Is Gawain, for the ghost is as the man.”
Gawain, however, was the favourite Arthurian hero in England up to Malory’s time,[110] and the finest contribution to English Arthurian romance in the Middle Ages,—Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight,—dealing, apparently, with an incident borrowed from the earlier traditions about Gawain, does full justice to him as a knight sans peur et sans reproche.
The most marvellous feature of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story of Arthur is the part played by the wizard Merlin in the events that led to Arthur’s birth. It is in Geoffrey’s History that we get, so far as is known, the first definite association of Merlin with the Arthurian legends. In subsequent romance Merlin stands in the first file of Arthurian characters, and his name is given to a group of romances as important as any of those dealing with the adventures of the great knights mentioned in the last few pages. In Welsh tradition Merlin, or Myrddin, was famous as both a bard and a magician, but the poetical compositions which bear his name may safely be taken as spurious. Geoffrey exalts him as a prophet as well, and the ‘Prophecies of Merlin’ contributed largely to the renown of the History of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey’s authorship is sometimes claimed for a Latin poem called the Vita Merlini, and composed about 1148, which tells much about the enchanter that is not always easy to reconcile with the account of him given in the History. The chief French romantic works dealing with the Merlin legend are a fragmentary poem, dating from the end of the twelfth century, and supposed to be by Robert de Borron, and the prose romance of Merlin, which exists in two forms known as the “ordinary” Merlin and the Suite de Merlin, of the latter of which Malory’s first four books are an abridgment. In these romances we first read of the enchanter’s own enchantment, how he was, in Malory’s words, “assotted and doted” on a “damosel of the lake,”—Ninien, or Nimue, a name that in the latest forms of the story comes to be Vivien. In these early French versions of the Merlin legend, also, appears the first suggestion that Modred was Arthur’s son. When the wife of King Lot,—the daughter of Igerne by her first husband,—came to King Arthur’s court soon after his coronation, Arthur fell in love with her, with the result that Modred was born. Modred’s rebellion, and the tragic end of Arthur himself, were thus represented as a just retribution for the king’s misconduct.
For English readers Malory’s Morte Darthur is the book in which the various strands of romantic matter reviewed in this chapter are woven into a connected, though not always a coherently artistic, texture. From a literary point of view, the relative values of the various constituents of ‘The French book’ whence Malory derived most of his material are of little consequence. What really matter are the style, the tone, the atmosphere of his own book; and these are charged to the full with the subtle magic of the enchanted land in which his borrowed characters live and move. It is here that we reap the harvest of mediæval romance, and catch, in the beautifully quaint style of the narrative, something of the fresh odour and mellow colouring of the ripened corn. Of equally small importance with the question of the precise identification and the value of his sources is that of Malory’s general motive, or plan. It may, indeed, be possible to find in the book an epic in which “may be traced a thread of destiny and providence, leading either to a happy triumph over circumstance, or to a tragic doom.”[111] But it is for no such reason that the Morte Darthur is valued by the modern reader. We read Malory now both for “his style and his love,”—his love of “King Arthur and his noble knights of the Round Table,” attested so signally by his painful zeal in garnering, and sifting, such a bewildering crop, both rich and rank, of manuscript material. His “style” is sufficiently near to the English of to-day, but at the same time retains so much in both vocabulary and grammar which the invention of printing forced the language to reject, as to be an almost ideal medium for the presentment to modern English readers of what was storied in the verse and prose of the age of high romance. Space does not allow of our giving any extended specimens of it here; but the reader may be referred, first, to a passage where Malory appropriately embroiders his narrative by expatiating upon “How true love is likened to summer,”[112] and, secondly, to the noble and pathetic chapter which tells of the passing of Arthur.[113] Incidental felicities of style could be quoted from almost every page of his book. Bedivere, when returning from his pretended attempt to “fling Excalibur,” tells Arthur that he saw “nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan.” Tristan, in a general fight, “fared among those knights like a greyhound among the conies”; while, of another fight we read that “the best of us all had been full cold at the heart-root had not Sir Launcelot been better than we.” What, again, could be in better chime with its theme than this sentence from the account of Gawain’s fight with Launcelot—“then Sir Gawaine deliberately avoided his horse, and put his shield afore him, and eagerly drew his sword, and bad Sir Launcelot, Alight, traitor knight, for if this mare’s son hath failed me, wit thou well a king’s son and a queen’s son shall not fail thee”? Or, what more pathetic than Guinevere’s words when Lancelot found her in the nunnery at Almesbury—“Sir Launcelot, wit thou well I am set in such a plight to get my soul’s health; and yet I trust, through God’s grace, that after my death to have a sight of the blessed face of Christ, and at doomsday to sit on his right side, for as sinful as ever I was are saints in heaven”? But the entire work is studded with such gems, and he who would know and revel in the richest treasures of Arthurian romance should devote his days and his nights to the reading of what is ingenuously, and truly, styled in its epilogue, “this noble and joyous book.”[114]
CHAPTER V
ARTHUR IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
English Arthurian romance before Malory, with the conspicuous exception of Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight—an alliterative poem composed in the fourteenth century by an unknown author to whom three other poems, The Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience, are ascribed,—possesses little literary charm or distinction. The wearisome monotony and the generally jejune character of the common metrical romances of his day, with their stereotyped phraseology and futile rhymes, had probably as much to do as anything with Chaucer’s attitude towards the newer romantic matters. His Tale of Sir Thopas is so openly contemptuous a burlesque of the methods of the romantic rhymers of the time that we may safely assume that the poet had little more respect for their themes.
“Into his sadel he clamb anon,
And priketh over stile and stoon
An Elf-queene for tespye;
Til he so longe hadde riden and goon