In the day of conflict I am Trystan.
Finally the Golden-tongued prevails, and they return together.
Our next glimpse of him is in the kingdom of the trouvères and troubadours, with whom he is a great favorite. The famous Mademoiselle Marie, in her translation, the “Lai Dee Chevrefoil,” written about the middle of the twelfth century, sings of a pretty episode in his love, which none of her successors have improved upon, and which most of them have omitted. There are allusions to him in Chrestien de Troyes, who wrote before the year 1191, and in the works of a poetical king of Navarre, about 1226. The date of the Auchinleck MS., “Sir Tristram,” which Scott raised such a tempest by ascribing to Thomas the Rhymer of Ercildoune, is said to be 1330. It is written in a curious and very effective metre; the short abrupt line of two syllables falling regularly near the end of each stanza reins in the full swing of the rest with great force and directness. The poem is full of life and vigor, and there are touches of naïf insight here and there in strange contrast with the rough, matter-of-fact tone of the whole. Many and quaint are the adventures of the hero, especially when he kills a dragon in Ireland for the sake of Iseult, that “brid bright, as blood upon snoweing,” and her mother cures him of the pain caused by its poisonous tongue, with treacle; or when, having overcome a terrible “geaunt” in Brittany, he requires him to adorn the walls of his castle with “images” of Iseult and Bragwaine, the beauty of which so astounds his young brother-in-law, evidently a novice in works of art, that he straightway falls backward and breaks his head!
This poem, or another much like it, was celebrated both at home and abroad, where “Thomas of Britain” was henceforth quoted as the great authority on the subject. About the same time lived Raoul de Beauvais, who also made it his study; Rusticien de Puise, whose work is in prose; and the authors of two metrical fragments in French, from one of which Scott completed the Auchinleck MS., though its end had not been unearthed when he became its editor. The translation, which carried the name of Tristram northward as far as Iceland, is still kept in the library at Copenhagen; and G. de le Flamma tells us that when the tomb of a Lombard king was opened in 1339, there was found inscribed on his sword, “This was the sword of Sir Tristram, who killed Amoroyt of Ireland.” Seghart von Bamberg wrote of him in 1403, and also Eylhard von Habergen. Of the same period is the Romance by Gotfried of Strasburg, who died in the midst of his work, leaving it to be finished in a less poetical spirit by Ulrich von Turheim and Heinrich von Vribert.
Our own Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to draw Sir Tristram into the magic circle of Arthur’s knights, in whose good company he has ever since remained. Lady Juliana Berners mentions him as the inventor of “venery” or terms of hunting; and his name occurs in “The Temple of Glass,” and in Gower, who states that he fell by King Mark’s own hand, a tradition followed only by Sir Thomas Malory and Tennyson. In the “Orlando Furioso” we hear of the “Rocca di Tristano,” and Ariosto and Boiardo drew from his legend, old even then, their fountains of love and hatred. Dante places him next to Paris among the lovers flitting by like cranes in his “Inferno.” In 1485 Sir Thomas Malory, himself a knight, published his noble “Morte D’Arthur,” in which Tristram is one of the most striking figures; and it is remarkable that although he never seems to have thought there was anything to condemn greatly in the nephew’s conduct, he palliates it by defaming the uncle as much as possible—a moral concession not to be found in either of the earlier romances, which he must have consulted for his work. But we will not multiply references, lest the reader should be fain to cry with the author of “Sir Hain and Dame Anieuse,”
Or pues tu chanter de Tristan,
Ou de plus longue, se tu sez.
The theme was getting wearisome. Le Seigneur Luce du château de Gast had exhausted it in his prose Romance (where, for the first time, Palamides, the Paynim lover of Iseult, and Dinadan, the foolish, knight, appear); and, besides this, there was a “Romance of Meliodas,” Tristram’s father, and afterwards a “Romance of Ysaie le Triste,” his son; so that all the details of his private life were nearly as well known as those of Mr. Carlyle’s to the present generation. “Ysaie le Triste” appeared in 1522; and in 1554, when no imagination, however vivid, could possibly add a single exploit to those which had been recounted already, Jean Maugin took a new departure, and turned the whole thing into an allegory, in which Sir Tristram became the type of Christian chivalry. His queer attempt is justly ridiculed by Scott; but it is not altogether without interest, as the first indication of the symbolic spirit in which modern poets have treated the legend—with the exception of Scott himself, whose beautiful Conclusion and Ballad are pure imitations of the mediæval spirit as well as of the mediæval form, and have nothing modern about them. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the taste for chivalrous romance died out in Europe—or rather fell asleep—and the name of Tristram was no more heard for more than two hundred years, except in a glowing stanza or two of Spenser’s “Fairy Queen.” Then came the revival of Scott and Southey to prepare the way, and lastly that signal triumph of the ancient story in our own day, when four of the greatest living poets singled it out for illustration, and it became a living power again in the hands of Wagner, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Matthew Arnold. But its power is of a different kind, for a change has come over the spirit of the dream, since it was first dreamed long ago among the Welsh mountains.
Accordingly Tristram, once the mere sport of existing circumstances, becomes a highly responsible person with correctly oppressive notions of duty. He has grown old along with the rest of the world; he rides no more light-hearted through the forest, sails no more gaily across the sea, forgetful of all but life and its deliciousness, woos no more whom he would. Nor, in the modern versions, does he die merrily, as he died in the “Morte D’Arthur” and in the “Book of Howth,” “harping afore his lady La Belle Isoud.”Wagner, to whom one might have fancied, à priori, that such an exit for his tenor would have been most welcome, sentences him to lingering death of a wound given him by the traitor Melot; Tennyson fells him with a blow of King Mark’s from behind; in Matthew Arnold he dies naturally; in Swinburne the false words of Iseult Les Blanches Mains finish the work of sickness. His love, his death, are all-important now; whereas of old the first was but an interesting episode in the life of a man who was second only to Sir Launcelot at a tourney, and the last so insignificant as to be disposed of in a single sentence. We hear nothing now of the Castle of Maidens, or of Lonazep; nothing of the wife of Sir Segwarides, or of other fair ladies; nothing at all of that great crisis in his life when he met Sir Launcelot at the peron, “and either wounded other wonderly sore, that the blood ran out upon the grass.”
Of course there may be a reason for this in the fact that we look upon Tristram as a hero by himself, and therefore have no need to illustrate his inferiority to Launcelot, and to Launcelot only, in love and in war. But where are ye now, Sir Palamides, Sir Bruno, and Sir Elias? Your very names have a forgotten sound.