The ancient adage that “there is no new thing under the sun,” has been
recently applied by a popular writer of fiction to the romantic stories
of the day. But surely nowhere are the words of the Preacher more
abundantly illustrated than in the realm of narrative poetry. With whom
did “The Canterbury Tales,” “The Fairy Queen,”“The Idylls of the King,”
originate? Certainly not with Chaucer, Spenser, or Tennyson. The hidden
sources of those delightful rivers of song lie far away, so far that
few care to trace them. The same, or nearly the same, story is handed
down from one man to another, till at last some master-mind catches
its true significance, tells it for once as it was never told before,
and links his name with it through all the ages. Sometimes though more
rarely, different capabilities of the same story will strike more than
one master-mind, and then the comparisons are full of interest, and
bring out into sharp relief the idiosyncrasies of each narrator. It has
been so with portions of the “Iliad,” of the “Nibelungen Lied,” and of
our own “Morte D’Arthur.” It is so still with the story of Sir Tristram
de Lyonesse, who, of all King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table,
seems to have gone the farthest and fared the best. Rarely indeed has
the homage of poets so far apart in time, and varying so widely in
spirit and conception, been tendered so persistently to one object.
Arthur may pass away in peace to the cool valley of Avilion, Launcelot
to his grave in Joyous Guard, Galahad to the Blessed Vision which last
he saw with mortal eyes in the city of Estorause; but Tristram is of
the earth, earthy, and on the earth he abides. Twelve centuries have
not quenched the ardor of his love for fair Iseult, nor traced one
wrinkle on his brow.
Briefly, the legend of his life is this: Sir Tristram de Lyonesse as
his first great exploit slew Sir Marhaus, the deadly foe of his uncle,
King Mark, but was by him so desperately wounded that he sailed to
Ireland under the name of Tamtris, to be cured of his wound by the
surgical arts of the Queen of Ireland, sister to Sir Marhaus, and
mother of the beautiful Princess Iseult. On his return to Cornwall he
described the Princess in words so glowing that King Mark resolved to
marry her, and sent his nephew back to escort her over the sea. Fearful
lest all should not go well, the Queen gave to her daughter’s faithful
maid, Bragwaine, a magic potion, which the bride was to drink on the
night of her marriage with King Mark, to ensure their mutual love.
Unwittingly, however, Tristram and Iseult drank of it together on board
the vessel; and, all their lives, it wrought them woe and misery, until
at length they died together, and were buried side by side. The facts
are always much the same—but the hero alters so completely as to change
the whole aspect of the story, and make the interpretation put upon it
different in every age.
When we first meet with him among the Welsh bards of the sixth century,
he is simply Drystan, or Trystan, the Tumultuous; his name has not
already doomed him to that _triste_ existence, which grows consistently
more and more tragic throughout the later records of his life. He
is the son, not of King Meliodas, but of Talwz; his lady is Essylt;
his uncle, Mark Meirzion; and the chief points in his character are
curiously brought out by his association with Greidial and Gwgon, as
one of the three heralds of Britain; with Gwair and Cai, the diademed
princes; with Call and Pryderi, the mighty swineherds; with Gwair and
Eiddillig, the stubborn chiefs; with Caswallan and Cynon, the faithful
lovers. Heraldry, obstinacy, fidelity—no very promising material for a
hero nowadays; but then the lines on which a poet worked were simpler.
For three years this tumultuous being withdrew from Arthur’s Court in
disgust at the issue of one of his quarrels, and the King, with almost
incredible folly, instead of rejoicing at the deliverance, sent after
him twenty-eight warriors in succession, all of whom Trystan overthrew.
At last, Gwalzmai with the Golden Tongue (the Gawaine of later days)
tried his fortune, accosting the fierce chieftain in these words:
Tumultuous is the wave naturally
When the sea is its base:
Who art thou, warrior incomprehensible?
To which Trystan Ossianically replies:
Tumultuous be a wave and a thunderstorm:
While they be tumultuous in their course,
In the day of conflict I am Trystan.
Finally the Golden-tongued prevails, and they return together.
Our next glimpse of him is in the kingdom of the _trouvères_
and _troubadours_, with whom he is a great favorite. The famous
Mademoiselle Marie, in her translation, the “Lai Dee Chevrefoil,”
written about the middle of the twelfth century, sings of a pretty
episode in his love, which none of her successors have improved upon,
and which most of them have omitted. There are allusions to him in
Chrestien de Troyes, who wrote before the year 1191, and in the works
of a poetical king of Navarre, about 1226. The date of the Auchinleck
MS., “Sir Tristram,” which Scott raised such a tempest by ascribing
to Thomas the Rhymer of Ercildoune, is said to be 1330. It is written
in a curious and very effective metre; the short abrupt line of two
syllables falling regularly near the end of each stanza reins in the
full swing of the rest with great force and directness. The poem is
full of life and vigor, and there are touches of naïf insight here and
there in strange contrast with the rough, matter-of-fact tone of the
whole. Many and quaint are the adventures of the hero, especially when
he kills a dragon in Ireland for the sake of Iseult, that “brid bright,
as blood upon snoweing,” and her mother cures him of the pain caused by
its poisonous tongue, with treacle; or when, having overcome a terrible
“geaunt” in Brittany, he requires him to adorn the walls of his castle
with “images” of Iseult and Bragwaine, the beauty of which so astounds
his young brother-in-law, evidently a novice in works of art, that he
straightway falls backward and breaks his head!
This poem, or another much like it, was celebrated both at home and
abroad, where “Thomas of Britain” was henceforth quoted as the great
authority on the subject. About the same time lived Raoul de Beauvais,
who also made it his study; Rusticien de Puise, whose work is in
prose; and the authors of two metrical fragments in French, from one
of which Scott completed the Auchinleck MS., though its end had not
been unearthed when he became its editor. The translation, which
carried the name of Tristram northward as far as Iceland, is still
kept in the library at Copenhagen; and G. de le Flamma tells us that
when the tomb of a Lombard king was opened in 1339, there was found
inscribed on his sword, “This was the sword of Sir Tristram, who killed
Amoroyt of Ireland.” Seghart von Bamberg wrote of him in 1403, and also
Eylhard von Habergen. Of the same period is the Romance by Gotfried of
Strasburg, who died in the midst of his work, leaving it to be finished
in a less poetical spirit by Ulrich von Turheim and Heinrich von
Vribert.
Our own Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to draw Sir Tristram into
the magic circle of Arthur’s knights, in whose good company he has ever
since remained. Lady Juliana Berners mentions him as the inventor of
“venery” or terms of hunting; and his name occurs in “The Temple of
Glass,” and in Gower, who states that he fell by King Mark’s own hand,
a tradition followed only by Sir Thomas Malory and Tennyson. In the
“Orlando Furioso” we hear of the “Rocca di Tristano,” and Ariosto and
Boiardo drew from his legend, old even then, their fountains of love
and hatred. Dante places him next to Paris among the lovers flitting
by like cranes in his “Inferno.” In 1485 Sir Thomas Malory, himself a
knight, published his noble “Morte D’Arthur,” in which Tristram is one
of the most striking figures; and it is remarkable that although he
never seems to have thought there was anything to condemn greatly in
the nephew’s conduct, he palliates it by defaming the uncle as much as
possible—a moral concession not to be found in either of the earlier
romances, which he must have consulted for his work. But we will not
multiply references, lest the reader should be fain to cry with the
author of “Sir Hain and Dame Anieuse,”
Or pues tu chanter de Tristan,
Ou de plus longue, se tu sez.
The theme was getting wearisome. Le Seigneur Luce du château de Gast
had exhausted it in his prose Romance (where, for the first time,
Palamides, the Paynim lover of Iseult, and Dinadan, the foolish,
knight, appear); and, besides this, there was a “Romance of Meliodas,”
Tristram’s father, and afterwards a “Romance of Ysaie le Triste,” his
son; so that all the details of his private life were nearly as well
known as those of Mr. Carlyle’s to the present generation. “Ysaie le
Triste” appeared in 1522; and in 1554, when no imagination, however
vivid, could possibly add a single exploit to those which had been
recounted already, Jean Maugin took a new departure, and turned the
whole thing into an allegory, in which Sir Tristram became the type of
Christian chivalry. His queer attempt is justly ridiculed by Scott;
but it is not altogether without interest, as the first indication of
the symbolic spirit in which modern poets have treated the legend—with
the exception of Scott himself, whose beautiful Conclusion and
Ballad are pure imitations of the mediæval spirit as well as of the
mediæval form, and have nothing modern about them. Towards the end of
the sixteenth century the taste for chivalrous romance died out in
Europe—or rather fell asleep—and the name of Tristram was no more heard
for more than two hundred years, except in a glowing stanza or two of
Spenser’s “Fairy Queen.” Then came the revival of Scott and Southey to
prepare the way, and lastly that signal triumph of the ancient story
in our own day, when four of the greatest living poets singled it out
for illustration, and it became a living power again in the hands of
Wagner, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Matthew Arnold. But its power is of
a different kind, for a change has come over the spirit of the dream,
since it was first dreamed long ago among the Welsh mountains.
Accordingly Tristram, once the mere sport of existing circumstances,
becomes a highly responsible person with correctly oppressive notions
of duty. He has grown old along with the rest of the world; he rides
no more light-hearted through the forest, sails no more gaily across
the sea, forgetful of all but life and its deliciousness, woos no more
whom he would. Nor, in the modern versions, does he die merrily, as he
died in the “Morte D’Arthur” and in the “Book of Howth,” “harping afore
his lady La Belle Isoud.”Wagner, to whom one might have fancied, _à
priori_, that such an exit for his tenor would have been most welcome,
sentences him to lingering death of a wound given him by the traitor
Melot; Tennyson fells him with a blow of King Mark’s from behind; in
Matthew Arnold he dies naturally; in Swinburne the false words of
Iseult Les Blanches Mains finish the work of sickness. His love, his
death, are all-important now; whereas of old the first was but an
interesting episode in the life of a man who was second only to Sir
Launcelot at a tourney, and the last so insignificant as to be disposed
of in a single sentence. We hear nothing now of the Castle of Maidens,
or of Lonazep; nothing of the wife of Sir Segwarides, or of other fair
ladies; nothing at all of that great crisis in his life when he met Sir
Launcelot at the peron, “and either wounded other wonderly sore, that
the blood ran out upon the grass.”
Of course there may be a reason for this in the fact that we look upon
Tristram as a hero by himself, and therefore have no need to illustrate
his inferiority to Launcelot, and to Launcelot only, in love and in
war. But where are ye now, Sir Palamides, Sir Bruno, and Sir Elias?
Your very names have a forgotten sound.
The knights’ bones are dust,
And their good swords rust,
Their souls are with the saints, I trust.
But he who wishes to find any record of their doings with Sir Tristram
must search through the length and breadth of Malory’s twenty-one books
ere he find it. Nor is there any trace in the modern poems of the sweet
old story, how after that “deep draughts of death” had taken the Lady
Elizabeth, Tristram’s mother, and his father, King Maliodas, had “let
call him Tristram, the sorrowful-born child,” and had actually, for
love of her, “endured seven years without a wife,” he married a wicked
lady, who tried to poison Tristram; and how she was condemned to death
for the attempt, and he rescued her from his father’s wrath, and made
them accorded, and how she “loved him ever after, and gave Tristram
many great gifts.”
All these things, which relieved the sombre hues of the picture have
faded into dimness. The martial glory of Tristram has passed away;
nothing but tragedy remains—the sin, the sorrow, the inexplicable
fate which linked two separated lives together. Long ago it was a bit
of witchcraft pure and simple; now the magic drink has become the
symbol of mystery and doom, and what not. Like Paolo and Francesca da
Rimini, the guilty souls are hurried round and round without a moment’s
respite by the whirlwind of their passion, in that wonderful opera
which the most devoted followers of Wagner esteem his masterpiece of
blended poetry and music. The fierce, dark, rapturous rejoicing of
love on the very edge of death lights it up with a lurid glare, which
makes everything else look pale and fanciful by comparison; it has no
parallel in art, even among Wagner’s other works, nor can any one
desire that it should have. The great difficulties which stand in the
way of its representation may prevent it from ever becoming popular
in the sense in which “Lohengrin” and “Tannhäuser” are popular; but
those who have had the good fortune to hear it will not easily forget
its unique and terrible power. It is strange that Wagner should have
made King Mark an ideal uncle, tender and forgiving to the last degree,
and so full of self-denial that had he but known of the fatal drink
in time, he would have resigned his bride to his nephew with the best
grace in the world. Dramatically the action loses by this change; the
sympathies of the audience are baffled and divided; do what we will,
the conduct of the hero seems mean and treacherous, and his death
more arbitrary than it need have been, since Melot, the traitor who
gives him his mortal wound, had far less reason to hate him than had
the injured bridegroom. Indeed, it is difficult to see what Wagner
himself thought that he gained by this amendment, unless that tragedy
itself becomes more tragic by the needless suffering inflicted on a
high and noble soul, ready to sacrifice its dearest hopes rather than
undergo the agony of seeing another’s virtue tempted beyond endurance.
There is also one dire offence against good taste, worthy of Wagner’s
earliest models (and of Shakespeare in “King Lear”,) in the scene where
Tristram tears the bandage from his wounds. But if the hero fares
rather badly, until we forgive him for the sake of his death-cry,
“Liebe!” the heroine has never in the course of her long life found
such an interpreter. She has lost, indeed, her old, light-hearted
innocence; but she has lost it to become one of the grandest and most
original creations in the whole range of the drama. She surpasses even
the bounds of passion; the very _fury_ of love is upon her, from the
moment when, foreseeing that she can no longer live without him, she
resolves to make Tristram drink with her of the death-drink, and the
charm begins to work, to the moment when she falls dead besides his
body. The magic only reveals what shame forbade her to confess. The key
to her whole character lies in her answer to Bragwaine’s entreaty that
she will not give the signal for Tristram’s approach by extinguishing
the torch in the window of her tower in King Mark’s palace—
Und wär ’es meines Lebens Licht,
Lachend es zu löschen
Zag ’ich nicht.
Wagner showed his wisdom when he left her alone in her glory, and made
no attempt to introduce that other Iseult of Brittany, who certainly
interferes with any conception of Tristram as the most faithful of
lovers. “And for because that Sir Tristram had such cheer and riches,
and all other pleasures that he had, almost he had forsaken La Beale
Isoud. And so upon a time Sir Tristram agreed to wed Isoud les Blanches
Mains. And at the last they were wedded, and solemnly held their
marriage,” But this is far too natural and unheroic for the nineteenth
century; and poor Iseult the Second fares ill at the hands of our
poets—excepting Matthew Arnold who, with unwonted chivalry, has taken
up the cause of this distressed damsel (this “snowdrop by the sea,”
whose own brother forsook her for her namesake), and made of her one
of those meek, motherly, sweet little women, who are ready to forgive
any one they love anything; and who, too weak either to make or mar the
lives with which they come in contact, yet hold their own by the power
of that clinging, lasting devotedness, which is all their innocent
natures let them know of passion. Very sweet is his picture of her,
standing in her gorgeous robes by the chimney-piece with the firelight
flickering on her white face and her white hands, and her jewelled
clasp, ready to vanish gracefully the moment her rival enters; and it
is with a gentle feeling of regret that we lose sight of her at last,
wandering on the seashore with her children, while she tells them
the old story of Merlin and Vivien to beguile the weary hours of her
widowhood. Here and here only the pure, white-handed maiden-wife bears
away the palm from the old Iseult of Tristram’s dreams, with
Her proud, dark eyes,
And her petulant, quick replies;
and we rather resent her intrusion than welcome her, when she comes
back to nurse him, very repentant indeed, like a sort of queenly
Sister of Mercy. His dying request is also a great innovation:
Close mine eyes, then seek the princess Iseult;
Speak her fair, she is of royal blood!
Say, I charged her, that thou stay beside me—
She will grant it; she is kind and good.
The hero of “the last tournament” is a very different being. Of all
those who have told the story, Tennyson alone seems to have looked
upon Tristram as thoroughly base and unworthy. Such a knight as this,
so rough, licentious, and wanting in courtesy, could never have been
Launcelot’s second; and indeed Tennyson lays no stress whatever on the
strong friendship which existed between them—so strong that neither
would ever wittingly harm any relation or friend of the other. As
Wagner has made the legend a symbol of that strife between man, his
passions, and his circumstances, which is the complex motive of our
latest tragedy,—as Matthew Arnold has drawn from it the lesson, that
quiet and neglected lives often do more to make the world lovely than
great and brilliant ones (a lesson which chivalry would never have
found there),—so Tennyson has made it a symbol of that degradation of
the whole nature, which follows the conscious surrender of the spirit
to the flesh, and has drawn from it the lesson that the very happiness
of partners in guilt is tainted with bitterness and turns to ashes
in their mouths. Nowhere else is there such a sharp contrast implied
between Launcelot, the sinner who repented and was given time for
repentance, and Tristram, the sinner who repented not and was cut off
in the midst of his sin. There is a great gulf between them, across
which they do not even join their hands.
Iseult stands in much the same relation to Guinevere; she is coarser,
more ironical, free from any feeling of remorse; but she surpasses
Tristram as Launcelot surpasses Guinevere, in “faith unfaithful,” and
one has a strong compassion for her in her lonely home, looking out
over the wild sea, with that stealthy spy of a husband, dogging her
every footstep. How full of compressed, dramatic force the last lines
are!
He rose, he turn’d, then, flinging round her neck,
Claspt it; and cried “Thine Order, O my Queen!”
But while he bow’d to kiss the jewel’d throat,
Out of the dark, just as the lips had touch’d,
Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek—
“Mark’s way,” said Mark, and clove him through the brain.
Not so has Swinburne read the character. His Tristram of Lyonesse is
once more the free, open-handed, light-hearted hero, or rather he
would be if he had not inevitably contracted some of the _Zeit-Geist_,
its weariness, its languor, its power of analysis. His gaiety is not
spontaneous—his song is as labored as if he had had to send it up for
an examination; his love is over-heavy with its own sweetness. The
long-drawn, honied lines drag on and on through pages of description,
till we almost long for a rough, dissonant note to break the eternal,
soft, alliterative hissing and kissing. But Iseult bears the wealth
of jewelled epithets lavished upon her, and it is easy enough to
understand them when we are under the spell of her fascination, or
when she is finely contrasted with the cruel, cold-blooded Iseult of
Brittany, who in her jealous anger kills her husband, by telling him
that the sails of the ship which is bringing his love to him are black
instead of white, so that he thinks she has refused to come:
And fain he would have raised himself and seen
And spoken, but strong death struck sheer between,
And darkness closed as iron round his head,
And smitten through the heart lay Tristan dead.
So there he lies. But he may yet be born again, and fight, and love,
and die, for who knows what shall be in the days to come, or to what
ancient songs the houses of our children’s children may echo? It may be
there is yet a further interpretation of the riddle, the outlines of
which we cannot even guess; and that the two Iseults may come to like
each other. Things even more strange than this have happened. It was
said that out of Tristram’s grave there grew an eglantine, which turned
itself around Iseult’s; and although it was cut three times by order of
the king, the eglantine was ever fair and fresh. By this time it has
grown into a mighty tree, and, for all we know, it has not done growing
yet.—_Merry England._