Nor are the marks of harmony and unity less plain in the several characters than in the events of the story. Arthur is a true knight, sharing the characteristics of his nobler knights, yet he differs from them all in showing also that he is, and feels himself to be, a king; as when—with an imperiousness which reminds us of Froissart’s story of Edward III refusing to listen to Sir Walter of Manny’s remonstrances on behalf of the burgesses of Calais—he tells Sir Launcelot that he ‘takes no force whom he grieves,’ or insists on his entering the lists against a tired knight whom he is not willing to see victorious over the whole field; or as when he sadly regrets that he cannot do battle for his wife, though he believes her innocent, but must be a rightful judge according to the laws. There are many others of the Round Table who are ‘very perfect gentle knights, yet we feel that Launcelot stands distinct among them all in the pre-eminence of his knightliness, notwithstanding his one great sin. Thus, to take one of many instances, who but Launcelot would have borne the taunts and the violence of Gawaine with his humble patience and ever-renewed efforts for a reconciliation, when he was leaving the realm, and when he was besieged in Joyous Gard. Modern critics of great name agree in censuring Sir Thomas Malory for departing from the old authorities who represented Gawaine as the very counterpart of Launcelot in knightly character: but I rather see a proof of Malory’s art in giving us a new Gawaine with a strongly individual character of his own. Gawaine’s regard for his mother’s honour, his passion for Ettard, and his affection for his brothers, are fierce impulses driving him to unknightly and unworthy deeds, yet he is far from being represented as a mere savage. If Malory depicts him thirsting to revenge upon Launcelot the unintentional killing of Gaheris and Gareth, he depicts also his long previous affection for Launcelot and his opposition to the hostility of his other brother, Mordred, against him; his devotion to his uncle Arthur; his hearty repentance towards Launcelot at the last; and his entreaty that he would ‘see his tomb, and pray some prayer more or less for his soul.’ Nor must we forget that it was by the prayer of those ladies for whom Gawaine had ‘done battle in a rightwise quarrel,’ that his ghost was permitted to give Arthur a last warning. Distinct again from the character of this fierce knight is that of the Saracen Palamides, whose unquestionable courage and skill in deeds of chivalry also want—though in another way than Gawaine’s—the gentleness, the meekness, and the delicate sense of honour of the Christian knight. Sir Dinadan again, who can give and take hard knocks if need be, though he has no great bodily strength, and who is always bantering the good knights who know and esteem him with his humorous protests against love and arms, is a distinctly drawn character. So is Merlin, half Christian, half magician, but always with dog-like loyalty to the house of Uther Pendragon. So is the Bishop of Canterbury, who appears at intervals in the story. So are many others whose names I might recite. The dignity of queen Guenever towards her husband and her court is not less marked than her guilty passion for Launcelot, and the unreasoning jealousy it excites in her. The wife-like simplicity of Igraine, the self-surrender beyond all limit, though from different impulses, of the two Elaines, the pertness of the damsel Linet, and the piety and self-sacrifice of Sir Percivale’s sister, will occur to the reader among the distinctive characteristics of the different ladies and damsels who live and move, each in her own proper form, in the story. Sir Thomas Malory, as we know, found many of these men and women already existing in the old romances as he represents them to us; but we may believe that those earlier books were to him something of what the pages of Plutarch and Holinshed were to Shakespeare.
Malory’s use of the Old Romances.
It has been too commonly assumed that, because Caxton says that Sir Thomas Malory took his work ‘out of certain books of French and reduced it into English,’ he was a mere compiler and translator. But the book itself shows that he was its author—its ‘maker,’ as he would have called it. Notwithstanding his occasionally inartificial manner of connecting the materials drawn from the old romances, there is an epic unity and harmony, ‘a beginning, a middle, and an end,’ which, if they have come by chance and not of design, have come by that chance which only befalls an Homeric or a Shakespeare-like man. If more instances and proofs are needed than have been already given, let us turn to the opening chapters of the book. If we compare these with the old romances which supplied the materials for them, we see at once how Malory has converted prose into poetry, giving life and beauty to the clods of earth, and transmuting by his art the legends which he yet faithfully preserves. For the long and repulsive narrative of Merlin’s origin[[3]] he substitutes a slight allusion to it: without disguising what he probably believed to be at least an half historical record of Arthur’s birth, he gives a grace and dignity to the story by the charms of the mother’s character, the finer touches of which are wanting in the original: and so through the whole of this part of the story.
Twenty-three years ago, I ventured to assert Malory’s claim to epic genius: and now this claim may be farther tested, and as I think, established, by help of the learned researches of Dr. Sommer. Of these I shall state some details, in speaking of the text and its several editions, here giving the result so far as it bears on the present point. We may now see how Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’ was fused into its actual form out of crude materials of ten times its bulk, and that while he often translated or transcribed the French or English romances as they lay before him, on the other hand he not only re-wrote, in order to bring into its present shape the whole story, but also varied both the order and the substance of the incidents that so he might give them that epic character, and that beauty in the details, which his book shows throughout. Malory was no doubt a ‘finder’ as well as a ‘maker,’ but so, I repeat, was Shakespeare, and so was every other great poet. But the quarry and the building are not the same thing, though the one supplies the rough stones with which the other is raised up. We see that there is much that is rude and inartificial in Malory’s art. He has built a great, rambling, mediæval castle, the walls of which enclose rude and even ruinous work of earlier times, and not a Greek Parthenon nor even an Italian palace of the Renaissance. Still, it is a grand pile, and tells everywhere of the genius of its builder. And I ask, as Carlyle once asked me, Who built St. Paul’s? Was it Wren, or the hodman who carried up the bricks? But while supporting my conclusions as to Malory’s art by the evidence of Dr. Sommer’s facts, it is right to add that the conclusions are my own rather than those of this learned critic. His estimate of Malory’s genius in the choice and treatment of his materials falls far short of mine: and I can believe that Malory may have judged rightly, for his own purpose, when he did not take that form of a legend which was in itself the most beautiful.
Malory’s History and Geography.
The most recent critics are disposed to prefer Hume’s and Gibbon’s belief to Milton’s scepticism as to the actual existence of Arthur. But upon this question I do not enter. Malory’s historical chapters, as they may be called, seem to be mainly taken from the Historia Brithonum of Geoffrey of Monmouth, though much of them is also to be found in the romances[[4]]. The details of Arthur’s march to Rome are so accurate that I think that Malory may have had actual knowledge of the road, which indeed must have been familiar to many men—soldiers, priests, and merchants—in the days of Edward IV. But of the rest of the history and the geography of the book before us we can only say that they are something
‘Apart from place, withholding time,
But flattering the golden prime’
of the great hero of English romance. We cannot bring within any limits of history the events which here succeed each other, when the Lords and Commons of England, after the death of King Uther at St. Alban’s, assembled at the greatest church of London, guided by the joint policy of the magician Merlin and the Christian bishop of Canterbury, and elected Arthur to the throne; when Arthur made Carlion, or Camelot, or both, his head-quarters in a war against Cornwall, Wales, and the North, in which he was victorious by help of the king of France; when he met the demand for tribute by the Roman emperor Lucius with a counter-claim to the empire for himself as the real representative of Constantine, held a parliament at York to make the necessary arrangements, crossed the sea from Sandwich to Barflete in Flanders, met the united forces of the Romans and Saracens in Burgundy, slew the emperor in a great battle, together with his allies, the Sowdan of Syria, the king of Egypt, and the king of Ethiopia, sent their bodies to the Senate and Podestà of Rome as the only tribute he would pay, and then followed over the mountains through Lombardy and Tuscany to Rome, where he was crowned emperor by the Pope, ‘sojourned there a time, established all his lands from Rome unto France, and gave lands and realms unto his servants and knights,’ and so returned home to England, where he seems thenceforth to have devoted himself wholly to his duties as the head of Christian knighthood.
With the exception just mentioned, the geography is fanciful enough; and we need the magic of Merlin, or of some conjuror-poet like him of Horace, to set us with the required disregard of time successively in Carleon, Carlisle, Winchester, London, St. Alban’s, and Camelot. The story opens within a night’s ride of the castle of Tintagil. Thence we pass to St. Alban’s, to London, and to Carlion. This last is, no doubt, Caerleon-upon-Usk; but it seems through this, as in other romances, to be interchangeable in the author’s mind with Carlisle, or (as written in its Anglo-Norman form) Cardoile, which latter in the History of Merlin is said to be in Wales, while elsewhere Wales and Cumberland are confounded in like manner. So of Camelot, where Arthur chiefly held his court, Caxton in his Preface speaks as though it were in Wales, probably meaning Caerleon, where the Roman amphitheatre is still called Arthur’s Round Table. Malory himself, though at page [49] he seems to connect Camelot with Avelion, or Glastonbury, yet farther on, page [63], says that Camelot is Winchester, where, too, there is a Round Table, mentioned by Caxton, and still to be seen,—an oaken board with the knights’ names on it. And yet at the time these authorities wrote Camelot itself existed in Somersetshire with its proper name, and with all the remains of an important town and fortress, and, doubtless, the traditions of Arthur which Leland found there, and which in great part at least remain to this day. Leland calls it Camallate or Camalat, ‘sometime a famous town or castle, upon a very torre or hill, wonderfully enstrengthened of nature[[5]].’ Four ditches and as many walls surrounded a central space of about thirty acres where foundations and remains of walls might be seen, and whence Roman pavements, urns, coins, and other relics have been found up to the present time. I find it called the Castle of Camellek in maps of the dates of 1575 and 1610, and in that of the 1727 edition of Camden’s Magna Britannica, the text of which says ‘the inhabitants call it King Arthur’s Palace.’ But soon after that date a learned antiquarian[[6]] writes that the name had been superseded by that of Cadbury Castle, which trilingual appellation may seem to indicate the Roman, British, and Saxon possessors by whom it was probably held in succession. The neighbouring villages which, according to Leland, bore ‘the name of Camalat with an addition, as Queen-Camel,’ still exist as Queen-Camel, or East Camel, and West Camel, and near by runs the river Camel, crossed by Arthur’s Bridge. Arthur’s well still springs from the hill side; and if Arthur’s Hunting Causeway in the field below, Arthur’s Round Table and Arthur’s Palace within the camp, cannot still, as of old, be pointed out to the visitor, the peasant girl will still tell him that within that charmed circle they who look may see through golden gates a king sitting in the midst of his court. Drayton describes the river Ivel in Somersetshire as