Much the most important novelty in the literature of this period is the "Morte d'Arthur," finished by the author, Sir Thomas Malory or Maleor, in 1469, and published in 1485. Malory is believed to have been the Squire of Newbold Revell in Warwickshire, born about 1400 (?) and a retainer of that Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who was called "the Father of Courtesy" by the Emperor Sigismund, and was the cruel jailer of Jeanne d'Arc at Rouen (1430-1431), where she was burned. Malory appears to have joined the Lancastrian party in the Wars of the Roses; he, or a man of his name, was left out of a general amnesty granted by Edward IV, in 1468; he may have fled to Bruges and there made the acquaintance of Caxton, and Caxton, in his Preface to the "Morte," says that the book is printed "after a copy unto me delivered which Sir Thomas Malory did take out of certain books of French, and reduced it into English". Malory died in England, and was buried in the Grey Friars, near Newgate, in 1471.
As we have seen already, the true first sources of the immense body of Arthurian romance are obscure: the fountain-head is certainly Celtic, but the affluents are mainly French—without France the legend would have been but a small thing. Malory constantly refers to "the French book" for his statements, to what book he does not say, but the learned industry of Dr. Sommer has detected that, for the youth of Arthur, Malory used French romances of Merlin the Seer; used French authorities for the tales of Sir Tristram and Lancelot, and also freely employed an English metrical romance, "Morte Arthur," attributed to the mysterious Scot,[Pg 125] Huchown. There are other sources, and Malory treats his authorities with much freedom, omitting, adding, and introducing confusions. His great romance has a definite beginning; it has a middle in the fatal revival of Arthurian chivalry in the search for the Holy Grail; and thence turns towards its end with the falling of Lancelot to his old sinful love of Guinevere, wife of Arthur, the decadence, the rebellion of Mordred, the passing of Arthur, and the penitence of Lancelot and Guinevere.
Malory's book may be called a work of true genius, so simple yet so noble is the prose style; so fine, loyal and chivalrous the temper, while even the confusions add to the element of mystery and to the expectation and curiosity of the reader. Malory purges away the stupid monkish fables about the birth of Merlin by a machination of a devil: he does not linger over the long dull fables of Arthur's wars against the Anglo-Saxon invaders; he gathers the flower of the chivalry of the fourteenth century, while true love is his theme, with no palliation of the guilt of sinful love. His Lancelot deserves the Douglas motto of "tender and true," though
His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.
Hence comes the inevitable tragedy, the greatest in romance.
"Herein," says Caxton, rising to the height of Malory's own style, men "shall find many joyous and pleasant histories, and noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, goodness, and sin. Do after the good, and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee."
Many recent critics of Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," which is mainly derived from Malory, appear to think that Malory's "Morte d'Arthur" is a violent, brutal, licentious book, and that Tennyson invented the noble courtesy, chivalry, humanity to suit the middle-class morality of 1860. This opinion is merely stupid. "The Morte," it has been well said, "assumes the recognition of a loftier standard of justice, purity and unselfishness than its own century knew.... The motive forces are the elemental passions[Pg 126] of love and bravery, never greed, or lust, or cruelty,"—except of course in traitors like Meliagraunce and Mordred. The knights have the strongest sense of fair play: Sir Lancelot bears no spite against Sir Palamedes, a pagan knight, who, from ignorance of the rules, deals a stroke in a tournament which the rules forbade. Their sense of honour is crystal-clear, and, as in Tennyson's Idylls, this honour and loyalty make the tragedy; the struggle between Lancelot's love of Guinevere, and his friendship for and loyalty to King Arthur. His sin brings its own punishment, he cannot win the vision of the Grail, that Holy thing: "blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God".
Arthur himself, after the wars of his youth, is but faintly drawn: it is not for the King to seek adventures, but to hear the suits of his people who come to him for help and justice. A mystery of Fate hangs over him: he is smitten by the sins of his knights, and passes away, sorely wounded but alive, as strangely as ?dipus in the tragedy of Sophocles: perhaps, who knows, to come again. "In Avalon he groweth old," in the peaceful hidden land of apples and apple-blossom.
The scenes all pass in a world where colours are magically soft and bright. There is an old song of the fourteenth century which gives the kind of colour that abounds in Malory.
Lully, lulley, lully, lulley
The fawcon hath borne my mate away!
He bare him up, he bare him down,
He bare him into an orchard brown.
In that orchard there was a hall
That was hanged with purple and pall.
And in that hall there was a bed,
It was hung with gold so red.
And in that bed there lieth a knight,
His wounds bleeding day and night.
By that bedside kneeleth a may,
And she weepeth both night and day.
This is like a song made on some scene in the Quest for the Grail.
Malory's world is "an unsubstantial fairy place," yet there is no fairy non-morality. There is the loftiest ideal among the[Pg 127] knights who follow the gleam and fragrance of the Holy Grail. That all do not attain to their ideal is but the failing of human nature, the ideal is among them, they aspire to reach "the spiritual City". For Guinevere, Malory has the chivalrous compassion of Homer for Helen; of Chaucer for Criseyde, but while Helen wins, with light penance, to her home by the Eurotas, and her translation to Elysium, the Avalon of Greece, it is through many years of penance that Guinevere comes to her rest. What Shelley said of the end of the Iliad may be said of the last chapters of the "Morte," they die away "in the high and solemn close of the whole bloody tale in tenderness and inexpiable sorrow".
The prose with all its simplicity has rhythm and charm. Thus, "Therefore all ye that be lovers call unto your remembrance the month of May, like as did Queen Guinevere, for whom I make here a little mention, that while she lived she was a true lover, and therefore had she a good end". The words spoken by Sir Ector over the dead body of Lancelot are one of the noblest passages in English prose.
The very titles of the chapters call us into the realm of romance, like a blast blown on Arthur's horn. "How Sir Lancelot came into the Chapel Perilous, and gat there of a dead corpse a piece of cloth and a sword." "How the damsel and Beaumains came to the siege, and came to a sycamore tree, and there Beaumains blew an horn, and then the Knight of the Red Lands came to fight him." "How Sir Lancelot, half-sleeping and half-waking, saw a sick man borne in a litter, and how he was healed with the Sangreal." Who can read the titles, and not make haste to read the chapters? The beautiful close of Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur" is merely done into verse from the fifth chapter of Malory's twenty-first book,—the casting of Excalibur into the mere, and the coming of the barge with the elfin ladies, "many fair ladies, and among them all was a Queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur".
But for Malory, the old Arthurian romances would be known only to a few of the learned. Malory "made them common coin," his romance was neglected only in the eighteenth century.[Pg 128] It has been the inspiration of many poets, but none can "recapture the first fine careless rapture," to which Tennyson comes nearest in the best of his "Idylls of the King," and in "Sir Galahad," and "The Lady of Shalott".
Next to Chaucer's poems, Malory's romance is the greatest thing in English literature from "Beowulf" to Spenser. To boys, and to men who retain the boy, the "Morte" is an inestimable treasure, which has not to be sought for in the seldom-visited shelves that hold the publications of learned Societies, but is within the reach of all.[1]
[1] In the Globe edition, edited by Sir Edward Strachey. Macmillan & Co.