Introduction to The Morte Darthur: Parts Seven and Eight, by Sir Thomas Malory
[In the following excerpt, Brewer traces the history of Arthurian legend, in addition to providing an overview of the structure, sources, and thematic concerns addressed in Malory's text.]
I
Malory's series of stories has delighted five centuries of readers, whether or not their own lives have been as exciting as his book. The Arthurian tales, that mixture of myth, adventure, love-story, enchantment, tragedy, live in his work as the essence of medieval romance, yet always with a contemporary relevance. This combination of romantic remoteness with contemporary relevance was true even in his own day. He wrote in the middle of the fifteenth century, a period of sagging confidence, and bewildering change, when England's empire had been almost entirely lost. He was looking backward to an imagined, more primitive, if glorious past. Contemplation of this past, however, was to provide, besides its intrinsic interest, an analysis of the problems of the present, and also an ideal for the future.1The Morte Darthur was a part of the movement that transformed the medieval knight into the English gentleman. It expresses those potent ideals of the gentleman's private virtue and public service that despite many failings activated English society and influence up to the first half of the twentieth century.
Even in the present day we respond to Malory's art and intent. The circumstances of knights in armour are remote from us, and interesting in their remoteness, yet the symbolic power of The Morte Darthur can also speak to the enduring contemporary need to reconcile the individual's demands with those of society, to recognize and cherish personal integrity, and true love, and to create a good society. Nothing bears witness more strikingly to the human power of Malory's work than the way it haunts the imagination of modern writers. Hardly a year passes without some retelling of the tale.
The Arthurian legend, in remotest origins Celtic, a medieval best-seller in twelfth-century Latin, which developed in the various European vernaculars into perhaps the largest single body of imaginative literature that the world has known, survives into the modern world as a living work only in English, at the hands of almost its last remodeller, Sir Thomas Malory. It is one of the many paradoxes of The Morte Darthur that it both is and is not Malory's. He is very much a translator, and rarely moves without help from sources. Yet he is also fully independent in handling his sources and unquestionably a great artist. He has suffered somewhat at the hands of critics by often being read in the light of other writers with different aims. We must recognize that his book is built up on the foundations of earlier works, or we shall misunderstand its nature, but it is the aim of the present essay to consider The Morte Darthur in its own right, as a great work of art. Many generations of readers, including men of genius and affairs from Henry VIII to T. E. Lawrence, have valued it, but literary critics from Ascham onwards have usually deplored or ignored it, misunderstanding its nature or assuming it to be merely derivative. Its real power and grasp as a book in itself have yet to be fully evaluated. Although it is the aim of this introductory essay to further that evaluation, and some new judgments are made, its brevity necessarily leaves many things only suggested or partly developed.
Malory's blend of fantasy and relevance is reinforced by his formal directness, whereby he reduces the complex elaborations of earlier Arthurian storytellers to a sequence of coherent tales which draws the reader along. Caxton, his first editor and publisher (whose edition of 1485 was for almost five centuries the only source of Malory's text), confused this strong direct form by dividing it, as he tells us, into twenty-one books, and into many, often illogical, chapter-divisions. Only when an unedited manuscript was discovered in Winchester College Library in 19342 was it possible to see without distraction Malory's true form, whereby the whole book is divided into eight main parts with subsections. No doubt the essential clarity of Malory's design has always been grasped, if unconsciously, by the common sense of readers, in Johnson's phrase, ‘uncorrupted by literary prejudice’, since Malory's book is the only version of the huge corpus of medieval Arthurian literature that is still naturally current. The other versions, more sophisticated in art and learning, have become immured within their own mazes, to which specialists alone have the key. Nevertheless, our natural appreciation of Malory's work has very much benefited now that the Winchester Manuscript is available, presented with all Professor Vinaver's learning in his splendid edition, though Professor Vinaver in his reaction from Caxton, seems in his turn to have gone beyond Malory's intentions by creating absolute divisions between the eight sections, putting asunder what Malory had carefully joined together. The text offered in this edition presents an integral portion of Malory's great work, that is, the last two main parts, where the whole work, and Malory's own art, rise to their climax. The text is taken principally from the Winchester Manuscript, occasionally corrected by reference to Caxton, except for the final pages of the manuscript, which are missing, and which therefore have to be taken from Caxton alone. The text is modernized in spelling. Little is lost by this and much is gained. Most modern English spellings would be recognizable, and many were current, in the fifteenth century, but the vagaries of fifteenth century spelling are distracting for the modern reader, interposing a veil of irrelevant quaintness.
II. THE GROWTH OF ARTHURIAN LEGEND
The true nature of Malory's book can hardly be appreciated without recognizing how different its situation is, and was, from a modern book, particularly a novel. Most people nowadays know a bit about the Arthurian legend before they read Malory, and this has always been the case. If we pick up a modern novel, on the other hand, we are disgusted if we find that we know the story, and that parts are even copied from earlier novels. Modern novelists, poets, dramatists, must, in the significant words of Ezra Pound, ‘make it new’. Before the eighteenth century writing was different. Shakespeare, for example, always used earlier writings as a base, sometimes hardly changing a word, as in his description of Cleopatra, taken from North's Plutarch. None of the great earlier writers, English or European, sought new material as the modern novelist must, or must pretend to. The same stories were constantly rewritten. For example, the story of King Lear had been told, though often very briefly, more than fifty times before Shakespeare wrote his play, which itself may have been founded on a previous play on the same subject. In this respect imaginative writers were more like modern historians than modern novelists. They sought novelty and freshness, of course, but they sought it in presentation, in taking a different view of known facts, in presenting new evidence. The similarity with historians must not be pressed too far. Older writers invented their new evidence as modern historians do not. But it may be recalled that those who are still accounted the greatest historians, Thucydides and Tacitus, certainly invented the speeches they put into the mouths of historical characters, just as Malory invented some of the speeches he put into the mouth of his main ‘historical’ character, King Arthur.
Such an attitude to writing as Malory's has important results. First, every reader can be expected to know the story roughly, at least. The author need not worry too much about ‘unity’ (see below, p. 22). He has received a given mass of material. Again, he need waste no time in building up certain effects, because they are already known, as the characters, in outline, are known, too, and he can rely on the reader's co-operation. He can achieve effects of irony and distance, along with familiarity. The author is also limited. He may change the quality of personality of a given character in the story (some writers even degraded the character of King Arthur), or the interpretation of an event, but he can hardly change a principal event completely. Secondly, the writer, taking over a story perhaps already elaborated several times, is taking over a structure of several layers. The advantage of this is that several layers may have effects both powerful and obscure, surviving underneath more superficial and recent though equally interesting layers of event and commentary, much as an oil painting by a great master has a play of different tones through the several layers of paint (the painted-out first thoughts and mistakes, even the dirt and varnishes of later years may contribute to the final effect). On the other hand, the disadvantage of an old and much rewritten story is that it may incorporate misunderstood earlier passages; or passages from earlier and later rewritings may be inconsistent with each other. The classic examples of such inconsistencies are to be found in Shakespeare's Hamlet. The example of Hamlet also suggests that such inconsistencies are not very important in a work of art. They violate that realism or naturalism that the nineteenth-century has taught us to demand, but which the twentieth century, in art as in literature, is teaching us to abandon. We must abandon it also for Malory. The Morte Darthur, whatever it is, is not a novel, with the typical novel's unity and naturalism. It is a complex, layered structure of great fascination, with its own internal laws (see further, p. 20 below).
How do these layers come about?3 The origin seems to have been a successful Romanized British (i.e., in modern terms, Welsh) war-leader of the British, or Gaelic, peoples, whom the Anglo-Saxons were conquering or driving out of what is now England, in the fifth century A.D. The first account of Arthur is in the story of the wars between the British and the English given by Nennius, a British (i.e. Welsh) priest, who wrote his Historiae Britonum about 800. Another mention of Arthur, however, comes in a Welsh poem perhaps of the seventh century. Other later historians preserve and slightly extend Nennius's account and Mordred appears as Arthur's last enemy. Other Welsh poems show Arthur as a mythical hero, in a supernatural world, capable of strange exploits, but already accompanied by Kay and Bedivere.
History and legend in various forms are the two chief elements in the Arthurian story, with now one dominating, now the other, now each in balance. History and legend were brought together for the first time in the same work by Geoffrey of Monmouth (his origin is significant) in his History of the Kings of Britain written in Latin and usually dated near 1135. It may be said of Geoffrey's combination of the two elements that it was achieved by giving legend the sober presentation of history. It is a fascinating situation. Geoffrey, whose parents may have been Bretons, was probably born in Monmouth and educated at Oxford; he wrote in Latin for a Norman-French audience, about a Welsh hero, who was king of England. Geoffrey derived Arthur's ancestry from a line of kings which included Lear and Cymbeline, went back to the grandson of Aeneas, called Brutus, and so back again to Romans and Trojans. His work was immensely successful in England and Europe.
The tangled skein of European culture was further interwoven by the enthusiasm with which European courts took up Geoffrey's account of Arthur. More Celtic legends were garnered from the Welsh, or from Brittany, to enrich the harvest. The Arthurian concept was so strong that it attracted other stories, of remote and separate origin, like that of Tristram. Elements from classical Latin literature, and a certain sophistication of literary culture, were employed in making Arthurian tales by clerkly court poets, especially by the French poet Chrestien of Troyes. Chrestien was probably the most influential writer—the invention of Lancelot and his love for Guenevere are perhaps his—but all the major European vernaculars produced many Arthurian stories. Although the stories are so numerous and varied, the significant point they have in common is that they used Arthurian mythology to provide a mirror in which to see the romance of their own lives, the lives of knights and ladies. Orthodox Christian story could not be so completely adopted partly because of its intrinsic nature, partly for historical reasons (though one must not forget the importance of saints' lives in the development of romance). Every society has an imaginative need to see itself, not quite as it is, but as it essentially thinks of itself. Medieval courtly European society imagined its secular self in terms of knight-errantry, conflict, love of ladies, high ideals of noble behaviour. The developing individualism of the twelfth century relished the presentation of a single knight's solitary quest, of his personal initiative, freedom from social pressures; it required the record of victories not only over normal enemies and competitors but also over monsters that are really the indwelling terrors of men's own minds. That the day-to-day actuality was often different from the literature need hardly surprise us—the same is true of novels in relation to ordinary life even today. We read novels because we hope both to lose and to find ourselves. Literature, fortunately, is not life. The fantasies of chivalric romance, especially those of Chrestien, clearly met important imaginative needs in their own time, and are attractive even now. In them, however, the element of legend, which from the twelfth century we had better call romance, predominated. The realism is limited, the historical and social elements subordinate.
From the point of view of Malory's work it is the French and a few later English versions that are important. In the thirteenth century the verse romances of Chrestien and others were turned into French prose and much enlarged, for example, by the story of Lancelot's early years, by accounts of Merlin, and by much else besides. The most important additions are the books of the History of the Holy Grail and the Quest of the Holy Grail. The Grail was thought to be the vessel in which Christ's blood from the cross was received, though scholars have sought the history of the idea in pagan Gaelic culture. The intention of the Grail stories is to denigrate the chivalric life of the knight-errant and to exalt its complete opposite, the virginal, ascetic, meditative, untravelled life of the monk. The authors are thought to have been Cistercian monks. They used the chivalric myths to deny chivalric values. They wrote a serious allegorical parody of wordly chivalry to exemplify the unwordly life of the spirit. Nothing more clearly shows the tremendous imaginative power of the myth of chivalry. The Grail stories were apparently as successful as the other Arthurian stories in French prose in the thirteenth century, partly because of their literary art, and, partly, no doubt, because their audience, unlike their authors, were able to believe in both the chivalric virtues and in spiritual virtues. Most people live with such inconsistencies easily enough and no one avoids them. The Grail stories were joined with other principal Arthurian stories, such as those of Lancelot and Guenevere (a romance of adultery), and of the death of Arthur. Thus a huge composite series of romances was put together, now known, because of its popularity, as the Vulgate. The Vulgate romances are also sometimes known as ‘cyclic’ romances, because of the way they were narrated, by a method also known as interlacing. That is, the story of one knight was told for a few pages. Then he was left, and the tale of another taken up for a similar space. Then again a third, and so back to the first. It was these cyclic romances of the French Vulgate version that Malory knew, and that provided him with most of his material.
They may not have given him his original inspiration. They are deficient in practical historical realism and directness. These qualities Malory found nearer home, particularly in Morte Arthure, an alliterative poem written in English in the fourteenth century. From the middle of the fourteenth century till sometime in the fifteenth century a number of English poems are found in the alliterative metre that goes back to Old English times. At first they seem to be associated more with the Northern and Western parts of the country. They usually have a strong, provincial, old-fashioned, patriotic, aristocratic seriousness with considerable political and religious interests. Such at least is the case with the alliterative Morte Arthure.4 Several of the alliterative poems show a patriotic interest in Arthur, but the alliterative Morte treats his triumph and death extensively. In this poem the author goes back to the original historical concept of Arthur, though he knows something of later romance. Gawain, not Lancelot, is Arthur's principal knight, and there is no love-interest. Lancelot is a minor figure. What is most striking is that although Arthur is king of ‘Britain’, he is thought and spoken of as English, as ‘our’ king, his men ‘our’ men. It is a poem of characteristically English self-glorification—Arthur creates an Empire from Ireland to Rome—and equally characteristic self-castigation, for Arthur is criticized as well as glorified. The English audience is expected to identify itself with Arthur and his men, and it is possible that Arthur himself is quite deliberately designed to represent in certain ways Edward III (who was himself a keen Arthurian).5 In other words, we have in this poem that sense of historical and political relevance on English ground that the French romances so notably lack. Such fantasy as there is in the alliterative Morte, like Arthur's fight with the giant, is presented with military realism, not untouched by a grim humour. Other elements of fantasy are presented through dream, the most realistic method of presenting fantasy. One of Arthur's dreams is of Fortune's Wheel, central to the tragic concept of the poem, as it is to the form that Malory eventually adopted.
Malory translated Morte Arthure. He made a number of changes in it. For example, he suppressed much of the heroic Gawain, and in turn exalted Lancelot, inventing new episodes to his glory. Since Lancelot as the lover of Queen Guenevere was well known in the fifteenth century, the effect of this is to introduce an element of romance, and reduce the unduly nationalistic tone, for Lancelot was a Frenchman. At the same time Malory maintained the historical and political relevance, for Professor Vinaver shows that there is good reason to suppose that Malory slightly recast Arthur's route in his expedition through France to accord better with that of King Henry V. In this section of Malory's work Arthur is probably to some extent an image of Henry V as in the alliterative poem he was of the equally heroic Edward III.
The ‘prosification’ of the alliterative Morte, though it appears as the second section of the Winchester MS and as Book V in Caxton,6 may have been, as Vinaver argues, Malory's first ‘work’. Although, as the reader already knows, the present writer does not agree with Professor Vinaver's further thesis that all the sections are entirely separate works, his view that the alliterative Morte was the first Arthurian section to be handled by Malory is an attractive one. It gives a sensible historical theory for the quality and success of Malory's work, showing fantasy grounded in historical relevance. It also helps us to grasp Malory's form. Malory did not, obviously, simply translate Morte Arthure through from beginning to end, or he would have come to Arthur's death before he had well begun. Yet the Morte gave two valuable leads to Malory. First, it is an example of a straightforward Arthurian story, enriched, certainly, by relevant digressions in the manner of medieval narration, but without the tiresome elaboration of interlacing. There were other examples of straight-forward narration within or without a larger frame, but Morte Arthure was right in the centre of Malory's interest. The second lead is more complicated. Morte Arthure provides an example of medieval tragedy in the upward and downward movement of Fortune's Wheel, that great medieval image. Malory took the moment of triumph, but for the moment postponed the fall. His section on Arthur and the Roman Wars, taken from the alliterative Morte, does not, like the Morte, go on immediately to the discovery of Mordred's treachery and so to Arthur's return and death. Naturally, Malory knew that this was the end to which he would have to work, as a matter of history. But he wanted to dilate on the splendour of Arthur's achievement and on the achievements of Arthur's knights: here the romances, the mirror of chivalry, came to his aid. With their material Arthur's moment of triumph is prolonged, and we hear many adventures, including that of the Grail. Malory does not return to the alliterative Morte Arthure until he comes to the tragic end. The downward turn of Fortune's wheel is all the more tragic when we see the glory and complexity of what is destroyed.
When he comes to Arthur's end Malory does not use only the alliterative Morte. He has learnt to blend and select from various sources. So he uses a French source, and another English poem, the stanzaic Morte Arthur, to supply the material he works on.
The way Malory worked on his sources has been shown in fascinating detail by Professor Vinaver, and following him, by other scholars.7 Briefly, Malory has selected from his sources those stories which he requires, thus ‘breaking up’, as Professor Vinaver has shown (Works p. lvii) ‘the complicated structure’ of the cyclic romances and ‘using its fragments for smaller narrative patterns’. He makes ‘(a) a rearrangement of episodes consistent with [his] own narrative technique, and (b) a series of connecting passages designed to link together the episodes so rearranged’ (Works p. 1575). Whereas Professor Vinaver sees the ‘fragments’ as entirely separate, it seems fair to say that most scholars now see the fragments arranged in the form of a larger whole (perhaps suggested by the alliterative Morte), which tells the whole life and death of Arthur and the marvellous deeds of his knights, with all that is implicit in them of romantic and historical significance.8
History (of a kind) and romance are now in Malory grown together. It is not literal historical truth for us, of course, since King Arthur never existed as Malory thought of him (though to many medieval Englishmen he did). It is not unreasonable, however, to think of Malory's feeling for England, for a special personal situation, for what creates and destroys great human institutions, as generally ‘historical,’ with a practical human relevance.
This human relevance feeds green sap through the romance of chivalric adventure and love; the events are no dry leaves of dream but living gleaming images of human life. Malory grafts on to the sturdy stock of Morte Arthure the exotic flowers of French romance, achieving the exchange and mutual enrichment of strength and beauty.
III. THE MORTE DARTHUR
The Morte Darthur is the name traditionally given to Malory's work, though, as the words of the colophon (see p. 158) presumably written by Malory suggest, the subject of the work is ‘Arthur and his knights from the beginning to the ending’. Caxton first named it The Morte Darthur, though he noted that more was meant. The short title signifies the most important single event, which is certainly Arthur's death. Although Professor Vinaver concludes that the short title The Morte Darthur can apply only to the last of eight main parts, to which it literally belongs, practically the same title, Morte Arthure, had also been given in the fifteenth century manuscript to the whole alliterative poem which contains many other events. In the same way, Morte Darthur covers the whole of Malory's book.
As will have been gathered from the discussion above, The Morte Darthur is a very long book, with many adventures intermingled. It cannot but contain some inconsistencies, though the effect of these is not disastrous. Most of them arise in the narrative of the adventures of knights in the middle section, when the Round Table is at the height of its glory. These adventures may be thought of as roughly parallel in the general time sequence. Such inconsistencies arise less obviously in the last two sections. A novelistic naturalism is, however, not to be expected, and the superficial resemblance of the book to a novel is misleading.
Nevertheless the book treats a coherent and cohesive mass of material, sorted with great care. The Arthurian stories had for long been known as ‘the matter of Britain’ (one of the three great topics of medieval romance), but for Malory, as for the author of Morte Arthure, the subject is not Britain but England. That Malory's chief hero, Lancelot, is French, only shows that Malory's feeling is not a form of post-Renaissance xenophobia. The people and the vague localizations of the French sources are given an English local habitation which is named.9 The castle of Meliagaunt is seven miles from Westminster. To get to it in a hurry, as Lancelot once had to, to rescue the Queen, you make your horse swim the Thames at Westminster, and land at Lambeth. Queen Guenevere, about to be married, goes up to London to buy her trousseau. Camelot is actually, Malory tells us, Winchester. Many other places are similarly identified. At another level Malory leaves no doubt of one of the themes that preoccupy him when he makes his well-known apostrophe to his fellow-Englishmen, reproaching them for their instability (p. 139). He fits Arthur's reign into what was known of pre-Anglo-Saxon chronology, and dates it in the fifth century. His interest in history is not ours; not impersonally political or economic, or social. His history was incarnate in the person of Arthur, and in Arthur's achievements and knights. Naturally it was real history-writing, a story, not annals.
The story is of the rise and fall of King Arthur, with which is closely involved the achievement and disaster of Lancelot, Arthur's principal knight, the strongest and bravest of all, who comes to a sad but pious end. The lives of the two are closely intertwined, and their double thread holds all the great, varied, and beautiful tapestry together. Malory tells how Arthur is begotten, in a way that already plants the seeds of tragedy. He comes to the throne unknown, but chosen by fate and justified by his own bravery and honour. He establishes a great Empire, stretching from Ireland to Rome, and a brotherhood of warriors, the knights of the Round Table, whom he causes to be vowed to an ideal of equity, bravery, justice, help for the weak and oppressed, personal goodness. Many knights come to his court, attracted by the glory of the Round Table. From the court they depart on many strange adventures, returning to increase its glory. The strangest adventure of all is the search for the Holy Grail, symbol of healing for the Waste Land, to be attained only by the pure in heart. Three knights achieve it, notably Galahad, the son of Lancelot. Lancelot fails, for this adventure demands a perfection not given to even the best of ordinary mortals, and it is part of Malory's literary achievement that even Lancelot, ‘the greatest knight of a sinful man’, as Malory calls him, is yet so human. Lancelot comes nearer to achieving the Grail than any of the other ‘ordinary’ knights, but, strong and noble as he is, he is also proud and—by some standards—unstable. He is not unstable in the ordinary sense, because in his adulterous love for Arthur's Queen, Guenevere, he is all too stable; but unstable in his desire for moral perfection, as we all are. The signs of Lancelot's instability are his pride and his obsessive love for Arthur's Queen. Lancelot, after the Arthur of the earlier sections of the whole work, is the prime architect of the fame of Arthur's court. After his return from the Quest of the Holy Grail he is at the precarious height of his glory, the supreme ornament of that supreme institution, the Round Table. But the fine crack in the golden bowl of noble achievement that the Grail Quest has clearly revealed begins to widen. Because he loves Guenevere, and because he is honourable and loyal, Lancelot cannot desert her. Yet he cannot be the lover of Guenevere and remain honourable and loyal to Arthur. His pride must drive these honours and loyalties to destroy each other, and much else. Lancelot's own faults are emblematic of the evil that exists among some other of the knights. They are not necessarily adulterous, though many are incontinent; some are envious, others are vengeful (which are not faults of Lancelot), and some are proud. In a word, they are human. But the worst is Mordred, who is himself the illegitimate product of Arthur's own early sin, in his brief incestuous (though in this respect ignorant) affair with his half-sister. Mordred and others force the reluctant Arthur to recognize Lancelot and Guenevere's adultery; the lovers must abscond. Arthur must attack them; Mordred rebels in Arthur's absence and in the last battle mortally wounds him before dying himself at his own father's hand. The whole glorious and humanly insecure institution of chivalry, so briefly once achieved in that England where Malory later contemplated it with joy and sorrow, is brought crashing down. The death of the most noble knights of all the world, and the most noble king, is brought about by the faithful love of the best of them all. Had Lancelot been worse or better none of it would have happened. Arthur is carried off to the mysterious Avilion. Lancelot and Guenevere withdraw separately into lives of penitence and solitude until they die. Lancelot's soul goes to Heaven.
This is in briefest outline the story that Malory tells, or rather retells. It is the great secular story of Western medieval Christendom. Within the whole body of legend are found the grandest public themes and the dearest private concerns: the Great King and the Great Society; secret love and solitary death. Arthur himself is by turns, as the story develops and as he grows older, Hero, King, Father, finally destroyed by his son Mordred and surrogate-sons Gawain and Lancelot. They themselves are respectively villain, half-villain, hero. There is a whole range of motifs of the deepest antiquity, such as the modern conscious mind may barely recognize, of hope and doom, strange sicknesses, mysterious healing, enchantments, quests and journeys, conflicts, fatal or lucky chances. They are gathered together from the Celtic, Classical, Eastern past, mingled with and transformed by the Christian thought and passion of many different centuries. Malory welded them together in the image of England; his sober treatment of what was once wildest fancy reflects a political, military, historical concern. He is rationalistic in his cutting down of marvels, in his refusal of folk superstition. He is realistic in his estimate of what a man may do. He loves and admits high ideals and strange marvels, but cautiously, and after testing, so that they appear the more noble and marvellous. He senses both the development of a new individualism, and a new concept of the nation-state as a great institution, and finds in the clash between them some part of his tragic structure.
He does not think in terms of mass society, or of jingoism. He thinks of the brightness and eclipse of the ideal yet corrupted society that he imagined as Arthur's English court; of the glory and corruption of good men, in particular of those two aboundingly good men, Arthur and Lancelot, but also of some few intimates like Gawain and his brothers, and some few dozen more whose adventures brought them to the court, and who made up the noble fellowship of the Round Table. Specific as it was, localized in time and place, vivid, there, nevertheless Malory also created in his work an image, a model, that may be widely applied throughout one's own experience, and throughout our knowledge of human society in any country. Malory's book is about an ideal society, and its fall; good men and their faults; an exciting way of life, and a great tragedy.
Like all great authors his inclusiveness is such that he seems to us to be balanced at a significant point between past and present, and to hold together elements naturally in tension—the individual and society, passion and faithfulness, honour and sanctity, glory and shame. Even in form and structure he achieves an astonishing blend of the medieval and modern: his work has elements that relate it to the old cyclic romances, to modern short story and novel, to The Faerie Queene, even to Proust's great work; yet it maintains its own distinctive form, both between and of different worlds.
IV. THE STYLE OF A GENTLEMAN
Malory's style is supremely well suited to his matter; it is both colloquial and ceremonious—the style of a fifteenth century gentleman. He is not scholarly, genteel, nor boorish.10 He is at one with Shakespeare's courtly Hotspur, who required his wife to swear ‘a good mouth-filling oath’ ‘like a lady’; with the ceremonious Lord Chesterfield, who thought it extremely rude to answer yes or no, without adding Sir, My Lord, Madam, according to the quality of the person addressed; and with the aristocratic Lord Byron.11
The colloquial vigour—there is no need to call it popular, if this implies what is non-aristocratic or non-gentrylike—is everywhere apparent. It appears in a blunt directness: Sir Lancelot ‘sank down upon his arse’ (p. 55) according to the Winchester MS; Caxton has ‘buttocks’, a more genteel middle-class word. Caxton's version is here not likely to be Malory's (see Note on the Text p. 37).
Not surprisingly, Malory comes out best with the spoken word of dialogue, vigorous, laconic, expressive. What richness of implication is rendered in Lancelot's sharp words to the queen. ‘Have ye no doubt, madam, I allow your wit. It is of late come since ye were waxen so wise.’ The restrained sarcasm tells a tale of personal relationships that Malory might have found it hard to put in more abstract, analytic terms—and which, had he done so, we should have found a good deal less interesting than its dramatic and concrete expression.
The colloquial energy of Malory's writing is particularly revealed by his syntax, which is plain enough, and rarely gives trouble, but which often has a fine unconcern for rules of proper relation, coordination, and subordination. He slides from clause to clause in a way that makes it difficult to impose modern bookish punctuation on his syntactic structures. Very often the interposed dash of a fluent letter-writer, did it not look typographically rather odd, would be the best punctuation to separate clause from clause. This sliding syntax is everywhere apparent, but most noticeably where Malory is writing on his own, unguided by the more formal French, as in the passage on May season (p. 100). Occasionally it degenerates into mere muddle (e.g. p. 150), where one feels that Malory must have been sleepy indeed; but more typically it occurs in the transitions between narrative, reported speech, and direct speech. Such a slide from one mode to another is not uncommon in Middle English generally, because Middle English writing is closer to colloquial speech than is most modern print, but in Malory it is especially frequent. It shows his confidence, his freedom from either social or scholarly anxieties; it is one of the ways in which his remarkable unity with diversity of tone is maintained.
The colloquial power of Malory's style cannot be properly estimated without recognizing what is a strange conjunction to the twentieth-century reader; the conjunction of the colloquial with the ceremonious. We tend to think that colloquial style is in every sense ruder and lower than other styles, and in its nature opposed to any form of high style. That is not the case with Chaucer12, who was also a writer for the gentry and who could use a coarse word with courtliness; and it is not the case with Malory. Within the range of the spoken word and an unbookish diction his style easily comprehends a casual simplicity at one end of the scale and a deep-toned stateliness at the other. An obvious example of his style at its highest is Sir Ector's threnody for the dead Lancelot (p. 157). It rests on the simple use of a well-known rhetorical device, anaphora or repetitio, the repetition of an introductory phrase. This device had previously been very effectively used by Chaucer at the end of Troilus, at a similar point in the story, also summing up certain qualities of his hero, in the lines beginning ‘Swich fyn …’ (Troilus V 1828-32), with which Malory's passage may be usefully compared. Malory has less ambivalence, is more directly moving, and has his own complexity. He takes over the traditional paradoxical attributes of the Christian knight, his fierceness and gentleness, and by placing them in the mouth of a brother and faithful comrade gives them more expressive dramatic force of personal speech than could be obtained by direct author's comment. The use of the second person singular is also significantly moving, as will be later shown. Yet he does not aim at a realistic naturalism. The speech is not sobbed or gasped out, though we are told of the extremity of Sir Ector's grief. The speech has a liturgical solemnity, arising from a complex parallelism of phrase and idea that has its roots in the old alliterative poetry (see the notes), and possibly in biblical parallelism too. The speech is naturally at one extreme of Malory's stylistic range, just as bluntness of description, or Lancelot's sarcasm, is at the other. Between these extremes Malory modulates with extraordinary skill, keeping all the time an evenness of tone that is instantly recognizable. There is no disputing the sense of a living speech. ‘“Fall whatsomever fall may”, said sir Agravain,’ or, as we now say, ‘Come what may’. The words are entirely natural in their unforced expression of absolute determination. Living and natural as the colloquial tone is, it is not the clumsy inexpressive jargon of the downtrodden populace, deprived of so much of intellectual as of other riches. Malory may not have been an educated man in the way a clerk was educated, but he could and did read, like his own characters. His style was partly formed by the stateliness of the French prose with which he lived for what must have been many years. And he reflects the high manners of a society in which to speak well was itself one of the main expressions of good manners. There is a casual dignity of expression everywhere. Even in the amusing passage where Lancelot's own dignity is punctured by an arrow in the buttocks, Lancelot speaks with a crisp irritation that shows a delightfully gentlemanlike self-control in speaking to however errant a lady. Everywhere in the book the characters speak to each other in terms of ceremonious address—Sir, Madam, My Lord, My most redoubted king, Mine own lady, Fair maiden, Fair sister, and so forth.
The most striking example of Malory's language in its careful modulation of tones, revealing both its colloquial liveliness and ceremonious dignity, is to be found in his use of the second person of the personal pronoun. The normal pronoun of address is the second person plural, the polite, public form. It is almost always the form used between Lancelot and Guenevere. In their desperate plight when Agravain has trapped Lancelot in Guenevere's chamber, Lancelot still uses this polite, respectful form. Then, ‘“Nay, sir Lancelot, nay!” said the queen, “Wit thou well that I will not live long after thy days.”’ How moving is that brief change to the warmth and intimacy of the second person singular. Malory achieves a delicate effect here with minimal means. Guenevere immediately reverts to the plural and only once again does she use the second person singular to Lancelot, even more movingly, when she banishes him for ever: ‘And therefore, sir Lancelot, I require thee and beseech thee heartily, for all the love that ever was betwixt us, that thou never see me no more in the visage. …’ And so the sad, tender, cruel words go on. Lancelot himself never uses the second person singular to her. There is much implicit here of their whole relationship and respective characters.13
Other uses of the second person singular as expressive of deep feeling, easily overlooked by a modern reader, but striking in themselves, are the rare occasions when Arthur uses it. The polite public plural form is almost always used by Arthur, even though he is always in the position of a superior addressing an inferior. Nothing points more clearly to his grace and courtesy as a king than this. But even Arthur breaks forth in sorrow and tenderness at Gawain's death-bed, ‘Alas, sir Gawain, my sister son, here now thou liest, the man in the world that I loved most;’ and again, later, after the great defeat, ‘“Ah, sir Lancelot”, said king Arthur, “this day have I sore missed thee!”’ Almost as moving is his use of the second person singular to sir Bedivere, when Arthur is desperately near death, and must have Excalibur properly consigned to the lake, though the tenderness here becomes mixed with an imperious indignation which again is quite appropriately conveyed by the use of the singular form. His final words to Bedivere, harsh as they must be with the harshness of all inevitable partings, are nevertheless softened, made warm and human, by the use of the singular in the final request: ‘in me is no trust for to trust in. … And if thou hear nevermore of me, pray for my soul.’
The note of intimate appeal is also marked by the fleeting use of the singular by sir Urry just before he is cured by sir Lancelot; and by Lancelot himself in his prayer, on the same occasion, where the intimacy of the address to God is not harmed by the accompanying formality—a mixture which, fossilized in the liturgy, is the only survival of the potency of the second person singular in English today. Lancelot also uses the singular form in brief prayer when trapped by Agravain.
The fullness of feeling which the singular form can convey in appropriate context reaches its effective climax in sir Ector's noble threnody for his brother and comrade, the hero of the whole book, with its repetition, both stately and intimate in a combination modern English can no longer match, of the second person singular itself; ‘thou, sir Lancelot, there thou liest, thou were … thou were,’ and the reiteration of ‘thou were’ eight times more. This is stylistically as bold as Lear's five times repeated ‘never’, though it has the additional weight of the peculiar mixture of feeling conveyed by the form itself.
There are other uses. Occasionally the singular form simply denotes the social superiority of the speaker to the person addressed, though there may also be a touch of other feeling present, such as anxiety or a sense of haste. Examples are Queen Guenevere's speech to the child who serves her, and whom she sends to Lancelot for rescue when Meliagaunt captures her; and Lancelot's own speech to the carter whom he asks for a lift to Meliagaunt's castle. This note of superiority is different from that of intimacy; the duality is of course perfectly familiar in second person singular usages in other European languages, though democratic levelling has removed it from English. The sometimes implied superiority, as well as the expressiveness, is essential for that other—again well-recognised use—of the singular form, as insult. To take Lancelot's adventures on the way to the castle of Meliagaunt again as an example, when he meets the archers he of course uses the plural form since there are more than one of them. But they add to the injury they do his horse the insult of using the singular form to him. It is insulting because they are socially inferior and also strangers. The first carter is similarly rude in using the singular form, being also one of Meliagaunt's men. But when Lancelot has struck him dead, the second carter is very careful to use the second person plural! When Lancelot arrives at Meliagaunt's castle he storms in with angry insult, calling on Meliagaunt, ‘Thou false traitor’.
The modulations from the polite and dignified plural to the insulting singular can be followed in the relationships between Lancelot and Gawain, after Lancelot has so unhappily killed Gawain's brother Gareth. Gawain constantly uses the insulting singular. Lancelot, with noble forbearance, with a grievous sense of his own fault, and of Gawain's partial justification, normally uses the plural form, but now and again is so sorely tried that he replies in the singular. When Gawain, after his wound, loses his hatred of Lancelot, he begins to use the plural form.
There is another interesting set of contrasts in the scene where Agravain and Mordred trap Lancelot with the Queen. In insulting excited triumph Agravain constantly uses the singular form. Lancelot, calm, courtly, determined, grim, is never shaken out of his self-control: he always uses the plural.
Whether Malory was self-conscious in his use of the various grammatical forms it is impossible—and unimportant—to know. The subtlety of their use is there, part of the structure of the book, and no reader will wish to remain insensitive to it. It is indicative of many other subtleties still insufficiently realised which this essay can only touch on. Some of them may be summed up in pointing to the dramatic terseness that also characterises Malory's style, indicative of a certain practical, man-of-the-world's tone, of a desire to get on with the story, and an English gentleman's feeling that he does not need to underline the effects and significance of his words. The social and personal insight conveyed by the varying use of a simple grammatical form can be matched in a hundred brief speeches where our alertness is rewarded by a richness and a sophistication that would not shame Chaucer, though it has been unaccountably overlooked by critics. A single brief example must serve here. When sir Gawain seeks the knight of the red sleeve who had done so well at the tournament (and who is Lancelot incognito) he eventually comes to the house of sir Bernard, the father of the fair maiden of Astolat, where Lancelot had stayed. Sir Bernard had lent Lancelot the shield of his sick son, sir Tirry, and sir Bernard's daughter, as she calmly and openly says, had fallen irrevocably in love with Lancelot. Gawain politely questions sir Bernard and his daughter about the identity of the unknown hero, who had left his own shield with them.
‘Ah, fair damsel,’ said sir Gawain, ‘please it you to let me have a sight of that shield?’ ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘it is in my chamber, covered with a case, and if ye will come with me ye shall see it.’ ‘Not so,’ said sir Bernard to his daughter, ‘but send ye for that shield.’
The innocence and goodness of the girl could hardly be made more delightfully plain. They are the basis of her honesty in love, and of the pathos of her fate. At the same time the entirely proper, sharp, worldly caution of her father removes any touch of sentimentality. The realism of the little scene extends from the ‘shield in the case’ to the intangibilities of character. The presumed French source is a long way away: it includes an otiose scene in which the promiscuous Gawain attempts to make love to the maiden, who repulses him. Gawain is a better man than this in Malory's last two main sections. The stanzaic English poem which also partly serves as source is equally remote from Malory; while not making Gawain so amorous the poem interestingly allows the maiden ‘hend and fre’ to take Gawain to her chamber to show him Lancelot's armour, left with her. Malory's worldly wit and wisdom, his sense of character and feeling, are in this, as in so many other places, enormously superior to, and really quite different from, his sources, whatever hints he may have received from them.
The terse dramatic realism of Malory's style, with its economic presentation of the essence of character and action mainly through speech, though apparent everywhere, can be seen with extraordinary vividness in the scene where Lancelot and Guenevere are trapped by Agravain and his followers. One can measure Malory's quality by presenting him in comparison with and contrast to his sources: here one can also do it by considering an effective modern treatment of the same episode in T. H. White's The Once and Future King (1958). White's account is about three times the length of Malory's, though the most crucial part of the fighting is evaded. It is much more realistic in giving everyday details. Lancelot spends a page brushing Guenevere's graying hair! The dialogue is full of the meaningless colloquialisms of normal modern speech: ‘well’, ‘it was nice’, ‘do you know’, ‘really’, etc. Much more attention is paid to, or at least more words are spent on, psychological motivation, and on the explanation of underlying psychological forces in a generalizing language attributed (rather unconvincingly) to the characters themselves. It is a touching and enjoyable scene completely and very competently in the manner of the conventional modern novel.
By contrast, Malory has no love-chat, no cosy domesticity. He deliberately refrains from prying into what the lovers were about—the physical details are not his interest; he knows what physical life is like, and assumes a similarly cool attitude in his readers. His dialogue reflects the essential attitudes and actions of the characters, and gives necessary information. It is not skimped, but not a word is wasted in the interests of a superficial verisimilitude. He notes physical actions as they reflect the essential situation; for example, ‘Then he took the Queen in his arms and kissed her.’ The fighting is not only stirring, it is technically quite convincing, granted Lancelot's strength, partly because Malory does not, like White, deprive Lancelot of even a sword to start with. In a word, where realistic details is really needed, Malory can select and present more artistically and more convincingly. (In general, Malory's realistic touches show his sense of practical necessity, as in the occasional references to money and treasure, which Professor Vinaver comments on rather scornfully (Works p. xxii).)
The picture that this selective drawing presents is remarkably full. Guenevere shows herself passionate, loving, selfish, cool, and entirely convincing—here, as elsewhere, the most fascinating, exasperating, and human of all medieval heroines. Lancelot similarly reveals himself in all his magnificence, unshakable and splendid in love or battle, noble yet disingenuous, proud and adulterous, yet never failing in courtesy, and with a simple piety. Economy and pace are never sacrificed to realism and ceremonious manners.
The comparison with T. H. White is not intended to denigrate his remarkable though lesser achievement, but to emphasise Malory's strength. The realism of conventional novelistic technique forces White into various kinds of triviality. Malory, though realistic, escapes trivial realism and constantly uses what White himself calls, but can only occasionally use, the High Language. There is an exalted tone in Malory's style, which reflects, no doubt, the true quality of his imagination as it rises to meet the greatness of his story. It would be a mistake to equate Malory's High Language only with the ceremoniousness I have already noted (though ceremony is an essential part of the High Language) if the emphasis on ceremony were to deny the poetic force also deriving from what is colloquial and direct and simple. Malory's supreme art lies in this, that his High Language, the poetic force of his style, is made up of his whole range of tone, and is as much simple as ceremonious. Similarly, his art moulds into a whole the other paradoxical compounds of violence and tenderness, worldliness and piety, realism and romance. All is held together in a style that springs from a culture and a literary imagination that in its rhythms could maintain these opposites in balance, in fruitful conjunction; a culture in which, despite Malory's own fears, the centre could hold. Rhythm is the most potent, least analysable, quality of literary style. We feel it on our pulses. We sense the living passionate voice in Malory's powerful, masculine movement; we respond to a deep (if narrow) sensibility and to an unshaken nerve: we are moved by the noble style of Malory's mind, that with unselfconscious dignity looks around his beleaguered world to save what he can. This is the style of Malory; the style of a gentleman.
V. STRUCTURE
The steady progressive movement of the style in detail is reflected in the general sequential line of the book as a whole, though sequence is less marked in the middle of The Morte Darthur, not given here, than in the final movement. From the end of the Grail story the narrative moves firmly onwards in a clear line, with certain constant preoccupations. We feel the compulsions of progressive cause and effect, while gradually the possibilities of choice before Lancelot and Guenevere narrow, as previous decisions begin to realize their inevitable effects.
The clear narrative development does not sacrifice richness to clarity. Although there is no interlacing, the narrative weaves its own pattern. The development of significant pattern may be most easily demonstrated in the series of stories leading to the first great crisis, when Guenevere and Lancelot abscond. In each story the recurrent main motif in the pattern is their love: next is their almost equally constant discordance, due to Guenevere's jealousy. Another motif is Lancelot's tendency (who can blame him?) to disappear. In all three stories misfortune comes to Guenevere, who is rescued at the last minute by Lancelot. (The first of these stories, ‘The Poisoned Apple’, is omitted from the present edition because of lack of space.) The stories, though significantly similar in outline, are not repetitious. They describe a relationship and its development, showing both nobility and the progression of guilt. In the first story, ‘The Poisoned Apple’, both Guenevere and Lancelot are entirely innocent, but they are shown to live in a dangerous environment. Then Lancelot's lovable greatness and goodness in so many ways is emphasised in the beautiful and touching story that follows, ‘The Fair Maid of Astolat’, which also shows us more of Guenevere, and which is completed by Lancelot's success in the ‘Great Tournament’. There follows in due sequence Guenevere's second dangerous adventure, this time her capture by Meliagaunt in the story entitled ‘Knight of the Cart’. During this adventure she and Lancelot become morally in the wrong, though Lancelot when he fights Meliagaunt is technically in the right. (The advantages he gives Meliagaunt are further subtleties in favour of Lancelot.) Then again follows a brief episode to the greater glory of Lancelot—‘The Healing of Sir Urry,’ in which Malory, with his long lists (partly omitted in the present text), gathers up, as it were, all the glory of the Round Table, and sets Lancelot—whom we have recently seen to be now compromising his own integrity—at the peak of his glory. Lancelot weeps after his miraculous cure of Sir Urry; surely at the thought of what he might have been. It is a wonderful climactic stroke of characterization. Then we move into the eighth part of the whole book with no sense of discontinuity as we come to the third episode of Guenevere's danger, after she and Lancelot have been caught together in her room, where it is now clear that the chivalric convention that right is might has been reversed by Lancelot. Guenevere and Lancelot are known to be guilty, but Lancelot is prepared to brazen it out by fighting any one who speaks of their guilt. Right is no longer might. Might bewilderedly asserts that it is right. The appearance of honesty fails to correspond with reality. Ultimately reality will break through, to the destruction of all. Meanwhile Lancelot for the third and final time comes at the last minute to rescue the Queen, and in the mêlée kills the unarmed Gareth. The death of Gareth initiates another chain of ironic cause and effect, for it is specifically Gareth's death which arouses his brother Gawain's unrelenting hostility to Lancelot, which in its turn drives Arthur on against Lancelot in the next series of episodes.
The killing of Gareth is thus a bridge. Malory has carefully prepared it. In the episode of the ‘Great Tournament’, which rounds off the story of ‘The Fair Maid of Astolat’, Malory had strongly emphasized the goodness of Gareth and his devotion to Lancelot, as well as Lancelot's love for him. The nature of Malory's artistic concern to make connexions and build up cumulative patterns is plainly seen here.
What is even more clear is how Malory can use one event to achieve multiple effects. Implicit in our knowledge of Gareth is the whole of his past history, related in the fourth main section of the whole book with notable prominence. From that section the charm and endeavour of the unknown knight, his successful adventures, his love for and marriage to the lady whom he rescued, and especially Lancelot's knighting of him, are remembered, if only vaguely. That Lancelot should inadvertently kill Gareth is thus in itself one of Malory's most effective and painful ironies. It is also fraught with heavy consequences, symbolic of the internal destructiveness which causes the final collapse of Arthur's court. It is part of a long sequence of events which are related to each other and which build up patterns of event, theme, and underlying concept. The distinguishing mark of Malory's narrative in this respect is its sequaciousness, its connectedness. One sentence leads to the next, one event to the next. There is in almost every case even an explicit verbal connexion between the eight major sections of the whole book.14 This connected narrative sequence weaves patterns whose effects come from events which are held in memory by the reader, and which thus interact as it were out of time. The patterns of event, character, theme, with the implicit concepts of loyalty, love, bravery and the rest, act over the whole book. Mordred, who is active in the last two main sections, is begotten by Arthur in the first main section. The three principal characters of the whole book, Arthur, Guenevere, Lancelot, are all introduced in the first main section and are active throughout. The ethical ideal, the High Order of Knighthood, is instituted in the first section and is an implicit basis for all that later occurs. It has been said above that it is Malory's purpose to chronicle this ideal, as embodied in Arthur and his knights and as grounded in English history, in its rise, its glory and its fall, on Fortune's wheel, through the procession of time. A note at the end of this introduction sets out the structure of that chronicle schematically, as it is shown in the eight main parts. In that scheme, and in the various continuities of event, character, tone and underlying preoccupations, we may legitimately seek and find the ‘unity’ of structure in Malory's whole book.
At the same time we should not force our sense of unity. When a reader first comes to Malory's work, besides recognizing it as one mass, he also sees something that may be likened to the forest of pinnacles, spires and towers that rise within the walls of a medieval city. They are all in the one city—but what a bewildering variety! A few tower above the rest, are easily recognized, and are most important. Some are in obvious relationship to each other—a west-end tower to a central spire, a row of pinnacles leading along a great nave to another steeple. But there are many others. We reach them from the central square, but there is a bewildering complexity and many a tall building of ancient date seems only where it is because it is. There are stories in Malory's whole book which give one the same impression. They are there because they are there. They contribute to the variety, the richness, the interest, the pleasure; they are part of the general style and content of the book, as an old building is part of a town, but no one could claim they are part of an organic unity. How such an accumulation could come about has been explained above. Here the nineteenth-century concepts of ‘organic unity’ can only mislead. The whole book is the work of one man, but he has worked on the diverse material of many other men in various ages. Different points of view have been included with different stories. Some of the unity of the book is no more than the product of its history, a matter of mere incorporation of an interesting adventure. In this respect the narrative is like a circumambulation of the walls of a city, enclosing a variety of dwellings, as the walls of Chester or York enclose buildings of every date from Rome to the present day, yet still make one medieval city.
It must be insisted that medieval writers—and I include Shakespeare as well as Anglo-Saxon writers—tolerated a degree of inconsistency, of multiplicity of points of view, within one piece of writing, that the artistic totalitarianism of the twentieth-century finds hard to bear.15 This does not mean that there is no general cohesion in the subject-matter, overriding, or at least not totally denied by, the separate constituents, especially in the last two main sections of The Morte Darthur. In such literature it will be found that one principal event, usually near the end of the work, effectively dominates the heterogeneous material. In the Bible it is the Crucifixion and Resurrection. In Troilus it is Criseyde's betrayal of the hero. With Malory it is the death of Arthur, with all that that implies of the tragedy of the honourable society he had created.
VI. THE TRAGEDY OF THE HONOURABLE SOCIETY
The main events of Malory's story he cannot alter. They are his ‘matter’. But the interpretation of matter, the finer points of character, the general ethos, which in medieval French literary terminology were summed up as sens, the ‘sense’, are mainly his, as Professor Vinaver has shown.16 Malory has his own view of the characters and often modifies the material supplied by his sources. A clear example of his independence in the present selection is the character of Gawain.17 In the earliest chronicle versions, and in later works based on them, Gawain is Arthur's chief knight. He was displaced by Lancelot in the twelfth-century French versions, and being described in these versions as of an amorous, promiscuous nature, was presented in an unfavourable light by the Grail authors, with their ideal of the monk's life of chastity. Malory accepts Lancelot's predominance, but presents a Gawain of some complexity in the last two main sections. He is bold but not amorous; somewhat ambivalent in his attitude to Lancelot, yet not against him until the unfortunate killing of Gareth. He is then shown as angry and vengeful, inspired not only by love of Gareth but by the spirit of ancient family feud. At his death he repents. He is a simple, stubborn man, an outstanding fighter, formidable in his depth of feeling, passionately proud and fierce in his personal and family honour. There is nothing in him of the light-of-love, and Malory, as already noted, omits, for example, the French Gawain's genial attempt to seduce the Fair Maid of Astolat. Malory inevitably relies on his sources for most of his material, but never hesitates to take what he wants, to add, and to reject. He then presents the character economically and dramatically almost entirely through event and speech.
The other characters, even minor ones, have a similar solidity. How clearly, for example, is Meliagaunt's slippery nature presented; and yet we feel his genuine love for the Queen. How clearly the admirable ‘steadfast Bors’18 comes through; brave, loyal, sensible, stolid.
How subtle is the presentation of Arthur, the wise king, with his touch of irritable weariness, with his constant concern to hold together his great creation, his good society. If there are uncertainties in our knowledge of his character it is because Malory has deliberately left them so. Similarly with Guenevere, so variable, always uneasy and jealous in her love for Lancelot, querulous and queenly. We catch a glimpse into her heart at times; at others, as with people we know in actuality, what she feels is a mystery; her speech is what she is. Exasperating in her imperious vagaries, she is perhaps victim as much as queen in a man's world.
When considering the variety and success of Malory's characterization one must also recognize that characterization as such is not his aim. The event has come first; the character's plausible speech comes next, as part of the interpretation, the sens. The interpretation itself is necessarily part of some general views or concepts implicit in the book. Malory himself rarely generalizes, and when he does it is but a brief passing comment, not itself to be taken at a very high level of generality. It would be mistaken, nevertheless, to think that his work did not have general implications.
Malory's presentation of love is clearly of great importance and has been well analysed recently by scholar-critics.19 The love between Lancelot and Guenevere is represented as in itself good. When Lancelot and Guenevere are together, ‘love that time was not as love nowadays’; that is, love was genuine, not merely lust. Malory says that he does not intend to discuss ‘whether they were abed or at other manner of disports’. His French source says bluntly that they were in bed together. Malory is not avoiding such a plain statement because he is squeamish. Perhaps he is in part simply trying to palliate Lancelot's offence, and his later lies, but he is also making a point about their love's moral quality. Again, the whole episode of ‘Elaine the Fair Maid of Astolat’, shows his sympathy with love and his open treatment of it. Elaine's innocence and goodness are in no way impaired because she openly confesses her love. Her dying speech is Malory's own invention and he surely agrees with her refusal to obey the priest's command to forget sir Lancelot for whom she is dying, when she says, ‘for my belief is that I do none offence, though I love an earthly man, unto God, for he formed me thereto, and all manner of good love cometh of God’ (p. 68). That she would have had Lancelot even as a paramour, rather than not have him at all, does not bother Malory, or us. Malory's moral concern is deep but he is not a narrow moralist or moralizer. The same episode, along with others, shows that he has little interest in the elaborations of fine amour. It is honest faithful open love, in ‘every lusty heart’, with gentleness and service, that he approves of, as he says when talking about the month of May, which gives all lovers courage (p. 78). Again, love must be free; as Lancelot says, one cannot be constrained to love by egotistical demand. Yet love must be ‘stable’. Gentleness, service, unselfishness, kindness, faithfulness (stability), all these are the distinguishing marks of true love, which is natural, formed in men and women by God, and so virtuous. Thus it is clear that Lancelot's love for Guenevere is in itself virtuous.
Lancelot's love is also criminal. Through the love that he and Guenevere loved together was the best fellowship of knights in the world destroyed. How can this be? For here is tragedy. To consider an answer we have to seek still deeper down among the general concepts that underlie The Morte Darthur, into concepts of honour and community, radical to the book, and indeed—like love—to our own lives.
Honour,20 which Malory calls by its Old English name, ‘worship,’ still the usual word in his time, may be said to be the strongest single motivating force in the society which Malory creates. It is stronger even than love, even than Lancelot's love for the Queen: at least, when Bors and his friends advise Lancelot to rescue the Queen in her third and most dangerous predicament, it is to Lancelot's honour, and not his love, that they refer: ‘it is more your worship that ye rescue the queen from this peril, insomuch that she hath it for your sake’ (p. 108). Nor does Lancelot dispute this motive, though there is no doubt of his love.
How is honour obtained in this fierce, masculine, aristocratic society? Primarily, as numberless instances and remarks will show, by fighting bravely in battle or tournament; specifically, by defeating the enemy, or by helping friends who are in difficulty, and by fighting fairly. Secondarily, by associating with those who already have honour, especially, of course, with Arthur and Lancelot. Again, many incidents and more or less casual remarks anywhere in Malory make this plain. Presumably ladies' honour is also acquired by their association with honourable men. It clearly, as in Guenevere's case, need not derive from their chastity or marital faithfulness. It is however implicit that a lady cannot associate with more than one or two men. But there are so few women in this society, and they (even Guenevere) are so much at the disposal of some man, that it is hard to generalize about them.
Honour demands certain personal loyalties. The first is to the king. The second is to one's ‘friends’. It is clear from the associates of Gawain and of Lancelot, for example, that ‘friends’ include a kinship group, and another different but overlapping group of those in a feudal relationship (perhaps holding their lands in fee from the same lord). Also included among persons to whom one must be loyal are those whom one has been helped by; but this is not always an overriding obligation. Gawain has several times been helped by Lancelot, yet becomes his enemy. That Gawain is nevertheless under such obligation makes for deeper sadness and bitterness. Also included among friends are those whom one has knighted or been knighted by. The particular example in the present text is Gareth. That Lancelot should even accidentally kill him whom he knighted is bitterly ironical; combined with the fact that Gareth is Gawain's beloved brother, it further interweaves the tragic pattern.21 Finally, among friends bound by the obligations of honour are included those who simply like each other. The outstanding practical example is Sir Lavain's love for Lancelot, but the friendship between Lancelot and Gareth is another important instance, while naturally brothers and feudal comrades may well also love each other. Loyalty to the king and to friends should naturally reinforce each other. It is part of the tragedy that these loyalties became contradictory.
The third obligation of loyalty required by honour is toward the lady one loves. In a good man such love is virtuous. Lancelot thus has a clear obligation in honour towards Guenevere. In a true society the knight's loyalty to his lady should coincide with loyalty towards king and friends, and again, a prime element in the tragedy is the mutual incompatibility, for Lancelot, of his loyalty to his king with that to his lady.
In honourable societies the deep question is the relationship between honour and goodness. Professor Pitt-Rivers, in his important study, asserts that honour and goodness are quite separate,22 though society attempts to ‘blur’ the distinction. In dealing with the problem Malory in The Morte Darthur is not entirely clear: he has a rich inconsistency. But however one understands his treatment there can be no doubt that one of the most powerful underlying themes of the whole book, which is highly important in the culminating sections of it presented here, is the relation between honour and goodness.
In the earlier parts of The Morte Darthur the identity of honour and goodness is assumed and the consequent behaviour incumbent on a knight is summed up in that ethical ideal, dear to Malory's heart, which he calls the High Order of Knighthood. It is expressed by the oath, mainly Malory's invention, which he tells us in the first main section that Arthur, having consolidated his kingdom and conquests, and having instituted his court of the Round Table, makes his knights swear every Pentecost:
Then the king stablished all the knights and gave them that were of lands not rich, he gave them lands, and charged them never to do outrage nother murder, and always to flee treason, also by no mean to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asketh mercy, upon pain of forfeiture of their worship and lordship of king Arthur for evermore: and always to do ladies, damsels, and gentlewomen and widows succour; strength them in their rights, and never to enforce them upon pain of death. Also that no man take no battles in a wrongful quarrel for no love ne for no worlds goods. So unto this were all knights sworn of the Table Round, both old and young. And every year so were they sworn at the High Feast of Pentecost.
cf. Caxton Book V, 15; Works, pp. 119-20. (Text constructed from Caxton and Winchester MS.)
This ideal of behaviour is an implicit standard throughout the whole book. When contemplating the actions described in the present selection the reader should have it constantly in mind, for Lancelot, for example, clearly engages in a wrongful quarrel for love. After making due allowance for the chivalric and literary conventions in which and through which the ideal is expressed it is clearly seen to be a noble and satisfying ideal of human behaviour; even within its conventions it is an excellent symbol for some of the most important concerns of all human life.
In the oath the association of honour with goodness is very close, for to do wrong is to forfeit honour (‘worship’). There is another sanction, too: loss of the lordship of King Arthur; that is, in more modern terms, those who do wrong will be punished by ejection from society. The close association of honour with goodness is not the same as complete identification of the two. What honour and goodness here have in common is a reference to the same society, summed up as the ‘lordship of King Arthur’.
The notion of fellowship, which, if it does not in Malory's work itself extend to a full concept of society, may at least be thought to symbolize society, deserves a little more emphasis. Its supreme exponent is of course King Arthur, whose constant care it is to foster his noble company of knights, and who in this surely has Malory's deepest sympathy. When Lancelot rescues the Queen from burning in the third of her misfortunes, and absconds with her, it is for the fellowship of knights of the Round Table, which is destroyed, that Arthur laments, and not for Guenevere. ‘And therefore’, said the king, ‘wit you well, my heart was never so heavy as it is now. And much more I am sorrier for my good knights' loss than for the loss of my fair queen; for queens I might have enough, but such a fellowship of good knights shall never be togethers in no company’ (p. 114). To take another example, the noble threnody for Lancelot's death spoken by Sir Ector (p. 157) expresses Lancelot's greatness, as much as anything in terms of social relationships. The comradeship that Malory feels so sympathetic towards is the pattern of a society that is, within its own conventions, confident, admirable, delightful, dynamic. It is composed of like-minded men, for the most part, and in it the individual can find both his friends and his own identity. Such a fellowship might well stand as a model for the supreme temporal, perhaps even the supreme eternal good, imaging a condition to which all social institutions and the men that make them might justly aspire. Malory expresses something of its successful achievement in his third, fourth and fifth main sections and its destruction is the theme of the seventh and eighth sections as given here.
The tragedy has multiple causes; among them, Arthur's own fault in begetting Mordred, Mordred's and Agravain's malice, Lancelot's pride, his adultery with Guenevere, and so forth. Arthur himself may be thought to be at fault in that he is concerned so entirely with community, that is, with public virtues and necessities, that he neglects private virtues and necessities: that is, he fails to cherish his wife as an individual. Lancelot, on the other hand, is so concerned with his private obligations, in particular his obligation, which is clear, however immoral, towards Guenevere, that he denies public values.
Arthur's fault, if such it be, may be seen as a particular instance of a more general development which brings about the tragedy—the divergence of the values of honour and goodness from each other. The divergence is especially marked with Lancelot, for whom honour is the supreme value, as community is for Arthur. The clearest statement of the divergence of honour from goodness is made by Sir Bors when the queen is in peril of death because of the accusation of her adultery with Lancelot. Bors tells Lancelot he must
‘knightly rescue her; for and ye did any other wise all the world would speak of you shame to the world's end. Insomuch as ye were taken with her, whether ye did right other wrong, it is now your part to hold with the queen.’
(p. 108)
Distinction between right and wrong must go when honour's at the stake. Thus an honourable man must sometimes tell lies.23 Lancelot is justified by honour in his various quibbles, prevarications and downright lies to preserve the Queen's good name (‘name’, or reputation, being a typical aspect of honour). Early in The Morte Darthur a maiden asks Lancelot for his love. He, the lover of Queen Guenevere, disclaims all interest in love. Critics have been puzzled. Is not this an inconsistency? No, it is a lie. Similarly, like an honourable gentleman, he lies to Arthur himself (p. 117).
Honour may permit, if it does not encourage, adultery or indeed promiscuous sexual intercourse. Lancelot is an adulterer, and Gawain, even in Malory, not chaste; but each is honourable. On the other hand, Lancelot considers he would be dishonourable if he were unfaithful to Guenevere, and he resists the attempt of Meliagaunt's damsel to seduce him. He can kiss and lose no worship, but nothing more (p. 91). Ladies also, if of high rank, may be honourable and unchaste: witness Guenevere and Iseult. Men of honour recognize this. Arthur, for example, is as prepared as King Mark to take back his wife after she has been living for some time with another man. But they must have an appearance of chastity; they must not be spoken of as unchaste.
A nice example of the difference between honour and virtue is the universal fact that a cuckold, but not an adulterer or seducer, is dishonoured. (There is an obvious biological force on the side of honour here, but that is true of other parts of honour, like physical prowess. For biology, might is right.) Arthur therefore is dishonoured as Lancelot is not by Lancelot's seduction of Guenevere (or by Guenevere's seduction of Lancelot). Gawain reminds Arthur of this. But to bring dishonour on the man to whom one owes loyalty is, if not dishonourable, at least ungrateful. That Lancelot clearly feels this makes his portrayal paradoxically more sympathetic.
If honour does not necessarily depend on virtue, it certainly depends on reputation, on what people say. Thus, although Guenevere's honour and shame (they are two sides of the same coin) do not depend on her chastity, they do depend on not being talked about. The importance of speech is clear in Bors' words quoted above. Honour's connexion with speech has given trouble to critics more virtuous or more simple-minded than Malory. For example, Malory keeps us in the dark about just how much Arthur knows of Guenevere's and Lancelot's adultery. The attempts by those excellent scholars Lumiansky and Moorman to work out in terms of novelistic realism how Arthur must have known all about it before the Grail Quest, how there must have been a reconciliation scene, and forgiveness, and a promise by Lancelot not to do it again, etc., are ingenious. They Bradleyize Malory, and The Morte Darthur is strong enough to stand the process. But the book is not a nineteenth-century novel, and such realism is beside the point, as Bradley's speculations about what goes on behind the scenes in Shakespeare's plays are often beside the point. So long as the lovers are reasonably discreet, and nobody speaks of them to Arthur's face, he can remain apparently ignorant and need do nothing. Arthur is not a fool. He has a ‘deeming’ but he does not want to know. He was ‘full loath that such a noise should be’ (p. 102). Malory observes a similar honourable discretion. Honour and shame progressively throughout these final pages live more and more in men's mouths, less and less in relation to the actual state of affairs. Mordred forces Arthur's hand by witnessing Lancelot with Guenevere in her chamber and by telling Arthur so to his face. Malory shows us an Arthur very unwilling to have his hand forced. He knows Mordred is no friend to him. But once the ‘noise’, that is, the speech, is out, he is obliged by his own honour to act. Arthur has to say ‘I may not with my worship but my queen must suffer death’ (p. 110). It is one of Malory's subtleties and ironies that he here makes Gawain offer the king a way out by a lenient, though possible, interpretation of Lancelot's presence in Guenevere's chamber. But Arthur will not accept the way out, being for once, apparently, moved by a purely personal emotion, his ‘ire’ (p. 110). He asserts that Guenevere shall ‘have the law’ and be burnt. (Legality offers yet another structure within society, not necessarily coinciding with the structure of honour and virtue. Malory is not much interested in law, however—not surprisingly if our author is the Malory of Newton Rebold!—and we need not pursue it further here. Later on the king is ready to take Guenevere back and forget about the law.)
Arthur is the man of greatest honour in the kingdom24 (p. 94), and here his honour puts him in a cruel position. But apart from personal anger he also invokes the law and by implication virtue as coincidental with his honour. We see once again here that Arthur's function is to draw together the various systems into one fellowship, with which he equates his honour. We may say that for Arthur, and perhaps for Malory, true honour coincides with virtue and law, and all together constitute the supreme value of fellowship. The story shows how fallen humanity fails to reach, or at any rate, to maintain, the ideal; ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’. Fellowship breaks, honour, virtue, law, separate themselves from each other. Honour becomes selfish, virtue corrupt, and law is set aside. When the honourable are not good, and when law becomes an instrument of revenge, when loyalties clash and good men are at odds, then treachery flourishes. The bonds of society fall apart and chaos is come again. It has happened often enough since the fifteenth century for us to be compelled by Malory's fifteenth-century symbol.
By a tragic paradox, that honour which has created the good society brings about its collapse. Arthur's honour has created the High Order of Knighthood, foundation stone of a potentially ideal society. The same honour forces him, once the adultery is public, to enforce public law by condemning his queen to be burnt at the stake. Lancelot's honour leads him to perform brave deeds and loyally to keep his personal obligations whatever the cost to himself. The same honour forces him to rescue the Queen, whose love was also the inspiration of his honour. His honourable love and his love of honour lead him to be disloyal to Arthur, and also to conflict with an aspect of ‘worship’ as presented in the Pentecostal Oath of the High Order of Knighthood—that he should take on no battles in a wrongful quarrel for no love. Yet although Lancelot grieves over his disloyalty to Arthur and its result in the destruction of the whole society, he hesitates only a little to do what in honour bound he feels he must. His fault is very great, but it is Malory's achievement that we never pause in our love and admiration for Lancelot, and that Lancelot himself always appears so noble. It is part of the tragedy that one so greatly endowed with physical and spiritual gifts, in no way perverted or corrupt, the chief support of the glory of Arthur's court, should also be the chief agent of its destruction; that honour should destroy the honourable society.
The Morte Darthur tells the story of a tragedy, and if modern definitions of tragedy cannot encompass it, so much the worse for their definitiveness. The tragedy is the complex of the success and failure of the Round Table, and particularly of Arthur and Lancelot. They are not individualized tragic heroes, any more than the whole book is the unique production of one individual. Just as the book expresses in some sort the mind of the whole grand medieval episode of Europe's social and political history, so the heroes express in themselves something of English and European ideals and destinies, public and private. It is not fanciful to hear, as we watch the collapse of Arthur's empire, the long, slow, menacing echoes, rarely completely silent in European ears, of the grinding disastrous fall of the Roman Empire, and indeed, through the power of literature, of other empires since the fifteenth century, gone down in a rumble of dust and suffering. In Europe we still know the horror of disorder and collapse.
Though The Morte Darthur tells the story of such significant tragedy, it does not stop there. Medieval authors (and we may include Shakespeare and most of his contemporaries with them) did not call down the curtain at the moment of disaster. Europe knows that some life and words continue even though empires fall. But no one who lives through disaster is unchanged. Arthur can only die, since all that he has lived for has gone, and Malory, with his aristocratic rationalism, will have no truck with the folk-superstition of his return. The tragedy for Arthur lies not in the moment of his death, but in what had led to it, as is the case with Shakespearean tragic heroes. Lancelot and Guenevere turn to ‘perfection’. The outline of the story is in Malory's sources, both French and English, although much of the detail and emphasis is Malory's own. Here again we deal with something deep in the European mind, which is the result of many men's strivings, experience, and meditations.
Lancelot's and Guenevere's turning to perfection, to saintliness, is something more than the expression of profound regret for their sins. It is also a repudiation of their whole previous way of life. Here we stumble across a basic paradox—or inconsistency—of medieval Christianity, perhaps of all Christianity, possibly of all human existence. Put simply, the best is the enemy of the good. Yet we find it hard enough to be even ordinarily good. In terms of Malory's book, all the characters attempt to be ordinarily good Christians within the context of what is for them ordinary decent society. This is true even of Lancelot, who may be said to excel only within the context of ‘ordinariness’, because he has received greater gifts than anyone else. And so, when caught in Guenevere's chamber, he naturally and casually invokes the help of Jesus to get out, and we warmly sympathize with him. C. S. Lewis is surely wrong when he denies that the persons in this society are Christians because in the end they come to repent.25 If those only are Christians who have nothing to repent, then Christians are few indeed. These knights are not saints, and have much to be sorry for, but that is true of nearly everyone. Yet it is right to see a different quality of life, a different standard and different point of view invoked when Lancelot, and Guenevere, and others, turn to penitence. Their saintliness repudiates not only their past vices but their past virtues too. Saintliness, as the anthropologists have observed, cuts wholly across the honourable society. There have been hints of this earlier in the story. For example, the hermit who looks after Lancelot in the story of ‘The Fair Maid of Astolat’ was once a member of the Round Table, a knight of honour and prowess, but now being a hermit, vowed to God, he has consciously abandoned his loyalty to Arthur and the Round Table (p. 55). Again, much of Lancelot's own honour, and even his good deeds, arise from pride, as he himself confesses (for example, p. 155) and as was driven home to him in the adventure of the Grail. His worldly pride is source of both virtue and vice.
Lancelot's repudiation, in itself tragic in intensity, adds another light on the tragedy of the honourable society. His saintliness repudiates honour and shame, and substitutes for them the concepts of innocence and guilt, which are standards of goodness, not honour, and which are also, in our kind of society at least, expressions of an internalized, individual, set of values, held, if necessary, in utter unconformity with the crowd. The individualism that conceives of guilt, therefore, by that very conception may need to reject the whole notion of society, as Lancelot does by becoming a hermit, who is the expression of a pure, unsocial (but not anti-social) individualism.
Lancelot's destiny also shows, in Arthurian terms, how the Cistercian authors of the anti-chivalric story of the Grail finally achieved their end. The monkish otherworldly ideal overcomes, through sheer persistence, the moral and chivalric this-worldly ideal. Here we may well be reminded of the similar transcendent destiny of another great medieval hero, Chaucer's Troilus, who, after death, surveys and despises secular sufferings, and by implication his past way of life.
In this respect The Morte Darthur is, like the Troilus, as Professor Shepherd has well said,26 a ‘romance in a tragic mode’. The shift of the plane of narration at the end, the invocation of transcendent values, expresses that mysterious sense of destiny, of the total relativity of earthly life and of all our most passionately followed desires and even values, that is one of the great powers of medieval tragedy. Not merely have we agonized over the destruction of the honourable society: by a last twist of tragic irony we are told that we need not, so it now seems, have agonized at all. When we are young this is too bitter a tragic pill to swallow. The ‘tears in things’ are sweeter than this. But perhaps there are few who are middle-aged or more who cannot recognize some of their experience here; as if to say, in trivial mundane terms, ‘I was miserable over nothing’. Still this is not all. The shift to transcendence can also suggest a sense of mysterious fate, the ineluctable process to an inescapable end, the abiding question of the ultimate values that surround life as well as penetrate it. None, or few, can nowadays accept the specific, historically conditioned formulation of the transcendent heavenly destiny of humanity as it appears in medieval fiction. But we can recognize the validity of the perceptions which underlie that formulation: and even if we do not believe in heaven we know that at least we shall shift from the plane of earthly existence: we shall die. Death is the mystery that surrounds all life. Medieval tragedy, not centred on the individual, contemplates instead the universal progress from life to death and the inevitable dualities in life that such contemplation reveals. It is useless to complain of inconsistency. Death is inconsistent with life.
Although Malory's work can properly sustain such generalizations it is typical of its layered richness that these are not the only reflections we are left with. Although Lancelot's fate impugns the very concept of the honourable society, the validity of the good chivalric fellowship on earth, Malory himself does not fully accept this. It is still possible for him at the very end to refer to ‘worshipful’ men with respect. The superb threnody spoken over Lancelot's dead body by Sir Ector exalts again in Lancelot the great European heroic ideal, found as early as Beowulf, the ideal of the knight fierce as a lion in the field, gentle as a lamb in the hall, which is reiterated throughout medieval literature, and potent in the later, derived, concept of the gentleman.27 This is a worldly, though noble, ideal. And paradoxically Lancelot's good end though in one way a condemnation of his earlier life, is also a validation of it. He was a good man in the appropriate circumstances of the various ages of man. Malory's contemporary, Sir Stephen Scrope, as Ferguson in his valuable book points out,28 recommends in all serious actuality that when a knight becomes too old and feeble for earthly chivalry, he should take up spiritual chivalry, moral contemplation, and spiritual deeds. Shakespeare makes Prospero do much the same. Whatever one may think of the morality of this it is certainly human and—given the premises—sensible.
So we return once more to the relation of honour and goodness, to the maintenance of true fellowship. Arthur lives and dies by this ideal. Lancelot goes beyond it. All individual men, from kings to those peasants whom Malory so totally disregards, must in their individual selves go beyond it, to die alone. But at another level society continues, even through disaster. Perhaps this is one of the basic confidences of English and European society which the very absurdity of the pseudo-history of the Kings of Britain, especially as received in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, might be taken to illustrate. Even from Troy, through its fall, to rise in Rome, through its fall, to rise again, as Christendom in all its struggle and difficulties had risen; from far back, and through whatever setbacks, the faith in human fellowship continues. So it happened in fifteenth and sixteenth century England's transformation of difficulty into dynamism, through the efforts of many men who shared Malory's views, and no doubt in part through the effect of The Morte Darthur itself. The sense of general survival and continuity is strong in Shakespeare's tragedies, especially, of course, in King Lear. A good deal of this feeling has gone into English society, which has sought solidarity within itself, and successfully survived apparently overwhelming threats to its existence, for a good many centuries now. Something of such confidence comes at the end of The Morte Darthur when we are told that Constantine ruled this realm, England, ‘worshipfully’. The honourable society must always, being human, collapse, and must always be left behind, and yet must always continue. Malory asserts the possibility that honour may be the same as goodness; that Christians may be good men, even if most of them do not want to be monks, and cannot be saints;29 and by a fruitful paradox of inconsistency he asserts the validity of this worldly ideal as well as of the transcendental ideal. He asserts, in fact, through and along with his tragedy, the possibility, and indeed the requirement, for English gentlemen, of living good lives here on earth in a good society. And this assertion is fully in accord with the sober rationalistic realistic temper of so much of his book. I express his assertion in local terms here, for obvious historical reasons. But everyone of good will, of whatever race and society, can see the symbol in his own terms, recognize its significance for his own ideals, take it to his own business and bosom.
VII. THE AUTHOR AND DATE OF THE MORTE DARTHUR30
At the end of The Morte Darthur the author says he completed the work in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV (i.e. between 4 March 1469 and 3 March 1470), names himself ‘Thomas Maleore knyght’, and asks his readers to pray for his deliverance, presumably from prison. In the Winchester Manuscript he makes the same request for deliverance at the end of The Tale of Sir Gareth, and at the end of The Tale of King Arthur he names himself again as a ‘knyght presoner’. Records so far known appear to reveal only one knight-prisoner named Malory (which has several different spellings) between 1460 and 1470, though he seems to have had a somewhat surprising career. He was a gentleman of an old Warwickshire family who succeeded to his estate at Newton Rebold in Warwickshire in 1433 or 1434. He served at Calais in the train of the Earl of Warwick with one lance and two archers, and married some years later. Then in 1450 to 1451, when he was about forty or more, he was charged with several major crimes—robbery, theft, two cattle-raids, extortions, rape, attempted murder. He was imprisoned, escaped by swimming the moat, and is then alleged to have broken into and robbed an abbey, repeating the offence the next day. He was imprisoned from August 1451 to 1454, with a brief interval, and on release continued, it is alleged, offences such as cattle-raids, in Essex. He was gaoled in Colchester, then London. In 1455 he was pardoned; in 1456 he served as Member of Parliament for his shire. He had several spells in prison afterwards, in some cases perhaps for debt, but he was in the train of Edward IV when he went to Northumberland in November 1462, and with the Earl of Warwick at the siege of Alnwick in January 1463—which may account for the mention of Alnwick, and even of Bamborough (of which the siege was raised on Christmas Eve, 1462) in the last section of The Morte Darthur (p. 155 below). He was specifically excluded from two general pardons granted to members of the Lancastrian faction in 1468, and may have been in prison again. He died on 14 March 1471 and was buried near Newgate. The book, finished in 1469, must have occupied parts of the last decade or two of his life, from about forty to sixty, presumably when bouts of prison (of a gentlemanly kind, with books and paper, pen and ink allowed) gave him leisure to write. His work, especially the final parts, is the distillation of mature and varied experience.
His career is by no means necessarily that of a scoundrel. Leaving aside the point that allegations are not proof, and assuming that Malory did some things that may well have been like those he was charged with, one must also take into account the violent factionalism of the time of the Wars of the Roses. The Warwick interest supported now Yorkists, now Lancastrians, and some, perhaps most, of Malory's deeds may have been for him a warlike pillage, while the accusation may be similarly inspired. Cattle-raiding is not necessarily beneath a gentleman, as many a Highland chief could witness. Malory is accused of twice forcing Joan, the wife of Hugh Smith. Without wishing to palliate an evil crime, or traduce a dead woman's name, it might also be said that while to be forced once was misfortune, to be forced twice by the same man argues carelessness on someone's part—or some degree of affection. In a word, to parallel a remark made by C. S. Lewis, we might think differently even of Lancelot if the only evidence of his life that we possessed was the charges prepared by King Arthur's solicitors during the war.
The truth is that even if Malory of Newton Rebold was the author of The Morte Darthur we shall never know in any significant degree what kind of man he was: the aim of the above remarks is simply to show that it is not inconceivable that a man with such a record, however we interpret it, could have written such a book. The author of the book, we can have little doubt, was a gentleman, vital and passionate, of an intense, even obsessive imagination, who, no doubt, like almost everyone else in this world, behaved much less well than he ought to have done and probably than he wanted to do. It is all too possible to know the good and follow the bad: ‘the evil that I would not, that I do’. Although there is a connexion between a man and his book it is indirect and obscure at the best of times. We have no real evidence for the personality of Malory the man, and are not likely to get it even if he turns out to be from somewhere else than Newton Rebold. And anyway, the man is dead. The book lives.
Notes
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See Ferguson. Bibliographical references are normally denoted by key-names which are set out in alphabetical order with full references in the bibliography below.
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By Mr. W. F. Oakeshott. See his account in Bennett.
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The many problems are the subject of a vast scholarly literature, most of which has little relevance to Malory. The most useful brief and interesting account is in Loomis (1). For fuller details see Loomis (2) and its bibliographies.
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There are some variations from this pattern, naturally, in the greatest of these poems, Piers Plowman, which is clerical and London-based, and not aristocratic, and in the varied works of the Gawain-poet. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries alliterative verse spread widely, and was reabsorbed into the national tradition. Cf. D. S. Brewer, ‘An Unpublished Late Alliterative Poem’, English Philological Studies (1965).
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The Order of the Garter, founded by Edward III in the middle of the fourteenth century, is based on an Arthurian mythology.
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Caxton ‘edited’, that is, cut, this section more ruthlessly than any other, and undoubtedly here improved on Malory. See Shaw, in Bennett.
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See especially the work of Professor Lumiansky's team in Lumiansky (1).
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See my account in Bennett and see also Lumiansky (1) passim.
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Cf. Stewart.
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Malory's style has been regrettably little investigated. H. C. Wyld in what he describes as his ‘lighthearted’ History neglects Malory but for a few words of general praise. He points out, however, the colloquial yet ceremonious speech of gentry from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, and emphasises the close relation between the written and spoken word. Jan Šimko, in the most elaborate, but still limited, treatment of Malory's language so far available finds in Malory's style the ‘earthiness of popular speech,’ contrasting with him Caxton's ‘tradesman's’ anxiety about ‘correctness.’ See also Works p. 1653.
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Cf. Wyld, pp. 17 ff., and Byron, Don Juan Canto XI, especially stanzas XLII-XLIV.
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See my essay ‘Chaucer and the English and European Traditions’ in Brewer.
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For purposes of comparison it may be noted that in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde the lovers never use the second person singular to each other. In contrast, it is almost constantly used between the friends Troilus and Pandarus, though Pandarus has a tendency to use the second person plural at the beginning of a conversation with Troilus, presumably in acknowledgment of Troilus's superior social rank as a prince of the blood royal. One wonders indeed if there is not a shade of presumption in Pandarus's almost constant use of the singular form.
In the early fourteenth-century romance Guy of Warwick, probably intended for an audience less aristocratic than either Chaucer's or Malory's, the second person singular is very promiscuously used.
Caxton's text sometimes confuses thou and ye. The only place where the Winchester MS scribe seems wrong and Caxton right is on p. 137 where Caxton has the singular for the plural and the Winchester MS the reverse. I have corrected the text.
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For proof see Brewer in Bennett.
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Cf. G. Shepherd in Stanley, pp. 10-11, 14-15, for Anglo-Saxon poetry; Mrs E. Salter considers that ‘Chaucer could never have intended (Troilus) to be seen as a unified whole,’ Lawlor, p. 106. The inconsistencies within Shakespeare's plays are self-evident, though critics sometimes waste time trying to explain them away. The Bible as one book is the great example of contained discontinuities, and such containment is characteristic of many separate books of the Bible as well. Cf. D. E. Nineham, Saint Mark, The Pelican Gospel Commentaries, 1963, especially pp. 29-30, for comments pertinent to the literary problem. Benson's valuable article on apparent inconsistency and tragedy in the alliterative Morte Arthure came to hand too late to be fully used, but supports what is argued here.
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Works, pp. lx ff.
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Cf. Whiting.
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Lumiansky (2).
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See P. E. Tucker in Bennett and R. T. Davies in Lawlor.
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For a very suggestive series of essays on this topic, in which the one by Professor Pitt-Rivers is especially relevant to Malory, see Peristiany.
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The speech by Arthur on ‘worship’, significantly placed at the end of the section ‘The Great Tournament’, is important.
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Peristiany, pp. 17, 30, 36
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Cf. Pitt-Rivers in Peristiany, p. 32
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Here Malory appears to disagree with Pitt-Rivers, who asserts that the king is above the honour-system. Probably the difference here lies between the medieval concept of kingship, represented by Malory, and the later concept represented in most of Pitt-Rivers's sources.
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Lewis p. 1
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Shepherd, in Brewer, p. 86
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It seems to be a European ideal. My very able Japanese students confronted with Chaucer's formulation of it in the description of the Knight in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales thought that Chaucer was being comic. The samurai were different.
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Ferguson, p. 56
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Cf. T. C. Rumble's interesting study in Lumiansky (1).
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In this summary account I follow Works, p. xiii et seq.; Vinaver; and Baugh. At the time of writing a publication by William Matthews apparently disputing the identification of the author with Malory of Newton Rebold has been announced but has not appeared.
Select Bibliography
Baugh: A. C. Baugh, ‘Documenting Sir Thomas Malory’, Speculum, VIII (1933), 3–29 and Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XXIX (1930), 452-7.
Bennett: J. A. W. Bennett (ed.), Essays on Malory, London, 1963.
Benson: L. D. Benson, ‘The alliterative Morte Arthure and Medieval Tragedy’, Tennessee Studies in Literature, XI (1966), 75–87.
Brewer: D. S. Brewer (ed.), Chaucer and Chaucerians, London, 1966.
Ferguson: A. B. Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry, Durham, N.C., 1960.
Lawlor: Patterns of Love and Courtesy, ed. J. Lawlor, London, 1966.
Lewis: C. S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Cambridge, 1966.
Loomis (1): R. S. Loomis, The Development of Arthurian Romance, London, 1963.
Loomis (2): Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R. S. Loomis, London, 1959.
Lumiansky (1): Malory's Originality, ed. R. M. Lumiansky, Baltimore, 1964.
Lumiansky (2): R. M. Lumiansky, ‘Malory's Steadfast Bors’, Texas Studies in English, VIII (1958), 5–20.
Morte Arthure: Morte Arthure, ed. E. Brock, Early English Text Society, O.S. 8, London, 1871.
Peristiany: Honour and Shame. The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J. G. Peristiany, London, 1966.
Salter: E. Salter, ‘Troilus and Criseyde: a Reconsideration’, in Lawlor, 86–106.
Stanley: Continuations and Beginnings, ed. E. G. Stanley, London, 1966.
Stewart: G. R. Stewart, ‘English Geography in Malory's Morte D'Arthur’, Modern Language Review, XXX (1935), 204-9.
Whiting: B. J. Whiting, ‘Gawain: His Reputation, His Courtesy’, Medieval Studies, IX (1947).
Works: The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, 3 vols., London, 1947.
Wyld: H. C. Wyld, History of Modern Colloquial English, 3rd ed., London, 1936.
The following have appeared since this book went to press:
W. Mathews, The Ill-framed Knight, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966.
Sir Thomas Malory, King Arthur and his Knights, ed. R. T. Davies, London, 1967.
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