It can hardly be doubted that Spenser, while drawing largely from
Geoffrey of Monmouth, was acquainted with Malory’s story of Arthur, if
not with the earlier romances also. We might have known this with
certainty, if Spenser had completed his great design which he sketched
in his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, prefixed to the first three books
of the _Faerie Queene_, and after labouring ‘to pourtrait in Arthur
before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the
twelve Morall Vertues,’ he might have been ‘perhaps encouraged to frame
the other part of Politick Vertues in his person, after that he came to
be King.’ He farther identifies his hero as the son of the Lady
Igraine, and the infant charge of Merlin, and his description of the
Redcross Knight and his claim to the adventure of Una, must forcibly
recall Malory’s story of Beaumains and the lady Linet, notwithstanding
the differences between the two. Beyond this, there is the evidence of
general literary probability. Spenser’s ideals of knighthood and
knight-errantry are so much in harmony with those of Malory, while they
rise into a far higher moral life, that it does not seem unreasonable
to suppose a relation between the two, and to believe that we owe to
Malory the transmission from the earlier romances of all that was worth
preserving in these to the generation which could give birth to the
_Faerie Queene_.
And while Spenser strove to carry forward the national life of his
countrymen by presenting the noblest ideals of chivalry under the old
forms of romance, Shakespeare was embodying them in the new forms
destined thenceforth to take the place of the old, and showing us in a
Ferdinand, a Prince Henry, or a Hamlet, the ideals of the _Gentleman_,
while the Sydneys and the Raleighs were presenting the counterpart in
actual life. Ben Jonson, too, though he makes fun of ‘the whole sum of
Errant Knighthood’ in his _Execration upon Vulcan_, elsewhere describes
the old training of pages and squires in chivalry, as ‘the noblest way
of breeding up our youth in all the blazon of a gentleman.’
Of Milton’s debt to Malory there is no less probability. He no doubt
knew the other legends of Arthur, but Malory’s book must surely have
had some part in taking that hold on his imagination, and exercising
that influence in the formation of his character and life, of which he
himself tells us. In his poem addressed to Giovanni Battista Manso,
Marquis of Villa, the friend of Tasso, and of himself when he visited
Naples, he says:—
‘O mihi si mea sors talem concedat amicum;
Phoebaeos decorasse viros qui tam bene nôrit,
Si quando indigenas revocabo in carmina reges,
Arturumque etiam sub terris bella moventem;
Aut dicam invictae sociali foedere mensae
Magnanimos Heroas, et (O modo spiritus adsit)
Frangam Saxonicas Britonem sub Marte phalanges.’—_Mansus_ 78[16].
The like hope and purpose of writing an Epic poem of British story is
to be found in the _Epitaphium Damonis_. And in his defence of his life
in the ‘Apology for Smectymnuus,’ he says:—
‘Next, (for hear me out now, readers), that I may tell ye whither my
younger feet wandered; I betook me among those lofty fables and
romances, which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood
founded by our victorious kings, and from thence had in renown over all
christendom. There I read it in the oath of every knight, that he
should defend to the expence of his best blood, or of his life, if it
so befel him, the honour and chastity of virgin or matron; from whence
even then I learned what a noble virtue chastity sure must be, to the
defence of which so many worthies, by such a dear adventure of
themselves, had sworn; and if I found in the story afterward, any of
them, by word or deed breaking that oath, I judged it the same fault of
the poet, as that which is attributed to Homer, to have written
indecent things of the gods; only this my mind gave me, that every free
and gentle spirit, without that oath, ought to be born a knight, nor
needed to expect the gilt spur, or the laying of a sword upon his
shoulder to stir him up both by his counsel and his arms, to secure and
protect the weakness of any attempted chastity. So that even these
books, which to many others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose
living; I cannot think how, unless by divine indulgence, proved to me
so many incitements, as you have heard, to the love and steadfast
observation of virtue.’
In a word, not the fears of Ascham but the hopes of Caxton were now
fulfilled in Milton’s study of the old romances.
And though it were idle and mistaken to wish that the poet had finally
chosen the Death of Arthur rather than Paradise Lost, the lovers of the
story of the Round Table may be forgiven if they wish it were possible
to call up him who left untold that story as it would have been seen in
the light of his genius.
Such a transformation has, indeed, been effected for us by Lord
Tennyson in his _Idylls of the King_. He who has been familiar with the
old Morte Arthur from his boyhood, must consent to let the poet
transport him into a quite new region of the imagination, and must in a
manner and for the time forget the old before he can read the _Idylls
of the King_ without a somewhat sad feeling that these are not the old
knights whom he has always known. I have already likened Malory’s work
to a mediæval castle, and, if I may be allowed to vary my parable a
little, I would say this: There are some of us who in their childhood
lived in, or can at least remember, some old house, with its tower and
turret stairs, its hall with the screen, and the minstrel’s gallery,
and the armour where it was hung up by him who last wore it: the
panelled chambers, the lady’s bower, and the chapel, and all the quaint
rambling passages and steps which lead from one to another of these.
And when in after years he comes to this same house, and finds that it
has all been remodelled, enlarged, furnished and beautified to meet the
needs and the tastes of modern life, he feels that this is not the very
home of his childhood, and that a glory has departed from the scenes he
once knew: and yet, if the changes have been made with true judgment,
and only with a rightful recognition of the claim that the modern life
should have full scope for itself while preserving all that was
possible of the old, though not letting itself be sacrificed or even
cramped and limited, for its sake: if he is thus reasonable, he will
acknowledge that it was well that the old order should yield place to
the new, or at least make room for it at its side. And such are the
thoughts and sentiments with which the lover of the old Morte Arthur
will, if he be also a student of the growth of our national character
and life, read the new _Idylls of the King_.