Yet the "Morte Darthur," if epic in plan and treatment, is by no means free from the defects of primitive literature. It was written before the age of criticism, and confusion reigns supreme in many of its pages,—a confusion which a very little critical supervision might have removed. As an instance, we find that Galahad, two years after his birth, is made a knight, being then fifteen years old. In like manner the "seat perilous" at the Round Table is magically reserved for Galahad, the author evidently forgetting that he had already given it to Percivale. King Mark's murder of his brother Baldwin is revenged by Baldwin's grandson, thirty or forty years afterward, though there is nothing to show that the characters had grown a year older in the interval. Here a knight finds one antagonist quite sufficient for one man; there he does not hesitate to attack fifty at once; here a slight wound disables him; there a dozen deep wounds are fully healed by a night's rest. Many similar instances might be given, but these will suffice. The discrepancies here indicated were perhaps due to the employment of diverse legends, without care to bring them into accordance, but they lay the work open to adverse criticism.
This lack of critical accuracy may have been a necessary accompaniment of the credulous frame of mind that could render such a work possible. It needed an artlessness of mental make-up, a full capacity for acceptance of the marvellous, a simple-minded faith in chivalry and its doings, which could scarcely exist in common with the critical temperament. In truth, the flavor of an age of credulity and simplicity of thought everywhere permeates this quaint old work, than which nothing more artless, simple, and unique exists in literature, and nothing with a higher value as a presentation of the taste in fiction of our mediæval predecessors.
Yet the "Morte Darthur" is not easy or attractive reading, to other than special students of literature. Aside from its confusion of events and arrangement, it tells the story of chivalry with a monotonous lack of inflection that is apt to grow wearisome, and in a largely obsolete style and dialect with whose difficulties readers in general may not care to grapple. Its pages present an endless succession of single combats with spear and sword, whose details are repeated with wearisome iteration. Knights fight furiously for hours together, till they are carved with deep wounds, and the ground crimsoned with gore. Sometimes they are so inconsiderate as to die, sometimes so weak as to seek a leech, but as often they mount and ride away in philosophical disregard of their wounds, and come up fresh for as fierce a fight the next day.
As for a background of scenery and architecture, it scarcely exists. Deep interest in man and woman seems to have shut out all scenic accessories from the mind of the good old knight. It is always but a step from the castle to the forest, into which the knights-errant plunge, and where most of their adventures take place; and the favorite resting-and jousting-place is by the side of forest springs—or wells, as in the text. We have mention abundant of fair castles, fair valleys, fair meadows, and the like, the adjective "fair" going far to serve all needs of description. But in his human characters, with their loves and hates, jousts and battles, bewitchments and bewilderments, the author takes deep interest, and follows the episodical stories which are woven into the plot with a somewhat too satisfying fulness. In evidence of the dramatic character of many of these episodes we need but refer to the "Idyls of the King," whose various romantic and tragic narratives are all derived from this quaint "old master" of fictitious literature.
With all its faults of style and method, the "Morte Darthur" is a very live book. It never stops to moralize or philosophize, but keeps strictly to its business of tale-telling, bringing up before the reader a group of real men and women, not a series of lay-figures on a background of romance, as in his originals.
Kay with his satirical tongue, Dinadan with his love of fun, Tristram loving and noble, Lancelot bold and chivalrous, Gawaine treacherous and implacable, Arthur kingly but adventurous, Mark cowardly and base-hearted, Guenever jealous but queenly, Isolde tender and faithful, and a host of other clearly individualized knights and ladies move in rapid succession through the pages of the romance, giving it, with its manners of a remote age, a vital interest that appeals to modern tastes.
In attempting to adapt this old masterpiece to the readers of our own day, we have no purpose to seek to paraphrase or improve on Malory. To remove the antique flavor would be to destroy the spirit of the work. We shall leave it as we find it, other than to reduce its obsolete phraseology and crudities of style to modern English, abridge the narrative where it is wearisomely extended, omit repetitions and uninteresting incidents, reduce its confusion of arrangement, attempt a more artistic division into books and chapters, and by other arts of editorial revision seek to make it easier reading, while preserving as fully as possible those unique characteristics which have long made it delightful to lovers of old literature.
The task here undertaken is no light one, nor is success in it assured. Malory has an individuality of his own which gives a peculiar charm to his work, and to retain this in a modernized version is the purpose with which we set out and which we hope to accomplish. The world of to-day is full of fiction, endless transcripts of modern life served up in a great variety of palatable forms. Our castle-living forefathers were not so abundantly favored. They had no books,—and could not have read them if they had,—but the wandering minstrel took with them the place of the modern volume, bearing from castle to court, and court to castle, his budget of romances of magic and chivalry, and delighting the hard-hitting knights and barons of that day with stirring ballads and warlike tales to which their souls rose in passionate response.
In the "Morte Darthur" is preserved to us the pith of the best of those old romances, brought into a continuous narrative by one who lived when chivalry yet retained some of its vital hold on the minds of men, and who, being a knight himself, could enter with heartfelt sympathy into the deeds of the knights of an earlier age. Certainly many of the readers of modern fiction will find a pleasure in turning aside awhile from the hot-pressed thought of the nineteenth-century novel to this fresh and breezy outcrop from the fiction of an earlier day; with the double purpose of learning on what food the minds of our ancestors were fed, and of gaining a breath of wild perfume from the far-off field of the romance of chivalry. That the story of Arthur and his Knights can arouse in modern readers the intense interest with which it was received by mediæval auditors is not to be expected. We are too far removed in time and manners from the age of knight-errantry to enter deeply into sympathy with its unfamiliar ways. Yet a milder interest may still be awakened in what gave our predecessors such enthusiastic delight, and some at least may turn with pleasure from the most philosophic of modern novels to wander awhile through this primitive domain of thought.
To such we offer this work, which we have simply sought to make easy reading, with little further liberty with Malory's quaint prose than to put it into a modern dress, and with the hope that no such complete divorce exists between the world of the present and that of the past as to render the exploits of King Arthur and his Round Table Knights dull, wearisome, and profitless reading, void of the human interest which they once possessed in such large and satisfying measure.