key to this strange poetic parable is more easily found in the character of Satan than in the character of Merlin. The evil power is no more absolute with Immermann than with Goethe or Quinet, but is conceived in a very different way. Satan is emphatically the Time-spirit, the principle of the phenomenal universe. He is therefore re- presented, in accordance with some Alexandrian theories, as the mighty demiurge who has created the world and is its immediate prince. But this is translated into the conceptions of contemporary thought. He is not only patron of the fulness of heathen art and life, and type of the glories and riches of the earth ; he stands, in opposition to the liberty of the spirit and the free workings of grace, as representative of the iron causation that obtains in the physical world : he names him- self Fate, the Lord of the Must. But since this necessity is viewed as the necessity of law, he is further conceived as the intelligible element in things ; and with him is contrasted the spontaneous power of the divine, secret and undiscoverable, surpassing the possibilities of knowledge and mock- ing the petty measurements of reason. It is the revelation of this unfathomable power among men as the Christ, and the resignation and asceticism TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 225 of the new faith, which threaten the glories of Satan's universe, and drive him to beget Merlin as Antichrist, to make good for him his claims to the earth. But his hopes are deceived. As the letter of a book receives its meaning from the reader, so the seed of Satan wins his soul from his mother's grace ; and Merlin is his father's child in knowledge but his mother's in meek- ness and prayer. He refuses to obey the Satanic mandate ; for in virtue of his vision, demonic yet devout, he perceives the dependent place that the world-spirit holds. No doubt the demiurge has his dominion, but it is not uncon- trolled ; and when most he thinks himself creative and supreme, he is but repeating separately in time and " doling from needy hand" the things that exist together and eternally in God. And the coming of Christ is not the destruction of the world in time, but its consummation as a world in spirit. " If it is the annihilation of thy world thou dreadest," says Merlin to his father, " because when thou hadst done with it, He took it gently in his arms, and breathed on the lips of the glorious bride the kiss called Christ, know, almighty yet mistaken spirit, that now first does it live and will never fade." 1 It 1 " Wenn dir vor deiner Welt Vernichtung graut, Weil Er, als du damit zu Stand gekommen, Sie zartlich in den Arm genommen, Und auf die Lippen der geschmiickten Braut Den Kuss gehauchet, welcher Christus heisst, So wiss', allmachtiger, und doch befangner Geist : Nun lebt sie erst und vvelket nie !" Scene — Am Grabe der Mutter. p 226 ARTHURIAN STORY is with this conviction of the rational connection and harmony of all that is, that Merlin views his own work. He deems himself elected to draw down the most sacred mysteries within the range of all man- kind, and to transfer the keeping of the Grail from its recluse guardians to Arthur and his knights. He incites them to their task, and promises to bring them to their goal. But he reckons without his host. He has meted out the Eternal by the Phe- nomenal, and has thought that the principles which prevail in his father's kingdom of nature, apply also in the divine kingdom of grace. But they differ as an intelligible system from an inscrutable mystery. Lohengrin, the aimless vagrant, is welcomed to the Temple of the Grail, above the doors of which are the words — " My law is what is righteous in my sight, Ye seek me all for nought ; The wanderer who finds my shrine aright, Him have I sought." 1 And scarcely has Lohengrin arrived, than the Grail flees afar from the threat of Merlin's enterprise, which is branded as the sacrilege of Antichrist. It is doomed by the Highest. Arthur and his knights, who have set out on the quest, die in the desert of hunger and weariness and thirst, their eyes un- gladdened by any vision of the holy thing. And 1 " Ich habe mich nach eignem Recht gegnindet, Vergebens sucht ihr mich. Der Wanderer der meinen Tempel findet, Den suchte ich." Scene — Montsalvatsch. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 227 Merlin cannot help them, for in him there is no help. Not in weakness, nor in wantonness, but in love, he has told his secret to Niniana, and now lies by the white-thorn in passionate despair, thinking himself prisoned by strong walls and chains, and hearing the agonised cries of the friends he is power- less to aid. Years have gone by, when Satan again stands before him and frees him from the spell, and, showing him what he has done, again demands his service. His sin has been in seeking to comprehend the divine ; or, have he and Arthur otherwise trans- gressed ? " No," answers Merlin, " my soul was a single breath of longing that rolled straight up to Him like the smoke of a pure sacrifice." 1 And he apostrophises his perished friends, " I brought you like a vase of rich-hued flowers and fruits to be laid on the altar in glad oblation. Why, my Beloved, didst Thou despise them ? " " It seems then, by His acts," returns Satan, " that He ties Himself to no laws, and moves exalted, dark, and solitary, above all human hope and feeling ; so let Him be worshipped in dread and silence, but with me there can be more human intercourse. I have this advantage over Him that you can understand me. ... Be mine, deny Him and believe in me." But Merlin answers, " No," and to Satan's threats opposes the steadfast temper of the man of Uz — " Though He slay me, yet will I trust 1 " Meine Seele, tin Sehnsuchtshauch, Wallend empor wie reinlichen Opfers Rauch Grade zu ihm." Nachspiel, Scene — An der Weissdorfihecke, where see the remaining quotations. 228 ARTHURIAN STORY Him." " An eternity between me and his love ! " he cries. " I am blotted from the book of grace, cast out from the children's heritage, the derision of rogues. . . . He has kennelled me with the hounds where I whimper, bleeding and flayed ; but I cannot give Him up." And his dying whisper is, " Hallowed be Thy name." This profoundly sad and very powerful poem would almost seem to have been written in reaction from an over-confident idealism that made sure it could spiritualise the universe, and " justify the ways of God to men." It has great and, perhaps, per- manent worth as a poetical protest against the disposition to take the mysteries of existence too easily. But it is rather a protest than a harmonious work of art with a solution of its own. It has been called the " tragedy of contradiction," and so it is, but the contradiction is in the mind of the author. This will be seen by contrasting it with the medieval story which it attempts to supplement and complete. Immermann may have received the suggestion of his subject from a striking passage in the French Prophecies of Merlin : " Know that if luxury had not overtaken him, neither Peter, nor Paul, nor James, nor any other of the Apostles would have done so much good as he would have done in the world. Nevertheless, so much he did, that I know of a certainty he is not damned, but is out of the power of Lucifer." 1 Here his lifework, transcending 1 Et saichez que si sa luxure ne l'eust si surpris, ne pierre, Ne pol ne iacque ne nuls autres des apostres ne firent tant de bien que il auait fait au siecle, et nompourtant en fist il tant que ie scay certainem^wt q«71 n'est pas dawpne ains est hc-rs du TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 229 the apostolic, is wrecked for the definite cause of his luxury ; but with Immermann it is wrecked by its own nature. His offence is that he presumes to know, and make others know, the arcana of the divine. This at first seems, and in a certain sense is, a profounder conception, but in the last resort it is unintelligible. And it is made more unintelligible by Merlin's final and ineradicable faith. The whole course of the poem presupposes the Deity as the un- knowable source of being, who, transcending reason and exempt from law, resents the infringement of His jealous seclusion ; but Merlin's conviction that He is akin to his own spirit is not to be shaken, and he dies with " Our Father " on his lips. This conclusion in favour of instinctive feeling at the expense of definite thought, sounds the knell of Immermann's efforts as speculative poet ; and when at the close of his life he once more took a subject from British story, it was to treat it in a far slighter and less searching way. In his Merlin he had introduced more or less explicitly the greater number of the Arthurian characters and legends, but he had left on one side the story of Tristram, which has never been very intimately joined to the rest. It was to this that he now turned, and, in a way, no subject could better suit the state of his feelings ; for, as the dedication avows, he was inspired by his own love to tell once more the old love-tale: — " Dead was my heart and lay within the grave, Your gentle spells re- wake it tenderly ; pouoir lucifer. — Merlin (Paris, 1528), torn. iii. Lcs Prophecies 230 ARTHURIAN STORY It beats anew, and feels the life you gave— 'Tristram and Isolt!' is its earliest cry." 1 But, again, the story was not so suitable, for he no longer found an attraction in the intellectual proolem it presents. The meaning of the love-draught and its relation with the lovers, so that while in one sense all their sorrows are deserved, in another they are innocent in the midst of their guilt ; these are essential points which, nevertheless, he does not touch. So, in this instance also, he is left with a contradiction in the heart of his poem. At the outset, the passion of the fated pair is represented as natural and fit ; the philtre is no concoction of evil art, but the masterpiece of " noon-day magic ( Mittagszauber), won from the earthly paradise on the free hill-top beneath the summer sun ; and the poem glorifies the first ecstasy of the lovers as " a harmless honest thing " (schuldlos redlich Ding) y moved by God. Presently, however, Immermann accentuates the sacrifice of Brangwaine, curtails the hours of joy, and to judge from the memoranda of the cantos that remained unwritten, makes the en- suing penitence swift, long, and bitter. But there is no transition from the one view to the other, and their connection is not explained. It is there- fore natural that Immermann, slurring over the essential in his story, should try to make amends by dwelling on what is secondary and by the way. The hunt that introduces Tristram to King Mark,, 1 " Gestorben war das Herz und lag in Grabe : Dein Zauber weckt es wieder auf, der holde ; Es klopft und fiihlt des neuen Lebens Gabe, Sein erster Laut ist : Tristan und Isolde." TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 23 1 the encampment of Morolt on the Cornish coast, the expedition of the elder Isolt to prepare the magic potion, are all described in great detail and with a profusion of vivid colour. It is one way of making the story live before the eyes of modern readers, but not the most excellent ; it portrays its body and neglects its soul. And sometimes this effort after realistic details results only in the in- congruous and offensive, that is none the less so for its ironical intention. It is extremely hard to forgive Immermann when he describes the sea-sick- ness of the Cornish ambassadors, or the consterna- tion of King Mark at finding himself a wooer ; but forgiveness is impossible when he assigns to Morolt a comrade called O'Connor, or names Isolt's waiting- women Miss Betty and Miss Kitty. Sometimes his pleasant adaptation of the old story becomes as grotesquely out of keeping as De Bracy's version in Ivanhoe of the exploits of the men of Benjamin. Immermann, however, has the credit of drawing the attention of contemporaries to the Tristram legend ; and both the beauties and the defects of his fragment, as well as its unfinished condition, incited others to take it in hand. Two minor poets saw its dramatic possibilities and developed it in one or other of the directions indicated in Immermann's work. F. Roeber in his Tristan und Isolde (1856) tries to vivify the details of the old material. L. Schneegans in his Tristan (1865) tries to modernise its tone and setting. Roeber in most of his incidents keeps pretty close, sometimes too close, to his authority. It is by suffusing the whole in fantastic glamour and 232 ARTHURIAN STORY lyric feeling, and flashing it before the eye in a kaleidoscopic series of brightly contrasted views, that he seeks to renew its power. This is hardly the method of the dramatist, and his Tristan und Isolde is rather a poem in scenes and dialogue than an acting play. He is best in the erotic pass- ages, when the fond or passionate outbursts of the lovers- possess the music and sometimes employ the metres of song. The finest is naturally the episode of the philtre. The poet gives himself free rein in describing the strange carving of the flagon, with its crowned serpents rising from the abyss, its gracious figures hovering aloft; the overmaster- ing fragrance of the draught at once stupefying and keen ; the whispers, " Drink not/' and again, " Dryik," that seem to rise from its foam ; the sudden revelation it brings, so that the hearts of the drinkers ring out like nightingales singing of love. Sometimes, however, his lyricism carries him too far, as when he makes the Moon a speaker at one of the secret interviews ; which recalls the tragical mirth of the most lamentable comedy of Pyramus and Thisby. But when he is not lyrical, he is disjointed and flat. One peculiar device shows both his imaginative sensibility and his dra- matic weakness. At the beginning of each act, he has a prelude, in which the portions of the story that cannot be introduced on the stage, are re- counted to Isolt of Brittany and commented on by her. This contrivance, which emphasises her jealous affection from the beginning and through- out, and gives the other aspect of the lovers' history, is poetically effective : but a drama has TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 233 not been thoroughly digested in which so much narrative is required. Far more equal in workmanship, and much better thought out, is the Tristan of Schneegans ; but it is too obviously written with a purpose, and is so modern in tone and aim that much of the old romantic witchery has to go. The philtre, rightly enough from the author's point of view, plays no part in the drama. It only survives as the subject of a folk-song, which is sung behind the scene as the hero and heroine shrive their hearts to each other, and the old-world story of fated passion breaks and blends in their voluntary avowal of love. The legend becomes one of the protests, so frequent nowadays — and the surest justice cannot give relish to frequent fare — against the credit of loveless marriages. Isolt, turning on King Mark, becomes the mouthpiece of the author, and states with sufficient precision, his view of the story. " That I have loved him, that I have followed the prompting of my heart, is not my crime : but it is this, that I did not always follow the prompting of my heart, that in my folly I opposed the behest of God, and joined myself to thee, whom I loved not. Such an union, shameless, monstrous, cannot last, for it wants the soul. Whoso weds thus, vows herself to adultery." 1 lu Nicht dass ich ihn geliebt, dass ich dem Drang Des Herzens bin gefolgt, ist mein Verbrechen. Das ist es aber, dass ich nicht dem Drang Des Herzens immer folgte, dass ich thoricht Mich widersetzte dem Gebote Gottes Und dir, dem Ungeliebten, mich verband. 234 ARTHURIAN STORY This hardly puts it quite fairly. Neither her un- sanctioned love of Tristram, nor even her loveless marriage with Mark constituted her chief trans- gression, but that she married the King when his nephew already had her love. However, we per- haps ought not to raise objections when the chief party concerned makes none : Mark is convinced by her words, and owns that she is in the right and he is in the wrong. What we have a right to resent is the ploughing up of the fine old story for the operations of the doctrinaire, especi- ally when his crop is by no means difficult to grow, and has already been gathered in with much clamorous jubilation from a thousand fields. The Isolt whom we know and love has many faults, but at least she is not this emancipated heroine who repeats at second hand the lessons of George Sand. Already, however, when Schneegans trans-shaped the story to serve his tendency-moral, it had been appropriated by a mightier genius for a treatment alike more catholic in its aim and more suitable to the theme. In 1859 appeared Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. It is difficult in literary sketches to avoid saying either too much or too little of the great composer's music dramas. It is almost as unfair to take the words by themselves as it would be to substitute a dry analysis for the poetic ful- ness of a Shakespearian play, and so taken, they may deserve the hard things that some of the Ein solches Bundniss, schamlos, ungeheur, Kann nicht besteh'n, weil ihm die Seele fehlt : Dem Ehbruch weiht sich, wer sich so vermahlt." TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 235 author's countrymen have said about them. On a matter like this, a foreigner is scarcely entitled to speak. On the other hand, it is by the text that the dramatic power and the scope of the meaning must be judged, a judgment permissible to all ; and these are no slight elements in the excellence of the whole. In both respects Wagner's opera must be placed very high. With one sweep, he brushes away, as indeed the nature of his task re- quired, all of the^ story that is subordinate or beside the point. It is, reduced to its most elemental form, and no frippery of ornament is suffered to distract the eye from the bare and solemn lines of the central tragedy. The fight with the dragon, the shifts of the culprits, their threatened punish- ment, their woodland joys, even the intervention of the Breton Isolt, are all obliterated. The story is ^ compressed into three pregnant scenes : the galley, when Isolt in her indignant wrath thinks to reach Tristram the draught of death, and drinks with him the draught of love ; the garden, when the lovers are surprised in the intoxication of their stolen delight ; Tristram's ancestral castle, when his sick waiting is crowned with a last greeting and the death of both. Thus the attention is riveted on the spectacle of a love strong as death and mysteri- ous as the sea. It came unbidden and it heeds no curbs. It regards " glory and honour, might and gain, as idle motes of the sunbeam." 1 Even faith and friendship are a dream to him " who has gazed into the night of love, and to whom she has con- 1 "Ruhm und Ehr 1 , Macht und Gewinn . . . Wie eitler Staub der Sonnen." — Act ii. 236 ARTHURIAN STORY fided her deep mystery." 1 The play portrays the victims and hierophants of a headlong passion that mocks the restrictions and belies the freedom of men, and the overture resounds with the voices of that ocean on which we are carried away like the floating wreck of the sea. But in all this it. is not to be supposed that we merely hear the ingenuous doxology of sexual desire, hymned forth to the throbbing of the blood. At the core of it there is thought, and thought which in the form that Schopenhauer gave it, has greatly influenced our times. Beneath the shows of the phenomenal world, the necessary illusions of conscious life, there works, not a spiritual somewhat that we can or cannot know, but an inevitable, unconscious, irrational will which is the sole reality and principle of things. It reveals itself above all in the love of man and woman, .which is thus no caprice of the individual but a draught of the universal magic, an effluence of the one omnipresent force, dark, resistless, impersonal. And lurking behind the vanities and fever of existence, this world-will, the essence of all that is, together with its mani- festation in love, may be opposed to day and life, compared with night, and identified with death. Tristram and Isolt are lulled by the darkness, and know not whether it is union or annihilation they most desire. The loss of their separate being in their love is like the self-oblivion which shall be theirs when they merge in the All of things. Tristram, begotten of a dying father and born of a 1 " Der in der Liebe Nacht geschaut, Dem sie ihr tief Geheimniss vertraut." — Act ii. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 237 dying mother, bids Isolt follow him to the land of death and peace and love : " It is the dark land of night, whence my mother erewhile sent me forth, when in death she brought to light him whom in death she had conceived." 1 Isolt, swooning to death, finds it " highest rapture " to sink into the unconscious drift which does not live, but is the well-spring of all life. It may be questioned whether such a conception is proof against certain ethical objections, but at least with its help the drama is wound up to a close that leaves the mind content that it should be so ; and there can be no question that it harmoni ses r well with the tone of the old story. Wagner certainly brings his subject home to the temper of the present day, but he does no violence to its spirit. On the contrary, he divines its idea, as the sculptor divines the statue in the block. He seems to read between the lines its deepest secret, and bring it to completion, while penetrating it with contemporary thought. This, one feels, is the way to revive, or rather awaken, old stories, not merely for scholars and coteries, but for the general world of living men. It was in a similar spirit that, in 1877, he com- posed his Parsifal. This story, like Tristram's, had already found adapters in Germany. Immermann, as we have seen, makes use of the Grail as an emblem of the mystery of supernatural grace ; but 1 " Es ist das dunkel nachtge Land Daraus die Mutter einst mich sandt', Als, den im Tode sie empfangen, Im Tod' sie liess zum Licht gelangen." — Act ii. 238 ARTHURIAN STORY it is treated only as an episode of the main theme, the history of the wizard's blighted purposes and hopes. Percivale again appears in Halm's drama of Griseldis (1837), but without a trace of his con- nection with the Grail, and with hardly any of his legendary characteristics; he is somewhat unjusti- fiably made the tyrannic lord of the patient heroine, and retains only the truculence and rudeness of his forest breeding as these are displayed at the outset of the old romance. The Grail itself plays a part in the title of Joseph Pape's Schneewittchen vom Gral (1856), a narrative poem composed in the stanza of the Niebelungenlied and in imitation of the medieval style. Here, too, however, the mixture of incongruous elements, of fairy tales like the Sleeping Beauty, of historic persons like Albertus Magnus, of political allegory, which identifies the awakening maiden with Ger- many, and the wicked stepmother with France, keeps it from having any real connection with the Grail legend. 1 A really sympathetic treatment of this as of the Tristram story was reserved for the great musician ; and, as in the one^under the symbol of the philtre, he presents the fatalism of the modern theory, which has somewhat hastily been branded as pessimistic, in the other he sets forth its austere altruism in con- nection with the symbol of the Holy Cup^ While in Tristram, however, his modifications were chiefly 1 The above statements are based partly on extracts from Schneewittchen, partly on critical notices. I have been un- able to see the entire poem, which is not even in the British Museum. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 239 in the way of omission, in Parsifal they are even more in the way of addition ; and his version shows a wider external divergence from his authority The Temple of the Grail is contrasted with the V Grotto of the magician Klingsor, and to its hallowed wonders are opposed his infernal spells. Klingsor had once aspired to it himself, and enraged at his rejection, now wars against the knights ; and by exciting the carnal desire of its guardian Amfortas has been able to wrest from him the sacred spear and deal him a wound that no natural means can staunch. Amfortas is still steward and minister of the Grail, though the sight of it now fills him with pangs as of death ; nor can he be healed till the weapon that wounded him is recovered and applied to his hurt. Heaven has announced its emissary for the task, " The chaste fool, enlightened by sympathy, wait for him whom I have chosen." 1 Parsifal is the predestined one. He is introduced as a rude and awkward boy, who beholds " in stupid surprise " the mysteries of longing and remorse. But he is edu- cated through temptation and trial. Klingsor assails him with the delights of sense, and above all with the solicitations of Kundry, the same who caused Amfortas to fall. She is enslaved to the bidding of the wizard, but it is against her will. Left to herself, she wanders wild and un- lovely about the sacred mount, where she was discovered at the founding of the Temple, and yearns to serve those whom she has betrayed. But when the spell is at work she is clothed in 1 " Durch Mitleid wissend, Der reine Thor Harre sein Den ich erkor." 240 ARTHURIAN STOR V beauty, and compulsion is on her to tempt and seduce ; yet could she find one to resist her allure- ments, she would be freed from her servitude and would gain release. Plying Parsifal with her arts, eager at once to vanquish and be vanquished, she at last imprints a kiss on his lips. Immediately he is " made wise by sympathy." He feels the wound of Amfortas ; the secrets of sin and sorrow, of desire and regret are on the sudden disclosed to him. He seizes the spear which the advancing Klingsor casts against him, and departs for the deliverance of Kundry, the recovery of Amfortas, the achievement of the Grail. At the close of this miracle play, there is, and not without warrant, a hinted comparison of Par- sifal with Christ. For it is the redeeming power of love that is described, that true love which must be so selfless as to exclude all personal reference and every sensual craving, but feels the pangs of others as its own, their sinful yearnings and agonised remorse. And in Kundry, " the rose of Hell," 1 who was once Herodias, appears the lower love that flowers from unregenerate life ; that, partly of spirit and partly of sense, is in contradiction with itself, thrilling now for service and now for gratification, mocking at the sacrifice of the cross yet feeling it as the highest. Kling- sor is her master, because on him alone her might is of no avail ; 2 for he is unperplexed by her double nature, his is the selfishness that cannot love but only feel desire. Amfortas, guardian of the 1 Hollen Rose.— Act ii. 2 "Weil einzig an mir deine Macht nichts vermag." — Act ii. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 241 aspiration that unites with the divine, is wounded when he stains it with sensuous passion ; but his very sorrow is a means to spiritual perfection. It is needed to leaven the innocence of Parsifal with insight and compassion : " Blessed be thy suffering that gave the timid fool the highest force of sympathy and the might of purest knowledge." 1 /JS, In thus deepening the significance of the old stories, it was possible that their plastic life, their flesh and blood, might be etherealised away ; but another direction of literary activity in Germany provided for the continuance of their simpler and directer forms. A number of men, like San Marte, Simrock, Kurz, admirably equipped as a rule both in learning and feeling, laboured to reproduce the medieval poems in modern German, and thus render them accessible to a wider circle of readers. This, as a literature of translations, may be passed 'over briefly, but one writer, who on the whole belongs to the group, must be noticed more in detail. It is the poet and scholar, Wilhelm Hertz (born 1835). In i860 appeared his Lanzelot und Genevra, a poem in which he selects from the old account of the downfall of the Table the traits that were most congenial to his own mode of feeling, and recounts them, freely as regards the letter, but faithfully as regards the spirit, in the couplets of four and occasionally of three feet that were the typical measure for chivalrous romance. The only im- 1 " Gesegnet sei dein Leiden, Das Mitleids hochste Kraft Und reinstes Wissens Macht Dem zagen Thoren gab." — Act iii. 242 ARTHURIAN STORY portant change of conception that he makes is in the character of Modred, who, a comrade of the sea-rovers and worshipper of force, despises the dalli- ance of love till himself inflamed by the beauty of Guinevere. For the rest it is the fine old story that will never be out of date, of guilty but raptur- ous passion, of the discovery and flight of Lancelot, of Guinevere's sentence to the stake, of her rescue by her lover and the slaughter of Gawain's brothers, of the war with Lancelot, of Modred's revolt, of the final battle. A few new episodes are introduced, but it is rather on the luxuriant development of the old suggestions that Hertz relies. His vivid pictures are not to be forgotten, of the tender tryst that precedes the discovery ; of Modred's pangs of awakening love ; of Guinevere on her trial, when she refuses to defend herself before " the guild of men " by profaning "To her disgrace Her heart's most consecrated place " ; * of the wounded Arthur and swooning Guinevere, united at last "on sorrow's burning marriage-bed." 2 I may quote the passage which tells how Arthur, after laying Gawain in his grave, chances on the vanished Merlin in the wood of Broceliand, and hears tidings of the end — " Mid stretches of narcissus flower He saw a blossom-shadowed bower, Whose airy arches overhead The leafage of a white-thorn spread ; lu Dass ich zu meiner ewgen Schmach Das Heiligthum des Herzens brach." — Canto iv. 2 "Im heissen Hochzeitbett der Schmerzen." — Canto v. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 243 On the soft moss a man at rest Lay on a lissome lady's breast, Whose dainty limbs a drape of green, Hung from her girdle, served to screen. Mid tears and laughter did she sing A song of wondrous love-longing ; The wood-birds on the branches round Sat hearkening to her voice's sound ; The bower seemed all to swing and sway To the sweet measure of her lay ; And round her elfin face was shed A glowing light of rosy red. The quiet man whose rest she lull'd Was youthful strong, and huge of mould ; Of dusky gold his beard and hair ; His face august and wondrous fair; Within his eyes' black depths there lay The brightness of no earthly day ; And from the lines his brow that seamed, Weird spiritual potence gleamed. Wan was his visage as the snow, Whereon there lay a hopeless woe, Despair of all attaining And love's unspoken plaining. ' 1 1 " Da fand er im Narzissen-feld Ein bliithig schattig' Laubgezelt, Das hatte hoch in luftigen Bogen Ein griiner Weissdornbusch gezogen. Drin lag ein Mann auf weichem Moos In eines schlanken Weibes Schooss. Ihr Leib war nackt, vom Giirtel nieder Deckt griiner Flor die feinen Glieder : Sie sang und lachte unter Thranen Ein Lied voll wundersamen Sehnen. Es lauschten auf den Zweigen all Waldvoglein ihrer Stimme Schall ; Es schien nach ihren siissen Weisen 244 ARTHURIAN STORY But though Lancelot and Guinevere is a very pretty and attractive poem, it is probably by his rendering of Gottfried of Strassburg's Tristan unci Isolde, in 1877, that Hertz has contributed most to the revival of British story. In comparing it with other modernisations of medieval poetry, one is inclined to say, " So such things should be." " My first concern," he writes, " was to afford the educated man of to-day as fresh and pure an im- pression of the poem as was possible ; and a free but pious adaptation seemed to me likelier to attain this end than a philologically exact translation from the first word to the last." x In carrying out Das Zelt zu schwanken und zu kreisen ; Und lodernd rosen-rothes Licht Umkranzt ihr schelmisch Angesicht. Der stille Mann in ihrem Schooss War jugendstark und heldengross ; Sein Haar und Bart von dunklem Gold ; Sein Antlitz hehr, und wunderhold ; In seinen schwarzen Augen lag Ein iiberirdisch lichter Tag ; Und fremde geistige Gewalten Verklarten seiner Stirne Falten. Bleich war sein Angesicht wie Schnee Drauf lag ein hoffnungsloses Weh Erzwungenes Entsagen, Und stumme Liebesklagen. 5 ' — Canto viii. One or two expressions in the above are taken from a translation of Hertz by C. Bruce, entitled the Story of Queen Gidnevere and Sir Lancelot (1865). It is very well done, but too free for my purpose. 1 Es gait mir hieher vor allem, dem Gebildetem von heute, einen moglichst frischen und reinen Eindruck des Gedichtes zu gewahren, und diesem Zweck schien mir eine freie aber TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 245 this programme he has shown the tact of a poet and a scholar, cutting down the inessential, con- densing the superfluous, but never distorting the individuality of the original, and, above all, never failing to reproduce it in a form that is beautiful now and for us. Here we may throw a backward glance on the ground we have traversed, and review the main characteristics of the contemporary literature in Germany that is occupied with subjects from the Arthurian cycle. There is on the one hand a tendency to modernise the stories, and bring them into relation with the life of to-day. There is also, at the opposite pole from this, a tendency to re- tain and revive as much as possible of the antique flavour. And, as it were between the two, there is the effort, to discover in them a central mean- ing which may be developed with reference to the needs of our own intellectual life. This last trait is shared with the French parable of Merlin, but in another respect there is a great difference between the procedure of Quinet and the pro- cedure of the Germans. Ouinet's work is encyclo- paedic, and endeavours to include a multitude of extraneous legends within the single frame. In Germany, on the other hand, with the partial, or rather apparent, exception of Immermann's Merlin} the various branches of the one cycle are treated pietatvolle Bearbeitung eher zu erreichen als eine philologisch treue Uebersetzung vom ersten bis zum letzten Wort. — Preface to Tristan unci Isolde. 1 I say apparent, for already in the prose romance he found the story of Merlin connected with the story of the Grail. 246 ARTHURIAN STORY separately, and, in the case of Percivale and Tris- tram, the connection with Arthur is practically surrendered. The Frenchman began with only a general and vague knowledge of the tradition, and perhaps for that reason hardly felt with sufficient clearness what was distinctive in the legend, and where its limits lay. The Germans approached the subject with a thorough knowledge of the best medieval authorities, which they studied either at first hand or in competent adaptations. It is not, however, the best but the latest romances that lay stress on the connection of the various adventures, and accordingly this connection was not forced on their notice. In the English literary movement, which we have next to consider, we shall see some writers, as in Germany, attempting to modernise the antiquated material, some to catch the secret of the old aroma, some to find an eternal message in the venerable tales, and Tennyson uniting all these tendencies in his Idylls of the King. Like Quinet he is en- cyclopaedic, for he gives in compendium the whole story of the Table, and recounts the adventures of its most typical members. But he avoids Quinet's incongruities by confining himself to the Arthurian circle, and so resembles the Germans in the sure- ness of his traditional tact. Thus in a manner he combines both the tendencies and the materials that elsewhere we see in isolation. And perhaps he was helped to this by the circumstance that he almost alone among his contemporaries based on the compilation of Malory. 1 He need not be 1 I am aware that this is not the general opinion. It has TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ABROAD 247 a scholar for this ; Malory is intelligible to all, and a favourite even in the schoolroom ; yet he has, of course, more of the medieval note than the best translation or keenest study of elder romance can secure. And his labyrinth of tales, in which he himself sometimes forgets his purpose and loses his way, would appeal to the youthful poet to seek the authentic clue. been said, for example, that Malory "inspired Swinburne to write his Tristram of Lyonesse, and Matthew Arnold to compose his poem Tristra.771 and IseidtP It is perhaps im- possible to say whence their inspiration came, but their material at least they got for the most part from other versions than Malory's. CHAPTER V TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME A LTHOUGH it is convenient to postpone the discussion of the Idylls till the works of Tennyson's English contemporaries have been con- sidered, in a certain sense this violates the chrono- logical order and obscures the facts of the case. Of the writers we shall review he was the first to enter as well as the last to leave the field of Arthurian poetry, and all such poetry that can claim even secondary importance lies framed be- tween the publication of The Lady of Shalott in 1833 and the publication of Merlin and The Gleam in 1889. Moreover, his influence was as powerful as it was early and continuous. He furnished the precedent which others might repeat, or refract, or resist, but which they could not with impunity neglect. It should, therefore, be remem- bered that his work forms the background of the various poems that have now to be noticed, and that his example dominates the movement. This statement would at first sight seem to be refuted, but in reality is confirmed by the romance which opens the series, Lytton's King Arthur, which TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 249 appeared in 1848. No doubt it stands out of all relation with Tennyson's method, but then it also stands out of all relation with the tendencies of the time. It was, and is, and will be a performance of no account, that had neither acceptance nor result. Yet it is by no means destitute of merit. Some passages are, if not exactly poetical, at least as poetical as it was granted the author to be. Thus his discontent with the hard commonplace of the present is expressed in a stanza that owes something to reminiscences of previous laments, but is not without a sweet cadence of its own : " Oh, the old time's divine and fresh romance ! When o'er the lone yet ever haunted ways Went frank- eyed knighthood with the lifted lance, And life with wonder charmed adventurous days, When light more rich, through prisms that dimmed it, shone, And Nature loomed more large through the unknown. " There is even a touch of sublimity in his invocation of the North, with the myriad organisms in the silence of its frozen |teas : — „ " Magnificent Horror ! How like royal death Broods thy great hush above the seeds of life. . . " Nor bird nor beast lessens with visible Life the large awe of space without the sun ; Though in each atom life unseen doth dwell And glad with gladness God, the Living One ; He breathes — but breathless hang the airs that freeze ! He speaks — but noiseless list the silences ! " Sometimes there is a fanciful ingenuity about his reflections, as in the following — 2$0 ARTHURIAN STORY " Prove not our dreams, how little needs the soul Light from the sense or being from the breath? Let but the world an instant fade from view, And of itself the soul creates a new." Or here is a simile for the visitation of good in the guise of grief: — " Even thus some infant, in the early spring, Under the pale buds of the almond tree, Shrinks from the wind, that with an icy wing Shakes, showering down, white flakes that seem to be Winter's wan sleet — till the quick sunbeam shows That those were blossoms which he took for snows." Occasionally his sayings have an aphoristic ring, for instance — "After the martyr the deliverer comes." Generally, however, his epigrams betray a straining after points, as when he describes the career of a demagogue in power — " The promised freedom vanished in a tax And bays, turned briars, scourged bewildered backs." But sometimes his smartness is not without its humour. It is very unfair to the language which he assumes to be the mother-tongue of Arthur, when he makes the Etruscan augur address him — " Oh guttural-grumbling and disvowelled man " : for, as Shakespeare knew, Welsh, if rightly spoken, is "As sweet as ditties highly penned Sung by a fair queen in a summer's bower With ravishing division, to her lute." 1 1 Henry IV., I. iii. i. 209. TENNYSON S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 25 I But the augur's calumny would express the senti- ments of Hotspur, if not of Mortimer. And there is real drollery, though of a somewhat flippant type, in the description which Freya's priest gives of their method of sacrifice to the voracious idol. "That furnace heated by mechanic laws, Which gods to priests for godlike ends permit, We lay the victim bound across the jaws And let him slowly turn upon the spit : The jaws — (when done to what we think their liking) — Close ; — all is over : — the effect is striking. 1 ' There is no doubt that King Arthur contains a modicum of fancy, a good deal of wit, a fair amount of sententiousness ; and far inferior pro- ductions have often attained a measure of success. There is no reason why it should have been so absolute a failure, except that it was born out of due time, and that the author adopted an attitude to Arthurian romance that was antiquated and untenable. Though not published till more than twenty years later, it was conceived, as he tells us, when he was at college; that is, between 1822 and 1825. It thus really belongs to an earlier period, of which Heber's Morte Arthur is a typical specimen, although it had the misfortune to appear fifteen years after Tennyson's Lady of Shalott and six after his Morte d' A rthur. " From the char- acters in the legends of the Round Table," says Lytton in his preface, x " I have but borrowed the names. . . . Preferring to invent for myself an entirely original story, I have taken from Sir *To the edition of 1878, from which the above quotations are taken. 252 ARTHURIAN STORY Thomas Malory's compilation little more than the general adoption of chivalrous usages and manners, and those agencies for the marvellous which the chivalrous romance naturally affords, the fairy genius and the enchanter." In sound this is not unlike the prefatory note to Wordsworth's Egyptian Maid, but it is very different in meaning. Wordsworth employs the Arthurian machinery, that the chords of kindred memories may vibrate in advance and attune us for his own romantic parable. But Lytton uses Arthur's great name merely as a signboard to win custom for a fantastic tale of adventure that contradicts the matter and feeling of the legend, and has no particular meaning of its own. He ingeniously explains away the scandal about Guinevere by assuming that there were two ladies, beloved by Arthur and Lancelot respectively, who were called Genevieve and Genevra — " One name in truth, though with a varying sound." But this unwonted condescension to the tradition which he discards is quite superfluous, when he has no scruple in sending Arthur to discuss religion with the heathen Etruscans and to hunt walruses at the North Pole. His jumble of errantry and travel, of burlesque and magic, rightly seemed out of date to a generation that had received the first instalment of Tennyson's " Epic." The problem of Arthurian poetry, as we have seen, was to unite sympathy for the romantic colour with the sense of present needs, and to do this by fixing on the meaning of the story. It may be said of the three chief poets who took such subjects in hand before the Idylls assumed their TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 253 connected and coherent form, that they accent one'' or other of these tendencies at the expense of the rest. Matthew Arnold's Tristram and Iseult, in 1852, lays almost exclusive stress on the modern aspects of the tale ; William Morris's Defence of Gue?ievere and its companion pieces, in 1858, are as distinctively medieval ; Robert Stephen Hawker's Quest of the Sangraal, in 1863, is filled with the mystic significance of his theme, but his conception is not that of the Middle Ages, and does not lie particularly close to the life of our own day. Arnold (1822-1888) seems to have composed his poem in a mood which is not infrequent in his earlier verse, of discontent alike with tumult and with rest. Now he contemns the " Tedious vain expense Of passions that for ever ebb and flow ; " 1 now his spirit " Hears a voice within it tell : Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well. 'Tis all perhaps which man acquires, But 'tis not what our youth desires." 2 He sums up his impressions of the old-world history, which he narrates, in a parenthesis of melancholy reflection — " And yet, I swear, it angers me to see How this fool passion gulls men potently ; Being, in truth, but a diseased unrest, And an unnatural overheat at best. How they are full of languor and distress Not having it ; which when they do possess, They straightway are burnt up with fume and care." 3 1 Youth's Agitations. * Youth and Calm. 3 1 1 1 . Iseult of Brittany. m^234 ARTHURIAN STORY a\A^254 This text is illustrated in the three parts of the poem, which have respectively as their central figures Tristram and the two Iseults. Tristram, subdued by a "tyrannous single thought," 1 sees on his deathbed all that he "did before, shadow and dream." 2 In his delirium he lives through his former life once more at fever speed, calling up scene after scene, the draining of the cup, the last sad meeting, the war with Rome, the return to the Breton forests ; and he wakens to recognition of Iseult — not the Iseult he desires — who has been watching, perhaps overhearing, his unconscious shrift. " My princess, art thou there ? Sweet, do not wait ! To bed, and sleep ! my fever is gone by ; To-night my page shall keep me company. Where do the children sleep ? kiss them for me ! Poor child, thou art almost as pale as I ; This comes of nursing long and watching late." 3 Then Iseult of Ireland arrives, unhindered by her magnanimous rival, to exchange with Tristram the bitter-sweet of guilty love and vain regret. She is presented as a great lady, worn with passion and weary of life, like any of the present day. She has been in the " Gradual furnace of the world, In whose hot air our spirits are upcurl'd Until they crumble, or else grow like steel." 4 This is the burden of her answer to his implied reproach. l IIL Iseult of Brittany. 2 Ibid. 3 1. Tristram. * III. Iseult of Brittany. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 2$$ " Alter'd, Tristram ? Not in courts, believe me, Love like mine is alter'd in the breast ; Courtly life is light and cannot reach it — Ah ! it lives, because so deep-suppress'd ! " What, thou think'st men speak in courtly chambers Words by which the wretched are consoled ? W r hat, thou think'st this aching brow was cooler, Circled, Tristram, by a band of gold? " Royal state with Marc, my deep-wrong'd husband — That was bliss to make my sorrows flee ! Silken courtiers whispering honied nothings — Those were friends to make me false to thee ! " Ah, on which, if both our lots were balanced, Was indeed the heaviest burden thrown — Thee, a pining exile in thy forest, Me, a smiling queen upo7i my throne ? nx She escapes from the feasts and laughter of Tyn- tagel, where she was " clogg'd by fear and fought by shame," to the quiet of death, the one balm alike for Tristram's brooding and for her distrac- tion. " Her life was turning, turning, In mazes of heat and sound. But for peace her soul was yearning, And now peace laps her round." 2 And in the third part, when the lovers are laid in their Cornish grave, we find Iseult of Brittany- trying to solace her broken life as it fades away, with the care and training of her children, watching them at their play, walking with them on the heath, and telling them the tales they love. But, " is she 1 II. Iseult of Ireland. 2 Arnold's Requiescat, composed about the same date. 256 ARTHURIAN STORY happy ? " asks the poet. Her eyes are sunk, and even her voice " comes languidly." " Yes, it is lonely for her in her hall. The children, and the grey-hair'd seneschal, Her women, and Sir Tristram's aged hound, Are there the sole companions to be found. But these she loves ; and noisier life than this She would find ill to bear, weak as she is. She has her children, too, and night and day Is with them ; and the wide heaths where they play, The hollies, and the cliff, and the sea-shore, The sand, the sea-birds, and the distant sails, These are to her dear as to them ; the tales With which this day the children she beguiled She gleaned from Breton grandames, when a child, In every hut along this sea-coast wild. She herself loves them still, and, when they are told, Can forget all to hear them, as of old." 1 What was the story she told the children ? is the meaning question at the close. It was of Merlin left dead-alive, a prisoner till the judgment day, on " a little plot of magic ground." Perhaps it was something similar in her own fate that made her choose the narrative of his. Arnold has written a poem full of beauty and pathos, but its connections with the elder versions are very slight. Its medievalism is confined to a few superficial touches, as when he talks of the " blown rushes on the floor," 2 or of the rich furs, "Which Venice ships do from swart Egypt bring": 3 or of Alexander invading the " Soudan's realm." To Iseult the betrayal of Merlin is a fragment of 1 III. Iseult of Brittany. ■ II. Iseult of Ireland. 3 III. Iseult of Brittany. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 2$ J Breton folklore, the talk of the peasantry, as it might be now ; but in the romantic chronology it took place only a few years before, when Lancelot was a child. The pictures of the children asleep, or at play, or listening to their mother's stories, as hatted and cloaked they walk up and down in the shelter of the hollies, are more suggestive of the tender family life of to-day than of anything in romance. " In M. Arnold's brief poem of the death of Tristram," says Mr. Andrew Lang, 1 " the passage which haunts us is all his own, owes nothing to Malory, 2 or the French books, the beautiful passage on the children of Iseult — " But they sleep in sheltered rest Like helpless birds in the warm nest On the castle's southern side." But the mere presence of the children, is rather disconcerting to those who remember the more classic versions of the ancient tale. The picture of the Breton Iseult as a loving wife and mother, who even unloved cherishes the hand that slights her, whose harshest look is like " a sad embrace," and who seeks for consolation in the nursery, has a disturbing effect on one's associations. And so has the companion picture of the Irish Iseult, 3 1 Introductory Essay in Sommer's Malory, vol. iii. 2 To judge from the note, Arnold got his material from Dunlop's History of Fiction. At any rate he did not get any of it from Malory. 3 Why do our modern poets as a rule make this lady dark? Arnold talks of her "raven hair," and Tennyson, more em- phatically, of her "black-blue Irish hair." Do they forget the swallow with the golden thread in its beak? Or have they R 258 , ARTHURIAN STORY which portrays her " with bloom less rare," after she has " left her youth afar," for the true Isolt, like Guinevere and Helen of Troy, never grows old. In short, Tristram and Iseult is a very fine poem, but there seems no particular reason why it should have its name. The main points of contact with the old legend are that the hero's wife loves him, and that he prefers another man's. These do not carry us very far, and in the detail there is much more of contrast than of parallel. It was inevitable, however, that such legends, in their mere sentiment, their form and colour, should have a potent fascination for those to whom the life of the present appeared chiefly on its sordid and seamy side. The mood that bids us " Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town," * might well esteem it a precious boon to yield to the glamour of old romance, to enter its haunted world and walk on ways where the dust of reality had never blown. To repeat the poetic fancies of the Middle Ages in a day-dream of the nineteenth century was a congenial task for the school of poetry and painting which has been called the Pre-raphaelite, and of which Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and, in his earlier phase, William Morris, are among the chief representatives. Rossetti, the author of a theory that passionate beauty should be dark? In this as in much else Swinburne is truer to the original : " a more golden sunrise was her hair." 1 Earthly Paradise^ prologue. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 2$g the Blessed Damozel, the artist who has been said to render on canvas the effects of an illuminated missal or a stained-glass window, might have been expected to seize on such a prize as Arthurian romance. And so he did, but it was for the employment of his pencil, not of his pen. Morris, however, (born 1834) who wrote at first greatly under the influence of Rossetti, gave several short half-lyric versions of Arthurian episodes. In his Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems he to some extent follows the manner of Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, but accentuates the medievalism in the fashion of the Pre-raphaelite school. Not that he adheres very closely to the facts of his authorities, which, indeed, he often contra- dicts. Guenevere, in her self-vindication, exclaims, as though she were answering her chief accuser — " Nevertheless you, Sir Gawaine, lie, Whatever may have happened all these years God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie." But in Malory Gawain is her friend, and will have nothing to do with the proceedings against her ; it is only after the accidental slaughter of Sir Gareth that he turns on Sir Lancelot, but his enmity does not extend to the Queen. Morris makes the last interview of Lancelot and Guenevere take place at Arthur's Tomb — " So Guenevere rose and went to meet him there, He did not hear her coming, as he lay On Arthur's head, till some of her long hair Brush'd on the new-cut stone — 'Well done ! to pray " ' For Arthur, my dear lord, the greatest king That ever lived.' ' Guenevere ! Guenevere ! 260 ARTHURIAN STOR V Do you not know me, are you gone mad? fling Your arms and hair about me, lest I fear " ' You are not Guenevere, but some other thing.' 1 Pray you forgive me, fair Lord Lancelot ! I am not mad, but I am sick ; they cling, God's curses, into such as I am ; not " ' Ever again shall we twine arms and lips.' " In Malory the scene is at Almesbury, and not till her burial is the Queen carried to Glastonbury to \/ lie by her lord. In Sir Galahad, the virgin knight receives his arms from saints and angels at the forest shrine, not in the series of adventures that the old romance recounts. But in none of these variations is there any violence done to the feeling of the story. They are the sort of variations that might occur if a man repeated from memory something that had profoundly impressed him, and into the life of which he had lived. And further, the imagination thus steeped in the spirit of the legend would not rest satisfied within the limits of the actual record. Dreaming and brooding, it would inevitably pass out beyond, and delight in expanding the hints and filling in the gaps. Thus Malory says nothing of Guenevere's trial, and the questions crowd on Morris ; How would she com- port herself before her judges, and what plea would she urge in her defence? what associations would be stirred in her breast, when thus for a second time she was placed in danger of the stake? And what would be Lancelot's feelings and memories, what would be hers, as he rode to the Queen after Arthur's death, hoping to bear her away to his TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 26 1 castle beyond the sea? Or again, was Galahad on his maiden quest never stung with thoughts of happy or of hopeless love, and how did he receive the revelation of the Most High? — "In this way I "With sleeply face bent to the chapel floor, Kept musing half asleep, till suddenly A sharp bell rang from close behind the door, And I leapt up when something passed me by, "Shrill ringing going with it ; still half blind I stagger'd after, a great sense of awe At every step kept gathering on my mind, Thereat I have no marvel, for I saw "One sitting on the altar as a throne, Whose face no man could say he did hot know, And though the bell still rang, he sat alone, With raiment half blood-red, half white as snow. "Right so I fell upon the floor and knelt, Not as one kneels in church when mass is said, But in a heap, quite nerveless, for I felt The first time what a thing was perfect dread. "But mightily the gentle voice came down: ' Rise up, and look and listen, Galahad, Good knight of God, for you will see no frown Upon my face ; I come to make you glad.'" 1 Thus Morris lets a situation sink into his heart till it quickens in the live soil and yields increase of bud and leaf. Sometimes a mere name is enough. Sir Ozanna le cure hardy is an indefinite and un- important personage who is mentioned in Malory without much circumstance, generally as one of a 1 Sir Galahad. 262 ARTHURIAN STORY group ; but his " name-letters " grow luminous to the soul of Morris, and Ozana of the hardy heart becomes the centre of the dream-like little mystery of The Chapel in Lyoness. The poet's passion has the power to evoke a phantom flowerage of romance in these latter days. Perhaps it is not quite the same as the real growth. It may be said without para- dox that his yearning after the old sentiment is too strong to let him reproduce it with absolute truth. He crushes it to get the perfume, and distils from it an essence that is not the same as its fainter wafts of fragrance. It has " an intensity that is alien to the leisurely romance. . . . Like Lancelot — " We gaze upon the arras dizzily Where the wind sets the silken kings asway." 1 And he exaggerates the defective composition of his sources. The medieval tales are often badly constructed, but as Swinburne says of King Arthur's Tomb, " it has not been constructed at all ; the parts hardly hold together, it has need of joists and screws, props and rafters." 2 But the character- istics of these lyrics, if they differ from the poetry of the Middle Ages in degree, are very similar in kind. In a sense the medievalism of Hawker (1804- 1 Mr. Andrew Lang's Introductory Essay (Sommer's Malory, vol. Hi.), where by a slip he puts Guinevere for Lancelot. 2 Essays and Studies, page 113, where he bears eloquent testimony to the passion and beauty of the poem he discusses. Of the Queen and Lancelot, he writes, "Their repentance is as real as their desire ; their shame lies as deep as their love." TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 263 1875) was even m ore thorough and complete than that of the youthful Morris ; for with him it was not attained by a conscious effort of the imagina- tion, but it formed, in so far as the thing was possible, a matter of his habitual daily life. Mr Baring-Gould in his charming biography of the Vicar of Morwenstow} defines his position : "He was, it must be borne in mind, an anachronism. He did not belong to this century or to this country. His mind and character pertained to the Middle Ages and to the East." This resulted from the circumstances of his life as well as from his original temperament. Presented, when still a young man, to the living of Morwenstow, he spent his days in remote villages of Cornwall, where there were many influences to strengthen and few to check his bias towards medieval mysticism. His pastoral work among a wild people in a wild land, the pervasive " atmosphere of ecclesiastical legend," the strange superstitions in which many of his parishioners had implicit faith, concurred to naturalise him "in a visionary dream-world of spirits," which to him became as real as the world of sense and fact. He believed in witchcraft, in the power of the evil eye, in special providences of the crassest description. Many of his utterances betray a symbolism run mad. When his biographer exclaimed at the beauty of the zig-zag moulding in his church : " Zig-zag, zig-zag ! " echoed the vicar scornfully ; " do you not see that it is near the font that this moulding occurs? It is the ripple of the Lake of Gen- nesaret, the Spirit breathing upon the waters of 1 London, 1876. 264 ARTHURIAN STOR Y Baptism." He was firmly convinced that " no good thing comes from the West. In the primitive church they turned to the West to renounce the Devil." To him the Southern Cross was in the most sober and literal sense the actual Star of Bethlehem : — "That pentacle of Stars, the very cross That led the wise men towards the Awful Child, Then came and stood to rule the Peaceful Sea." A few hours before his death he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, in other respects, he was very far from ful- filling the ideal of a medieval saint. He was no ascetic in his life, and was almost too liberal in catering for the meat, and for the drink, of his poorer neighbours. A certain secular shrewdness is perceptible in the story of his first marriage and in many of his satiric sayings, e.g., " Conceit is the compensation afforded by benignant nature for mental deficiency." His robust jocularity, in its proximity to other very different qualities, rather takes one's breath away ; as when he runs away from school singing his grandfather's favourite hymn, Lord, Dismiss us with Thy Blessing ; or, for a practical joke, lets loose a whole tribe of pigs ; or plays the merman in the sea to the consternation of the rustics. This love of comedy intrudes even on the domain that he held most sacred. Some- times it assumes the form of playful mystification, as when he went to ecclesiastical antiquities for an explanation of his eccentric dress. Some- times it comes perilously near what would be TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES A T HOME 265 irreverence in another man, as when he takes his cats to church and excommunicates one of them for eating a mouse on Sunday. Such was the man who, six years before Tenny- son, undertook to sing the Quest of the Sangj'aal. Cherishing the Cornish traditions, and among them the tradition of Arthur, living in an atmosphere of medieval belief, he could not avoid being attracted by the theme ; and in many respects it seems made for him. Its mystic symbolism appealed to him as perhaps it could appeal to no other poet of the nineteenth century ; the man who found meaning in a zig-zag ornament could not but feel that there was a depth of unexplored meaning in this. But as to what the meaning is, he is not very explicit. Of course, this is partly due to the abrupt termination of his poem ; but even that is not without its significance, for when a man, un- hindered by death, leaves his work a fragment, it shows that at the time he was not entirely in the spirit of it. And indeed there were reasons why Hawker should find it difficult to proceed. It was hardly given to a man who believed in the fables of witchcraft to translate the quest into modern thought, or to bring it home as a thing that con- cerns ourselves. Nor was it easy for the eccentric, whose incurable humour would crop up in the most unlikely places, perfectly to mirror the ascetic medi- eval conception. Yet what masculine force and what mystical fervour breathe in the fragment as it stands ! " { Ho for the Sangraal, vanished vase of Heaven, That held like Christ's own heart an hin of blood : 266 ARTHURIAN STOR Y Ho for the Sangraal ! ' How the merry shout Of reckless riders on the rushing steed Smote the loose echo from the drowsy rock Of grim Dundagel, throned along the sea." Then Arthur, the son of Uter and the Night, turns to the mighty-moulded fellows of the Table — " Ho for the Sangraal, vanished vase of God ! Ye know that in old days, that yellow Jew Accursed Herod ; and the earth-wide judge, Pilate the Roman ; doomster for all lands— Or else the judgment had not been for all — Bound Jesu-master to the world's tall tree Slowly to die. — Ha, sirs, had we been there They durst not have assayed their felon deed, — Excalibur had cleft them to the chine ! — Slowly he died, a world in every pang, Until the hard centurion's cruel spear Smote his high heart : and from that severed side Rushed the red stream that quenched the wrath of heaven. Then came Sir Joseph, hight of Arimathie, Bearing that awful vase the Sangraal ! The vessel of the Pasch, Shere Thursday night, The self-same cup wherein the faithful wine Heard God, and was obedient unto blood ; Therewith he knelt, and gathered blessed drops From his dear Master's side that sadly fell, The ruddy dews from the great tree of life : Sweet Lord ! What treasures ! like the priceless gems Hid in the tawny casket of a king — A ransom for an army ; one by one ! That wealth he cherished long : his very soul Around his ark : bent as before a shrine. He dwelt in Orient Syria, God's own land : The ladder-foot of Heaven — where shadowy shapes In white apparel glided up and down ! TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 26j His home was like a garner, full of corn And wine and oil : a granary of God. Young men, that no one knew, went in and out With a far look in their eternal eyes. All things were strange and rare ; the Sangraal As though it clung to some ethereal chain Brought down high Heaven to earth at Arimathie." Arthur goes on to tell how it came to Britain and passed thence when the land was tainted with the "garbage of sin"; but it is to be achieved once more, and who will attempt it ? Lots are drawn ; Sir Lancelot must go north ; Sir Percivale, south ; Sir Tristram, west ; and Sir Galahad, east. " Now feast and festival in Arthur's hall : Hark, stern Dundagel softens into song ! They meet for solemn severance, Knight and King, Where gate and bulwark darken o'er the sea. Strong men for meat and warriors at the wine, They wreak the wrath of hunger on the beeves, They rend rich morsels from the savoury deer, And quench the flagon like Brunguillie dew. Hear ! how the minstrels prophesy in sound, Shout the King's waeshael, and drinkhael the Queen." This splendid fragment is in the end so hastily- huddled to a conclusion, that it is rash to conjec- ture what it might have been. But one cannot help feeling that the vase is taken too dogmatically and without sufficient breadth of view ; that when only four knights go out for it, a good deal of the deeper significance is lost for ourselves ; while the elder significance, whether of the Percivale or the Galahad version, is not retained ; and that, 268 ARTHURIAN STORY with the defect of meaning for our own day, the mystical and the heroic are not very well har- monised. These burly knights that " wreak their wrath of hunger on the beeves," are they the fellowship which sends out questers for the vanished vase of God, amidst its heavenly guardians " with the far look in their eternal eyes " ? Hawker himself recognised that it was rather Tennyson than he who was elected to give the Arthurian stories their ultimate form and genuine immortality. Already in 1859 he presaged the event in a poem to Tennyson on the earlier Idylls ; " They told me in their shadowy phrase Caught from a tale gone by, That Arthur king of Cornish praise Died not and would not die ! " Dreams had they, that in fairy bowers Their living warrior lies ; Or wears a garland of the flowers That grow in Paradise ! " I read the Rune with deeper ken And thus the myth I trace : — A bard should rise, midst future men The mightiest of his race. " He ! — would great Arthur's name rehearse On gray Dundagel's shore ; And so the king ! in laurelled verse Shall live, and die no more." 1 One effect of this resurrection of King Arthur was to call forth a number of poems on kindred subjects by minor writers, most of which are dead J R. S. Hawker's Poetical Works, 1879. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 269 and forgotten, though a few of them had merits that would have entitled them to live, but for the achievements of Tennyson and his principal con- temporaries. Sometimes they took for their theme matter which the laureate had not yet treated, and which it did not appear from the early Idylls that he intended to treat. A favourable specimen of this class is Arthurs Knights, published anonymously in 1859, which deals with the quest of the Grail and the ruin of the order and the land, brought about by the sin of the questers. The tone of the poem, which is written in various measures, may be illustrated by the passage describing the home of Lancelot's childhood. " Deep in the Bretagne forest lands The enchanted lake doth lie, And there the fairy palace stands Where all my youth went by. Beneath the towers, all the day We heard the water swell ; Sometimes from very far away Sounds of the real world fell, The trumpet proud or the bugle gay Or the sound of a chapel bell." Occasionally these poets elaborate suggestions that Tennyson's Idylls had supplied. Thus Gordon, the poet of the Australian race-course, in his Rhyme of Joyous Garde (1868), depicts the remorse of Lancelot, a motif that lay very near his own noble nature in its moments of insurgent regret. "Would God I had slept with the slain men long Or ever the heart conceiv'd a wrong That the innermost soul abhorred — 270 AR THURIAN STOR Y Or ever these lying lips were strained To her lids pearl-tinted and purple-vein'd, Or ever those traitorous kisses stained The snows of her spotless forehead." " If ever I smote as a man should smite, If I struck one stroke that seem'd good in Thy sight, By Thy loving mercy prevailing, Lord ! let her stand in the light of Thy face, Cloth'd with Thy love and crown'd with Thy grace, When I gnash my teeth in the terrible place That is fill'd with weeping and wailing." 1 Sometimes those who have caught a breath of Tennyson's manner and style, anticipate his treat- ment of a subject that belongs to the series of the Idylls. Thus the Tristram and Iseult of F. Millard (1870) has occasional lines with something of the Tennysonian ring, as when he accounts for Tris- tram's marriage — "His old love Dwelt in the dreary chambers of his brain And made the seeming faithful inly false" — or when he tells how Iseult of Ireland fled through the corridors and vast chambers, " Until she saw her other baser self Crouch'd like a hound before a little door." And there are many descriptions of the same type, as the following — " Twice twenty days they wandered : on the last Footsore and fainting, o'er a withered heath Which seemed the world-end, they beheld the sun 1 A. L. Gordon's Poems. 1887. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 271 Wrapped in a ghastly veil of thin-drawn mist, Slope slowly westward ; as his last damp rays, That gleamed like embers in a dying fire, Sank in the vapour, suddenly a vale Dark, deep and woody, yawned before their feet Into the which they stumbled : the chill night Struck like a palsy through their sluggish veins." 1 By far the most remarkable of such minor con- tributions, however, is the Farewell of Ganore by- Mr. G. A. Simcox, published in 1 869.2 It begins by describing the final leave-taking between Lancelot and the Queen, and in this respect, as well as in its peculiar colouring, suggests the poem on King Arthurs Tomb by William Morris. Lancelot has pronounced the words that put them asunder : " Trembling he spoke and looking up at her : But she stood upright, looking far away With a hot glory on her golden head ; Her scarcely sunken cheek was flushed full fair Not at his words, but at the fierce sun ray." But the respective roles which Morris assigns the lovers are reversed in this poem, for it is Lancelot whose remorse demands their severance, and Ganore interprets his penitence as a flaw in his professed devotion. She has always hungered after utter unquestioning love, and has never ob- tained it either from the king or the knight. The characters of both of these are conceived on sug- gestions from Tennyson's early Idylls. Lancelot with the unquenchable impulse, " I needs must 3 Tristram and fseult, F. Millard. 1870. 2 Poems and Romances. 272 ARTHURIAN STORY break these bonds that so defame me," 1 and the aspirations that will not let him rest till he die "a holy man"; Arthur embodying a "passionless perfection," u Rapt in this fancy of his Table Round, And swearing men to vows impossible, To make them like himself : " 2 neither of them could understand or satisfy her imperious need for an infinite affection, and her life is unfulfilled. " I asked of Arthur what he could not give, I gave what Lancelot could not repay ; My God, what shall I say? And Arthur asked of me To live in dreams, hoping what shall not be, And Arthur asked in vain. Because we asked, how many have been slain ! Wilt Thou require their blood of me? And Lancelot is parted now in pain Because I am less sorrowful than he And still could have been happy out of Thee. . . . How shall I complain That Arthur loved too little, I too much, That Lancelot's hot love shrivelled at the touch Of Thy disdain ? Doubtless I might have striven against the stream, Labouring to live in Arthur's knightly dream ; He might have folded me in arms of love More closely though his eyes were set above." But these are vain regrets, and now it is less sorrow for the woes that she has caused, than the feeling of her great solitariness that stupifies her heart 1 Lancelot and Elaine, 1409. 2 I&id. 129. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 273 " I find no passionate true word to say But only this unmeaning cuckoo cry, ' Alone until I die ! ' " She gets leave of the religious sisterhood to set out by herself on a pilgrimage, and wanders on till she reaches a steep hillside, which she climbs almosMat unawares. " The dreamy queen went fingering At reddening berries and at fading flowers, Kissing them often as she wandered on In happy memory of those early hours, Unclouded by the grim dreams of the king, When she and Lancelot had often gone Together in glad lowland woods in May." length she gains the height from which she "A great lake glow, In azure set between two golden hills . . . Then at her left Ganore espied a crone Branded as bondmaid of the Holy Grail, Who wore her white hair woven for a veil, Crowned with gold rays, for she too was a queen, And sat upon the black coils of a snake, And her blue feet hung down in the blue lake Nailed to an iron cross, but did not bleed ; And backwards she was spelling out a creed. But higher up she saw a white flock feed, And upon each there were three locks of red, And in the figure of a cross they fed : Their shepherd was a boy in gay attire Of many colours, with a crook of gold ; He lay as haply fifteen summers old ; But where his face should be, there was a fire, Whence came a carolling how the stars should pale Before the radiance of the Holy Grail," s 274 ARTHURIAN STORY The old queen points to Ganore, and calls to the shepherd lad, — " ' Wilt thou not take her captive to the Grail ? ' But from the fire there came a sighing wail : 'How can I, for her love is crucified?'" At this Ganore flees up the hill in despair, but one sheep leaves the flock and seeks her side. Its wool becomes red and her hand becomes red when she touches it. It is her guide through desolate and toilsome tracts up the mountain side, over a moor beset with treacherous pools, till she comes to the sea : " And on the sands a little shalop lay, Ready to float upon the ebb to sea, Wherein was neither anchor, helm, or oar, But one fair sail of purple wrought with gold, And in the sheets a little crimson fold Wherein a scroll in silver words to say: ' For the espousals of the Queen Ganore.' " She ventures on board, and sits down with the " patient firstling of the magic flock" on her knee, sweetly resting as the night comes down. Thus the Farewell of Ganore, though it starts with suggestions from Tennyson, proceeds in a style that belongs to the author alone. But it is not the only poem that he has written on an Arthurian subject. His Gawain and the Lady of Avalon is a finer piece, and in it he works in complete inde- pendence of Tennyson on a subject which Tennyson never touched. The ballad on the marriage of Sir Gawain supplies the ground-work on which are woven the stories of the beauty transformed into a monster, of the fairy lady who grants her love for a time TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 275 to earth-born men, and of the immortal stranger whose name must not be asked. Arthur's kingdom is harassed with drought and the depredations of a dragon, when a wandering damsel comes to his court, and claims the fulfilment of an old pledge that he shall wed her to one of his knights. " The dew was on her raven hair And her blue glistering eye ; No dust on foot or ankle bare, Though all the land was dry : And every knight was ready there To wed with her or die." But when they hear that she dwells in the wilder- ness in the den of the dragon their faces grow pale and their ardour cools. She puts her hand in Gawain's, who chooses to let it remain. " (He) bade them call the holy priest To knit the twain in one. She said, ' I keep my marriage-feast Not here, at Avalon.' None knew why all men as she ceased Trembled in Caerleon. . . . " ' The dragon's scales of woven glass Will light my banquet well ; Iscariot will sing the mass, And Pilate toll the bell, And all my marriage guests will pass Over the mouth of Hell.' .... " She kissed Sir Gawain on the mouth, He kissed her on the hand ; Then she departed to the South, Between the sea and sand, Leaving behind a bitter drouth On all King Arthur's land." 276 ARTHURIAN STORY Gawain in due time sets out, and reaches the land of Grammarie, where, by a leaden sea, a tower of granite rises on a meadow blood-red with wild wind-flowers. " Thereon went many quick and dead And some who do not die ; Each wore a garland on the head, Each laughed within the eye ; No flower was bent beneath their tread, No dewy leaf brushed dry." Then comes the weird horror of the marriage and the marriage feast. Suddenly only the knight and the guests are there, but the bride is nowhere to be seen, and, amid the revelry and song, Gawain " Felt the dragon sliding by And heard the lady's voice." Another moment, and all else has vanished except the lovely Fairy Queen, and Gawain, laying his hand on her knee, looks in her face and wonders that it is not the dragon that he sees. But his delight is not for long : " The moon above the misty sea Hung like a globe of fire, Whereby Gawain a hag might see In ghastly gay attire, Whose wrinkled face flushed horribly With jubilant desire. "He knew her, for she held the hand He gave to one more fair; He knew her by the magic band His lady used to wear, With jewels from an unknown hand Bound in her raven hair." TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 277 But Gawain remembers his plighted word, and the morning sees her restored to more than her old beauty. " Her brow was veiled with woven brass And bonds were on her hands, Which held an emerald hour-glass, Wherein few golden sands ; Her feet seemed quivering to pass Into untra veiled lands." Then comes the old question whether her husband would have her fair for himself and hideous in the eyes of the world, or fair before the world and hideous for him. He fears a snare in the dilemma, and, refusing to choose, bids her, " Use your own gentle will." She praises him, and promises him that all will be as he desires ; when he adds the fatal words, that he knows not yet his " lady's lovesome name." " The colours of the dragon's mail Flashed in the dewy grass : The lady's face flushed red and pale ; — 4 And I had hoped, alas ! That thou should'st rend the brazen vail And loose the bonds of glass. " ' Ah, woe is me, it may not be, And I have loved thee so ! But henceforth thou shalt never see My footprints when I go To wake the flowers upon the lea And kiss away the snow ! ' " He smiled farewell ; her colour rose, She cried aloud : * For shame ; I sojourn seven years with those That do not ask my name. 278 ARTHURIAN STORY Hence with thee and thy painted shows, Hence by the road ye came. " ' Go home, and boast in Caerleon, Below thy courtly breath, About the bonny bride ye won For whom Hell hungereth ; But come no more to Avalon, For that will be thy death.' " Low fell the veil of woven brass On heavy eyelids bound : On folded hands the bonds of glass Clanked softly without sound : • And so Gawain beheld her pass Over the dewy ground." Meanwhile, after 1870, the number of Arthurian poems decidedly falls off. By that year Tennyson had given his Idylls their connected form, and by 1872 the series was practically complete. He had taken the whole cycle for his . province, arid, as in such cases might is right, his achievement tended to warn off intruders from the domain he had made his own. Nevertheless, in one respect his procedure invited supplements. He had not been able to read unity into the ill-compacted mass of Malory's compilation without incurring a little loss as price for the inestimable gain. It was necessary for him to trim and dock the luxuriance of many an illustrious adventure, in order to fit it for its place in his chaplet ; so that some of the elder branches of the romance were neglected, or seemed, in so far as they were independent stories, to receive hard treatment at his hands. There was, therefore, an opportunity for other poets to take them as separate subjects. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 279 complete in themselves, and handle them on their own merits. Mr. Simcox represents the transition to this phase of Arthurian poetry, which arises, as it were, in reaction from the Idylls. His Farewell of Gcmore begins by elaborating hints that he found in Elaine and Guifievere ; his story of the Lady of Avalon is based on a ballad that Tennyson left unused. But the reaction was soon to be exemplified by a more famous poet in his treatment of a more famous theme. In the case of no branch of Arthurian romance has Tennyson's unavoidable pruning been more cruel than in the story of Tristram, in which, besides following Malory instead of .the finer versions, he leaves out a number even of Malory's beauties. It was worth while to treat the legend for its own sake, and to rescue it from the necessary defacement it underwent as portion of a larger whole ; and perhaps it was in part a feeling of the injustice it had sustained that stimulated Swinburne in 1882 to compose the gorgeous poetry of Tristram of Lyonesse — which is in all respects at the opposite pole from the corresponding idyll of The Last -Tournament. It was impossible for the old love-romance to find among English-speaking men a more sympathetic or unprejudiced interpreter. None was better fitted to do justice to its pathos and passion, in abandonment to the charms of the " literature," and undeterred by scruples about the 1 dogma." Wisely he has kept close to the better medieval type, only curtailing the more tedious and irrelevant passages, and fixing on the main scenes as the texts for his lyrical disquisition. For 280 ARTHURIAN STORY he neither tells, nor aims at telling, a swift and straightforward tale. He takes the chief moments of the history, and plays on them with endless variety of melody and movement. Those who look for an epic narrative will be disappointed, but there is amends if they will listen to an emotional symphony in verse. Swinburne has so keen a feeling for the changing moods of the romance, and enters into each of them with such thorough abandon, that its various aspects are emphasised in turn as though they were the chief or the sole to be considered. Sometimes a little more reticence would not be out of place when sensuous passion is the theme, and the imagination is apt to become cloyed with descriptions of how " Her mouth Was as a rose athirst that pants for drouth, ^ Even while it laughs for pleasure of desire." l But these passages are perhaps poetically justified as furnishing the contrast between the short violence of the delight, and the weary time of regret and desolation. " Ye light washing weeds," says Tristram, " Blind waifs of the dull sea, Do ye so thirst, and hunger, and aspire, Are ye so moved, and with such strong desire In the ebb and flow of your sad life, and strive Still toward some end ye shall not see alive — But at high noon ye know it by light and heat Some half-hour, till ye feel the fresh tide beat Up round you, and at night's most bitter noon The ripples leave you naked to the moon?" 2 1 Tristram of Lyoncsse, II. -Ibid. III. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 28 1 It is a forlorn view of life, which takes as its motto " brief joy, long sorrow," and fhe tragedy is height- ened by the irony of it. The death of the lovers is brought about by that Iseult whom they thought they could afford to neglect, and on whom they never spent a thought. " Nought, is it nought, O husband, O my knight, O strong man, and indomitable in fight, That one more weak than foam-bells on the sea Should have in heart such thoughts as I of thee? Thou art bound about with stately strengths for bands ; What strength shall keep thee from my strengthless hands?" 1 Yet in another sense their lot is less tragic than happy ; they pass away before their love has lost the bloom, when it is still all in all to them, and leaves no room for fear or doubt. *' Death shall not take them drained of true dear life Already, sick or stagnant from the strife, Quenched : not with dry-drawn veins and lingering breath Shall these through crumbling hours crouch down to death. Swift, with one strong clean leap, ere life's pulse tire, Most like the leap of lions or of fire Sheer death shall bound upon them : one pang past Their first keen sense of him shall be their last, Their last shall be no sense of any fear." 2 The conclusion is such consolation, as can be drawn from a naturalistic Pantheism. They sink into the rest of the universal life and become " a portion of the loveliness, which once they made more lovely." The close of the poem leaves them, their dust, their 1 Tristram of Lyonesse, VII. "Ibid. VI. 282 ARTHURIAN STORY tomb, the land of their sojourning, engulfed in the waves on which they had once sported and tossed-^ — " Peace they have that none may gain who live, And rest about them that no love can give, And over them while death and life shall be The light and sound and darkness of the sea." 1 It is the return to the unvexed, harmonious process of Nature, which Tristram elsewhere describes more fully and more mystically as the fate of Merlin. " The great good wizard " " Takes his strange rest at heart of slumberland, More deep asleep in green Broceliande Than shipwrecked sleepers in the soft green sea Beneath the weight of wandering waves ; but he Hath for those roofing waters overhead Above him always all the summer spread Or all the winter wailing : or the sweet Late leaves marked red with autumn's burning feet, Or withered with his weeping, round the seer • Rain, and he sees not, nor may heed or hear The witness of the winter : but in spring He hears above him all the winds on wing Through the blue dawn between the brightening boughs, And on shut eyes and slumber-smitten brows Feels ambient change in the air and strengthening sun, And knows the soul that was his soul at one With the ardent world's, and in the spirit of earth His spirit of life reborn to mightier birth And mixed with things of elder life than ours ; With cries of birds, and kindling lamps of flowers, And sweep and song of winds, and fruitful light Of sunbeams, and the far faint breath of night, 1 Tristram of Lyon esse, IX. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 283 And waves and woods at morning ; and in all, Soft as at noon the slow sea's rise and fall, He hears in spirit a song that none but he Hears from the mystic mouth of Nimue Shed like a consecration ; and his heart Hearing is made for love's sake as a part Of that far singing, and the life thereof Part of that life that feeds the world with love." l This view colours the whole story, and gives the passion of the lovers a background of physical though not unkindly fate. It constitutes the great difference, so far as the conception is concerned, between Swinburne and his medieval predecessors. Where they laid stress merely on Tristram's sur- render to the obligation of love, without clearly feeling that it needed an excuse, with Swinburne the episode of the philtre becomes the beginning and end of the plot, nor are we ever suffered to forget it. The blame is thus, as with Wagner, shifted from the guiltless delinquents : and what- ever may be said of the ethical or even the artistic justification of such a contrivance, its immediate effect is to leave our sympathy and respect for the helpless victims of love undisturbed. Characteristi- cally, one of the finest passages in the poem is that which deals with the drinking of the love-draught. Nowhere does Swinburne show more mastery than in his contrast between the sane, innocent strength and loyalty of the pair, the bright girlishness of Iseult, the simple heroism of Tristram before the draught, their delight in danger and effort and storm ; and their delirious joy when they 1 Tristram of Lyonesse, VI. 284 ARTHURIAN STORY have drunk from " the sinless source of all their sin " and its fire is coursing through their veins. 1 Thus the old romance, as a separate piece, has received from Swinburne the most sympathetic and genial interpretation. But that interpretation would be impossible to reconcile with the idea of the Arthurian stone? as a whole, in the only form in which the idea is true for this age ; and Tennyson had to sacrifice a beauty of detail, a beauty more- over which is somewhat out of his line, for a larger beauty congenial to his whole nature. And this was not an isolated case. In at least one other instance the general scope of the Idylls foreclosed for the poet a very promising path. The view according to which there was a Merlin, an historical personage, a partisan of the Druid cult, who, on the overthrow of his party, retired in despair to the wood of Caledon, is obviously full of poetical matter. And it has not been passed by. Professor John Veitch, whose interest in the traditional antiquities of the Border has shown itself in history and criticism, has also celebrated them in original verse. His lines on the Cymric Town show how fine and true are his sympathies with the ancient race, and how he is penetrated with the memories of their haunts, where now the more stubborn, but not more gifted, Saxon dwells. 1 The passage is too long to quote, and must not be dis- membered in extracts. See Book I., from the line, "And while they sat at speech as at a feast," to the end. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 285 " Tis the place of the Cymric town On the high and airy hill ; The green o'er its ruined mounds, Its once living voices still. " Shapeless the homes where they lived, Shapeless the cairns of their dead ; Sun God ! ye gleam as of yore, But ye thrill not the mouldering head ! "The bees hum low in the heather, The old tune the waters keep ; But nerveless the eager ear, Nought breaks on the dreamless sleep. " Sweet music flows in each name They gave to the wavy hill, The haugh and the gleaming stream, And the rushing mountain rill. " Garlet, Garlavan, Caerdon, Ye speak of their ancient time ; Penvenna, Trahenna, Traquair, Ye fall with a mystic chime. " Theirs Talla, Manor, and Fruid, Drummelzier foaming in speed ; And streams to be famous in story, Yarrow, Teviot, and Tweed. " The height and the might of the hill, The depth of the misty glen, The roaring wind and the flood Were dear to the Cymric men. "And one great power was in all, The spirit of shade and gleam, That made his peace with the eve And woke in the morning beam. 286 ARTHURIAN STOR V " By the caer are the ancient graves, On this high and airy height ; No lowlier tomb for the Cymri Than the eagle sweeps in his flight ! " x This idea of the Briton's pantheistic brotherhood with nature he incarnates in the woodland Merlin, whom he associates with the scenes that he describes, and to whom he recurs again and again, and in all his volumes of verse. Now he ques- tions the Grey Stone on Dollar Law — " Dost thou mark the sacred spot, Where Merlin fell, the poet seer, As on the mountain solitudes He flitted past, a form of fear ? "Ah! well he lov'd the Powsail Burn, Ah, well he lov'd the Powsail Glen ; And there beside his fountain clear, He sooth'd the frenzy of his brain." 2 Now he pictures the sage in his mantle, marked with blood-red Druidic signs, and rent and torn like his heart, brooding apart on " the dark un- spoken secret of the world " — "By fountain, stream, And tree, he dwells, as nature-forms of God, And on the gray stone circle of the hill He sits and eyes the burning sun complete His daily round ; lone weird communion holds With spirits of the air, that he may be The Lord of Nature, may know life and death And destiny ; dread things of years to come." 3 1 Merlin and Other Poems, 1889. 2 Hillside Rhymes, 1872. 3 Tweed a?td Other Poems, 1875. TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES AT HOME 287 And in a separate piece Merlin is depicted after the defeat of the chief Gwenddoleu and the Druidic faith, heart-broken and perplexed, doubting yet cherishing his old religion in the silence of his woods. He receives no comfort from the visit of his early love Hwimleian, the gleam, who comes singing ; — " Over the mottled hills I fly My brother shade with me, With light wings drape the peace that broods O'er the moorland spaces free." For him all else is swallowed up in regrets for the past mingled with forebodings for the future — "My prince, my Gwenddoleu, whose golden torques I wore, and thou well loved Gwendydd's son, Thou fearless bearer of the white-rimmed shield Where may I seek you now ? . . . Ghosts of the mountain mutter in mine ear : Sea-birds, sky-borne aye clang it on my brain — The bard dishonoured, worthless priest extolled, The kingless Cymri trampled on the plain, Blood-spilling from the sea to shoreless land, Their caers all desolate on the windy hills, Haunted by wailing spirits of the dead — This powerless I behold in my despair." 1 With this poem we return to Tennyson ; for it is interesting to note, and is an indication of the interest of the subject, that in the same year in which it appeared, the author of the Idylls, turning from the versions he had hitherto employed, resorted to this variant for his final poem in connection with British legend, the little lyric 1 Merlin, etc., 1889. 288 ARTHURIAN STORY piece of Merlin and The Gleam. But this is the aftermath of his production. His genuine inspir- ation was derived not from tradition but from Romance. 1 1 When a procession has gone past, the street boys may be seen leaping the barriers and turning summersaults in the rear, but this does not form part of the function. Behind the procession of Arthurian literature come the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, and The New King Arthur. In the opinion of the present writer they are unworthy alike of their subjects and their authors, and being without even the humble merits of good parody or burlesque, are not to be described as literature at all. The mention of them in a foot-note seems sufficient. CHAPTER VI TENNYSON AS ARTHURIAN POET HPWENTY years ago, when the Idylls wore the new gloss of a connected whole, they were sometimes described and admired as forming a great " Epic of Arthur." 1 But epical they ob- viously are not, and it is now the fashion in some- quarters to compare them unfavourably in this respect with Malory's story, which, we are told, in them " loses its epic grandeur, and is broken up into a series of petty miniatures." 2 One school of criticism goes further, seeing in them " little beyond dexterity, a rare eloquence, a laborious patience of hand," 3 and would deny them not only epical merit, but any transcendent merit at all. Such, however, is hardly the general view. Among ordinary readers Tennyson's Idylls are a great deal more read than Malory's romance, and whether epical or not, they contain something that makes them, as I believe, the most widely beloved of all 1 This is the title and the attitude of an article in the Edin- burgh Review, April, 1870. 2 E. Rhys, Introduction to King Arthur. Camelot Series. ] 3 Swinburne, Essays and Studies, page 115. \ T 290 ARTHURIAN STORY the poet's longer works. The popular verdict is at least worth considering. Tennyson was the favourite poet of his time in virtue of certain qualities of his genius, and the public in its pre- ference for the Idylls has probably fixed on the work in which these qualities have fullest play and freest expression. This would not necessarily mean that they are the best specimens of his poetry ; it would mean that they are the most characteristic. In estimating the achievement of a writer, it is sometimes useful to determine the period to which that achievement peculiarly belongs. In Tennyson's case it may be roughly described as extending from the appearance of the volume of 1842 to the appearance of Gareth and Lynette in 1872. Before the former year, despite the excellence of many previous pieces, he was still winning his way to note. After the latter year, though several of his finest poems were yet to be composed, he was chiefly occupied with new, and not wholly successful, experiments in dramatic writing. But for the thirty years within these dates he was practically the supreme English poet, without rival in national recognition. Now these years correspond generally with a period of secure and tranquil movement in the history of the country. The calm was interrupted chiefly by a few distant wars, of which those in the Crimea and in suppression of the Indian Mutiny were the chief, a few commercial crises that did not affect the general course of prosperity, a few social outbreaks of which none was really dangerous. TENNYSON AS AR THURIAN FOE T 2g I But it was not the calm of stagnation. New aptitudes for refinement were being developed: the general temper of thought was becoming more genial and tolerant ; a gentle course of reform, which perhaps left the hardest problems untouched, was pursued by constitutional means without viol- ence or hurry, but also without pause. The close of the period brings us to another state of things. The Franco-German war affected the position of England as a European power. Bolder specu- lations, philosophic and social, both of Englishmen and foreigners, began to tell on the public mind. Since the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the political measures that have been before the country may be described both by their friends and foes as more drastic in character than those that preceded them. In short, more troublous and vehement years have come. It is the brighter aspects of the previous period that have passed into Tennyson's verse. Whatever they possessed of ordered calm, of tempered hope, of reconciling culture, was congenial to the nature of the man. All that is seemly, gracious, and refined in the life of the English gentry and the English Church was gathered up in the stock from which he sprung, and enfolded the home of his early years. The same influences were round him at the university, where he lived in an atmosphere of noble memories and liberal thought, amid a group of kindred spirits with kindred tastes. In the after years he held aloof from the town with its clamour of jostling life and jarring views, but this from no lack of sympathy with the higher mind of the 292 ARTHURIAN STORY nation. And the nation in all its ranks delighted to do him honour. His poems became household words, and pension, laureateship, and peerage were the well-merited rewards bestowed on him by the Queen and her statesmen. But all this did not tempt him from his refined retreat, where, amid J the cherished sanctities of friendship and home, he I unfolded " the white flower of a blameless life." His lines on Hallam are applicable to himself — " High nature amorous of the good, But touch'd with no ascetic gloom ; And passion pure in snowy bloom Thro' all the years of April blood ; " A love of freedom rarely felt, Of freedom in her regal seat Of England ; not the schoolboy heat, The blind hysterics of the Celt." l It was natural that this pure, tranquil culture should first reveal itself in the domain of style. It was the point in which Tennyson could show his originality as compared with his predecessors. It was his sense of technic that was the distinctive note of his early verse. " Just as Pope gave the finishing artistic touch to the poetry of wit and rhetoric which came in with the Restoration, so Tennyson gave the finishing artistic touch to the romantic poetry that came in with the French Revolution." 2 Few English poets have had so keen 1 In Memoriam, cix. The quotations from Tennyson are taken from the single volume edition of his collected works, Macmillan & Co., 1893. 2 I think this is a remark of Mr. E. C. Stedman's. TENNYSON AS ARTHURIAN POET 293 a feeling for their art. Few have had a higher standard of workmanship or been more rigorous in their self-criticism. Few have been so lynx-eyed for the smallest suggestions of phrase, or more un- wearied and ubiquitous in the pursuit of them. It .is the search for this exquisite catholicity of style that appears already in the annotations to the Poems by two Brothers in 1827; it is the attainment of it that characterises the volume of 1830, in which perhaps there is not much else that is characteristic. It may have been the attention to expression as expression, when the content was occasionally of little interest, that excited so much adverse criticism at the time. But Tennyson was soon to show himself much * more than a virtuoso in diction. He was too thorough an artist to suppose that the soul of art lay in the form by itself, any more than in the subject by itself, and not in the relation of the matter to the form. In the volumes of 1833 and and 1842 he again gives proof of his eclectic range, but now by his wide choice of subjects, each of them presented with the beauty appro- priate to itself. The Lady of Shalott, The Lotos- Eaters, The May Queen, Sir Galahad, Ulysses, Locksley Hall, are only a few among the crowd of master-pieces. Whether he deals with the modern or the medieval or the antique, he in- variably clothes worthy thoughts in noble words. In truth his culture, which in one sense made him heir of all the ages, gave him a large stock of ideas and feelings to arrange and order in his artistic presentment. He knew and loved the 2y4 ARTHURIAN STORY classics, he knew and loved the Middle Ages, nor did he turn away from present problems of thought and society and morals. His manifold material and his composite manner, the discrepancy of his elements and his skill in assorting them, are well illustrated in The Princess, A Medley, published in 1847, where he "moves as in a strange diagonal," not only between the Serious and the Burlesque. This poem gathers up the scattered traits of his previous miscellanies. In theme it is half antique, dealing with academies and polities,, and half medieval, dealing with knighthood and chivalry ; in feeling it is wholly modern, and is occupied with the new questions of female emanci- pation and the relations of man and woman — u A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, A talk of college and of ladies' rights, A feudal knight in silken masquerade, And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments." ' Perhaps there is no such delightful farrago, of jest and wisdom in the English language, unless it be the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. It has all the magic charm, the incoherent coherence of a sweet dream. And then, in its final form, the fantastic story is broken and interrupted, saucily, inappropriately, and beautifully by sparkling little jets of melody that have nothing to do with the subject. But in this first attempt at a lengthy work, it cannot but be noticed that Tennyson makes no effort to fuse his material in the crucible of fer- 1 The Princess, Prologue. TENNYSON AS ARTHURIAN POET 295 vid passion or consuming thought. The parts are pieced together in an elaborate mosaic, not amal- gamated in a single molten stream. Of course they are not intended to be, and those must be ill to please who cannot enjoy what the poet gave, on the ground that it is not something else. At the same time there is a loftier level of composition, where the different materials are exhibited not as isolated strata but organically related as parts of a whole. And Tennyson's inferiority in this kind would appear if he en- deavoured to compose a poem in the higher style. His In Memoriam, published in 1850, was undoubtedly the most serious work he had as yet conceived, the one in which he had generalised his deepest experiences and enshrined his' loftiest thought. It contains a wealth of those wise words that are " as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies." It often unites, in a wonderful degree, the perfect simplicity of art with the far ken of the soul. We are sometimes apt in the perfect clearness of the utterance to mistake its real depth, sornetimes in the subtlety of the idea to overlook the luminous expression. Its poetical rumination of hopes and fears, of doubts and sorrows, that bereavement awakes in us all, has spoken home to countless hearts, and will do so again to countless more. Still, has it gone to the root of the problems it-^> stirs ? Does Tennyson fairly face the sceptical issues that his own questions raise ? Surely the answer must be No. He was too much dominated by respect for all that w r as honest and of good report to pass through the deepest waters of mental 296 ARTHURIAN STOR Y trial. His culture shows him that difficulties lurk here and threaten there, but it preserves him from all one-sided extremes. With his fine eclectic tact he takes whatever is most attractive in science and tradition, in criticism and assent, without deeply inquiring if the elements can be reconciled, or rather satisfied that they somehow are reconciled already in the medium of his own pure and liberal feeling, his religious and ethical instinct. "When Tennyson, disgusted with the conclusions to which materialistic science seems to be driving him, cuts the knot by declaring that — 1 Then, like a man in wrath, the heart Stood up and answered, " I have felt," ' he is speaking the language of subjective religion, and claiming that an inward conviction should out- vote all outward experience." 1 The heart does not even utter itself " like a man in wrath " — " No, like a child in doubt and fear : But that blind clamour made me wise ; Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying, knows his father near." 2 Everywhere he prefers the " lame hands of faith " to the grip of thought ; " she is the second, not the first," he says of the latter, and he has a solemn warning against the other view — " Hold thou the good : define it well : For fear divine Philosophy Should push beyond her mark, and be Procuress to the Lords of Hell." 3 1 Professor E. Caird's Evolution of Religion, vol. i., page 329. 2 In Memoriam. cxxiv. 3 In Memoriam. liii. TENNYSON AS ARTHURIAN POET 297 Doubtless many readers have felt that thought has no fixed fence beyond which it must not push, and also that the defining of the good, which is to give Philosophy her bounds, can only be the work of Philosophy herself. This is an instance of a tendency in In Memoriam to establish a com- promise where no compromise can be, instead of answering doubt by deeper doubt, and digging till the firm rock is reached. There is an effort, which is doomed to failure, to delimit the spheres of faith and reason, and fly to arms if the latter crosses the border. And meanwhile this want of unity in principle brings with it a want of unity in execution. It is not merely that in structure the poem is a little straggling and disconnected, for that is implied in its plan. But it is difficult to see that its varying thoughts and moods are in any real sense harmonised. It is, though infinitely finer, the same sort of tesselated work as The Princess. Tennyson's thought was neither fearless nor searching enough to find the principle for a more thorough combination. In his next longer work, Maud, which was pro- duced in 1854, he tried a new species of composition, which he described as a monodrama. The hero, speaking always in the first person in isolated lyrics of various measures, tells the story of his life and love. The centre and nucleus of the whole is to be found in the exquisite monody — " O that 'twere possible After long grief and pain To find the arms of my true love Round me once again" 1 1 Maud, Part 2, IV. i. 298 ARTHURIAN STORY which has been described by Mr. Swinburne as " the poem of the deepest charm, the fullest delight, of pathos and melody, ever written, even by Mr. Tennyson." All the rest forms the setting of this one jewel, and as the setting it is admirably managed, besides being full of beauties of its own. The poem is a drama where " successive phases of passion in one person take the place of successive persons," *■ and the various lyrics are thus connected in the life-history of the individual. v The general conception, also, which portrays the ^transition from morbid discontent, through love and despair, to the patriotic act, even as the nation passes from the stagnation of peace to the energy of war, is undoubtedly dramatic. Nor is there any more reason why there should not be a crowning lyric in the monodrama, than why there should not be a crowning scene in a regular drama. ^_ Yet many critics complain of a want of unity in the design, and of inequality in the execution. One describes it as " a greater medley than The Princess" because it shifts through so many themes, though clearly these are prescribed in the shifting moods of the lover. Another dismisses the re- mainder of the poem as " a glorified apparatus of foot-notes " to the one supreme achievement, though there are, unfortunately, few foot-notes like " Go not, happy day ! " or " O, art thou sighing for Lebanon." If, nevertheless, there is a certain un- evenness in the whole, it is rather that the passages of love and regret stand off by their absolute and 1 Remarks of Tennyson, as quoted by Mr. Knowles in "Aspects of Tennyson," II. Ni?ietecnth Ce?itiiry^ Jan., 1893. TENNYSON AS ARTHURIAN POET 299 universal truth from the passages in which a rather contemptible hypochondriac displays his woes, and the passages in which the regeneration of the country is expected from a somewhat irrational explosion of war feeling. The parts seem hetero- geneous because they have not all the same high note of inevitable passion and reality. Tennyson's monodrama, however, must always be regarded as one of his loveliest and most genial productions. The same can hardly be said of his series of regular dramas, the first of which belongs to the year 1875, when he had almost reached the age of sixty-six. Thus they are a kind of composition that he had never attempted in the prime of manhood, as he surely would have done had he possessed in any high degree the true dramatic bent. But the realism of the dramatist was alien from his nature ; he never sank himself in the life of others ; there was an aristocratic solitude and exclusiveness about his genius ; in his career he cultivated the fellowship of the few, and shunned the collisions and contradictions of the workaday world. Doubtless in this he was right, he knew what suited his peculiar gifts ; but such is not the training that gives a knowledge of men, or of that interplay of character which is all- essential in a drama. The extraordinary thing is that Tennyson, with so little apparent equipment, should have attained the measure of success that must be conceded to his plays, for there is none of them, from Queen Mary to The Foresters, that is without many high and admirable qualities. But they do not show him at his best, it is not to 300 ARTHURIAN STORY them that his admirers turn. Yet if he has not written great dramas, the attempt to do so has made his insight into situation and character more true and keen. Poems like The Revenge and Riz- pah have clearly benefited by his dramatic studies. They have a gathered strength, a power of charac- terisation, a mastery of individual traits, that are hardly to be found in his earlier pieces. In them he seems to pass beyond himself ; but just because in a sense they transcend his own manner, they are less typical than many others of the distinctive Tennysonian style. $Ve have left the Idylls to the last, owing to Whe difficulty of assigning them a determinate date. They do not belong to a particular year, but almost to half a century, if we reckon from 1842, when they may be said to have begun in the Morte d } Arthur, to 1886, when they received their final supplement in Balin and Balan. And this of itself contains a hint as to their importance. Extending through the greater part of Tennyson's literary life, they have a right to be regarded in some sort as his life work. And the interval from the earliest instalment in 1842 till they took their cyclic shape in 1869, is not only the period of Tennyson's mature vigour, but the period of which, as we saw, he was best fitted to be spokesman. The atmosphere of the day was his proper element, and he was in touch with the best feeling of the country. It is an indication of this that he took the time-honoured name of Arthur as the centre of his most extensive work, and that he chose the version of the story that was widest spread and TENNYSON AS ARTHURIAN POET 301 best beloved among his fellow-countrymen. His art is thus fortified and enlarged by something of a national interest ; there is a breath of popular sympathy to fill his sails and give his genius a freer sweep. Thus his subject was congenial to his audience ; certainly it was not less congenial to himself. The Arthurian stories have often been blamed for their want of reality, but realism is not the note of f- Tennyson's poetry. He had never pierced to the ^ heart of humanity with its mysteries of good and evil, and its crowning commonplace mystery of their inextricable entanglement. But the knights and ladies of the Round Table had never really belonged to the world of living men. It has been said of Tennyson, that " his scene is neither in earth or heaven, seeing that we cannot get from the one to the other except by a sword-bridge over the abyss of the other place " ; what country fitter for him, then, than the unhistoric Britain of King Arthur expanded and glorified through the mists of romance? Mrs Browning speaks of "en- chanted reverie " as his grand characteristic, and there can be no better description of the dream- like mood in which the glamour of the old legends falls on his heart. Already in 1 8 3 3 he was under the spell. Portrayed on the arras in The Palace of Art \ he sees how " Mythic Uther's deeply-wounded son In some fair space of sloping greens Lay, dozing in the vale of Avalon, , — And watch'd by weeping queens." Nor did he merely use the material for the embellish- 302 ARTHURIAN STORY ment of other poems ; he had made it the theme of one independent piece, The Lady of Shalott. Perhaps nowhere else does he so catch the magic of old romance as in the picture of the spell-bound maiden at her loom, singing and weaving, and see- ing nought of the world but the reflected images on her glass. "There she weaves by night and day A magic web with colours gay. She has heard a whisper say, A curse is on her if she stay To look down to Camelot. She knows not what the curse may be, And so she weaveth steadily, And little other care hath she, The Lady of Shalott." But the shadow of Sir Lancelot makes her dare her fate. " She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro' the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look'd down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide ; The mirror crack'd from side to side ; ' The curse is come upon me,' cried The Lady of Shalott." Then only death remains for her, and she lays herself in the shallop to float down the stream. " Lying, robed in snowy white That loosely flew to left and right — The leaves upon her falling light — Thro' the noises of the night She floated down to Camelot : TENNYSON AS AR THURIAN POET 303 And as the boat-head wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her singing her last song, The Lady of Shalott." When she reaches the city all come out to gaze and question — " Who is this ? and what is here ? And in the lighted palace near Died the sound of royal cheer ; And they cross'd themselves for fear, All the knights at Camelot : But Lancelot mused a little space; He said, ' She has a lovely face ; God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott.'" It is like the end of the dream-life of childhood, with its visions and music and mimic-work, when the hour of passion has come. It is interesting to notice that, like Wordsworth's Egyptian Maid, between which and Morris's Pre- raphaelite lyrics it occupies a middle place both in chronology and in character, this piece, with all its medieval colour, is a free fantasia, with a subtle psychological suggestion of a modern kind, on the given romantic theme, by no means a reproduction of it. Afterwards Tennyson was to be more faithful, for this may be regarded as an early draught of the idyll of Elaine, which adheres more closely to the original. Shalott, derived from Escalot, is merely a variant of Astolat, whose " lily maid " met with a similar fate, and whose dead body made a similar voyage, through vain love for Lancelot. In like manner, in the succeeding volume of 1842, 304 ARTHURIAN STORY occurs the fragment entitled Sir Lanncelot and Queen Guinevere, which bears an analogous relation to the idyll of Guinevere. " Then, in the boyhood of the year, Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere Rode thro' the coverts of the deer, With blissful treble ringing clear. She seem'd a part of joyous Spring : A gown of grass-green silk she wore, Buckled with golden clasps before ; A light-green tuft of plumes she bore Closed in a golden ring." But there are some points of contrast between this poem and its predecessor. The metre is almost the same, but not quite ; and it differs in being simpler, for the rhymes of the fifth and ninth lines are freely varied, and are not preserved the same in all the stanzas. This may indicate a transition from Tennyson's highly lyric manner ; and the tone of the fragment, as compared with that of The Lady of Shalott, is more that of a straightforward narrative. Altogether, in its general effect, it shows a closer correspondence both with the traditional material and with the later idyll, though it is not exactly reproduced from the one and is not exactly repeated in the other. And why was it left unfinished ? We may fancy, on analogy, that the story of the lovers was to have been given in three or four parts like The Lady of Shalott ; but Tennyson, getting beyond this metre and this treatment, abruptly breaks off. Meanwhile to the same date belongs Sir Galahad, which may be regarded as the first sketch of the Holy Grail. In its pervasive medieval charm, it TENNYSON AS ARTHURIAN POET 305 resembles the two others ; but the metre has become in comparison much less elaborate, and is practically that of the simple ballad. And, though the con- ception of the old romance differs widely from that of the modern idyll, there is nothing in this poem that is incompatible with the first, and nothing, save one particular, which will hereafter be noticed, that is incompatible with the second. It repre- sents, as it were, the centre of indifference between them. " When on my goodly charger borne Thro' dreaming towns I go, The cock crows ere the Christmas morn, The streets are dumb with snow. The tempest crackles on the leads, And, ringing, springs from brand and mail ; But o'er the dark a glory spreads, And gilds the driving hail. I leave the plain, I climb the height ; No branchy thicket shelter yields ; But blessed forms in whistling storms Fly o'er waste fens and windy fields. " A maiden knight — to me is given Such hope, I know not fear ; I yearn to breathe the airs of heaven That often meet me here. I muse on joy that will not cease, Pure spaces clothed in living beams, Pure lilies of eternal peace, Whose odours haunt my dreams ; And, stricken by an angel's hand, This mortal armour that I wear, This weight and size, this heart and eyes, Are touch'd, are turn'd to finest air." Meanwhile Tennyson, leaving the continuation 306 ARTHURIAN STOR Y of the Pre-raphaelite medieval style to other hands, had already, in this volume of 1842, passed beyond it with his Morte cT Arthur. Not that he ever forgot what his early reveries had showed him, but he mingles it with other elements, and accents the modern interest. This poem is framed in the conversation of some friends over the log on Christmas Eve. Frank Hall had written an epic on King A rthur, " some twelve books," and destroyed it because they were " faint Homeric echoes," and, " He thought that nothing new was said, or else Something so said 'twas nothing — that a truth Looks freshest in the fashion of the day : . . ' Why take the style of those heroic times ? For nature brings not back the Mastodon, Nor we those times.' " 1 However, the eleventh book has been preserved, the Morte dA rthur ; and it, when read, holds the listeners rapt. " Perhaps some modern touches here and there Redeem'd it from the charge of nothingness." 2 At any rate it seizes them and haunts them, and continues with them in their sleep, making the narrator dream that " Arthur is come again " — " King Arthur, like a modern gentleman Of stateliest port." 3 Now here there are one or two hints that Tennyson gives us about his poem. He talks of the " Homeric echoes," and it is undeniable that 1 The Epic. 2 Morte