The English Novel

by George Saintsbury

But there is a third argument, less practical in appearance but bolder and deeper, which is really decisive of the matter, though few seem to have seen it or at least taken it up. The separation of romance and novel—of the story of incident and the story of character and motive—is a mistake logically and psychologically. It is a very old mistake, and it has deceived some of the elect: but a mistake it is. It made even Dr. Johnson think Fielding shallower than Richardson; and it has made people very different from Dr. Johnson think that Count Tolstoi is a greater analyst and master of a more developed humanity than Fielding. As a matter of fact, when you have excogitated two or more human beings out of your own head and have set them to work in the narrative (not the dramatic) way, you have made the novel in posse, if not in esse, from its apparently simplest development, such as Daphnis and Chloe, to its apparently most complex, such as the Kreutzer Sonata or the triumphs of Mr. Meredith. You have started the "Imitation"—the "fiction"—and tout est là. The ancients could do this in the dramatic way admirably, though on few patterns; in the poetical way as admirably, but again not on many. The Middle Ages lost the dramatic way almost entirely, but they actually improved the poetical on its narrative side, and the result was Romance. In every romance there is the germ of a novel and more; there is at least the suggestion and possibility of romance in every novel that deserves the name. In the Tristram story and the Lancelot cycle there are most of the things that the romancer of incident and the novelist of character and motive can want or can use, till the end of the world; and Malory (that "mere compiler" as some pleasantly call him) has put the possibilities of the latter and greater creation so that no one who has eyes can miss them. Nor in the beginning does it much or at all matter whether the vehicle was prose or verse. In fact they mostly wrote in verse because prose was not ready.

In the minor romances and tales (taking English versions only) from Havelok to Beryn there is a whole universe of situation, scenario, opportunity for "business." That they have the dress and the scene-backing of one particular period can matter to no one who has eyes for anything beyond dress and scene-backing. And when we are told that they are apt to run too much into grooves and families, it is sufficient to answer that it really does not lie in the mouth of an age which produces grime-novels, problem-novels, and so forth, as if they had been struck off on a hectograph, possessing the not very exalted gift of varying names and places—to reproach any other age on this score. But we have only limited room here for generalities and still less for controversy; let us turn to our proper work and survey the actual turn-out in fiction—mostly as a result of mere fashion, verse, but partly prose—which the Middle Ages has left us as a contribution to this department of English literature.

It has been said that few people know the treasures of English romance, yet there is little excuse for ignorance of them. It is some century since Ellis's extremely amusing, if sometimes rather prosaic, book put much of the matter before those who will not read originals; to be followed in the same path by Dunlop later, and much later still by the invaluable and delightful Catalogue of [British Museum] Romances by Mr. Ward. It is nearly as long since the collections of Ritson and Weber, soon supplemented by others, and enlarged for the last forty years by the publications of the Early English Text Society, put these originals themselves within the reach of everybody who is not so lazy or so timid as to be disgusted or daunted by a very few actually obsolete words and a rather large proportion of obsolete spellings, which will yield to even the minimum of intelligent attention. Only a very small number (not perhaps including a single one of importance) remain unprinted, though no doubt a few are out of print or difficult to obtain. The quality and variety of the stories told in them are both very considerable, even without making allowance for what has been called the stock character of mediæval composition. That almost all are directly imitated from the French is probable enough, that most are is certain: but this matters, for our purpose, nothing at all. That the imitation was not haphazard or indiscriminate is obvious. Thus, though we have some, we have not very many representatives of the class which was the most numerous of all in France—the chansons de geste or stories of French legendary history, national or family. Except as far as the Saracens are concerned, they would naturally have less interest for English hearers. The Matière de Rome, again—the legends of antiquity—though represented, is not very abundant outside of the universally popular Tale of Troy; and the almost equally popular Alexander legend does not occupy a very large part of them. What is perhaps more remarkable is that until Malory exercised his genius upon "the French book," the more poetical parts of the "matter of Britain" itself do not seem to have been very much written about in English. The preliminary stuff about Merlin and Vortigern exists in several handlings; the foreign campaigns of Arthur seem always (perhaps from national vanity) to have been popular. The "off"-branches of Tristram and Percivale, and not a few of the still more episodic romances of adventures concerning Gawain, Iwain, and other knights, receive attention. The execrable Lonelich or Lovelich, who preceded Malory a little, had of course predecessors in handling the other parts of the Graal story. But the crown and flower of the whole—the inspiration which connected the Round Table and the Graal and the love of Lancelot and Guinevere—though, so far as the present writer's reading and opinion are of any weight, the recent attempts to deprive the Englishman, Walter Map, of the honour of conceiving it are of no force—seems to have waited till the fifteenth century—that is to say the last part of three hundred years—before Englishmen took it up. Most popular of all perhaps, on the principle that in novels the flock "likes the savour of fresh grass," seem to have been the pure romans d'aventures—quite unconnected or nearly so with each other or with any of the larger cycles. Those adventures of particular heroes have sometimes a sort of Arthurian link, but they really have no more to do with the main Arthurian story than if Arthur were not.

For the present purpose, however, filiation, origin, and such-like things are of much less importance than the actual stories that get themselves told to satisfy that demand which in due time is to produce the supply of the novel. Of these the two oldest, as regards the actual forms in which we have them, are capital examples of the more and less original handling of "common-form" stories or motives. They were not then, be it remembered, quite such common-form as now—the rightful heir kept out of his rights, the usurper of them, the princess gracious or scornful or both by turns, the quest, the adventure, the revolutions and discoveries and fights, the wedding bells and the poetical justice on the villain. Let it be remembered, too, if anybody is scornful of these as vieux jeu, that they have never been really improved upon except by the very obvious and unoriginal method common in clever-silly days, of simply reversing some of them, of "turning platitudes topsy-turvy," as not the least gifted, or most old-fashioned, of novelists, Tourguenief, has it. Perhaps the oldest of all, Havelok the Dane—a story the age of which from evidence both internal and external, is so great that people have not quite gratuitously imagined a still older Danish or even Anglo-Saxon original for the French romance from which our existing one is undoubtedly taken—is one of the most spirited of all. Both hero and heroine—Havelok, who should be King of Denmark and Goldborough, who should be Queen of England—are ousted by their treacherous guardian-viceroys as infants; and Havelok is doomed to drowning by his tutor, the greater or at least bolder villain of the two. But the fisherman Grim, who is chosen as his murderer, discovers that the child has, at night, a nimbus of flame round his head; renounces his crime and escapes by sea with the child and his own family to Grimsby. Havelok, growing up undistinguished from his foster-brethren, takes service as a scullion with the English usurper. This usurper is seeking how to rid himself of the princess without violence, but in some way that will make her succession to the crown impossible, and Havelok having shown prowess in sports is selected as the maiden's husband. She, too, discovers his royalty at night by the same token; and the pair regain their respective inheritances and take vengeance on their respective traitors, in a lively and adventurous fashion. There are all the elements of a good story in this: and they are by no means wasted or spoilt in the actual handling. It is not a mere sequence of incident; from the mixture of generosity and canniness in the fisherman who ascertains that he is to have traitor's wages before he finally decides to rescue Havelok, to the not unnatural repugnance of Goldborough at her forced wedding with a scullion, the points where character comes in are not neglected, though of course the author does not avail himself of them either in Shakespearean or in Richardsonian fashion. They are there, ready for development by any person who may take it into his head to develop them.

So too is it in the less powerful and rather more cut and dried King Horn. Here the opening is not so very different; the hero's father is murdered by pirate invaders, and he himself set adrift in a boat. But in this the princess (daughter of course of the king who shelters him) herself falls in love with Horn, and there is even a scene of considerable comic capabilities in which she confides this affection by mistake to one of his companions (fortunately a faithful one) instead of to himself. But Horn has a faithless friend also; and rivals, and adventures, and journeys; and returns just in the nick of time, and recognitions by rings, and everything that can properly be desired occur. In these—even more perhaps than in Havelok's more masculine and less sentimental fortunes—there are openings not entirely neglected by the romancer (though, as has been said, he does not seem to have been one of the strongest of his kind) for digression, expatiation, embroidery. Transpose these two stories (as the slow kind years will teach novelists inevitably to do) into slightly different keys, introduce variations and episodes and codas, and you have the possibilities of a whole library of fiction, as big and as varied as any that has ever established itself for subscribers, and bigger than any that has ever offered itself as one collection to buyers.

The love-stories of these two tales are what it is the fashion—exceedingly complimentary to the age referred to if not to the age of the fashion itself—to call "mid-Victorian" in their complete "propriety." Indeed, it is a Puritan lie, though it seems to possess the vivaciousness of its class, that the romances are distinguished by "bold bawdry." They are on the contrary rather singularly pure, and contrast, in that respect, remarkably with the more popular folk-tale. But fiction, no more than drama, could do without the ἁμαρτἱα—the human and not unpardonable frailty. This appears in, and complicates, the famous story of Tristram, which, though its present English form is probably younger than Havelok and Horn, is likely to have existed earlier: indeed must have done so if Thomas of Erceldoune wrote on the subject. Few can require to be told that beautiful and tragical history of "inauspicious stars" which hardly any man, of the many who have handled it in prose and verse, has been able to spoil. Our Middle English form is not consummate, and is in some places crude in manner and in sentiment. But it is notable that the exaggerated and inartistic repulsiveness of Mark, resorted to by later writers as a rather rudimentary means of exciting compassion for the lovers, is not to be found here; in fact, one of the most poetical touches in the piece is one of sympathy for the luckless husband, when he sees the face of his faithless queen slumbering by her lover's side with the sun on it. "And Mark rewed therefore." The story, especially in its completion with the "Iseult of Brittany" part and the death of Tristram, gives scope for every possible faculty and craftsmanship of the most analytic as of the most picturesque novelist of modern times. There is nothing in the least like it in ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would do it justice in modern times we should have to take the best notes of Charles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and Mr. Meredith, leaving out all their faults, and combine. It is not surprising that, in the very infancy of the art, nobody in German or French, any more than in English (though the German here is, as it happens, the best), should have done it full justice; but it is a wonder that a story of such capacities should have been sketched, and even worked out in considerable detail, so early.

Of the far greater story of which Tristram is a mere episode and hardly even that—a chantry or out-lying chapel of the great cathedral—the Arthurian Legend, the earlier English versions, or rather the earlier versions in English, are, as has been said, not only fragmentary but disappointing. There is nothing in the least strange in this, even though (as the present writer, who can speak with indifferent knowledge, still firmly holds) the conception of the story itself in its greatest and unifying stage is probably if not certainly English. The original sources of the story of Arthur are no doubt Celtic; they give themselves out as being so, and there is absolutely no critical reason for disbelieving them. But in these earlier forms—the authority of the most learned Celticists who have any literary gift and any appreciation of evidence is decisive on this point—not only are the most characteristic unifying features—the Graal story and the love of Lancelot and Guinevere—completely wanting, but the great stroke of genius—the connection of these two and the subordination of all minor legends as to the dim national hero, Arthur, with those about him—is more conspicuously wanting still. Whether it was the Englishman Walter Map, the Norman Robert de Borron, or the Frenchman Chrestien de Troyes, to whom this flash of illumination came, has never been proved—will pretty certainly now never be proved. M. Gaston Paris failed to do it; and it is exceedingly unlikely that, where he failed, any one else will succeed, unless the thrice and thirty times sifted libraries of Europe yield some quite unexpected windfall. In the works commonly attributed to Chrestien, all of which are well known to the present writer, there is no sign of his having been able to conceive this, though he is a delightful romancer. Robert is a mere shadow; and his attributed works, as his works, are shadows too, though they are interesting enough in themselves. Walter not only has the greatest amount of traditional attribution, but is the undoubted author of De Nugis Curialium. And the author of De Nugis Curialium, different as it is from the Arthurian story, could have finally divined the latter.

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time. And the most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are rarely handled at all in such early vernacular versions of it as we have, whether in verse or prose. Naturally enough, perhaps, it was the fabulous historic connection with British history, and the story of the great British enchanter Merlin, that attracted most attention. The Arthour and Merlin which is in the Auchinleck MS.; the prose Merlin, published by the Early English Text Society; the alliterative Thornton Morte d'Arthur, and others, are wont to busy themselves about the antecedents of the real story—about the uninteresting wars of the King himself with Saxons, and Romans, and giants, and rival kings, rather than with the great chivalric triple cord of Round Table, Graal, and Guinevere's fault. The pure Graal poems, Joseph of Arimathea, the work of the abominable Lonelich or Lovelich, etc., deal mainly with another branch of previous questions—things bearable as introductions, fillings-up, and so forth, but rather jejune in themselves. The Scots Lancelot is later than Malory himself, and of very little interest. Layamon's account, the oldest that we have, adds little (though what little it does add is not unimportant) to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace; and tells what it has to tell with nearly as little skill in narrative as in poetry. Only the metrical Morte—from which, it would appear, Malory actually transprosed some of his most effective passages in the manner in which genius transproses or transverses—has, for that reason, for its dealings with the catastrophe, and for the further opportunity of comparison with Tennyson, interest of the higher kind. But before we come to Malory himself it is desirable to turn to the branches—the chapels, as we have called them, to the cathedral—which he also, in some cases at least, utilised in the magnum opus of English prose romance.

These outliers were rather more fortunate, probably for no more recondite reason than that the French originals (from which they were in almost every instance certainly taken) were finished in themselves. Of the special Gawain cycle or sub-cycle we have two romances in pure metrical form, and more than two in alliterative, which are above the average in interest. Ywain and Gawain, one of the former, is derived directly or indirectly from the Chevalier au Lyon of Chrestien de Troyes; and both present some remarkable affinities with the unknown original of the "Sir Beaumains" episode of Malory, and, through it, with Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette. The other, Lybius Disconus (Le Beau Déconnu) is also concerned with that courteous nephew of Arthur who, in later versions of the main story, is somewhat sacrificed to Lancelot. For a "real romance," as it calls itself (though it is fair to say that in the original the word means "royal"), of the simpler kind but extremely well told, there are not many better metrical specimens than Ywain and Gawain, but it has less character-interest, actual or possible, than those which have been commented on. The hero, King Urien's son, accepts an adventure in which another knight of the Table, Sir Colgrevance, has fared ill, after it has been told in a conversation at court which is joined in first by the Queen and afterwards by the King. Sir Kay here shows his usual cross-grainedness; and Guinevere "with milde mood" requests to know "What the devil is thee within?" The adventure is of a class well known in romance. You ride to a certain fountain, pour water from it on a stone, and then, after divers marvels, have to do battle with a redoubtable knight. Colgrevance has fared badly; Kay is as usual quite sure that he would fare better; but Ywain actually undertakes the task. He has a tough battle with the knight who answers the challenge, but wounds him mortally; and when the knight flies to his neighbouring castle, is so hard on his heels that the portcullis actually drops on his horse's haunches just behind the saddle, and cuts the beast in two. Ywain is thus left between the portcullis and the (by this time shut) door—a position all the more awkward that the knight himself expires immediately after he has reached shelter. The situation is saved, however, by the guardian damsel of romance, Lunet (the Linet or Lynette of the Beaumains-Gareth story), who emerges from a postern between gate and portcullis and conveys the intruder safe to her own chamber. Here a magic bed makes him invisible: though the whole castle, including the very room, is ransacked by the dead knight's people and would-be revengers, at the bidding of his widow.

This widow, however, is rather an Ephesian matron. The sagacious Lunet, whose confidante she is, suggests to her that, unless she enlists some doughty knight as her champion, the king will confiscate her fief; and that there is no champion like a husband. A very little more finesse effects the marriage, even though the lady is made aware of the identity of her new lover and her own husband's slayer. (It is of course necessary to remember that the death of a combatant in fairly challenged and fought single contest was not reckoned as any fault to his antagonist.) Ywain actually shows his prowess against the King: and has an opportunity of showing Kay once more that it is one thing to blame other people for failing, and another to succeed yourself. And after this the newly married pair live together happily for a time. But it was reckoned a fault in a knight to take too prolonged a honeymoon: and Ywain, after what the French call adieux déchirants, obtains leave for the usual "twelvemonth and a day," at the expiration of which, on St. John's Eve, he is without fail to return, the engagement being sealed by the gift from his lady of a special ring. He forgets his promise of course: and at the stated time a damsel appears, sternly demands the ring, and announces her lady's decision to have nothing further to do with him. There is in such cases only one thing for any true knight, from Sir Lancelot to Sir Amadis, to do: and that is to go mad, divest himself of his garments, and take to the greenwood. This Ywain duly does, supporting himself at first on the raw flesh of game which he kills with a bow and arrows wrested from a chance-comer; and then on less savage but still simple food supplied by a benevolent hermit. As he lies asleep under a tree, a lady rides by with attendants, and one of these (another of the wise damsels of romance) recognises him as Sir Ywain. The lady has at the time sore need of a champion against a hostile earl, and she also fortunately possesses a box of ointment infallible against madness, which Morgane la Faye has given her. With this the damsel is sent back to anoint Ywain. He comes to his senses, is armed and clothed, undertakes the lady's defence, and discomfits the earl: but is as miserable as ever. Resisting the lady's offer of herself and all her possessions, he rides off once more "with heavy heart and dreary cheer."