The influence of Sir Thomas Malory’s book upon English literature, and
so upon English life, upon our thoughts, morals, and manners, has been
great and important. I have spoken of its claims to be considered an
Epic poem; but it is not the less true, that it is our first great work
of English prose, the first in which the writing of prose was shown to
be one of the fine arts for England. Malory’s style is often
inartificial: he is not always able to master the huge masses of his
materials, and fails to fuse and mould them into a perfect whole. But
we must confess the like of Milton, whose grand periods of magnificent
English are often followed by others which are confused and cumbrous in
form, if not in thought. It has taken many workmen, through many
generations, to make our prose writing what it is: but there is an
infant beauty in Malory’s style which is full of promise of the perfect
manly form that is to be. The passages which I have already quoted are
instances of this inartificial beauty of style. The thoughts and images
spontaneously utter themselves in words without any attempt at
rhetorical balance and arrangement. Thus in the lament of Sir Ector
over Sir Launcelot, Malory does not ask himself whether there is a
logical connection between courtesy and bearing a shield, or between
true friendship and bestriding a horse, as a modern writer would have
done, and so brought those sentences into a more finished though more
monotonous correspondence with the rest. The flow of feeling is true,
direct, and simple, and that is enough. Dr. Sommer, in his notes on the
language of ‘Le Morte Darthur,’ points to the indications, in grammar,
spelling, and other usages of words, of its transitional place between
the language of Chaucer and that of Shakespeare; while Southey says
that it was composed in the best possible time for making it what it
is: and Mr. J. A. Symonds (whom I am permitted to name) says:—‘The
Morte Darthur was written at a lucky moment in our literary history,
when the old Saxon fountain of speech was yet undefiled, and when
printing had not introduced stereotyped forms or enforced the laws of a
too scrupulous grammar; at the same time the language is truly
English—rich in French and Latin words, as well as Saxon, and not so
archaic as to be grotesque or repulsive[14].
And if in these things Malory was happy in the opportuneness of the
times in which he wrote, not less was he so in that he lived in a day
in which (as we see from Caxton’s Preface) men could still believe in
the marvellous adventures of knight-errantry. A hundred years later,
the spirit of chivalry had so departed from the old forms that Spenser
could only use them as materials for allegory, while Cervantes, himself
full of the old spirit, could only treat the belief in knight-errantry
as the fantasy of a crazed though generous mind. But Malory was still
able to embody the ideals of chivalry in actual and serious personages,
and so to influence the national character and manners of his
countrymen in the best way. His book is a possession for all times. The
old stock is still putting out new leaves and fruits for ourselves.