THE ENGLISH NOVEL
BY
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
LONDON: J.M. DENT & SONS LTD.
BEDFORD STREET, STRAND 1913
NEW YORK: E.P. BUTTON & CO.
PREFACE
It is somewhat curious that there is, so far as I know, no complete
handling in English of the subject of this volume, popular and important
though that subject has been. Dunlop's _History of Fiction_, an
excellent book, dealt with a much wider matter, and perforce ceased its
dealing just at the beginning of the most abundant and brilliant
development of the English division. Sir Walter Raleigh's _English
Novel_, a book of the highest value for acute criticism and grace of
style, stops short at Miss Austen, and only glances, by a sort of
anticipation, at Scott. The late Mr. Sidney Lanier's _English Novel and
the Principle of its Development_ is really nothing but a laudatory
study of "George Eliot," with glances at other writers, including
violent denunciations of the great eighteenth-century men. There are
numerous monographs on parts of the subject: but nothing else that I
know even attempting the whole. I should, of course, have liked to deal
with so large a matter in a larger space: but one may and should
"cultivate the garden" even if it is not a garden of many acres in
extent. I need only add that I have endeavoured, not so much to give
"reviews" of individual books and authors, as to indicate what Mr.
Lanier took for the second part of his title, but did not, I think,
handle very satisfactorily in his text.
I may perhaps add, without impropriety, that the composition of this
book has not been hurried, and that I have taken all the pains I could,
by revision and addition as it proceeded, to make it a complete survey
of the Novel, as it has come from the hands of all the more important
novelists, not now alive, up to the end of the nineteenth century.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
_Christmas_, 1912.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE
II. FROM LYLY TO SWIFT
III. THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN
IV. THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL
V. SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN
VI. THE SUCCESSORS--TO THACKERAY
VII. THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL
VIII. THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY--CONCLUSION
INDEX
THE ENGLISH NOVEL
CHAPTER I
THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of
literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any
rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great
classical languages, of what we call by that name. It might be an
accident, though a rather improbable one, that we have no Greek prose
fiction till a time long subsequent to the Christian era, and nothing in
Latin at all except the fragments of Petronius and the romance of
Apuleius. But it can be no accident, and it is a very momentous fact,
that, from the foundation of Greek criticism, "Imitation," that is to
say "Fiction" (for it is neither more nor less), was regarded as not
merely the inseparable but the constituent property of poetry, even
though those who held this were doubtful whether poetry must necessarily
be in verse. It is another fact of the greatest importance that the
ancients who, in other forms than deliberate prose fiction, try to "tell
a story," do not seem to know very well how to do it.
The _Odyssey_ is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the
original romance of the West; but the _Iliad_, though a magnificent
poem, is not much of a story. Herodotus can tell one, if anybody can,
and Plato (or Socrates) evidently could have done so if it had lain in
his way: while the _Anabasis_, though hardly the _Cyropædia_, shows
glimmerings in Xenophon. But otherwise we must come down to Lucian and
the East before we find the faculty. So, too, in Latin before the two
late writers named above, Ovid is about the only person who is a real
story-teller. Virgil makes very little of his _story_ in verse: and it
is shocking to think how Livy throws away his chances in prose. No:
putting the Petronian fragments aside, Lucian and Apuleius are the only
two novelists in the classical languages before about 400 A.D.: and
putting aside their odd coincidence of subject, it has to be remembered
that Lucian was a Syrian Greek and Apuleius an African Latin. The
conquered world was to conquer not only its conqueror, but its
conqueror's teacher, in this youngest accomplishment of literary art.
It was probably in all cases, if not certainly, mixed blood that
produced the curious development generally called Greek Romance. It is
no part of our business to survey, in any detail, the not very numerous
but distinctly interesting compositions which range in point of
authorship from Longus and Heliodorus, probably at the meeting of the
fourth and fifth centuries, to Eustathius in the twelfth. At one time
indeed, when we may return to them a little, we shall find them
exercising direct and powerful influence on modern European fiction, and
so both directly and indirectly on English: but that is a time a good
way removed from the actual beginning of our journey. Still, _Apollonius
of Tyre_, which is probably the oldest piece of English prose fiction
that we have, is beyond all doubt derived ultimately from a Greek
original of this very class: and the class itself is an immense advance,
in the novel direction, upon anything that we have before. It is on the
one hand essentially a "romance of adventure," and on the other
essentially a "love-story"--in senses to which we find little in
classical literature to correspond in the one case and still less in the
other. Instead of being, like _Lucius_ and the _Golden Ass_, a tissue of
stories essentially unconnected and little more than framed by the main
tale, it is, though it may have a few episodes, an example of at least
romantic unity throughout, with definite hero and definite heroine, the
prominence and importance of the latter being specially noteworthy. It
is in fact the first division of literature in which the heroine assumes
the position of a protagonist. If it falls short in character, so do
even later romances to a great extent: if dialogue is not very
accomplished, that also was hardly to be thoroughly developed till the
novel proper came into being. In the other two great divisions, incident
and description, it is abundantly furnished. And, above all, the two
great Romantic motives, Adventure and Love, are quite maturely present
in it.
To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters with
our proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatable
subject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly care
to debate much. The opinion of the present writer--the result, at least,
of many years' reading and thought--is that it is a result of the
marriage of the older East and the newer (non-classical) West through
the agency of the spread of Christianity and the growth and diffusion of
the "Saint's Life." The beginnings of Hagiology itself are very
uncertain: but what is certain is that they are very early: and that as
the amalgamation or leavening of the Roman world with barbarian material
proceeded, the spread of Christianity proceeded likewise. The _Vision of
St. Paul_--one of the earliest examples and the starter it would seem,
if not of the whole class of sacred Romances, at any rate of the large
subsection devoted to Things after Death--has been put as early as
"before 400 A.D." It would probably be difficult to date such legends as
those of St. Margaret and St. Catherine _too_ early, having regard to
their intrinsic indications: and the vast cycle of Our Lady, though
probably later, must have begun long before the modern languages were
ready for it, while that of the Cross should be earlier still. And let
it be remembered that these Saints' Lives, which are still infinitely
good reading, are not in the least confined to homiletic necessities.
The jejuneness and woodenness from which the modern religious story too
often suffers are in no way chargeable upon all, or even many, of them.
They have the widest range of incident--natural as well as supernatural:
their touches of nature are indeed extended far beyond mere incident.
Purely comic episodes are by no means wanting: and these, like the
parallel passages in the dramatising of these very legends, were sure to
lead to isolation of them, and to a secular continuation.
But, once more, we must contract the sweep, and quicken the pace to deal
not with possible origins, but with actual results--not with Ancient or
Transition literature, but with the literature of English in the
department first of fiction generally and then, with a third and last
narrowing, to the main subject of English fiction in prose.
The very small surviving amount, and the almost completely second-hand
character, of Anglo-Saxon literature have combined to frustrate what
might have been expected from another characteristic of it--the unusual
equality of its verse and prose departments. We have only one--not
quite entire but substantive--prose tale in Anglo-Saxon, the version of
the famous story of _Apollonius of Tyre_, which was to be afterwards
declined by Chaucer, but attempted by his friend and contemporary Gower,
and to be enshrined in the most certain of the Shakespearean
"doubtfuls," _Pericles_. It most honestly gives itself out as a
translation (no doubt from the Latin though there was an early Greek
original) and it deals briefly with the subject. But as an example of
narrative style it is very far indeed from being contemptible: and in
passages such as Apollonius' escape from shipwreck, and his wooing of
the daughter of Arcestrates, there is something which is different from
style, and with which style is not always found in company--that faculty
of telling a story which has been already referred to. Nor does this
fail in the narrative portions of the prose Saints' Lives and Homilies,
especially Aelfric's, which we possess; in fact it is in these last
distinctly remarkable--as where Aelfric tells the tale of the monk who
spied on St. Cuthbert's seaside devotions. The same faculty is
observable in Latin work, not least in Bede's still more famous telling
of the Caedmon story, and of the vision of the other world.
But these faculties have better chance of exhibiting themselves in the
verse division of our Anglo-Saxon wreckage. _Beowulf_ itself consists of
one first-rate story and one second-rate but not despicable tale,
hitched together more or less anyhow. The second, with good points, is,
for us, negligible: the first is a "yarn" of the primest character. One
may look back to the _Odyssey_ itself without finding anything so good,
except the adventures of the Golden Ass which had all the story-work of
two mightiest literatures behind them. As literature on the other hand,
_Beowulf_ may be overpraised: it has been so frequently. But let
anybody with the slightest faculty of "conveyance" tell the first part
of the story to a tolerably receptive audience, and he will not doubt
(unless he is fool enough to set the effect down to his own gifts and
graces) about its excellence as such. There is character--not much, but
enough to make it more than a _mere_ story of adventure--and adventure
enough for anything; there is by no means ineffectual speech--even
dialogue--of a kind: and there is some effective and picturesque
description. The same faculties reappear in such mere fragments as that
of _Waldhere_ and the "Finnsburgh" fight: but they are shown much more
fully in the Saints' Lives--best of all in the _Andreas_, no doubt, but
remarkably also (especially considering the slender amount of
"happenings") in the _Guthlac_ and the _Juliana_. In fact the very
fragments of Anglo-Saxon poetry, by a sort of approximation which they
show to dramatic narrative and which with a few exceptions is far less
present in the classics, foretell much more clearly and certainly than
in the case of some other foretellings which have been detected in them,
the future achievements of English literature in the department of
fiction. _The Ruin_ (the finest thing perhaps in all Anglo-Saxon) is a
sort of background study for something that might have been much better
than _The Last Days of Pompeii_: and _The Complaint of Deor_, in its
allusion to the adventures of the smith Weland and others, makes one
sorry that some one more like the historian of a later and decadent
though agreeable Wayland the Smith, had not told us the tale that is now
left untold. A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply the
main substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditions
and circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with--these are
the great requirements of Fiction in life and character. You must mix
prose and poetry to get a good romance or even novel. The consciences of
the ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no such
revolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own mediæval
forefathers.
So few people are really acquainted with the whole range of Romance
(even in English), or with any large part of it, that one may without
undue presumption set down in part, if not in whole, to ignorance, a
doctrine and position which we must now attack. This is that romance and
novel are widely separated from each other; and that the historian of
the novel is really straying out of his ground if he meddles with
Romance. These are they who would make our proper subject begin with
Marivaux and Richardson, or at earliest with Madame de La Fayette, who
exclude Bunyan altogether, and sometimes go so far as to question the
right of entry to Defoe. But the counter-arguments are numerous: and any
one of them would almost suffice by itself. In the first place the idea
of the novel arising so late is unnatural and unhistorical: these
Melchisedecs without father or mother are not known in literature. In
the second a pedantic insistence on the exclusive definition of the
novel involves one practical inconvenience which no one, even among
those who believe in it, has yet dared to face. You must carry your wall
of partition along the road as well as across it: and write separate
histories of Novel and Romance for the last two centuries. The present
writer can only say that, though he has dared some tough adventures in
literary history, he would altogether decline this. Without the help of
the ants that succoured Psyche against Venus that heap would indeed be
ill to sort.
But there is a third argument, less practical in appearance but bolder
and deeper, which is really decisive of the matter, though few seem to
have seen it or at least taken it up. The separation of romance and
novel--of the story of incident and the story of character and
motive--is a mistake logically and psychologically. It is a very old
mistake, and it has deceived some of the elect: but a mistake it is. It
made even Dr. Johnson think Fielding shallower than Richardson; and it
has made people very different from Dr. Johnson think that Count Tolstoi
is a greater analyst and master of a more developed humanity than
Fielding. As a matter of fact, when you have excogitated two or more
human beings out of your own head and have set them to work in the
narrative (not the dramatic) way, you have made the novel _in posse_, if
not _in esse_, from its apparently simplest development, such as
_Daphnis and Chloe_, to its apparently most complex, such as the
_Kreutzer Sonata_ or the triumphs of Mr. Meredith. You have started the
"Imitation"--the "fiction"--and _tout est là_. The ancients could do
this in the dramatic way admirably, though on few patterns; in the
poetical way as admirably, but again not on many. The Middle Ages lost
the dramatic way almost entirely, but they actually improved the
poetical on its narrative side, and the result was Romance. In every
romance there is the germ of a novel and more; there is at least the
suggestion and possibility of romance in every novel that deserves the
name. In the Tristram story and the Lancelot cycle there are most of the
things that the romancer of incident and the novelist of character and
motive can want or can use, till the end of the world; and Malory (that
"mere compiler" as some pleasantly call him) has put the possibilities
of the latter and greater creation so that no one who has eyes can miss
them. Nor _in the beginning_ does it much or at all matter whether the
vehicle was prose or verse. In fact they mostly wrote in verse because
prose was not ready.
In the minor romances and tales (taking English versions only) from
_Havelok_ to _Beryn_ there is a whole universe of situation, scenario,
opportunity for "business." That they have the dress and the
scene-backing of one particular period can matter to no one who has eyes
for anything beyond dress and scene-backing. And when we are told that
they are apt to run too much into grooves and families, it is sufficient
to answer that it really does not lie in the mouth of an age which
produces grime-novels, problem-novels, and so forth, as if they had been
struck off on a hectograph, possessing the not very exalted gift of
varying names and places--to reproach any other age on this score. But
we have only limited room here for generalities and still less for
controversy; let us turn to our proper work and survey the actual
turn-out in fiction--mostly as a result of mere fashion, verse, but
partly prose--which the Middle Ages has left us as a contribution to
this department of English literature.
It has been said that few people know the treasures of English romance,
yet there is little excuse for ignorance of them. It is some century
since Ellis's extremely amusing, if sometimes rather prosaic, book put
much of the matter before those who will not read originals; to be
followed in the same path by Dunlop later, and much later still by the
invaluable and delightful _Catalogue of_ [British Museum] _Romances_ by
Mr. Ward. It is nearly as long since the collections of Ritson and
Weber, soon supplemented by others, and enlarged for the last forty
years by the publications of the Early English Text Society, put these
originals themselves within the reach of everybody who is not so lazy
or so timid as to be disgusted or daunted by a very few actually
obsolete words and a rather large proportion of obsolete spellings,
which will yield to even the minimum of intelligent attention. Only a
very small number (not perhaps including a single one of importance)
remain unprinted, though no doubt a few are out of print or difficult to
obtain. The quality and variety of the stories told in them are both
very considerable, even without making allowance for what has been
called the stock character of mediæval composition. That almost all are
directly imitated from the French is probable enough, that most are is
certain: but this matters, for our purpose, nothing at all. That the
imitation was not haphazard or indiscriminate is obvious. Thus, though
we have some, we have not very many representatives of the class which
was the most numerous of all in France--the _chansons de geste_ or
stories of French legendary history, national or family. Except as far
as the Saracens are concerned, they would naturally have less interest
for English hearers. The _Matière de Rome_, again--the legends of
antiquity--though represented, is not very abundant outside of the
universally popular Tale of Troy; and the almost equally popular
Alexander legend does not occupy a very large part of them. What is
perhaps more remarkable is that until Malory exercised his genius upon
"the French book," the more poetical parts of the "matter of Britain"
itself do not seem to have been very much written about in English. The
preliminary stuff about Merlin and Vortigern exists in several
handlings; the foreign campaigns of Arthur seem always (perhaps from
national vanity) to have been popular. The "off"-branches of Tristram
and Percivale, and not a few of the still more episodic romances of
adventures concerning Gawain, Iwain, and other knights, receive
attention. The execrable Lonelich or Lovelich, who preceded Malory a
little, had of course predecessors in handling the other parts of the
Graal story. But the crown and flower of the whole--the inspiration
which connected the Round Table and the Graal and the love of Lancelot
and Guinevere--though, so far as the present writer's reading and
opinion are of any weight, the recent attempts to deprive the
Englishman, Walter Map, of the honour of conceiving it are of no
force--seems to have waited till the fifteenth century--that is to say
the last part of three hundred years--before Englishmen took it up. Most
popular of all perhaps, on the principle that in novels the flock "likes
the savour of fresh grass," seem to have been the pure _romans
d'aventures_--quite unconnected or nearly so with each other or with any
of the larger cycles. Those adventures of particular heroes have
sometimes a sort of Arthurian link, but they really have no more to do
with the main Arthurian story than if Arthur were not.
For the present purpose, however, filiation, origin, and such-like
things are of much less importance than the actual stories that get
themselves told to satisfy that demand which in due time is to produce
the supply of the novel. Of these the two oldest, as regards the actual
forms in which we have them, are capital examples of the more and less
original handling of "common-form" stories or motives. They were not
then, be it remembered, quite such common-form as now--the rightful heir
kept out of his rights, the usurper of them, the princess gracious or
scornful or both by turns, the quest, the adventure, the revolutions and
discoveries and fights, the wedding bells and the poetical justice on
the villain. Let it be remembered, too, if anybody is scornful of these
as _vieux jeu_, that they have never been really improved upon except by
the very obvious and unoriginal method common in clever-silly days, of
simply reversing some of them, of "turning platitudes topsy-turvy," as
not the least gifted, or most old-fashioned, of novelists, Tourguenief,
has it. Perhaps the oldest of all, _Havelok the Dane_--a story the age
of which from evidence both internal and external, is so great that
people have not quite gratuitously imagined a still older Danish or even
Anglo-Saxon original for the French romance from which our existing one
is undoubtedly taken--is one of the most spirited of all. Both hero and
heroine--Havelok, who should be King of Denmark and Goldborough, who
should be Queen of England--are ousted by their treacherous
guardian-viceroys as infants; and Havelok is doomed to drowning by his
tutor, the greater or at least bolder villain of the two. But the
fisherman Grim, who is chosen as his murderer, discovers that the child
has, at night, a _nimbus_ of flame round his head; renounces his crime
and escapes by sea with the child and his own family to Grimsby.
Havelok, growing up undistinguished from his foster-brethren, takes
service as a scullion with the English usurper. This usurper is seeking
how to rid himself of the princess without violence, but in some way
that will make her succession to the crown impossible, and Havelok
having shown prowess in sports is selected as the maiden's husband. She,
too, discovers his royalty at night by the same token; and the pair
regain their respective inheritances and take vengeance on their
respective traitors, in a lively and adventurous fashion. There are all
the elements of a good story in this: and they are by no means wasted or
spoilt in the actual handling. It is not a mere sequence of incident;
from the mixture of generosity and canniness in the fisherman who
ascertains that he is to have traitor's wages before he finally decides
to rescue Havelok, to the not unnatural repugnance of Goldborough at
her forced wedding with a scullion, the points where character comes in
are not neglected, though of course the author does not avail himself of
them either in Shakespearean or in Richardsonian fashion. They are
_there_, ready for development by any person who may take it into his
head to develop them.
So too is it in the less powerful and rather more cut and dried _King
Horn_. Here the opening is not so very different; the hero's father is
murdered by pirate invaders, and he himself set adrift in a boat. But in
this the princess (daughter of course of the king who shelters him)
herself falls in love with Horn, and there is even a scene of
considerable comic capabilities in which she confides this affection by
mistake to one of his companions (fortunately a faithful one) instead of
to himself. But Horn has a faithless friend also; and rivals, and
adventures, and journeys; and returns just in the nick of time, and
recognitions by rings, and everything that can properly be desired
occur. In these--even more perhaps than in Havelok's more masculine and
less sentimental fortunes--there are openings not entirely neglected by
the romancer (though, as has been said, he does not seem to have been
one of the strongest of his kind) for digression, expatiation,
embroidery. Transpose these two stories (as the slow kind years will
teach novelists inevitably to do) into slightly different keys,
introduce variations and episodes and _codas_, and you have the
possibilities of a whole library of fiction, as big and as varied as any
that has ever established itself for subscribers, and bigger than any
that has ever offered itself as one collection to buyers.
The love-stories of these two tales are what it is the fashion--exceedingly
complimentary to the age referred to if not to the age of the fashion
itself--to call "mid-Victorian" in their complete "propriety."
Indeed, it is a Puritan lie, though it seems to possess the vivaciousness
of its class, that the romances are distinguished by "bold bawdry."
They are on the contrary rather singularly pure, and contrast, in
that respect, remarkably with the more popular folk-tale. But fiction,
no more than drama, could do without the [Greek: amarthia]--the
human and not unpardonable frailty. This appears in, and complicates,
the famous story of _Tristram_, which, though its present English form
is probably younger than _Havelok_ and _Horn_, is likely to have existed
earlier: indeed must have done so if Thomas of Erceldoune wrote on the
subject. Few can require to be told that beautiful and tragical history
of "inauspicious stars" which hardly any man, of the many who have
handled it in prose and verse, has been able to spoil. Our Middle
English form is not consummate, and is in some places crude in manner
and in sentiment. But it is notable that the exaggerated and inartistic
repulsiveness of Mark, resorted to by later writers as a rather
rudimentary means of exciting compassion for the lovers, is not to be
found here; in fact, one of the most poetical touches in the piece is
one of sympathy for the luckless husband, when he sees the face of his
faithless queen slumbering by her lover's side with the sun on it. "And
Mark rewed therefore." The story, especially in its completion with the
"Iseult of Brittany" part and the death of Tristram, gives scope for
every possible faculty and craftsmanship of the most analytic as of the
most picturesque novelist of modern times. There is nothing in the least
like it in ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would do
it justice in modern times we should have to take the best notes of
Charles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and Mr. Meredith, leaving out all
their faults, and combine. It is not surprising that, in the very
infancy of the art, nobody in German or French, any more than in English
(though the German here is, as it happens, the best), should have done
it full justice; but it is a wonder that a story of such capacities
should have been sketched, and even worked out in considerable detail,
so early.
Of the far greater story of which _Tristram_ is a mere episode and
hardly even that--a chantry or out-lying chapel of the great
cathedral--the Arthurian Legend, the earlier English versions, or rather
the earlier versions in English, are, as has been said, not only
fragmentary but disappointing. There is nothing in the least strange in
this, even though (as the present writer, who can speak with indifferent
knowledge, still firmly holds) the conception of the story itself in its
greatest and unifying stage is probably if not certainly English. The
original sources of the story of Arthur are no doubt Celtic; they give
themselves out as being so, and there is absolutely no critical reason
for disbelieving them. But in these earlier forms--the authority of the
most learned Celticists who have any literary gift and any appreciation
of evidence is decisive on this point--not only are the most
characteristic unifying features--the Graal story and the love of
Lancelot and Guinevere--completely wanting, but _the_ great stroke of
genius--the connection of these two and the subordination of all minor
legends as to the dim national hero, Arthur, with those about him--is
more conspicuously wanting still. Whether it was the Englishman Walter
Map, the Norman Robert de Borron, or the Frenchman Chrestien de Troyes,
to whom this flash of illumination came, has never been proved--will
pretty certainly now never be proved. M. Gaston Paris failed to do it;
and it is exceedingly unlikely that, where he failed, any one else will
succeed, unless the thrice and thirty times sifted libraries of Europe
yield some quite unexpected windfall. In the works commonly attributed
to Chrestien, all of which are well known to the present writer, there
is no sign of his having been able to conceive this, though he is a
delightful romancer. Robert is a mere shadow; and his attributed works,
_as_ his works, are shadows too, though they are interesting enough in
themselves. Walter not only has the greatest amount of traditional
attribution, but is the undoubted author of _De Nugis Curialium_. And
the author of _De Nugis Curialium_, different as it is from the
Arthurian story, _could_ have finally divined the latter.
But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions,
wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English,
a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a
long time. And the most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are
rarely handled at all in such early vernacular versions of it as we
have, whether in verse or prose. Naturally enough, perhaps, it was the
fabulous historic connection with British history, and the story of the
great British enchanter Merlin, that attracted most attention. The
_Arthour and Merlin_ which is in the Auchinleck MS.; the prose _Merlin_,
published by the Early English Text Society; the alliterative Thornton
_Morte d'Arthur_, and others, are wont to busy themselves about the
antecedents of the real story--about the uninteresting wars of the King
himself with Saxons, and Romans, and giants, and rival kings, rather
than with the great chivalric triple cord of Round Table, Graal, and
Guinevere's fault. The pure Graal poems, _Joseph of Arimathea_, the work
of the abominable Lonelich or Lovelich, etc., deal mainly with another
branch of previous questions--things bearable as introductions,
fillings-up, and so forth, but rather jejune in themselves. The Scots
_Lancelot_ is later than Malory himself, and of very little interest.
Layamon's account, the oldest that we have, adds little (though what
little it does add is not unimportant) to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace;
and tells what it has to tell with nearly as little skill in narrative
as in poetry. Only the metrical _Morte_--from which, it would appear,
Malory actually transprosed some of his most effective passages in the
manner in which genius transproses or transverses--has, for that reason,
for its dealings with the catastrophe, and for the further opportunity
of comparison with Tennyson, interest of the higher kind. But before we
come to Malory himself it is desirable to turn to the branches--the
chapels, as we have called them, to the cathedral--which he also, in
some cases at least, utilised in the _magnum opus_ of English prose
romance.
These outliers were rather more fortunate, probably for no more
recondite reason than that the French originals (from which they were in
almost every instance certainly taken) were finished in themselves. Of
the special Gawain cycle or sub-cycle we have two romances in pure
metrical form, and more than two in alliterative, which are above the
average in interest. _Ywain and Gawain_, one of the former, is derived
directly or indirectly from the _Chevalier au Lyon_ of Chrestien de
Troyes; and both present some remarkable affinities with the unknown
original of the "Sir Beaumains" episode of Malory, and, through it, with
Tennyson's _Gareth and Lynette_. The other, _Lybius Disconus (Le Beau
Déconnu)_ is also concerned with that courteous nephew of Arthur who, in
later versions of the main story, is somewhat sacrificed to Lancelot.
For a "_real_ romance," as it calls itself (though it is fair to say
that in the original the word means "royal"), of the simpler kind but
extremely well told, there are not many better metrical specimens than
_Ywain and Gawain_, but it has less character-interest, actual or
possible, than those which have been commented on. The hero, King
Urien's son, accepts an adventure in which another knight of the Table,
Sir Colgrevance, has fared ill, after it has been told in a conversation
at court which is joined in first by the Queen and afterwards by the
King. Sir Kay here shows his usual cross-grainedness; and Guinevere
"with milde mood" requests to know "What the devil is thee within?" The
adventure is of a class well known in romance. You ride to a certain
fountain, pour water from it on a stone, and then, after divers marvels,
have to do battle with a redoubtable knight. Colgrevance has fared
badly; Kay is as usual quite sure that he would fare better; but Ywain
actually undertakes the task. He has a tough battle with the knight who
answers the challenge, but wounds him mortally; and when the knight
flies to his neighbouring castle, is so hard on his heels that the
portcullis actually drops on his horse's haunches just behind the
saddle, and cuts the beast in two. Ywain is thus left between the
portcullis and the (by this time shut) door--a position all the more
awkward that the knight himself expires immediately after he has reached
shelter. The situation is saved, however, by the guardian damsel of
romance, Lunet (the Linet or Lynette of the Beaumains-Gareth story), who
emerges from a postern between gate and portcullis and conveys the
intruder safe to her own chamber. Here a magic bed makes him invisible:
though the whole castle, including the very room, is ransacked by the
dead knight's people and would-be revengers, at the bidding of his
widow.
This widow, however, is rather an Ephesian matron. The sagacious Lunet,
whose confidante she is, suggests to her that, unless she enlists some
doughty knight as her champion, the king will confiscate her fief; and
that there is no champion like a husband. A very little more finesse
effects the marriage, even though the lady is made aware of the identity
of her new lover and her own husband's slayer. (It is of course
necessary to remember that the death of a combatant in fairly challenged
and fought single contest was not reckoned as any fault to his
antagonist.) Ywain actually shows his prowess against the King: and has
an opportunity of showing Kay once more that it is one thing to blame
other people for failing, and another to succeed yourself. And after
this the newly married pair live together happily for a time. But it was
reckoned a fault in a knight to take too prolonged a honeymoon: and
Ywain, after what the French call _adieux déchirants_, obtains leave for
the usual "twelvemonth and a day," at the expiration of which, on St.
John's Eve, he is without fail to return, the engagement being sealed by
the gift from his lady of a special ring. He forgets his promise of
course: and at the stated time a damsel appears, sternly demands the
ring, and announces her lady's decision to have nothing further to do
with him. There is in such cases only one thing for any true knight,
from Sir Lancelot to Sir Amadis, to do: and that is to go mad, divest
himself of his garments, and take to the greenwood. This Ywain duly
does, supporting himself at first on the raw flesh of game which he
kills with a bow and arrows wrested from a chance-comer; and then on
less savage but still simple food supplied by a benevolent hermit. As he
lies asleep under a tree, a lady rides by with attendants, and one of
these (another of the wise damsels of romance) recognises him as Sir
Ywain. The lady has at the time sore need of a champion against a
hostile earl, and she also fortunately possesses a box of ointment
infallible against madness, which Morgane la Faye has given her. With
this the damsel is sent back to anoint Ywain. He comes to his senses, is
armed and clothed, undertakes the lady's defence, and discomfits the
earl: but is as miserable as ever. Resisting the lady's offer of herself
and all her possessions, he rides off once more "with heavy heart and
dreary cheer."
Soon he hears a hideous noise and, riding in its direction, finds that a
dragon has attacked a lion. He succours the holier beast, kills the
dragon, and though he has unavoidably wounded the lion in the _mêlée_ is
thenceforth attended by him not merely as a food-provider, but as the
doughtiest of squires and comrades in fight. To aggravate his sorrow he
comes to the fountain and thorn-tree of the original adventure, and
hears some one complaining in the chapel hard by. They exchange
questions. "A man," he said, "some time I was" (which must be one of the
earliest occurrences in English of a striking phrase), and the prisoner
turns out to be Lunet. She has been accused of treason by the usual
steward (it is _very_ hard for a steward of romance to be good) and two
brothers--of treason to her lady, and is to be burnt, unless she can
find a knight who will fight the three. Ywain agrees to defend her: but
before he can carry out his promise he has, on the same morning, to meet
a terrible giant who is molesting his hosts at a castle where he is
guested. Both adventures, however, are achieved on the same day, with
very notable aid from the lion: and Ywain undertakes a fresh one, being
recruited by the necessary damsel-messenger, against two half-fiend
brother knights. They stipulate that the lion is to be forcibly
prevented from interfering, and he is locked up in a room; but, hearing
the noise of battle, he scratches up the earth under the door, frees
himself, and once more succours his master at the nick of time. Even
this does not expiate Ywain's fault: and yet another task falls to
him--the championship of the rights of the younger of a pair of sisters,
the elder of whom has secured no less a representative than Gawain
himself. The pair, unknowing and unknown, fight all day long before
Arthur's court with no advantage on either side: and when the light
fails an interchange of courtesies leads to recognition and the
settlement of the dispute. Now the tale is nearly full. Ywain rides yet
again to the magic fountain and performs the rite; there is no one to
meet him; the castle rocks and the inmates quake. But the crafty Lunet
persuades her mistress to swear that if the Knight of the Lion, who has
fallen at variance with his lady, will come to the rescue, she will do
all she can to reconcile the pair. Which not ill-prepared "curtain" duly
falls: leaving us comfortably assured that Ywain and his Lady and Lunet
and the Lion (one wishes that these two could have made a match of it,
and he must surely have been a bewitched knight) lived happily
"Until that death had driven them down."
This, it has been said, is a specimen of the pure romance; with little
except incident in it, and a touch or two of manners. It does not, as
the others noticed above do, lend itself much to character-drawing. But
it is spiritedly told; though rougher, it is much more vigorous than the
French original; and the mere expletives and stock phrases, which are
the curse of these romances, do not obtrude themselves too much. In this
respect, and some others, it is the superior of the one coupled above
with it, _Lybius Disconus_, which is closer, except in names, to the
Beaumains story. Still, this also is not a bad specimen of the same
class. The hero of it is a son, not a brother, of Gawain, comes nameless
or nicknamed, but as "Beaufils," not "Beaumains," to Arthur's court, and
is knighted at once, not made to go through the "kitchen-knave" stage.
Accordingly, the damsel Elene (not Lunet), to whom he is assigned as
champion in the adventure of the Lady of Sinadowne, objects only to his
novelty of knighthood and is converted by his first victory. The course
of the adventures is, however, different from that which some people
know from Malory, and many from Tennyson. One of them is farcical: the
Fair Unknown rescues a damsel at her utmost need from two giants, a red
and a black, one of whom is roasting a wild boar and uses the animal as
a weapon, with the spit in it, for the combat. Moreover, he falls a
victim to the wiles of a sorceress-chatelaine whom he has also
succoured: and it is only after the year and day that Elene goads him on
to his proper quest. But this also is no bad story.
The limits of this volume admit of not much farther "argument" (though
the writer would very gladly give it) of these minor romances of
adventure, Arthurian and other. Ellis's easily accessible book supplies
abstracts of the main Arthurian story before Malory; of the two most
famous, though by no means best, of all the non-Arthurian romances, _Guy
of Warwick_ and _Bevis of Hampton_ (the former of which was handled and
rehandled from age to age, moralised, curtailed, lengthened, and hashed
up in every form); of the brilliant and vigorous _Richard
Coeur-de-Lion_; of the less racy Charlemagne romances in English; of the
_Seven Wise Masters_, brought from the East and naturalised all over
Europe; of the delightful love story of _Florice and Blancheflour_; of
that powerful and pathetic legend of the _Proud King_ (Robert of
Sicily), which Longfellow and Mr. William Morris both modernised, each
in his way; of those other legends, _Sir Isumbras_ and _Amis and
Amillion_, which are so beautiful to those who can appreciate the
mediæval mind, and to the beauty of which others seem insensible; of
_Sir Triamond_ and _Sir Eglamour_ (examples of the romance at its
weakest); of the exceedingly spirited and interesting _Ipomydon_, and of
some others, including the best of Scotch romances, _Sir Eger, Sir
Grame, and Sir Graysteel_. But Ellis could not know others, and he left
alone yet others that he might have known--the exquisite _Sir Launfal_
of Thomas Chester at the beginning of the fifteenth century, where an
unworthy presentment of Guinevere is compensated by the gracious image
of Launfal's fairy love; the lively adventures of _William of Palerne_,
who had a werewolf for his friend and an emperor's daughter for his
love, eloping with her in white bear-skins, the unusual meat of which
was being cooked in her father's kitchen; _Sir Orfeo_--Orpheus and
Eurydice, with a happy ending; _Emarè_, one of the tales of innocent but
persecuted heroines of which Chaucer's Constance is the best known;
_Florence of Rome_; the rather famous _Squire of Low Degree; Sir
Amadas_, not a very good handling of a fine motive, charity to a corpse;
many others.
Nor does he seem to have known one of the finest of all--the
alliterative romance of _Gawain and the Green Knight_ which, since Dr.
Morris published it some forty years ago for the Early English Text
Society, has made its way through text-books into more general knowledge
than most of its fellows enjoy. In this the hero is tempted repeatedly,
elaborately, and with great knowledge of nature and no small command of
art on the teller's part, by the wife of his host and destined
antagonist. He resists in the main, but succumbs in the point of
accepting a magic preservative as a gift: and is discovered and lectured
accordingly. It is curious that this, which is far above the usual mere
adventure-story and is novel of a high kind as well as romance, has no
known French original; and is strongly English in many characteristics
besides its verse-form.
On the whole, however, one need have no difficulty in admitting that the
majority of these romances _do_ somewhat content themselves with
incident, incident only, and incident not merely of a naïf but of a
stock kind, for their staple. There are striking situations, even striking
phrases, here and there; there is plenty of variety in scene, and more than
is sometimes thought in detail; but the motive-and-character-interest is
rarely utilised as it might be, and very generally is not even suggested.
There is seldom any real plot or "fable"--only a chain of events: and
though no one but a very dull person will object to the supernatural
element, or to the exaggerated feats of professedly natural prowess and
endurance, it cannot be said that on the whole they are artistically
managed. You feel, not merely that the picture would have been better if
the painter had taken more pains, but that the reason why he did not
is that he did not know how.
Sir Thomas Malory, himself most unknown perhaps of all great writers,
did know how; and a cynical person might echo the _I nunc_ of the Roman
satirist, and dwell on the futility of doing great things, in reference
to the fact that it used to be fashionable, and is still not uncommon,
to call Malory a "mere compiler." Indeed from the direction which modern
study so often takes, of putting inquiry into origins above everything,
and neglecting the consideration of the work as work, this practice is
not likely soon to cease. But no mistake about the mysterious
Englishman (the place-names with which the designation is connected are
all pure English) is possible to any one who has read his book, and who
knows what prose fiction is. _The Noble Histories of King Arthur, La
Morte d'Arthur, The Story of the most Noble and Worthy King Arthur, The
Most Ancient and Famous History of the Renowned Prince Arthur, The
Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur_--call it by whichever name anybody
likes of those which various printers and reprinters have given it--is
one of the great books of the world. If they can give us any single
"French book"--the reference to which is a commonplace of the
subject--from which it was taken, let them; they have not yet. If they
point out (as they can) French and English books from which parts of it
were taken, similar things may be done with Dante and Chaucer, with
Shakespeare and Milton, and very probably could have been done with
Homer. It is what the artist does with his materials, not where he gets
them, that is the question. And Malory has done, with _his_ materials, a
very great thing indeed. He is working no doubt to a certain extent
blindly; working much better than he knows, and sometimes as he would
not work if he knew better; though whether he would work as well if he
knew better is quite a different point. Sometimes he may not take the
best available version of a story; but we must ask ourselves whether he
knew it. Sometimes he may put in what we do not want: but we must ask
ourselves whether there was not a reason for doing so, to him if not to
us. What is certain is that he, and he only in any language, makes of
this vast assemblage of stories one story, and one book. He does it
(much more than half unconsciously no doubt) by following the lines of,
as I suppose, Walter Map, and fusing the different motives, holding to
this method even in parts of the legend with which, so far as one knows,
Map cannot have meddled. Before him this legend consisted of half a
dozen great divisions--a word which may be used of malice prepense.
These were the story of Merlin, that of Arthur's own origin, and that of
the previous history of the Graal for introduction; the story of
Arthur's winning the throne, of the Round Table, and of the marriage
with Guinevere, also endless branchings of special knights' adventures,
and of the wars with the Saxons and the Romans, and the episode of the
False Guinevere--with whom for a time Arthur lives as with his
queen--for middle; and the story of the Graal-quest, the love of
Lancelot for the Queen, and the rebellion of Mordred with its fatal
consequences, for close. Exactly how much of this Malory personally had
before him we cannot of course say: but of any working up of the whole
that would have spared him trouble, and robbed him of credit, we do not
know. In fact the favourite term "compiler" gives up the only dangerous
point. Now in what way did Malory _compile_? In the way in which the
ordinary compiler proceeds he most emphatically does not. He cuts down
the preliminaries mercilessly: but they can be perfectly well spared. He
misses almost all the wars with the Saxons, which are the most tedious
parts of the originals. He adopts, most happily, the early, not the
late, placing of those with the Romans. He drops the false Guinevere
altogether, which is imperative, that the true one may have no right to
plead the incident--though he does not represent Arthur as "blameless."
He gives the _roman d'aventures_ side of the Round Table stories, from
the great Tristram and Palomides romances through the Beaumains episode
downwards, because they are interesting in themselves and lead up to
the Graal quest. He gives that Quest as plentifully because it leads up
to the "dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all." How
he gives the Lancelot and Guinevere tragedy we shall see presently. And
the catastrophe of the actual "departing" he gives perfectly; with the
magnificent final scenes which he has converted, sometimes in almost
Shakespearean fashion, by the slightest verbal touches from mediocre
verse to splendid prose. A very remarkable compiler! It is a pity that
they did not take him and cut him up in little stars for a light to all
his brethren in compiling thereafter.
For he has what no compiler as such can have--because the moment he has
it he ceases to be a compiler, and becomes an artist--the sense of
_grasp_, the power to put his finger, and to keep it, on the central
pulse and nerve of the story. That he did this deliberately is so
unlikely as to be practically impossible: that he did it is certain. The
Arthurian Legend is the greatest of mediæval creations as a subject--a
"fable"--just as the _Divina Commedia_ is the greatest of mediæval
"imitations" and works of art. And as such it is inevitable that it
should carry with it the sense of the greatest medieval _differences_,
Chivalry and Romance. The strong point of these differences is the way
in which they combine the three great motives, as Dante isolates them,
of Valour, Love, and Religion. The ancients never realised this
combination at all; the moderns have merely struggled after it, or
blasphemed it in fox-and-grapes fashion: the mediævals _had_ it--in
theory at any rate. The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrate
Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot and
Guinevere with the minor instances, Love. All these have their [Greek:
amarthia]--their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw. The knight
wastes his valour in idle bickerings; he forgets law in his love; and
though there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live up
to the ideal that he does not actually forswear. To throw the
presentation--the _mimesis_--of all this into perfectly worthy form
would probably have been too much for any single genius of that curious
time (when genius was so widely spread and so little concentrated)
except Dante himself, whose hand found other work to do. To colour and
shape the various fragments of the mosaic was the work of scores. To put
them together, if not in absolutely perfect yet in more than sufficient
shape, was, so far as we know, the luck of Malory only: though some one
(Map or another) had done a mighty day's work long before in creating
the figure and the adventures of Lancelot and imagining the later quest
of the Graal with the figure of Galahad--that "improved Percivale," as
the seedsmen say.
But besides this power of shaping (or even of merely combining)
scattered elements into a story, Malory has another--_the_ other of the
first importance to the novelist proper--in his attraction to character,
if not exactly in his making up of it. It has been said above that the
defect of the pure romances--especially those of continental origin--is
the absence of this. What the Greeks called [Greek: dihanoia]--"sentiment,"
"thought," "cast of thought," as it has been variously rendered--is even
more absent from them than plot or character itself: and of its almost
necessary connection with this latter they often seem to have no idea.
Very rare is such a touch as that of Sir Amadas being unable at the feast
to get rid of the memory of the unburied corpse, kept by enemies from the
kindly earth that would hide it, and the rites that would help it to peace:
still rarer that in _Guy of Warwick_ when the hero, at the height of
his fame and in the full enjoyment of his desires, looks from the tower and
is struck by the selfishness and earthliness of his career. The first
notion is not "improved" in the original at all, and the second very badly;
but in most of the others such things do not even exist. Now the greater
Legend is full of situations which encourage such thoughts, and even of
expressed thoughts that only need craftsmanship to turn them into the
cornerstones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty words
long, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid that determine the
relations of Tristram and Iseult; the unconscious incest of Arthur and
Margause with its Greek-tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity of
Palomides, and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant allegory)
his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all these are matters in
point. But of course the main nursery of such things is the
Lancelot-and-Guinevere story itself. Nobody has yet made Guinevere a
person--nobody but Shakespeare could have done so perhaps, though
Shakespeare's Guinevere would probably have been the greatest woman in
all art. But Malory has not been the least successful with her: and of
Lancelot he has made, if only in study, one of the great characters of
that fictitious world which is so much truer than the real. And let no
one say that we are reading Tennyson or any one else into Malory. There
are yet persons, at least at the time this was written not quite
Methusalahs, who read the _Morte d'Arthur_ before the _Idylls_ appeared
and who have never allowed even the _Idylls_ to overlay their original
idea of the most perfect and most gentle of knights.
It is probable indeed that Malory invented little or nothing in the
various situations, by which the character of Lancelot, and the history
of his fatal love, are evolved. We know in most cases that this is so.
It is possible, too, that at first (probably because the possibilities
had not dawned on him, as it has been admitted they never did very
consciously) he has not made the most of the introduction of lover and
lady. But when the interest becomes concentrated, as in the various
passages of Guinevere's wrath with her lover and their consequences, or
in the final series of catastrophes, he is fully equal to the occasion.
We _know_--this time to his credit--how he has improved, in the act of
borrowing them, the earlier verse-pictures of the final parting of the
lovers, and there are many other episodes and juxtapositions of which as
much may be said. That except as to Lancelot's remorse (which after all
is the great point) there is not much actual talk about motive and
sentiment is nothing; or nothing but the condition of the time. The
important point is that, as the electricians say, "the house is wired"
for the actual installation of character-novelling. There is here the
complete scenario, and a good deal more, for a novel as long as
_Clarissa_ and much more interesting, capable of being worked out in the
manner, not merely of Richardson himself, but of Mr. Meredith or Mr.
Hardy. It _is_ a great romance, if not the greatest of romances: it has
a great novel, if not the greatest of novels, written in sympathetic ink
between the lines, and with more than a little of the writing sometimes
emerging to view.
Little in the restricted space here available can be, though much might
be in a larger, said about the remaining attempts in English fiction
before the middle of the sixteenth century. The later romances, down to
those of Lord Berners, show the character of the older with a certain
addition of the "conjuror's supernatural" of the _Amadis_ school. But
the short verse-tales, especially those of the Robin Hood cycle, and
some of the purely comic kind, introduce an important variation of
interest: and even some of the longer, such as that _Tale of Beryn_,
which used to be included in Chaucer's works, vary the chivalrous model
in a useful way. Still more important is the influence of the short
_prose_ tale:--first Latin, as in the _Gesta Romanorum_ (which of course
had older and positively mediæval forerunners), then Italian and French.
The prose saved the writer from verbiage and stock phrase; the shortness
from the tendency to "watering out" which is the curse of the long verse
or prose romance. Moreover, to get point and appeal, it was especially
necessary to _throw up_ the subject--incident, emotion, or whatever it
was--to bring it out; not merely to meander and palaver about it. But
language and literature were both too much in a state of transition to
admit of anything capital being done at this time. It was the great good
fortune of England, corresponding to that experienced with Chaucer in
poetry three quarters of a century earlier, that Malory came to give the
sum and substance of what mediæval fiction could do in prose. For more,
the times and the men had to come.