| KING ARTHUR. VOL. I. | ||
| PAGE | ||
| Furness Abbey | [Frontispiece.] | |
| Statue of King Arthur at Innsbruck | [24] | |
| King Arthur's Fair Love | [48] | |
| King Arthur's Tomb | [70] | |
| Merlin and Nimue | [89] | |
| The Great Forest | [94] | |
| Nimue | [105] | |
| The Love of Pelleas and Nimue | [134] | |
| Dream of Sir Lancelot | [139] | |
| Old Arches of the Abbey Wall | [149] | |
| King Arthur's Round Table, Winchester Cathedral | [179] | |
| Beaumains, Damsel, and Dwarf | [213] | |
| The Joyous Wedding | [235] | |
| Sir Tristram Harping to Isolde | [250] | |
| A Castle of Cornwall | [258] | |
| Tristram and the Fair Isolde | [273] | |
| The Cliffs above the Sea | [288] | |
| Tintagil King Arthur's Castle | [302] | |
| Tristram Thereupon Departed to his Pavilion | [325] | |
| Admission of Sir Tristram to the King of the Round Table | [359] | |
INTRODUCTORY.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, the famous chronicler of legendary British history, tells us,—in reference to the time when the Celtic kings of Britain were struggling against the Saxon invaders,—that "there appeared a star of wonderful magnitude and brightness, darting its rays, at the end of which was a globe of fire in the form of a dragon, out of whose mouth issued two rays; one of which seemed to stretch itself beyond the extent of Gaul, the other towards the Irish Sea, and ended in two lesser rays." He proceeds to say, that Merlin, the magician, being called on to explain this portent, declared that the dragon represented Uther, the brother of King Ambrose, who was destined himself soon to become king; that the ray extending towards Gaul indicated a great son, who should conquer the Gallic Kingdoms; and that the ray with two lesser rays indicated a daughter, whose son and grandson should successively reign over Britain. Uther, in consequence, when he came to the throne, had two gold dragons made, one of which he placed in the cathedral of Winchester, which it brightly illuminated; the other he kept, and from it gained the name of Pendragon. The powerful ray represented his great son Arthur, destined to become the flower of chivalry, and the favorite hero of mediæval romance.
This is history as Geoffrey of Monmouth understood it, but hardly so in the modern sense, and Arthur remains as mystical a figure as Achilles, despite the efforts of various writers to bring him within the circle of actual kings. After the Romans left Britain, two centuries passed of whose history hardly a coherent shred remains. This was the age of Arthur, one of the last champions of Celtic Britain against the inflowing tide of Anglo-Saxon invasion. That there was an actual Arthur there is some, but no very positive, reason to believe. After all the evidence has been offered, we still seem to have but a shadowy hero before us, "a king of shreds and patches," whose history is so pieced out with conjecture that it is next to impossible to separate its facts from its fancies.
The Arthur of the legends, of the Welsh and Breton ballads, of the later Chansons de Geste, of Malory and Tennyson, has quite stepped out of the historic page and become a hero without time or place in any real world, a king of the imagination, the loftiest figure in that great outgrowth of chivalric romance which formed the favorite fictitious literature of Europe during three or four of the mediæval centuries. Charlemagne, the leading character in the earlier romances of chivalry, was, in the twelfth century, replaced by Arthur, a milder and more Christian-like hero, whose adventures, with those of his Knights of the Round Table, delighted the tenants of court and castle in that marvel-loving and uncritical age. That the stories told of him are all fiction cannot be declared. Many of them may have been founded on fact. But, like the stones of a prehistoric wall, their facts are so densely enveloped by the ivy of fiction that it is impossible to delve them out.
The ballads and romances in which the King Arthur of mediæval story figures as the hero, would scarcely prove pleasant and profitable reading to us now, however greatly they delighted our ancestors. They are marked by a coarseness and crudity which would be but little to our taste. Nor have we anything of modern growth to replace them. Milton entertained a purpose of making King Arthur the hero of an epic poem, but fortunately yielded it for the nobler task of "Paradise Lost." Spenser gives this hero a minor place in his "Fairie Queen." Dryden projected a King Arthur epic, but failed to write it. Recently Bulwer has given us a cumbersome "King Arthur," which nobody reads; and Tennyson has handled the subject brilliantly in his "Idyls of the King," splendid successes as poems, yet too infiltrated with the spirit of modernism to be acceptable as a reproduction of the Arthur of romance. For a true rehabilitation of this hero of the age of chivalry we must go to the "Morte Darthur" of Sir Thomas Malory, a writer of the fifteenth century, who lived when men still wore armor, and so near to the actual age of chivalry as to be in full sympathy with the spirit of its fiction, and its pervading love of adventure and belief in the magical.
Malory did a work of high value in editing the confused mass of earlier fiction, lopping off its excrescences and redundancies, reducing its coarseness of speech, and producing from its many stories and episodes a coherent and continuous narrative, in which the adventures of the Round Table Knights are deftly interwoven with the record of the birth, life, and death of the king, round whom as the central figure all these knightly champions revolve. Malory seems to have used as the basis of his work perhaps one, perhaps several, old French prose romances, and possibly also material derived from Welsh and English ballads. Such material in his day was doubtless abundant. Geoffrey had drawn much of his legendary history from the ancient Welsh ballads. The mass of romantic fiction which he called history became highly popular, first in Brittany, and then in France, the Trouveres making Arthur, Lancelot, Tristram, Percival, and others of the knightly circle the heroes of involved romances, in which a multitude of new incidents were invented. The Minnesingers of Germany took up the same fruitful theme, producing a "Parzivale," a "Tristan and Isolt," and other heroic romances. From all this mass of material, Malory wrought his "Morte Darthur," as Homer wrought his "Iliad" from the preceding warlike ballads, and the unknown compiler of the "Nibelungenlied" wrought his poem from similar ancient sources.
Malory was not solely an editor. He was in a large sense a creator. It was coarse and crude material with which he had to deal, but in his hands its rude prose gained a degree of poetic fervor. The legends which he preserves he has in many cases transmuted from base into precious coin. There is repulsive matter in the old romances, which he freely cuts out. To their somewhat wooden heroes he gives life and character, so that in Lancelot, Gawaine, Dinadan, Kay, and others we have to deal with distinct personalities, not with the non-individualized hard-hitters of the romances. And to the whole story he gives an epic completeness which it lacked before. In the early days of Arthur's reign Merlin warns him that fate has already woven its net about him and that the sins of himself and his queen will in the end bring his reign to a violent termination, and break up that grand fellowship of the Round Table which has made Britain and its king illustrious. This epic character of Malory's work is pointed out in the article "Geoffrey of Monmouth" in the "Encyclopædia Britannica," whose writer says that the Arthurian legends "were converted into a magnificent prose poem by Sir Thomas Malory in 1461. Malory's Morte Darthur is as truly the epic of the English mind as the Iliad is the epic of the Greek mind."