Sire, fait il, ’ie sui Giglain
Votre fis, qui le roi Artus
Mist nom Le Biax Desconeus.
Which may well refer to the tale we know.
This is not the place to enter into a discussion of the varying tradition connected with Sir Guinglain; the point of interest is rather the character of the stories with which we are immediately dealing.
There can, I think, be little doubt that whoever was responsible for the Geste of Syr Gawayne, and whether Bleheris, whose name is more than once connected with it, composed, or merely arranged, the poems, they represent a tradition of great poetical force and vitality. The adventure with the sister of Bran de Lis is an admirable story, picturesque, vivid, and full of human interest. Our Syr Gawayne and the Grene Knyghte is notoriously one of the finest of our Mediæval poems. The visit of Sir Gawain to the Grail castle, related in our last volume, yields in dramatic detail and picturesque directness of narration to no other version of that mysterious story. We can well understand that, in its original form, the collection must have been one that appealed forcibly to the imagination of the hearers.
If any one will glance through these stories consecutively, he cannot fail to realise that the character of the hero is the same throughout. Gawain is unfailingly valiant, generous, and courteous, even, as we see in our final story, to excess. We realise as we read that, as Professor Maynadier, in his Wife of Bath’s Tale, has well pointed out, it is in truth Gawain and not Arthur who was the typical English hero.
Is it too much to ask of the students of Malory, fascinated by the noble style in which he has clothed and disguised the real poverty of his réchauffée, that they should for a short time lay him aside, and turning back to the true Arthurian legend, learn at last to do justice to one of the most gracious and picturesque figures in literature—a figure to which gross injustice has been done—that, rejecting Malory’s libel, they do tardy justice to our own insular hero—for not the most fanatical partisan of the Continental school has ever ventured to claim him—to the true Sir Gawain? Then, perhaps, we may have a demand for his real story, and it may be possible once more to rejoice the hearts of our English folk with a restored and modern rendering of the Geste of Syr Gawayne, even as Bleheris told it well nigh a thousand years ago. If that day ever come neither author nor hero will need any apology on the part of the translator!
Paris, February 1907.