The Morality of the Book.
In morals as well as in language (though more obscurely, since the subject of morals is so much more complicated than that of philology), we may find signs of a transition from the times of Chaucer to those of Shakespeare, and of progress no less than transition. The suppression of the Lollards—hated alike by the Church and the feudal lords, the War of the Roses, and the licentiousness of the court and courtiers, must, in the days of Edward IV, in which Malory wrote, have cut the moral and social life of the country down to its roots. Yet even in Malory’s book there are signs of the new moral life which was coming, and which in the days of the Reformation reached a power and expansion never before known. It would be absurd to pretend that Malory had greatly advanced in morality from the position of Chaucer and his age towards that of the Elizabethan period. Roger Ascham, indeed, while admitting that ‘ten Morte Arthurs do not the tenth part so much harm as one of these books made in Italy and translated in England,’ protests against the demoralising effect of the literature of which he takes this book as the example, ‘the whole pleasure of which,’ he says, ‘standeth in two special points—in open manslaughter and bold bawdray. In which book those be counted the noblest knights that do kill most men without any quarrel, and commit foulest adulteries by subtlest shifts[[15]].’ I remember Dante’s story of the sin and doom of Paolo and Francesca—
‘Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse’—
and recognise a real though only half truth in Ascham’s strictures. But he greatly over-states the evil, while he altogether omits to recognise the good in the book. Caxton’s estimate of the moral purport of the whole book, gives not merely the other side, but both sides of the case. Much more than half the ‘open manslaughter’ is done in putting down cruel oppressors and bringing back kingdoms from anarchy to law and good government; and the occasions call forth all the knightly virtues of gentleness, forbearance, and self-sacrifice, as well as those of courage and hardihood. And though it is far from possible to deny the weight of Ascham’s other charge, yet we must not, in forming our estimate of the book, forget the silent yet implied judgment which is passed upon lawless love by its tragic end, nor the ideal presented in the lives of the maiden knights, Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale. For the purpose of a due estimate of Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur,’ we may fairly take Caxton’s Preface as an integral part of the book. The Preface gives the tone, the motive, to the whole book. The morality of ‘Morte Darthur’ is low in one essential thing, and this alike in what it says and in what it omits: and Lord Tennyson shows us how it should be raised. The ideal of marriage, in its relation and its contrast with all other forms of love and chastity, is brought out in every form, rising at last to tragic grandeur, in the Idylls of the King. It is not in celibacy, though spiritual and holy as that of Galahad or Percivale, but in marriage, as the highest and purest realisation of the ideal of human conditions and relations, that we are to rise above the temptations of a love like that of Launcelot or even of Elaine; and Malory’s book does not set this ideal of life before us with any power or clearness. In no age or country has the excellence of marriage, as the highest condition of man’s life, been wholly unknown: but Luther and the Reformation brought it first into the full light of day, when he, a monk, married a nun, and thus in the name of God, declared that the vows of marriage were more sacred and more binding than those of the convent, and that the one might be lawfully set aside by the other. And we know how this ideal of love in marriage is worked out by Shakespeare. With Shakespeare it is marriage which explains, justifies, forgives, glorifies, and blesses every prosperous and happy condition of life, and gives an abiding peace as well as dignity to the closing scenes of his deepest tragedies. Marriage not only sheds its radiance upon the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda, and of Rosalind and Orlando, but on all around them: marriage justifies the boldness of Helena as the love of Elaine, touching as its self-surrender is, cannot do: it secures forgiveness to the weak and foolish Leontes, and even to the worthless Angelo; it is to the husband of Desdemona that we find ourselves constrained to accord the pardon and the sympathy which she herself had given him. And no one will know Hamlet as he is, nor fully understand his tragic destiny, unless he sees what it might have been, as his mother saw it, when she exclaims:—
‘Sweets to the sweet, farewell!
I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife;
I thought thy bridal bed to have deck’d, sweet maid,
And not have strew’d thy grave.’
But this is Shakespeare’s Ophelia, not the preposterous misconception of Tieck and Goethe, who should have been warned by Polonius not ‘to cast beyond themselves in their opinions.’
If Morte Arthur does not deserve the unqualified denunciation of the learned Ascham, it cannot be denied that it exhibits a picture of a society far lower than our own in morals, and depicts it with far less repugnance to its evil elements, on the part either of the author or his personages, than any good man would now feel. Still—with the exception of stories like those of the birth of Arthur and Galahad, which show not only another state of manners from our own, but also a really different standard of morals from any which we should now hold up—the writer does for the most part endeavour, though often in but an imperfect and confused manner, to distinguish between vice and virtue, and honestly to reprobate the former; and thus shows that his object is to recognize and support the nobler elements of the social state in which he lived, and to carry them towards new triumphs over the evil. And even where, as in the story of Tristram, there is palliation rather than reprobation of what Sir Walter Scott justly calls ‘the extreme ingratitude and profligacy of the hero,’ still the fact that such palliation, by representing King Mark as the most worthless of men, was thought necessary in the later, though not in the earlier, romance on the same subject, shows an upward progress in morals; while a real effort to distinguish virtue from vice is to be seen in the story of Launcelot, with his sincere though weak struggles against temptation, and his final penitence under the punishment of the woes which his guilt has brought on all dear to him as well as to himself. Or if we look at the picture which Chaucer’s works give us of the co-existence in one mind—and that one of the noblest of its age—of the most virtuous Christian refinement and the most brutish animal coarseness, and then see how in the pages of Malory, inferior as we must hold him to be to Chaucer, the brutish vice has dwindled to half its former size, and is far more clearly seen to be vice, while the virtue, if not more elevated in itself, is more avowedly triumphant over the evil, we find the same upward progress. And I cannot doubt that it was helped on by this book, and that notwithstanding Ascham’s condemnation of Morte Arthur, Caxton was right in believing that he was serving God and his countrymen by printing it; and that he justly estimated its probable effect when he says, ‘Herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, sin. Do after the good, and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommée.... All is written for our doctrine, and for to beware that we fall not to vice nor sin, but to exercise and follow virtue, by which we may come and attain to good fame and renommé in this life, and after this short and transitory life to come unto everlasting bliss in heaven; the which He grant us that reigneth in heaven, the blessed Trinity. Amen.’