Matthew Arnold attributed to Homer three great epic traits, swiftness, simplicity, and nobility. It is these three characteristics that have made the Morte Darthur so deservedly famous.
With the printing of Malory's book by the first English printer, William Caxton, in 1485, we come to the end of the Middle Ages in literature. Manuscripts written out laboriously by monks and clerks were now to give way to the printed page. The age of Elizabeth was less than a century away, one of the golden ages of the poets. Yet few of the Elizabethans touched on the story of Arthur. The main exception was Edmund Spenser, who made Prince Arthur the hero of his great poem The Faerie Queene, but Spenser's Arthur and his knights and ladies have little in common with the figures in the old romances.
The succeeding centuries, great as they were in English writers of genius, paid little attention to Arthur. Milton and Dryden made little use of the legends. Stories of ancient chivalry lost their vogue, novels were becoming popular and the poets chose themes closer to their own times and point of view. Not until the nineteenth century did Arthur come into his own again. Then the Victorian poets turned to him for inspiration. William Morris wrote The Defence of Guenevere, and a host of lesser poets tried their hands on similar themes. Swinburne told the story of Tristram of Lyonesse and the Tale of Balen, and James Russell Lowell composed his beautiful poem The Vision of Sir Launfal. Matthew Arnold wrote Tristram and Iseult. In 1850 Richard Wagner, the great German composer, produced his opera Lohengrin, and followed it with Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. These tell the old stories in somewhat new form, and follow the early French romances rather than Malory.
But the true descendant of Chrétien de Troies and Malory was Alfred Tennyson. The great work of this poet's life was his Idylls of the King, one of the finest achievements of English literature. He owed his inspiration chiefly to Malory. "The vision of Arthur as I have drawn him," Tennyson said to his son, "had come upon me when, little more than a boy, I first lighted upon Malory." He covered almost the entire field of the legends. The Idylls of the King are The Coming of Arthur, Geraint and Enid, Merlin and Vivien, Lancelot and Elaine, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettarre, Balin and Balan, The Last Tournament, Guinevere, and The Passing of Arthur.
Tennyson gives to the stories far more allegory, far more philosophy than the early poets gave them. His age was interested in philosophy and so, as was the case with each of the earlier poets, Tennyson handled the legends after the fashion of his own times. In his pages we see the characters as actual men and women, subtly drawn, concerned with right and wrong far more than with mere knightly adventures. Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere hold the center of the stage, and it is the fate of these three that provides the great moving motive of the poems.
To Tennyson we owe the most nearly perfect version of the story that dates back to a dim and legendary England. What verse more beautiful than his to tell of chivalry?
"Then, in the boyhood of the year,
Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere
Rode thro' the coverts of the deer,
With blissful treble ringing clear.
She seem'd a part of joyous Spring:
A gown of grass-green silk she wore,
Buckled with golden clasps before;
A light-green tuft of plumes she bore
Closed in a golden ring."
In beauty and dignity and human interest Tennyson gives us the great world of Arthurian legend in its most perfect form.
Malory's Morte Darthur was not Tennyson's only source for the stories of his Idylls. The adventures of Geraint he took from the Mabinogion, a collection of mediæval Welsh tales translated with great charm and accuracy by Lady Charlotte Guest, and published in 1838. Also, though to a very limited extent, he drew some of his incidents from the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the other early writers of chronicles.
The great panorama of stories that we group together under the title of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, when they are told in prose, are usually taken from Malory's book, the Morte Darthur, condensed in size, for Malory was frequently verbose, and related in more modern English. In this volume we have used as a basis the version prepared by Sir James Knowles, which is an abridgment of Malory's work as it was printed by Caxton, with a few additions from Geoffrey of Monmouth and other sources. To this we have added the story of Sir Gawain and the Maid with the Narrow Sleeves, which comes originally from the poem of Perceval by Chrétien de Troies.