His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.
Hence comes the inevitable tragedy, the greatest in romance.
"Herein," says Caxton, rising to the height of Malory's own style, men "shall find many joyous and pleasant histories, and noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, goodness, and sin. Do after the good, and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee."
Many recent critics of Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," which is mainly derived from Malory, appear to think that Malory's "Morte d'Arthur" is a violent, brutal, licentious book, and that Tennyson invented the noble courtesy, chivalry, humanity to suit the middle-class morality of 1860. This opinion is merely stupid. "The Morte," it has been well said, "assumes the recognition of a loftier standard of justice, purity and unselfishness than its own century knew.... The motive forces are the elemental passions of love and bravery, never greed, or lust, or cruelty,"—except of course in traitors like Meliagraunce and Mordred. The knights have the strongest sense of fair play: Sir Lancelot bears no spite against Sir Palamedes, a pagan knight, who, from ignorance of the rules, deals a stroke in a tournament which the rules forbade. Their sense of honour is crystal-clear, and, as in Tennyson's Idylls, this honour and loyalty make the tragedy; the struggle between Lancelot's love of Guinevere, and his friendship for and loyalty to King Arthur. His sin brings its own punishment, he cannot win the vision of the Grail, that Holy thing: "blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God".
Arthur himself, after the wars of his youth, is but faintly drawn: it is not for the King to seek adventures, but to hear the suits of his people who come to him for help and justice. A mystery of Fate hangs over him: he is smitten by the sins of his knights, and passes away, sorely wounded but alive, as strangely as Œdipus in the tragedy of Sophocles: perhaps, who knows, to come again. "In Avalon he groweth old," in the peaceful hidden land of apples and apple-blossom.
The scenes all pass in a world where colours are magically soft and bright. There is an old song of the fourteenth century which gives the kind of colour that abounds in Malory.
Lully, lulley, lully, lulley
The fawcon hath borne my mate away!
He bare him up, he bare him down,
He bare him into an orchard brown.
In that orchard there was a hall
That was hanged with purple and pall.
And in that hall there was a bed,
It was hung with gold so red.
And in that bed there lieth a knight,
His wounds bleeding day and night.
By that bedside kneeleth a may,
And she weepeth both night and day.
This is like a song made on some scene in the Quest for the Grail.
Malory's world is "an unsubstantial fairy place," yet there is no fairy non-morality. There is the loftiest ideal among the knights who follow the gleam and fragrance of the Holy Grail. That all do not attain to their ideal is but the failing of human nature, the ideal is among them, they aspire to reach "the spiritual City". For Guinevere, Malory has the chivalrous compassion of Homer for Helen; of Chaucer for Criseyde, but while Helen wins, with light penance, to her home by the Eurotas, and her translation to Elysium, the Avalon of Greece, it is through many years of penance that Guinevere comes to her rest. What Shelley said of the end of the Iliad may be said of the last chapters of the "Morte," they die away "in the high and solemn close of the whole bloody tale in tenderness and inexpiable sorrow".
The prose with all its simplicity has rhythm and charm. Thus, "Therefore all ye that be lovers call unto your remembrance the month of May, like as did Queen Guinevere, for whom I make here a little mention, that while she lived she was a true lover, and therefore had she a good end". The words spoken by Sir Ector over the dead body of Lancelot are one of the noblest passages in English prose.