In morals as well as in language (though more obscurely, since the
subject of morals is so much more complicated than that of philology),
we may find signs of a transition from the times of Chaucer to those of
Shakespeare, and of progress no less than transition. The suppression
of the Lollards—hated alike by the Church and the feudal lords, the
War of the Roses, and the licentiousness of the court and courtiers,
must, in the days of Edward IV, in which Malory wrote, have cut the
moral and social life of the country down to its roots. Yet even in
Malory’s book there are signs of the new moral life which was coming,
and which in the days of the Reformation reached a power and expansion
never before known. It would be absurd to pretend that Malory had
greatly advanced in morality from the position of Chaucer and his age
towards that of the Elizabethan period. Roger Ascham, indeed, while
admitting that ‘ten Morte Arthurs do not the tenth part so much harm as
one of these books made in Italy and translated in England,’ protests
against the demoralising effect of the literature of which he takes
this book as the example, ‘the whole pleasure of which,’ he says,
‘standeth in two special points—in open manslaughter and bold bawdray.
In which book those be counted the noblest knights that do kill most
men without any quarrel, and commit foulest adulteries by subtlest
shifts[15].’ I remember Dante’s story of the sin and doom of Paolo and
Francesca—
‘Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse’—
and recognise a real though only half truth in Ascham’s strictures. But
he greatly over-states the evil, while he altogether omits to recognise
the good in the book. Caxton’s estimate of the moral purport of the
whole book, gives not merely the other side, but both sides of the
case. Much more than half the ‘open manslaughter’ is done in putting
down cruel oppressors and bringing back kingdoms from anarchy to law
and good government; and the occasions call forth all the knightly
virtues of gentleness, forbearance, and self-sacrifice, as well as
those of courage and hardihood. And though it is far from possible to
deny the weight of Ascham’s other charge, yet we must not, in forming
our estimate of the book, forget the silent yet implied judgment which
is passed upon lawless love by its tragic end, nor the ideal presented
in the lives of the maiden knights, Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale. For
the purpose of a due estimate of Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur,’ we may
fairly take Caxton’s Preface as an integral part of the book. The
Preface gives the tone, the motive, to the whole book. The morality of
‘Morte Darthur’ is low in one essential thing, and this alike in what
it says and in what it omits: and Lord Tennyson shows us how it should
be raised. The ideal of marriage, in its relation and its contrast with
all other forms of love and chastity, is brought out in every form,
rising at last to tragic grandeur, in the _Idylls of the King_. It is
not in celibacy, though spiritual and holy as that of Galahad or
Percivale, but in marriage, as the highest and purest realisation of
the ideal of human conditions and relations, that we are to rise above
the temptations of a love like that of Launcelot or even of Elaine; and
Malory’s book does not set this ideal of life before us with any power
or clearness. In no age or country has the excellence of marriage, as
the highest condition of man’s life, been wholly unknown: but Luther
and the Reformation brought it first into the full light of day, when
he, a monk, married a nun, and thus in the name of God, declared that
the vows of marriage were more sacred and more binding than those of
the convent, and that the one might be lawfully set aside by the other.
And we know how this ideal of love in marriage is worked out by
Shakespeare. With Shakespeare it is marriage which explains, justifies,
forgives, glorifies, and blesses every prosperous and happy condition
of life, and gives an abiding peace as well as dignity to the closing
scenes of his deepest tragedies. Marriage not only sheds its radiance
upon the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda, and of Rosalind and Orlando,
but on all around them: marriage justifies the boldness of Helena as
the love of Elaine, touching as its self-surrender is, cannot do: it
secures forgiveness to the weak and foolish Leontes, and even to the
worthless Angelo; it is to the husband of Desdemona that we find
ourselves constrained to accord the pardon and the sympathy which she
herself had given him. And no one will know Hamlet as he is, nor fully
understand his tragic destiny, unless he sees what it might have been,
as his mother saw it, when she exclaims:—
‘Sweets to the sweet, farewell!
I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife;
I thought thy bridal bed to have deck’d, sweet maid,
And not have strew’d thy grave.’
But this is Shakespeare’s Ophelia, not the preposterous misconception
of Tieck and Goethe, who should have been warned by Polonius not ‘to
cast beyond themselves in their opinions.’
If Morte Arthur does not deserve the unqualified denunciation of the
learned Ascham, it cannot be denied that it exhibits a picture of a
society far lower than our own in morals, and depicts it with far less
repugnance to its evil elements, on the part either of the author or
his personages, than any good man would now feel. Still—with the
exception of stories like those of the birth of Arthur and Galahad,
which show not only another state of manners from our own, but also a
really different standard of morals from any which we should now hold
up—the writer does for the most part endeavour, though often in but an
imperfect and confused manner, to distinguish between vice and virtue,
and honestly to reprobate the former; and thus shows that his object is
to recognize and support the nobler elements of the social state in
which he lived, and to carry them towards new triumphs over the evil.
And even where, as in the story of Tristram, there is palliation rather
than reprobation of what Sir Walter Scott justly calls ‘the extreme
ingratitude and profligacy of the hero,’ still the fact that such
palliation, by representing King Mark as the most worthless of men, was
thought necessary in the later, though not in the earlier, romance on
the same subject, shows an upward progress in morals; while a real
effort to distinguish virtue from vice is to be seen in the story of
Launcelot, with his sincere though weak struggles against temptation,
and his final penitence under the punishment of the woes which his
guilt has brought on all dear to him as well as to himself. Or if we
look at the picture which Chaucer’s works give us of the co-existence
in one mind—and that one of the noblest of its age—of the most
virtuous Christian refinement and the most brutish animal coarseness,
and then see how in the pages of Malory, inferior as we must hold him
to be to Chaucer, the brutish vice has dwindled to half its former
size, and is far more clearly seen to be vice, while the virtue, if not
more elevated in itself, is more avowedly triumphant over the evil, we
find the same upward progress. And I cannot doubt that it was helped on
by this book, and that notwithstanding Ascham’s condemnation of Morte
Arthur, Caxton was right in believing that he was serving God and his
countrymen by printing it; and that he justly estimated its probable
effect when he says, ‘Herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy,
humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder,
hate, virtue, sin. Do after the good, and leave the evil, and it shall
bring you to good fame and renommée.... All is written for our
doctrine, and for to beware that we fall not to vice nor sin, but to
exercise and follow virtue, by which we may come and attain to good
fame and renommé in this life, and after this short and transitory life
to come unto everlasting bliss in heaven; the which He grant us that
reigneth in heaven, the blessed Trinity. Amen.’