The story of Joseph of Arimathea.
The starting-point of the whole, in time and incident, is the supposed revenge of the Jews on Joseph of Arimathea for the part he has taken in the burial of our Lord. He is thrown into prison and remains there (miraculously comforted, so that the time seems to him but as a day or two) till delivered by Titus. Then he and certain more or less faithful Christians set out in charge of the Holy Graal, which has served for the Last Supper, which holds Christ's blood, and which is specially under the guardianship of Joseph's son, the Bishop "Josephes," to seek foreign lands, and a home for the Holy Vessel. After a long series of the wildest adventures, in which the personages, whose names are known rather mistily to readers of Malory only—King Evelake, Naciens, and others—appear fully, and in which many marvels take place, the company, or the holier survivors of them, are finally settled in Britain. Here the imprudence of Evelake (or Mordrains) causes him to receive the "dolorous stroke," from which none but his last descendant, Galahad, is to recover him fully. The most striking of all these adventures, related in various forms in other parts of the Legend, is the sojourn of Naciens on a desert island, where he is tempted of the devil; while a very great part is played throughout by the Legend of the Three Trees, which in successive ages play their part in the Fall, in the first origin of mankind according to natural birth, not creation, in the building of the Temple, and in the Passion. This later legend, a wild but very beautiful one, dominated the imagination of English mediæval writers very particularly, and is fully developed, apart from its Arthurian use, in the vast and interesting miscellany of the Cursor Mundi.
Merlin.
But when the Graal and its guardians have been safely established upon English soil, the connection of the legend with the older and, so to speak, historical Arthurian traditions, is effected by means of Merlin, in a manner at least ingenious if not very direct. The results of the Passion, and especially the establishment on earth of a Christian monarchy with a sort of palladium in the Saint-Graal, greatly disturb the equanimity of the infernal regions; and a council is held to devise counter-policy. It occurs apparently that as this discomfiture has come by means of the union of divine and human natures, it can be best opposed by a union of human and diabolic: and after some minor proceedings a seductive devil is despatched to play incubus to the last and chastest daughter of a prud'homme, who has been driven to despair and death by previous satanic attacks. The attempt is successful in a way; but as the victim keeps her chastity of intention and mind, not only is she herself saved from the legal consequences of the matter, but her child when born is the celebrated Merlin, a being endowed with supernatural power and knowledge, and not always scrupulous in the use of them, but always on the side of the angels rather than of his paternal kinsfolk. A further and more strictly literary connection is effected by attributing the knowledge of the Graal history to his information, conveyed to his master and pupil Blaise, who writes it (as well as the earlier adventures at least of the Arthurian era proper) from Merlin's dictation or report.
For some time the various Merlin stories follow Geoffrey in recounting the adventures of the prophetic child in his youth, with King Vortigern and others. But he is soon brought (again in accordance with Geoffrey) into direct responsibility for Arthur, by his share in the wooing of Igraine. For it is to be observed that—and not in this instance only—though there is usually some excuse for him, Merlin is in these affairs more commonly occupied in making two lovers happy than in attending to the strict dictates of morality. And thenceforward till his inclusion in his enchanted prison (an affair in which it is proper to say that the earliest versions give a much more favourable account of the conduct and motives of the heroine than that which Malory adopted, and which Tennyson for purposes of poetic contrast blackened yet further) he plays the part of adviser, assistant, and good enchanter generally to Arthur and Arthur's knights. He in some stories directly procures, and in all confirms, the seating of Arthur on his father's throne; he brings the king's nephews, Gawain and the rest, to assist their uncle, in some cases against their own fathers; he presides over the foundation of the Round Table, and brings about the marriage of Guinevere and Arthur; he assists, sometimes by actual force of arms, sometimes as head of the intelligence department, sometimes by simple gramarye, in the discomfiture not merely of the rival and rebel kinglets, but of the Saxons and Romans. As has been said, Malory later thought proper to drop the greater part of this latter business (including the interminable fights round the Roche aux Saisnes or Saxon rock). And he also discarded a curious episode which makes a great figure in the original Merlin, the tale of the "false Guinevere," a foster-sister, namesake, and counterpart of the true princess, who is nearly substituted for Guinevere herself on her bridal night, and who later usurps for a considerable time the place and rights of the queen. For it cannot be too often repeated that Arthur, not even in Malory a "blameless king" by any means, is in the earlier and original versions still less blameless, especially in the article of faithfulness to his wife.
We do not, however, in the Merlin group proper get any tidings of Lancelot, though Lucan, Kay, Bedivere, and others, as well as Gawain and the other sons of Lot, make their appearance, and the Arthurian court and régime, as we imagine it with the Round Table, is already constituted. It is to be observed that in the earlier versions there is even a sharp rivalry between the "Round Table" proper and the "Queen's" or younger knights. But this subsides, and the whole is centred at Camelot, with the realm (until Mordred's treachery) well under control, and with a constant succession of adventures, culminating in the greatest of all, the Quest of the Graal or Sangreal itself. Although there are passages of great beauty, the excessive mysticism, the straggling conduct of the story, and the extravagant praise of virginity in and for itself, in the early Graal history, have offended some readers. In the Merlin proper the incompleteness, the disproportionate space given to mere kite-and-crow fighting, and the defect of love-interest, undoubtedly show themselves. Although Merlin was neither by extraction nor taste likely to emulate the almost ferocious horror of human affection entertained by Robert de Borron (if Robert de Borron it was), the authors of his history, except in the version of his own fatal passion, above referred to, have touched the subject with little grace or charm. And while the great and capital tragedies of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Tristram and Iseult, are wholly lacking, there is an equal lack of such minor things as the episodes of Lancelot and the two Elaines, of Pelleas and the Lady of the Lake, and many others. Nor is this lack compensated by the stories of the incestuous (though on neither side consciously incestuous, and on the queen's quite innocent) adventure of Arthur with his sister Margause, of the exceedingly unromantic wooing of Morgane le Fée, and of the warlock-planned intercourse of King Ban and the mother of Lancelot.
Lancelot.
Whether it was Walter Map, or Chrestien de Troyes, or both, or neither, to whom the glory of at once completing and exalting the story is due, I at least have no pretension to decide. Whosoever did it, if he did it by himself, was a very great man indeed—a man second only to Dante among the men of the Middle Age. Even if it was done by an irregular company of men, each patching and piecing the others' efforts, the result shows a marvellous "wind of the spirit" abroad and blowing on that company. As before, the reader of Malory only, though he has nearly all the best things, has not quite all even of those, and is without a considerable number of things not quite the best, but good. The most difficult to justify of the omissions of Sir Thomas is the early history of the loves of Guinevere and Lancelot, when the knight was introduced to the queen by Galahault the haughty prince—"Galeotto," as he appears in the most universally known passage of Dante himself. Not merely that unforgettable association, but the charm and grace of the original passage, as well as the dramatic and ethical justification, so to speak, of the fatal passion which wrecked at once Lancelot's quest and Arthur's kingdom, combine to make us regret this exclusion. But Malory's genius was evidently rather an unconscious than a definitely critical one. And though the exquisite felicity of his touch in detail is established once for all by comparing his prose narratives of the Passing of Arthur and the parting of Lancelot and the queen with the verse[51] from which he almost beyond question directly took both, he must sometimes have been bewildered by the mass of material from which he had to select, and may not always have included or excluded with equally unerring judgment.
The Legend becomes dramatic.
We have seen that in the original story of Geoffrey the treason of Mordred and the final scenes take place while Arthur is warring against the Romans, very shortly after he has established his sovereignty in the Isle of Britain. Walter, or Chrestien, or whoever it was, saw that such a waste of good romantic material could never be tolerated. The romance is never—it has not been even in the hands of its most punctilious modern practitioners—very observant of miserable minutiæ of chronology; and after all, it was reasonable that Arthur's successes should give him some considerable enjoyment of his kingdom. It will not do to scrutinise too narrowly, or we should have to make Arthur a very old man at his death, and Guinevere a lady too elderly to leave any excuse for her proceedings, in order to accommodate the birth of Lancelot (which happened, according to the Merlin, after the king came to the throne), the birth of Lancelot's son Galahad, Galahad's life till even the early age of fifteen, when knighthood was then given, the Quest of the Sangreal itself, and the subsequent breaking out of Mordred's rebellion, consequent upon the war between Lancelot and Arthur after the deaths of Agravain and Gareth. But the allowance of a golden age of comparatively quiet sovereignty, of feasts and joustings at Camelot, and Caerleon, and Carlisle, of adventures major and minor, and of the great Graal-quest, is but a moderate demand for any romancer to make. At any rate, he or they made it, and justified the demand amply by the result. The contents of the central Arthurian story thus elaborated may be divided into four parts: 1. The miscellaneous adventures of the several knights, the king himself sometimes taking share in them. 2. Those of Sir Tristram, of which more presently. 3. The Quest of the Sangreal. 4. The Death of Arthur.