It has been too commonly assumed that, because Caxton says that Sir
Thomas Malory took his work ‘out of certain books of French and reduced
it into English,’ he was a mere compiler and translator. But the book
itself shows that he was its author—its ‘maker,’ as he would have
called it. Notwithstanding his occasionally inartificial manner of
connecting the materials drawn from the old romances, there is an epic
unity and harmony, ‘a beginning, a middle, and an end,’ which, if they
have come by chance and not of design, have come by that chance which
only befalls an Homeric or a Shakespeare-like man. If more instances
and proofs are needed than have been already given, let us turn to the
opening chapters of the book. If we compare these with the old romances
which supplied the materials for them, we see at once how Malory has
converted prose into poetry, giving life and beauty to the clods of
earth, and transmuting by his art the legends which he yet faithfully
preserves. For the long and repulsive narrative of Merlin’s origin[3]
he substitutes a slight allusion to it: without disguising what he
probably believed to be at least an half historical record of Arthur’s
birth, he gives a grace and dignity to the story by the charms of the
mother’s character, the finer touches of which are wanting in the
original: and so through the whole of this part of the story.
Twenty-three years ago, I ventured to assert Malory’s claim to epic
genius: and now this claim may be farther tested, and as I think,
established, by help of the learned researches of Dr. Sommer. Of these
I shall state some details, in speaking of the text and its several
editions, here giving the result so far as it bears on the present
point. We may now see how Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’ was fused into its
actual form out of crude materials of ten times its bulk, and that
while he often translated or transcribed the French or English romances
as they lay before him, on the other hand he not only re-wrote, in
order to bring into its present shape the whole story, but also varied
both the order and the substance of the incidents that so he might give
them that epic character, and that beauty in the details, which his
book shows throughout. Malory was no doubt a ‘finder’ as well as a
‘maker,’ but so, I repeat, was Shakespeare, and so was every other
great poet. But the quarry and the building are not the same thing,
though the one supplies the rough stones with which the other is raised
up. We see that there is much that is rude and inartificial in Malory’s
art. He has built a great, rambling, mediæval castle, the walls of
which enclose rude and even ruinous work of earlier times, and not a
Greek Parthenon nor even an Italian palace of the Renaissance. Still,
it is a grand pile, and tells everywhere of the genius of its builder.
And I ask, as Carlyle once asked me, Who built St. Paul’s? Was it Wren,
or the hodman who carried up the bricks? But while supporting my
conclusions as to Malory’s art by the evidence of Dr. Sommer’s facts,
it is right to add that the conclusions are my own rather than those of
this learned critic. His estimate of Malory’s genius in the choice and
treatment of his materials falls far short of mine: and I can believe
that Malory may have judged rightly, for his own purpose, when he did
not take that form of a legend which was in itself the most beautiful.