ROMANCE
Before the close of the twelfth century the Arthur of popular legend,
and of the chronicles, had been transformed into a purely romantic
hero. The British king, soon after the appearance of Geoffrey’s
_History_, becomes the centre of the most profitably worked of the
cycles of mediæval romance. Much of his individuality is, inevitably,
lost in the process; and that loss implies, no less inevitably,
a gradual obscuration of the primitive British environment which
originally surrounded him. The paramount chief of early Britain,
whose prowess and conquests form the prime epic theme of Geoffrey
and of Layamon, appears as the king of no known realm, numbering
among his retainers heroic figures drawn from the uttermost limits
of the mythical world. Exalted, as a world conqueror, to a level
with Alexander and Charlemagne, he becomes, like them, largely lost
to sight among the crowd of fabulous characters called up around him
by the professional romancers. The Arthur of the romances is no
more than a _primus inter pares_. He does, indeed, stand above his
knights by virtue of his royal dignity,--he is still “King Arthur,”
and the head of a great Court. But our interest in his own personality
diminishes with the increasing accumulation of exploits attributed to
his knightly retinue. The glory of the king is dimmed by the general
brilliance of his Court. It is as though the Round Table, originally
founded to put an end to all claims of precedence among his knights,
had had the result of bringing Arthur himself into the unvalued “file.”
Knightly heroes, of whom little, or nothing, had been heard before,
enter the Arthurian circle, and perform feats which interest us far
more than anything done by the king. In early Welsh tradition, and
in Geoffrey’s chronicle, Kay and Bedivere and, later, Gawain, alone
figure as warriors whose deeds are at all worth mentioning by the side
of Arthur’s. In the romances, Kay and Bedivere play quite subordinate
parts, while Gawain becomes much more prominent, only, however, to find
his high station challenged, and frequently usurped, by newcomers such
as Tristram and Perceval and Lancelot.
The cause of all this change is obvious. The age of Chivalry had come,
and the Arthurian stories provided “the raw material” exactly suited
to its romantic literary requirements. The original Celtic legends
concerning Arthur and his few primitive “knights” lent themselves, at
once, to adaptation and embellishment by writers whose main concern
was with knight-errantry and courtly love; while the conception
of an Arthurian “court,” with its fellowship of questing knights,
invited the importation into it of any and every legendary hero whose
story could in any plausible way be connected with Arthur. They had
another advantage which contributed to their supreme popularity in
the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. They had about them an
element of mystery, of magic, of indefiniteness, coming as they did
from the Celtic wonderland in the West. The Arthurian kingdom had no
geography,--it was a “no man’s land,” which defied all cartography, and
the bounds of which could be extended by each romantic writer at his
will. It is true that British tradition, and the bards and chroniclers
who had sought to give it literary form, associated Arthur’s name with
well-known localities in Great Britain; but, even there, the “champion
of Britain” had no settled capital or court. London, the chief city
of the Norman kings, claimed him as her own; but so did Winchester,
Lincoln, York, Chester and Carlisle. Then there was Caerleon-upon-Usk,
the delectable “metropolitan city” where Geoffrey of Monmouth had
definitely located his court in Wales. Moreover places in Britain with
mysterious legendary associations came to be connected with Arthur’s
name. Glastonbury, whither Joseph of Arimathea was fabled to have
brought the Holy Grail, was reputed to be his burial-place, and the
district around it was identified with the mythical Avalon. The grim
old western castle of Tintagel was fixed upon as his birthplace, and
the tale of the battle on the Camel led to the building, in poetic
imagination,[94] of a new Arthurian court at “tower’d Camelot.” The
name of Camelot at once suggests such purely romantic regions as
“the wild woods of Broceliande” and “the sad sea-sounding wastes of
Lyonesse.”[95] Astolat, Cameliard, Sarras, Carbonek, Joyous Gard, and
other places, belong to the same romantic class, and lie quite beyond
geographical identification. Stories, in which the characters thus
roamed indifferently among places well known to Norman England and in
regions which belonged entirely to “the land of phantasy and illusion,”
lay open to the incursion of fabulous matter drawn from many varied
sources. In a word, the unrivalled possibilities of “the matter of
Britain” for all kinds of romantic exploitation established for it an
easy supremacy over the other romantic themes, and the literary uses to
which it was put by writers of romance throughout Western Europe all
but robbed it, ultimately, of its distinctive features as a native
British growth.
The various stages in the romantic use and adaptation of the Arthurian
legends, mainly by French writers, are not difficult to trace. First
of all, we get the metrical chronicles,--attempts to put Geoffrey’s
quasi-historical record into a poetical form which much better suited
its heroic theme than the sober garb of Latin prose. Wace’s _Brut_,
completed in the year of Geoffrey’s death, is our earliest extant
example of this poetical treatment of Arthurian story, and his work,
as we have seen, was written with a much more deliberate purpose of
pleasing courtly readers than Geoffrey’s. The tastes and requirements
of such readers, regarded solely from the standpoint of their interest
in knight-errantry and romantic love, determine the character of the
second and the third phase which Arthurian literature assumes. The
metrical, and the prose, French romances began to be written about the
same time, and from the same motive. It is generally held, however,
that the poetical romancers were in the field before the prose writers:
at any rate, the most famous of the metrical romances--those of
Chrétien de Troyes--are earlier than any prose romances which have come
down to us. Chrétien, in whom his admirers find the greatest mediæval
poet before Chaucer, wrote for the Norman aristocracy, and especially
for ladies, what were practically the fashionable novels of the day.
He dedicates his _Chevalier de la Charrette_ to the countess Marie of
Champagne, whose interest in everything appertaining to the French cult
of _l’amour courtois_ is well known; and all his poetical ‘novels’ are
largely designed for the entertainment of women eager for literature of
a more sentimental appeal than sagas of monster-slayers and warriors.
The sudden appearance of the immortal love-stories of Tristan and
Iseult, and of Lancelot and Guinevere, shows how triumphantly the
French romancers responded to the demands made of them.
Chrétien de Troyes’ share in the literary flotation of both these
stories entitles him to a place in the history of pure Arthurian
romance even above that of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey can claim,
beyond any question, to be the literary father of King Arthur himself
as a romantic hero. But the Arthurian legend, as it emerged from
mediæval romance and as we know it in its modern presentment by the
poets, contains so much more than the story of Arthur that the French
romantic scribes who brought Tristan and Lancelot and Perceval into
Arthur’s court must be regarded as the first artistic fashioners of a
purely poetic “matter of Britain.” Among them Chrétien, and--if we are
to take him as the unquestioned author of the great prose _Lancelot_
romance--Walter Map, stand pre-eminent. As to Chrétien’s signal share
in the work there is, at any rate, no controversy, and his name is
associated with the poetical treatment of the stories of each of the
three celebrated heroes just mentioned. He is believed[96] to have been
the author of a lost Tristan poem--probably his first work, composed
about 1160,--which is surmised to have been the foundation of the long
prose _Tristan_ romance, whence Malory drew much of his material. It is
in his _Chevalier de la Charrette_ that we first hear of Lancelot as
a lover of Guinevere. His unfinished _Conte del Graal_ is one of the
first literary presentations of the story of Perceval.
Two other poems of Chrétien are, with the _Conte del Graal_, of
exceptional interest as bearing a close relationship to three Welsh
prose romances included in _The Red Book of Hergest_, and translated by
Lady Charlotte Guest. The Welsh analogue of the _Conte del Graal_ is
the so-called ‘mabinogi’ of _Peredur, son of Evrawc_; while the Welsh
tales called _Geraint, son of Erbin_, and _The Lady of the Fountain_
resemble, in their main features, Chrétien’s two poems entitled _Erec_
and _Le chevalier au lion_. The Welsh romances, as we have them, are
undoubtedly of later date than Chrétien’s poems, and bear such clear
traces of Norman-French influence as to have led many critics to deny
altogether their Celtic origin. But they are neither translations, nor
adaptations of Chrétien’s works.[97] The only explanation that meets
all the facts is that the French poems and the Welsh tales follow an
older and a simpler Celtic form of the stories embodied in them, which
was accessible both to Chrétien and the Welsh writers.
Although by no means the best, the _Chevalier de la Charrette_ is
perhaps the most interesting of Chrétien’s extant works, for the reason
that we obtain in it our first literary introduction to the story of
Lancelot of the Lake. It treats, indeed, of only an episode in that
famous knight’s career, but that episode reveals him to us as the lover
of Arthur’s queen, and so marks an important stage in the evolution
of Arthurian romance. In Chrétien’s poem, Guinevere is abducted by
Meleaguant,[98] the son of the king of a land whence no man returns.
Her rescue is accomplished by Lancelot, who, in order to achieve his
object, has to ride in a cart used as a tumbril to convey prisoners to
execution; hence the name given to him and to the poem, ‘The Knight
of the Cart.’ Welsh tradition knows nothing whatever of the loves of
Lancelot and Guinevere, although, as we have seen, Guinevere did
come to have in Welsh folk-lore a doubtful reputation that somewhat
debased her name. It is in his Lancelot poem alone that Chrétien
suggests that Guinevere was anything but a gracious and loving wife.
Whence, then, did he derive the story of her illicit relations with
Lancelot? Some see in it the influence of the Tristram legend, in which
passionate love breaks every bond. Others attribute the invention of
Lancelot as Guinevere’s lover to the personal suggestion of Marie of
Champagne, who, according to Chrétien’s own account, furnished him
with the material for his poem. Whatever may be the truth about its
origin, the story of Lancelot is an obvious, indeed the most signal,
example of the way in which the Arthurian legends were adapted to
suit the conceptions of chivalry. We have in it a capital instance of
what was implied in the cult of “courtly love,” and hence it is not
surprising that among mediæval tales women, as Chaucer informs us, held
“in ful gret reverence the boke of Lancelot de Lake.”[99] That book
was not Chrétien’s poem, but, much more probably, the prose romance
of _Lancelot_, usually assigned to Walter Map. The same prose story,
or one of its adaptations, was presumably the book in which Paolo and
Francesca read, as related by Dante in the Fifth Canto of his _Inferno_.
The prose _Lancelot_ is a vast compilation embracing what is really
a series of romances, including a version of the Grail story, and is
attributed, on good MS. authority, to the courtier Walter Map. If he
be indeed its author, he is entitled to as high a pedestal in the
Arthurian House of Fame as either Geoffrey or Chrétien. The difficulty
of accepting his authorship of the work is not so much that he was
a very active public man, as that the one book of which he is the
indubitable author, the _De Nugis Curialium_,--a sort of commonplace
book in which contemporary history finds a place side by side with
fairy tales, and much other odd lore,--does not afford the slightest
trace of interest in Arthurian story. Map’s name was used to give a
literary passport to the notorious Goliardic poems gathered from many
cryptic sources in the thirteenth century, and it may very well be that
the ascription to him of so wholly laudable a work as the _Lancelot_
was dictated by some too modest scribe’s desire for high credentials.
The other great love-story of Arthurian romance, that of Tristram
and Iseult, is the most poetical and the most poignant in tragic
interest of all the tales that came to be included in “the matter
of Britain.” The story of Lancelot, with all its charm and pathos,
betrays only too obviously its origin in the artificial conventions
of “courtly love.” The story of Tristram, on the other hand, is one
of sheer, over-mastering, natural passion,--the first really great
story of passionate romantic love in modern literature. It is also,
in its scene, its characters, its colouring, a distinctively Celtic
tale. Tristram[100] is known to early Welsh tradition under the name
of Drystan, the son of Tallwch, as a purely mythical hero; so also
is Mark, or March ab Meirchion, who, in the first literary versions
of the story, appears as King of Cornwall. The “proud, first Iseult,
Cornwall’s queen,”
“She who, as they voyaged, quaff’d
With Tristram that spiced magic draught,”
came from Ireland; while the other Iseult,
“the patient flower,
Who possess’d his darker hour,
Iseult of the Snow-White hand,”[101]
had her home in Brittany. The entire atmosphere of the story is that
of the western Celtic seaboard, where lay the mystic land of Lyonesse,
then “unswallowed of the tides,” and
“the wind-hollowed heights and gusty bays
Of sheer Tintagel, fair with famous days.”[102]
Whence the French romancers derived the story it is impossible to say;
but it is probable that it existed in the form of scattered popular
lays long before the middle of the twelfth century. Fragments of two
_Tristan_ poems by the Anglo-Normans, Béroul and Thomas, otherwise
known as Thomas de Bretagne, have come down to us.[103] These two poems
were the foundations, respectively, of the German metrical versions of
the story by Eilhart von Oberge and Gottfried von Strassburg.
The most intricate, though not the least fascinating, problem connected
with the Arthurian legends is that of accounting for the origin, and
for the attachment to the original Arthurian stock, of the story of
the Grail and its quest. Here, at any rate, we have presented to us,
in Tennyson’s words, “Soul at war with Sense”; and it is clear enough
that the gradual manipulation of the Grail stories marks a deliberate
effort by ecclesiastical writers to neutralise the influence of the
dangerous ideals of chivalry upon Arthurian romance. Celibacy had to be
shown to be compatible with true knighthood; there was no reason why a
knight-errant should make love, and, all too often, illicit love, the
sole motive of his quest for adventure. So, we have ultimately created
for us the character of Galahad, who
“never felt the kiss of love
Nor maiden’s hand in his,”
and who alone, by virtue of his purity, is allowed to “find the Holy
Grail.” The earlier forms of the Grail legend know nothing of Galahad,
nor is there any reason for supposing that they had any religious
significance. Gawain, apparently,--he who, in his progress through the
romances, degenerates so much as to be finally described as “light in
life and light in death,”[104]--was the original hero of the Grail
quest. It is Perceval, however, who is the central figure of the
best-known versions of the story--as, for example, the _Conte del
Graal_, the Welsh _Peredur_, and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s _Parzival_.
But Perceval was not immaculate, and so had to be superseded by one
who “exemplified, in a yet more uncompromising, yet more inhuman,
spirit, the ideal of militant asceticism,”[105]--the virginal and
youngest knight of the Round Table, Galahad. And, in order to establish
Galahad’s right to a place in the Arthurian fellowship, he is
introduced as the son of Lancelot. Here is an artistic touch deserving
much more appreciation than it has yet generally received. The sin of
Lancelot is largely expiated by the unsullied purity of his son. Truly,
the “militant ascetics” knew their romantic business as well as the
best of the secular scribes.[106]
It is unnecessary, here, to outline the various ramifications of the
Grail legend, or to summarise the conflicting theories advanced as
to its origin and meaning. It comes to be connected with Arthur’s
court mainly through the knightly Perceval, who, though ultimately
deposed as the Grail hero by Galahad, remains to the end the real
protagonist of the story. The Grail romances are usually divided into
two classes,--one dealing with the “Quest” proper, and the other
with the “Early History” of the Holy Grail. In the “Quest” group of
stories--three of which have been named above--the main interest
lies in the personality of Perceval, and in his adventures in search
of certain talismans, which include a sword, a bleeding lance and a
“grail,” the latter, in Chrétien’s poem, a magic vessel, in Wolfram’s,
a stone. The “Early History” group--of which the chief representatives
are the _Joseph of Arimathea_ and the _Merlin_ of Robert de Borron,
and the _Quête del St Graal_ attributed to Map,--dwell chiefly upon
the origin and nature of these talismans. The Grail legends, as given
in these and other romances, and so far as they can be put into a
coherent whole, are undoubtedly a compound of remote mythical and
pagan elements, probably Celtic,[107] and of later accretions due to
monastic writers deliberately bent upon edification. A flagrant example
of the way in which the legends were turned to ecclesiastical uses is
furnished by the identification of the Grail with the cup of the Last
Supper, which Pilate gave to Joseph of Arimathea, and in which Joseph
treasured the blood that flowed from the Saviour’s wounds on the Cross.
Joseph brought this cup to Britain, and thus the Grail came to be
connected with the mythical story which attributed to Joseph the first
evangelisation of these islands.
It has been said that Gawain was, in all probability, the original
hero of the Grail quest.[108] Whatever the truth may be about that
matter, there can be no doubt that Gawain is the most famous of all the
knights grouped around Arthur in pre-romantic tradition. He figures
largely in the Welsh Triads and in the _Mabinogion_ under the name of
Gwalchmei, and in the story of Arthur’s wars as told by Geoffrey he is
the king’s most powerful lieutenant. Originally a mythical hero, he
was probably the centre of a cycle of traditional stories as old as,
if not older than, anything fabled or sung of Arthur.[109] No other
knight of the Arthurian court is the hero of so many episodic romances
and poems, while there is no more prominent figure in Arthurian
literature generally. No other knight, however, is subjected to such
churlish treatment at the hands of the romancers as he. In the earlier
stages of Arthurian story--in the _Mabinogion_, especially,--Gawain
appears as the very flower of chivalrous knighthood, no less courteous
and gracious than brave. His degradation is due largely to the later
manipulators of the Grail legends, who could not brook the importance
attached to so worldly a character. Malory and Tennyson follow in
their footsteps, until for modern readers Gawain is branded with the
words put into the mouth of Bedivere in _The Passing of Arthur_,--of
Bedivere, who, as one of Gawain’s oldest associates in Arthur’s
service, ought to have been spared the indignity of having attributed
to him so mean an aspersion upon a comrade in arms:
“Light was Gawain in life, and light in death
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]