[In the following essay, Pachoda outlines Malory's use of the Arthurian myth and its accompanying traditions as structural foundations for Le Morte Darthur.]

In turning to the collapse of the Arthurian ideal in Le Morte Darthur, we are forced to confront some problems related to the structure and nature of myth; such a consideration is crucial, since after all the Arthurian “myth” of social unity and cohesiveness disintegrates in these last tales. Only through some understanding of the function of myth can we see how this disintegration takes place in Malory's re-creation of the Arthurian story. The Lévi-Strauss structural approach to myth is based on the proposition that “mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions towards their resolution.”¹ More specifically, he insists that myth exists for the very purpose of providing a “logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”² This structuralist view of myth emphasizes its conservative nature: myth “tries to respect an older theory in the face of knowledge irreconcilable with it.”³ The contradictions and oppositions which the structuralist refers to are the antinomies basic to human existence. Lévi-Strauss gives the Oedipus myth as an example of the temporary reconciliation of the belief that man is autochthonous and the certain knowledge that he is born from the union of man and woman.

In the case of the Arthurian legend, the central contradiction which the story holds in check seems to lie in the fact that individuals are dependent on and drawn to the community and at the same time antisocial and antagonistic to its interests. The moral demands of Arthurian chivalry hold this contradiction in the balance, and the myth itself, because it cannot eliminate the antinomy in life, checks it in fiction. In Geoffrey, Wace, Layamon, and in the French and English romances before Malory, various interpretations surround the demise of the Arthurian world. But of these the Vulgate Cycle seems the only one to attribute the tragedy to internal causes, albeit spiritual ones. Despite this difference between the Vulgate romances and the other early versions, they all seem to have in common the presentation of the Arthurian legend as a model of social cohesion. In this sense the story functions for their various societies as a defense or reassurance against the threat of social disintegration; it plays, to a lesser or greater extent depending on the version, an exemplary role.

We can speculate from the evidence of the previous chapters that the Arthurian legend appealed to Malory because it had always served as a model of the cohesive society. We have seen a great deal of evidence that Malory enlarged upon the virtues of the story in this respect in Tales I-IV at least. But the crucial difference between Malory's version and the story as it appears in his sources is that while the sources present the Arthurian legend as a model for communal identity, they do so unconsciously; its exemplary role is built in, so to speak, and the romances do not acknowledge the presence of this function while they go about adding their own overlay of incidents and interpretations. With Malory, on the other hand, we find at first a purposeful and highly conscious exploitation of the story's role as a model of social cohesion. What was implicit in its sources becomes explicit in Le Morte Darthur. And it is this very conscious application of a political and social function to the story which in the end allows Malory to expose the myth of Arthurian society as a political ideal. The antinomies which the Arthurian legend in its earlier versions manages to reconcile are set free in the last tales of Malory's version. By allowing so great a degree of idealization to enter the initial stages of his story, Malory purposely disrupts the balance which allowed the ideal and the reality to exist without mutual betrayal in earlier versions.

In summing up this point we can turn back to an issue raised earlier concerning the cultural and political milieu of Le Morte Darthur. What we noted in Chapter 2 as being characteristic of Malory's time was its desperate concern for the permanence of human institutions in a time of crisis. With Fortescue this concern manifested itself in the need to define what characterizes England as a nation, who makes up this nation, and what continuity it maintains in time. Malory turns to art, and specifically to a national legend rich in its associations of social cohesion and communal identity, to examine such definitions. But by turning to the story as a potential cultural solution, in making it serve as a conscious cultural ideal, Malory—as we shall see—accomplished two things: he exposed the true nature of the moral demands implicit in Arthurian chivalry; and in showing their ultimate failure, he demonstrated the fallacy of consciously reviving the moral demands of the past to try to control the present.

A few general comments on the dissolution of the Arthurian ideal ought to illuminate those hidden aspects of the Arthurian story which Malory's version, by virtue of its special cultural demands, brings to light. The causality of the tragedy in Malory's book has usually been seen the wrong way around. That is, it has always been said that the tragedy results from a conflict of loyalties. But it becomes clear from reading the story in the way I have suggested that Malory is recording the decline of an institution, and the conflict of loyalties to God, king, and lady is not the cause but the result of the institution's losing its power to bind individuals to it and to prescribe what they shall give up in order to be so bound. In the last four tales we see that the Arthurian structure can no longer restrict the liberties of the knights with any success. What we should be interested in, then, is how and why the Arthurian institution forfeited its prescriptive powers.

The reasons which we can uncover for the dissolution of Arthurian society ultimately rest in its attitude towards its past and future. The immediate problems which beset Arthur have their sources in the earliest stages of his reign. Malory has reshaped the role of prophecy in the entire story so that it represents the constant threat of the past to reassert its power over the present. Merlin's prophecies in Malory's version are largely restricted to forecasting the consequences of certain events which happened in the early stages of Arthurian history. The begetting of Mordred, for instance, is an episode nearly buried in Arthur's past. It is so remote, in fact, that Arthur seems not only to have forgotten it, but also to have forgotten Merlin's prophecy relating to it. In fact all the crucial elements in the downfall of the Arthurian world have their roots in the past which Arthur has forgotten: the Lot-Pellinore feud, the choice of Guenevere and the Lancelot-Guenevere prophecy, and the Balin prophecies all are pre-Round Table, and all exemplify the past reasserting itself and controlling the present.

We can now see the reason Malory eliminated the role which fate or fortune plays in his sources. The prophecies are simply used here to record the claims of the past on the present, and the Arthurian world can therefore be held responsible for not coming to terms with its past. In failing to heed prophecies, and thereby implicitly denying the influence and importance of his past, Arthur has failed to control it, and thereby eliminated the possibility of his future.

Underlying this disregard for the dangers of its past, there is another element fundamental to the demise of the Round Table: its overevaluation of its own powers. The source of this exaggeration of its strengths is undoubtedly to be found in the idealism of Arthurian chivalry. Because of its asceticism and altruism chivalry seems the perfect historical ideal, given the political aspirations of Malory's time. But Malory's narrative discloses that the institution has asked more from the individual members of the Round Table in the way of renouncing private interests and of mutual devotion than is either realistic or safe. Conflicting loyalties exist in all societies; they are not in any way peculiar to the Round Table. What is distinctive about this structure is that its chivalric code, in an attempt to keep such conflicts under control, has repressed them almost out of sight by idealizing itself and exaggerating the loyalty of the Round Table knights to each other. Arthurian society, as a result of such excessive idealization of itself, has lost sight of the dangerous impulses of self-interest and has set free other destructive impulses which are unrecognized by the group. The specific problems which arise within the Arthurian structure in the last four tales suggest that we are faced with a society which as a result of such excessive idealization of its own powers is living psychologically beyond its means; it is asking more of its members than it can return to them in the way of personal stability and fulfillment. The change from the paternal or regal society of Uther to the fraternal political society of Arthur's Round Table has meant that the Round Table society must generate within itself the disciplines, renunciations and restraints which in the former age were imposed externally by the ruler. We should therefore look for the source of Malory's tragedy in the idealism which led Arthurian society to proceed without equalizing these pressures of social cohesion and individual instincts, and in its failure to provide itself with internal restraints.

Malory brings out the point that the confusion which confronts the political structure of the Round Table is a result of Arthur's ambiguous position as the “leader” of an ideally fraternal society. Medieval political theory, however visionary it became in advocating a society of peers and a political rule, never wavered in its demand for a strong leader. We have seen how Malory had stressed in Arthur those qualities which thinkers from John of Salisbury through Bracton and Fortescue had advocated as best suited for kingship. The king is the head of the body politic of which his councilors or his parliament are the limbs. He is not simply primus inter pares as we have seen, because in his public person he participates in a different time scale and is the representative of sacred things. In the last tales of Malory's book, however, we discover first that the real and significant distinctions between the king's public body and private person have not been preserved in Arthur's kingship, and second that as a result of this failure his kingship cannot survive the loss of his fellowship.

The psychological soundness of a theory like that of the king's twinned being stems from the unambiguous role of the leader's persona publica; only by maintaining this public person, as opposed to the private voluntas, can the leader maintain the emotional ties which hold this group together. The communal identity of one member with another is established initially by the relation which each member has to the leader. We find in Malory's version of the Arthurian legend that in crisis situations the dissolution of the society results from Arthur's failure to differentiate between his public and private roles. He cannot define himself except in terms of his followers, and he therefore becomes subject to the personal emotional ties which characterize his knights' relationships with each other. As a result, the crises of Tale VIII, no matter how minimal the actual danger, result in group panic—the knights lose their faith in Arthur and then necessarily abandon their attachments to each other.

The last general statement about the collapse of the Arthurian ideal in the final tales of Le Morte Darthur involves Malory's position in relation to his readers. Malory's fifteenth-century audience, of whom Caxton must be typical, is described by Margaret Schlauch as a wealthy merchant class which had superseded the old aristocratic families depleted by the Wars of the Roses.⁴ If so, and if these are the “many noble and dyvers gentylmen” who requested that Caxton print Malory's stories, their interest in imitating in art and life the tastes and activities of their predecessors (who were also their superiors) is certainly understandable. By repeating the customs and culture of the aristocracy they become the masters of the social situation which had formerly mastered them. Whether we accept this explanation or the explanation that the interest in Malory's Arthuriad represents the functionless aristocracy reviving a tradition with which to comfort itself, we are faced in both instances with the question of a conscious cultural revival.

Malory himself is of course conscious of the archaism of his work. He occasionally indicates his historical perspective by referring to the Arthurian customs “in tho dayes.” References of this sort are especially frequent in the last two tales, where his ability to make Arthurian chivalry serve realistic contemporary ends is greatly reduced. As the fragility of Arthurian society is exposed in Tales VI, VII, and VIII, the cultural gap becomes more pronounced. The basic problem is one that Auerbach noted in his essay on romance society in Mimesis: “Courtly culture gives rise to the idea that nobility, greatness, and intrinsic values have nothing in common with everyday reality.”⁵ Here is the heart of chivalry's inadequacy as an historical ideal of life. Malory has tested the ideal as a source of stable government and social relations, and in the last three tales it is clear that if its illusory world of romance is pressed too far into the service of actual needs, the ideal betrays itself. What has happened is that the moral background and function of the legend which we spoke of as implicit in Malory's sources have been made too explicit in his book. We are in the end faced with the futility of reviving a tradition and a morality and imposing them from the outside on a later age. By the end Malory has shown so much about what makes Arthurian society operate that it can not be morally compelling for his own time.

TALE V

In the second half of The Tale of Tristram we see further evidence of Malory's critical awareness as narrator. Here his additions to the story are most often expositions of Round Table society as it should be and/or disclosures of it as it is. At this point in the narrative the Arthurian world is unified and external threats have been reduced to a few forays with occasional outsiders: “And at that tyme kynge Arthure regned, and he was hole kynge of Ingelonde, Walys, Scotlonde, and of many othir realmys. Howbehit there were many kynges that were lordys of many contreyes, but all they helde their londys of kynge Arthure” (276).⁶ The Round Table has so to speak run out of enemies, and the narrative turns to the preoccupations of Arthurian society with itself. There is a consequent emphasis on tournaments, reputations, and personal relationships.

The shortcomings of the Arthurian code of Tale I become apparent only in the context of the community at peace, because the code is primarily directed at the knight's obligations to the society outside the Round Table. The code is inadequate as stated in Tale I because, as we learn in Tales V-VIII, Arthur is incapable of looking beyond the demands of a present situation to recognize and anticipate the internal weaknesses of his fellowship. Vinaver notices the differences between “Malory's” code and the one in the source, and decides that Malory was not concerned with the spiritual nature of Arthur's fellowship.⁷ It seems clear from these last three tales, however, that the code is of Arthur's making and characteristic of his approach to things. In this context we realize that it was Arthur who was not sufficiently interested in the internal and spiritual problems which confront a political body. At the end of Tale V and in Tales VI-VIII the hostility which Arthur's knights had formerly directed at outsiders had no object except the Round Table itself. The extreme civility and asceticism of chivalry cannot help but store up a residue of aggression which, robbed of a legitimate enemy, will express itself in antisocial form.

It is not surprising that a direct relationship develops between the degree of Arthur's control as king and the nature of the personal relationships within the fellowship. The perceptible decline in Arthur's charisma expresses itself in the lack of trust between members of the Round Table themselves. The episode of the Red City functions as a last warning to Arthur that the beneficent king is by no means invulnerable to the treachery of those he trusts. King Harmance's tragedy is a direct result first of his naiveté, and secondly of his insistence on following a personal or private whim and ignoring the future of his realm. The moral of the story is stated in the form of a warning to Arthur's court: “‘Therefore all the astatys and lordys, of what astate ye be, loke ye beware whom ye take aboute you. And therefore, sir, and ye be a knyght of kynge Arthurs courte remembir this tale’” (527).

Other warnings to the Round Table are stated in a still more explicit way. Throughout the tale the Round Table is concerned with attracting to it three knights who are among the best in the realm, Tristram, Palomydes, and Lamerok. The Round Table's success here is dependent first on Arthur's appeal as a leader, and secondly upon his exercise of enough authority to stabilize the relationships among his knights so that their society is safe for others. By the end of the tale it is clear that Arthur cannot function strongly enough as a leader to stabilize his fellowship. In a long passage added by Malory, Lancelot and Lamerok discuss the safety of Arthur's court (488). Lamerok departs from the fellowship because he recognizes that there has been a collapse in the mutual trust among the knights. Lancelot tells him that Arthur will command Gawain and his clan not to harm him. Arthur had formerly promised Lamerok by his crown to protect him from Gawain (494). But Lamerok realizes that Arthur is no longer in a position to re-establish trust and safety; thus despite Lancelot's suggestion he leaves. Malory makes a great deal more than do his sources of Lamerok's murder by Gawain and his brothers. It is symptomatic for him of Arthur's failure to use his kingship to prevent the distrust and panic which results in both murder and the dissolution of the bonds of fellowship. In a seemingly original passage Tristram expresses just this sentiment on Lamerok's murder (514), and soon thereafter we find Tristram commenting on the effect of the incident: “‘And for suche thynges,’ seyde sir Trystrams, ‘I feare to drawe unto the courte of kyng Arthure’” (520).

Through Malory's use of the murder of Lamerok we begin to see that the treason, envy and revenge of Gawain and his brothers implicates the entire Arthurian structure. What begins as personal vendetta ends in the envy and hatred of Arthurian virtues in general. Aggravayne and Mordred, in le Roman de Tristan have a grievance against Dinaden because his father killed the father of their friend, Dalan: but Malory's version glosses over their motives in order to represent them as willfully destructive of goodness. At this point Malory adds a forecast of their murder of Dinaden during the quest. It is clear from Malory's special use of Dinaden and his omission of a motive for Aggravayne and Mordred that he sees the attitudes and actions of these latter to stand not for personal revenge, but for the complete perversion of the Arthurian value system: “Whan they [Aggravayne and Mordred] undirstode that hit was Sir Dynadan they were more wrothe than they were before, for they hated hym oute of measure bycause of sir Lameroke. For Sir Dynadan had suche a custom that he loved all good knyghtes that were valyaunte, and he hated all tho that were destroyers of good knyghtes. And there was none that hated Sir Dynadan but tho that ever were called murtherers” (461).

The entire characterization of Dinaden differs markedly from the prose Tristan where he is the irreverent mocker of all aspects of chivalric life. Critics usually attribute Malory's omission of much of this irony to his desire to preserve the high seriousness of knighthood. But Malory's indictment of chivalry is if anything more pointed than that in his sources, and he has simply sharpened the character of Dinaden as a way of hitting at the particular aspects of chivalry which are potentially disruptive to the community. Dinaden's ridicule of courtly love and his long diatribes on insignificant chivalric customs are obviously irrelevant for this purpose, and Malory has omitted them. These omissions leave only two aspects of Dinaden's character in Malory's version. First he is consistently portrayed as devoid of pride and envy, the inspiration of love and trust for other good knights. Second, his comments on cowardice and his reluctance to fight appear in Malory's account when it is clear that the conventions of knight errantry work against the ideal of fellowship:

“Not so,” seyde Sir Dynadan, “for I have no wyll to juste.”

“Wyth me shall ye juste,” seyde the knyght, “or that ye passe this way.”

“Sir, whether aske you justys of love othir of hate?”

(452, italics mine)

At another point he at first refuses to help Aggravayne and Mordred because he doubts the justice of their cause. When the odds are overwhelming, he argues for the addition of wisdom to valor by ridiculing the chivalric excesses of Tristram, Lancelot, and Palomydes. In this use of Dinaden Malory's critical awareness of the paradoxes of Arthurian idealism is apparent.

That the full significance of Dinaden's actions and comments is not apparent to the rest of the Round Table is attributable to Malory's dramatic sense in handling the tragedy. The suspense of the final tales derives from this pattern established in the Tristram section: the method by which the fellowship destroys itself develops more rapidly than the awareness that it is being destroyed. Similarly, Malory's ideal as it appears through his use of Dinaden anticipates the criticisms of chivalry in the “Quest,” while the Arthurian code enables the Round Table to remain ignorant of the abuses of chivalry. Malory has shown in this tale that although the existing ideals of Arthurian society are responsible for the achievements of the Round Table, they are at the same time inadequate and therefore partly responsible for the dissolution of the community.

In discussing the conventions of courtly love in the Tristram legend, Denis de Rougemont comments on their role in the shape of the plot: “It is precisely the arbitrary character of the obstructions introduced into a tale that may show what this tale is really about and what is the real nature of the passion it is concerned with.”⁸ Here he is referring to the illogical complications which the conventions of courtly love introduce to sustain the agony of the lovers in spite of the fact that there are realistic opportunities for Tristram and Isolde to live happily ever after. In Malory the conventions of chivalry replace those of courtly love as “arbitrary obstructions.” In countless episodes the knights seek peril for its own sake: close friends and brothers fight each other “without knowing” it when it would have been perfectly easy to reveal their identities to each other and thereby avoid both the fight and their ensuing remorse (e.g., 359, 401, 425, 485, 571, 603). All challenges must be met and all fellows must be revenged, making it almost impossible not to do battle in a wrongful cause. The debate on wisdom and valor which Malory inserts throughout the book (e.g., 432, 521) implies that the two Arthurian ideals are mutually exclusive. Dinaden mocks the chivalric conventions because they begin to act as fate directing the behavior of even the best knights who unwittingly wound and humiliate each other. Tournaments and battles by the end of Tale V cease to be simply “war games” and become occasions for family pride and envy with the same risks and casualties as war itself. There is a noticeable deterioration in the feeling and the goals from the early tournaments of the tale to the tournament at Lonezep, where many knights of the Round Table take sides against Arthur because by doing so they can win more worship. Finally, near the end of the tale in a passage presumably original with Malory, Lancelot rebukes his kin for their treasonous plot to slay Tristram because his reputation had temporarily replaced the name of Lancelot (581). If we ask the same question about these chivalric conventions which Denis de Rougemont does of courtly conventions, we must ultimately discover that the highly ordered rituals of chivalry disguise a passion for anarchy, fratricide, and revenge. Surely much of the appeal of the story of Arthur lies in the paradoxes it temporarily holds in check: the highly ordered ritualistic society of peers devoted to a charismatic leader, and the anarchy, fratricide, and cuckolding of the king. These aspects of Arthurian society revealed in Tale V have taken us some distance from Fortescue's cohesive political model.

TALE VI

We have seen that in the first tales Malory defines the Arthurian ideal in political terms and emphasizes the success with which it maintained itself against external threats. In the narrative middle of Le Morte Darthur, the “Tristram,” it appears that the Arthurian code as it was formulated in Tale I has not defined the knights' responsibilities for the internal unity of the Round Table; here the fellowship shows itself insufficient to withstand the antisocial pressures which underly its version of chivalry. The decline in fortune in the last tales is plotted against the gradual disclosure that the fellowship is also unprepared for—and therefore inadequate to meet—the needs of the individual.

The Grail quest is in this sense the turning point of the book; it reveals that the Round Table has impoverished itself as a group ideal by neglecting both the spiritual ties between members and the spiritual resources of each individual. The adventures of the quest as Malory presents them demonstrate that the Round Table as an institution has lost its power to coerce its members. The knights are after all supposed to achieve the Grail for the glory of the Round Table, but their actions betray the fact that they have lost their sense of relationship with the Arthurian fellowship. The quest in Tale VI becomes a metaphor of societal dissolution, whereas in Tales III and IV it had functioned as a metaphor of unity. Without the structure of the fellowship the individual knights experience a sense of isolation and insecurity which precipitates the dissolution of the Round Table. As a panic measure they realign themselves into smaller groups in the “Quest” instead of proceeding as individuals, and these splinter groups become in Tales VII and VIII the agents of destruction.

The failure in the “Quest” has yet another dimension which is also related to medieval political theory. In Tale VI we see the consequences of Arthur's neglect of the moral and sacred purpose of the state which John of Salisbury had emphasized as the primary obligation of the king. The immortality of the state in fifteenth-century political theory was intimately connected with the semi-religious terminology used to describe it, and—as we shall see—the quest for the Grail in Malory's Arthuriad seems to be designed to establish at this belated stage such a spiritual basis for the Round Table. Whereas the French Queste is essentially a universalized exposition on grace and salvation, Malory confines his version to the specific failures and successes of Arthur's knights, so that the “Quest” becomes a specific commentary on the failure of Arthurian society to preserve itself by spiritual means.

What Malory omits from his source are the large portions of purely theological material on grace and salvation. As a result of this method, those French passages concerning the failure of the fellowship which do remain in Le Morte Darthur are thrown into a sharper focus. The experience of the quest tests the spiritual resources of the individual; one cannot see the Grail in the company of others. The substance of the hermits' explanations which remain in Malory's account emphasize that the Round Table's existence as a group ideal has seriously impoverished its members as individuals; the Arthurian code has not provided the knights with the individual virtues of patience and humility necessary for the spiritual quest. And it is the very deficiency of such qualities which in turn causes the individuals to panic, to betray and desert Arthur in the last tale. The commentary on Gawain's dream (683), for instance, is so pointed that it is difficult to believe that Malory did not borrow it and others like it for their pertinence to his theme. Malory's “Grail” is very compact, and what remains from the French must have been chosen specifically for its thematic relevance. Even Arthur's tears and the tone of sorrow at the departing which Vinaver and Moorman call Malory's addition,⁹ are present in the French version.¹⁰ Obviously, then, this passage is not simply inserted to show Arthur's attachment to his knights; in both versions of the “Quest” it functions as our first indication that the fellowship will not survive the spiritual demands made on its members. In addition, this passage also emphasizes the fact that Arthur's office as king is inextricably bound up with the fate of the Round Table.

It must be emphasized, however, that Malory presents the “Quest” as the Round Table's one opportunity to preserve itself. The Grail appears at the outset, and in a sourceless line Malory says that by its light “eyther saw other, by their semynge, fayrer than ever they were before” (634). This transitory revelation holds out to the Round Table the possibility of a harmonious political fellowship re-established through the spiritual fulfillment of each individual. Malory's chief alterations from the French appear, therefore, in his treatment of the Round Table before the departure, and in the trials of its greatest failure, Lancelot. These changes emphasize that the failure to take this instance of grace as a warning is attributable to that knight's lack of preparation for individual responsibility, to his insufficient knowledge of spiritual matters, and to his misunderstanding of the distinction between this quest and any other.

Gawain's naive vow to follow the Grail in Malory differs from the French source, where he at least exhibits some knowledge of the tremendous importance of the Grail's appearance as a sign of grace. His speech in the French is longer, less impetuous, and more humble than that in Malory, where he does not mention the grace that has been given them. In Malory Gawain's enthusiasm stems from his curiosity alone; he wants to see what the Grail looks like. In Malory it is Gawain, not Galahad, who sets the tone of the quest. In the source Bagdemagnus insists that Galahad is the spiritual leader who must vow first and show the others the way: “Sire fait le rois baudemagnus [au Roi] sauue vostre grace il ne le fera mie premierement. Mais grace il ne le fera auant nous tous qui nos deuons tenir por maistre a seignor de la table roonde ce est galaad.”¹¹ This passage and the ensuing vows are not in Malory, nor are the knights confessed as the priest recommends. They depart with their former ideals and sins still intact.

Gawain persists in conducting himself as though he were on his way to a tournament and continually adopts companions who wonder why they never have any adventures. Malory retains Galahad's remarks to Ywain and others about the necessity of proceeding alone and reinforces them by an alteration in a hermit's speech to Gawain. In the French, the hermit rebukes Gawain for murdering the seven brothers without giving them a chance to repent. Malory omits this aspect of the speech and substitutes instead the hermit's distinction between Galahad who subdued the brothers (the seven deadly sins) by “hymself alone,” and Gawain who with his two companions murdered them. Malory is naturally interested in keeping the characterization of Gawain as a murderer in the forefront, but the murder is only possible because Gawain is incapable of proceeding alone (650-51).

The indictment of chivalric customs and their connection with fratricide, which began in the latter half of the Tristram section, receives special emphasis in Malory's version of the Grail legend. For Malory, fratricide seems to be the central symbol of societal dissolution. His whole revision of the Balin story as a moral vignette was centered on the unwitting combat of the two brothers. The “Quest” begins with an echo of this story: according to Malory (but not to his source) Galahad's sword is the same one that Balin used in killing his brother (632). The emphasis on fratricide reappears when Gawain kills Ywain by mistake, and the author makes the comment that in future days it will be told that one sworn brother killed another. Ywain's reminder that as knights of the Round Table they were “sworne togydir,” and his message to Arthur to remember him “for olde brothirhode” (682) seem also to be Malory's additions. Finally, the whole episode concerning Bors and Lyonell, his brother, receives a different emphasis in Malory's version where Lyonell is described as a murderer and a traitor to brotherhood. In the source he is simply characterized as deficient in Christian virtue.

In another place (643), a good man explains to Galahad the allegory of the tomb he has just seen. In the French Galahad receives a long sermon on the tomb and the body and voice which emerged from it. All three tokens are essential to an understanding of the incident in the French. Malory, however, omits the explanation of the body and the voice, leaving a rather pointed emphasis on the moral of the tomb by itself: “… hit betokenyth the duras of the worlde. … For there was suche wrecchydnesse that the fadir loved nat the sonne, nother the sonne loved nat the fadir” (643). Here the violation of family ties pertains to fathers and sons. The disturbance of this crucial relationship recurs in the Percival section where the author comments on the singularity of Percival's virtue at a time when “the sonne spared nat the fadir no more than a straunger” (664).

The most significant thematic alterations from the source occur in connection with Lancelot. Far from exalting Lancelot, these alterations underline his lack of preparation for spiritual matters and attribute this failing both directly and indirectly to the ideals of the Round Table. Unlike the author of the French Queste Malory delays Lancelot's understanding of his spiritual responsibility until the end of The Morte Arthur. This lack of understanding or wisdom is not characteristic of Lancelot in the French version, because his spiritual failure there is not intended to be symptomatic of the weaknesses of Arthur's communal code. Malory does not excuse chivalry. His Grail is if anything a more severe indictment of the chivalric code than the French Queste. Lancelot's instability is his sin in Malory, not because Malory wants to ignore adultery or to let Lancelot off easily, but because his society has not provided him with a consistent code for governing himself in spiritual matters. Lancelot's experience at the Grail chapel differs significantly in this respect from its source, where Lancelot understands what is required of him. Malory emphasizes Lancelot's naiveté and bewilderment. He leaves the chapel weeping “for than he demed never to have worship more”; he contrasts his humiliation with his former glory and, finally, he is easily comforted by the birds singing around him. In the French, Lancelot's first two responses do not appear, and the birds serve only to remind him of his sin and failure: “Car lu ou il quidoit ioie trouer & toute honor terriene [la] a il failli ce est as auentures del saint graal.”¹² The naiveté of Lancelot's reactions is peculiar to Malory's account. It seems perfectly designed to emphasize that the ideals of his society are the sources of his instability and his ignorance.

When the hermit explains Lancelot's experience at the Grail chapel to him, Malory takes another opportunity to stress Lancelot's lack of preparation for his trial. In the French Lancelot is rebuked for wasting the gifts God gave him. In Malory, the hermit adds that Lancelot is shamed for bringing himself sinful and unconfessed into the presence of holiness. Immediately following this admonition Malory omits the passage where the hermit promises Lancelot that God will make him successful in all endeavors if he will only give up Guenevere. For Malory such a solution would only undermine the severity of Lancelot's other sins and their pertinence to the faults of the whole Round Table; therefore he omits it. In fact, Malory's insistence on Lancelot's instability implies that if it is not the cause of his pride and adultery, it is at least the reason for his persistence in ignorance and consequently sin.

Malory's shift away from the specific sin of adultery as Lancelot's main weakness to an emphasis on the more general instability which characterizes Lancelot and his society is again evident in Book IV of his “Quest.” In Malory's eyes Lancelot's adultery and the courtly love motif are simply the antisocial results of a more basic problem in Arthurian society: that is, the instability of the individual as well as his confusion of personal and social responsibilities is germane to all of Arthurian society. In the French, prior to Lancelot's vision the hermit explains that Lancelot entered knighthood completely virtuous and well fortified against sin and continued so until the devil devised Guenevere as the only possible temptation. The hermit goes on to speculate on the great deeds Lancelot might have done had it not been for the adultery. Obviously, Malory omits this passage to heighten the importance of the more general moral in the vision which follows it, where the substance of the old man's admonition is a reminder that knighthood should be informed by spiritual concerns. In the French text the old man merely commands the knight to yield up his treasure. Malory's expansion of this passage and his omission of the one on adultery accord perfectly with his method of using Lancelot's experience to illuminate the more basic weakness of the Round Table as a whole and to show the spiritual basis upon which the fellowship must be reconstructed to survive.

These alterations in the nature of Lancelot's sin are reinforced and clarified by the hermit's speech on the tournament of Black and White knights. The French version uses this contest as a figurative recapitulation of Lancelot's experience in the quest thus far, and it appears that he has made considerable spiritual progress. In Malory, however, the contest is an actual tournament which takes place immediately after Lancelot has been admonished in the vision to use prowess for spiritual ends. Malory's version emphasizes Lancelot's instability; his chivalric code prompts him to join the sinners without allowing him to perceive the relation between this test and the spiritual lesson which preceded it. At the end of this passage the Lancelot of the French Queste exhibits his theological sophistication by admitting that after these lessons he must hold himself fully responsible for any further sin. He then has a short adventure in the wilderness where his fortitude and patience demonstrate that he has understood his experience. Malory omits these two passages because his Lancelot never even realizes that individual responsibility is the question at hand.

Bors' partial success in the “Quest” is carefully counterpointed against Lancelot's failure. Malory has purposely developed Bors' character in the previous tales to show his unwavering adherence to the ideals of fellowship as they have been presented to him before his spiritual adventure. It is quite important to note, then, that Bors' success in the “Quest” is dependent upon his temporary denial of Arthurian customs: he forsakes his own brother in his pursuit of a higher goal. Later, in a speech original with Malory, Bors demonstrates his understanding that his own spiritual stability is contingent upon his rejection of the code: “‘fayre brother, God knowith myne entente, for ye have done full evyll thys day to sle an holy pryste which never trespasced. Also ye have slayne a jantill knyght, and one of oure felowis. And well wote ye that I am nat aferde of you gretely, but I drede the wratthe of God; and thys ys an unkyndely werre’” (701). There is a second dimension of this speech which indicates Bors' role in the quest. He acts as a link between the spiritual fellowship of Galahad and Percivale and the earthly fellowship of the Round Table. Spiritual stability becomes important to him as a way of preventing crimes against “one of oure fellowis.” Bors' stability is composed of the individual will and faith which should have been the basis of Arthur's code. Lancelot's instability lies in his inclination to act according to the destructive collective code which prompted him to join the Black Knights.

The theme of stability is Malory's way of making the quest pertinent to his political themes. Individual stability in spiritual matters is essential to the stability of a worldly ideal. Because the Round Table is established without accounting for these matters, it is at least partly responsible for the failure of its knights in the Grail quest, and almost totally responsible for its own dissolution at the end. Clearly, the final additions to the quest purposely emphasize the solitary deaths of the Grail winners who relinquish the claims of an earthly fellowship which will be unable to resist disorder. Galahad's message to Lancelot is then a momento mori for the entire Round Table: “‘My fayre lorde, salew me unto my lorde Sir Launcelot, my fadir, and as sone as ye se hym bydde hym remembir of this worlde unstable’” (739, italics mine.). Bors returns. In the last tales his experience is designed to show the incompatibility of spiritual ideals in the framework of the Arthurian ideal.

TALE VII

The last two tales work out the consequences of the failures initiated in the previous action. Nowhere is the gap between Malory's political ideal and the actual behavior of the Round Table so great as in The Tale of Lancelot and Guenevere. Though critics have often assumed that this tale functions as Malory's last fling with the glories of Arthuriana, his alterations in the sources and his two major additions, “The Great Tournament” and “The Healing of Sir Urry,” direct our attention instead to the flowering of those disruptive tendencies which emerged in Tales V and VI.

The most notable change in the Arthurian society of Tale VII, Lancelot and Guenevere, is in the attitude of the fellowship towards Arthur. Before the quest Arthur is idealized by his knights in several sourceless passages as the king and knight par excellence. In the Quest, the feeling of solidarity which such affection had produced breaks down: with their leader absent the knights lose their sense of communal identity and regroup themselves into smaller units. In Tale VI this development reflects a change in their relationships to the fellowship, but in Tale VII it is clear that the experience of the quest has also affected their attitude towards Arthur. The excessive idealization of Arthur as both fellow and king had very effectively covered the occasional envy and distrust which the knights quite naturally feel for their leader. Arthurian society has again endangered itself by over-idealizing its capacity to rid itself of internal strife. When the envy and distrust of Arthur do appear directly it is too late for the fellowship to handle them judiciously.

The source of distrust and hostility is in the very structure of Arthurian society. Arthur's authority is largely based on the degree of affection which he commands from his knights. But, as we see in Tales VII and VIII, the knights in turn demand that he love them equally, and they are continually testing Arthur's fidelity to this ideal. Tale II seems to be primarily devoted to showing how well Arthur satisfies this demand as a way of demonstrating his fitness to be king. But in the long run, as the last two tales show, Arthur cannot hold himself apart from the personal aspects of the Round Table—that is, he cannot distinguish between the public and private aspects of his role, and as a result he is betrayed into partiality.

In Tale VII the lack of faith in Arthur is merely incipient, whereas in the last tale it appears full-blown. The first evidences of this attitude occur in the “Poisoned Apple” episode. Malory adds Madore's speech to Arthur on the subject of Guenevere's trial for treachery (748). Madore does not take Arthur's word on the innocence of the queen but reminds Arthur that although he is a king he is also bound by the same ties of knighthood as his fellows and therefore should understand their insistence on having Guenevere brought to trial. Bors immediately understands the implications of such a trial for Arthur's kingship, and in a speech original with Malory points out the knights' lack of respect for their king: “‘Wete you well, my fayre lordis, hit were shame to us all and we suffird to se the moste noble quene of the worlde to be shamed opynly, consyderyng her lorde and oure lorde ys the man of moste worship crystyhde, and he hath ever worshipped us all in all placis’” (751).

The other piece of evidence which shows the perceptible weakening of Arthur's position as king lies in the implication of Lancelot's affair with Guenevere. Courtly love is given a strong political dimension in Malory's version of the story. Lancelot's adultery with Guenevere is first of all his contribution to the general abandonment of Arthur. Furthermore, his affair represents a withdrawal from the fellowship. As Malory portrays it in Tale VII, courtly love is essentially antisocial, because the two lovers relinquish their need for the rest of the society. The tournaments of Tale VII all show Lancelot pitting himself against Arthur's side, and his antisocial behavior is always related to the state of his worship in Guenevere's eyes. By contrast, Malory adds a section describing Gareth's modesty, generosity, and loyalty—virtues which Lancelot has ceased to display under the conditions of the tournament. The poignancy of the story in Malory's account is very largely the result of the tension which he highlights between Lancelot's very real affection for Arthur and devotion to his fellows and his hostility to both in his behavior throughout the last two tales. Earlier versions seem to have kept this tension out of sight, and it is only Malory's insistence on the political themes of the story which forces these oppositions to our attention.

Taking the five episodes of Tale VII in order we can see the extent to which Malory has exposed the political reality of Arthurian society and revealed its inappropriateness as an historical ideal of life. His additions and changes here not only expose Arthurian society to sharper criticism than we find in the sources, but they also reveal that its weaknesses are not the result of a gradual decay, but were built into the structure. In this way the book is made to function quite obviously as a moral for its author's age.

The additions in the opening of the first episode purposely link it very closely in time to the end of the Quest in order to tighten the cause and effect relationship between the two tales. In the first conversation between Lancelot and Guenevere Malory's additions indicate that whatever misgivings he may have about the adultery, Lancelot has not been slow to make up for lost time. Furthermore, his remarks on his failure in the Quest reveal his continued ignorance that his adultery is ultimately related to a larger complex of sins which affect the entire Round Table. These additions prepare the reader for Lancelot's behavior at the end of the episode where he defends his promise to be Guenevere's knight “in ryght othir in wrong” (755, Malory's addition)—an ironic echo both of his confessions in the quest and the vow he and his fellows make each Pentecost to “take no batayles in wrongefull quarell for no love ne for no worldis goodis” (91).

Finally, Lancelot's instability in this episode is only one aspect of disorder in the Round Table. The motivation for the poisoning of Gawain, unexplained in the source, establishes that the spiritual interlude between The Tale of Tristram and The Tale of Lancelot and Guenevere has not altered the course of revenge and disaster. The gradual relaxation of the political ties which had bound the knights to Arthur before the Quest necessarily culminates in this mutual distrust of the followers themselves. Malory's version of the “Poisoned Apple” is a highly condensed statement about the causal relationship between the events of the Quest and the events which follow it. In the Quest the Arthurian political structure confronts the problem of fratricide through the metaphorical explanations of the hermits; in the “Poisoned Apple” the threat of fratricide is a literal one, and moreover this threat is indicative of the fact that self-destruction is an integral part of the Arthurian brotherhood.

Malory's additions to the second episode stress the unfulfilled promise of the Arthurian ideal. Accompanying this theme is the indication that we are now some distance in time from the glorious days of the Round Table. This commentary on the action is presented in the sourceless speech of an old hermit who is asked to heal the disguised Lancelot: “‘I have seyne the day,’ seyde the ermyte, ‘I wolde have loved hym [Lancelot] the worse because he was ayenste my lorde kynge Arthure, for sometyme I was one of the felyship. But now, I thanke God, I am othirwyse disposed’” (765, italics mine). This addition echoes the themes of the Quest by underlining the general collapse of faith in and loyalty to both Arthur and the fellowship of the Round Table. The irony that the disguised knight whom the holy man is asked to cure is actually the first knight of the Round Table adds another dimension of absurdity and disorder to the anarchical behavior of Arthur's fellowship and sets the tone for the next episode, which is original with Malory.

“The Great Tournament” seems a necessary addition to the tale at this point because it is the fullest presentation thus far of the fellowship at work destroying itself, and simultaneously it includes Arthur's first complete definition of the internal obligations of fellowship. In accordance with the dramatic development of action and theme in the previous tales, Arthur's definition of the ideal changes to meet the demands made upon it; it does not anticipate them, and consequently the ideal appears in Arthur's speech to Gareth after the initial damage has been done. Similarly, the final component of the definition—the responsibility of the individual for his spiritual welfare so essential to the stability of the entire community—does not make its appearance until the end of the last tale. Although this tournament is presumably like the preceding ones, the narrative here is exclusively focused on the absurdity of the entire occasion. At the outset Lancelot is nearly prevented from winning worship because a young lady is inconsiderate enough mistakenly to lodge an arrowhead in his buttock. This incident, humiliating as it is to Lancelot, amounts to a burlesque of chivalry: it implies that worship cannot be worth much if it is thwarted by such an obstacle. Lancelot's antisocial behavior in the tournament seems entirely without point, and although Gareth and others save the situation, we see that the tournament is meant to figure forth the irrevocable extent of the internal confusion and the helplessness of Arthur's code in spite of its revision. The final sentence emphasizes that the virtues of the revised code are a response to and not an anticipation of disorder: “‘And he that was curteyse, trew, and faythefull to hys frynde was that tyme cherysshed’” (790, italics mine).

The conventional discourse on the seasons which opens “The Knight of the Cart” forms another retrospective link with the theme of instability in the Quest and looks forward to the second thematic use of the seasonal metaphor as an introduction to the final catastrophe in Tale VIII. Unlike the courtly use of seasonal reference in French poetry to describe a world “whose lovers sang within a paled green and sighed because the birds were gay and the ladies proud,” Malory draws on the didactic English tradition to reintroduce the theme of mutability.¹³ The passage stresses the hierarchy of love where the love of God is the only source of stability in other loves. By this spiritual standard we are to judge not only the instability of the Lancelot-Guenevere relationship, but also the failure of faith and love in the Round Table to “them that he promysed hys feythe unto” (791). The primacy of love for God can allow harmony in man's earthly loves because the proper love of one's lady founded on a love of God excludes “lycoures lustis” and thereby eliminates disloyalty to her husband. The sense of wasted potential enters the key sentence of this original passage: “‘And so in lyke wyse was used such love in kynge Arthurs dayes’” (791, italics mine). Here we see the distinction between the fact that Arthurian society could, and at times did, use such love in the proper manner, and the certain implication that it also in other instances fell far short of the mark.

The passage about Guenevere who “whyle she lyved she was a trew lover, and therefor she had a good ende” (791) exemplifies this mixture of stable and unstable love which characterizes Arthurian society as a whole. Her adulterous relationship with Lancelot, as we have seen in the previous episodes, is unstable; but by virtue of its best aspects, her admiration of Lancelot's finest qualities and her faithfulness to him, she will be capable of spiritual stability and understanding in the end. The same development is true for the knights of the Round Table in the last tale. Here Malory's additions demonstrate that the reassertion of the best aspects of the Arthurian ideal combined with the spiritual understanding which should have defined it in the first place enable the members of the fellowship to make a good end.

This entire introductory passage of Malory's argues for the proper hierarchy in love as a way of assuring stability. The political concerns of the book are directly related to this idea; that is, the establishment of a proper hierarchy in Arthurian society would have allowed the Round Table structure to perpetuate itself. But, as we have seen, Arthur's place in his society was defined ambiguously, as were the places of the other knights with respect to their affection for the king and for each other: we find that these relationships have been both dangerously idealized for their caritas and strongly underestimated for their quite natural fragility. The disruption of the Arthurian world which this opening passage of “The Knight of the Cart” reveals lies in the fact that the personal sphere of Arthurian society has supplanted the public sphere in the natural hierarchy of things, and thus there-can be no stabylité.

We should note one more dimension to Malory's criticism of Arthur's fellowship before he turns to the tragedy of the last tale. The numerous echoes of the Grail quest in the earlier sections of Tale VII become doubly significant in “The Healing of Sir Urry,” which climaxes the tale. Here the entire Round Table, except Lancelot, is tested and proved unworthy. It is difficult to believe, as some critics seem to, that the parade of knights is a testament to the splendor of Arthur's court. Their failure to heal Sir Urry quite obviously indicates that Malory was interested in making the story reflect the spiritual sterility of the Round Table as a whole. Lancelot's success in this episode is simply an instance of grace designed as a reminder to him that each of his actions since the Quest has increased his distance from spiritual fulfillment. The spiritual implications of the episode necessarily run parallel to the suspense of the Lancelot-Guenevere theme: Lancelot's tears could be tears of relief that his adultery has not been discovered,¹⁴ but they also indicate the realization that his spiritual powers long neglected and abused are still available to him through grace. The fact that the Urry episode changes nothing for Lancelot spiritually suggests what we have seen over and over again—the inability of the Arthurian knight to make the individual spiritual step which will insure him and his fellows against disaster. The occasional sign of grace is an incongruous and painful event to the spiritually impotent.

TALE VIII

Malory's narrative moves very abruptly from the last test of the Round Table as a spiritual unit in Tale VII to the introduction of the tragic material of the Morte Arthur. The sudden transition here implies a cause and effect relationship between the loss of the structure's spiritual power and its ultimate defeat. This implication resembles the echoes of the Grail quest in the opening of Tale VII, which serve to tie the themes of those two tales together as well. Such emphasis on a cause and effect relationship between the events in the Arthurian story is not characteristic of Malory's sources. As Rosemond Tuve describes the tragedy of the king in the French romances, it is apparent that his decline has mysterious and unspecified origins which cannot be remedied in natural ways. There is no cause and effect in the French Perlesvaus and Lancelot because the king's fate simply stands for the “deep sense of human inadequacy” which is the theme of the romances.¹⁵ Just as Malory inserted specific virtues and strengths to justify Arthur's election as king, he also avoids any interpretation which would suggest that the king's failure is only the result of some mysterious inadequacy fundamental to all human nature; the decline of Arthur has for Malory specific causes which relate to the political content of his book. Malory may have looked at the story without noting the symbolic meaning behind Arthur's loss of strength, seeing instead what his political milieu had prepared him to see—man's failure to perpetuate his institutions. The tragedy of the story for Malory does not lie in the revelation of mortality or human inadequacy except insofar as man fails to counteract these limitations with the permanence of his institutions. If this seems insufficient grounds for the “sense of loss” necessary for “tragic effect” remember that the failure here is not simply the political one of transient institutions, but the failure inherent in man's persistent over-idealization of his own concepts and structures. The real sense of desolation at the end of the Morte comes from the fact that Malory has taken away not the glories of Arthur, but our propensity to enjoy idealizing those glories in our own interest—our wish to preserve the whole as an historical ideal of life. The parallel connection here between the destructive weakness of the Arthurian knight cut loose from the fellowship and the weakness of all later ideals which tie themselves to the earlier model of Arthurian fellowship for their survival is obvious and instructive. If we must talk about tragic irony it can only be couched in the simultaneous recognition of the patent glories of the Round Table and their equally obvious unusability.

While Malory seems to have rejected implicitly one of the commonplaces traditionally associated with Arthur's tragedy, he has retained another because it has a political significance which lies at the heart of his critique of the Round Table structure. The relationship between the king and his fellowship in the French romances is binding to the extent that neither the functions nor the obligations of either party exist separately. Miss Tuve illuminates the force of this relationship by pointing out its sources: “The identification of ruler with realm and ‘the sovereignty’ was felt, even if the old belief had weakened in the intimate tie between the king's health and the commonwealth's, an Arthurian commonplace.”¹⁶ The only difference between what Miss Tuve describes as characteristic of the French romances, and Arthur's fellowship in Le Morte Darthur is that in the latter the society is held responsible (its failure is not mysterious, but a consequence of specific mistakes) for the shortcomings of such an intimate and personal structure. To describe it in fifteenth-century political terms, the problem of Arthurian society is that the king's public and private persons are defined totally in terms of his fellowship, so that an attack on the king as a private individual necessitates catastrophe for the entire structure.

Tale VIII brings out the consequences of this identification of king and realm. Near the opening of the tale Aggravayne tells Arthur of Lancelot and Guenevere's adultery and in a sourceless passage says that he and Arthur's other nephews “‘wote that ye shulde be above Sir Lancelot, and ye ar the kynge that made hym knyght, and therefore we woll preve hit that he is a traytoure to youre person’” (919, talics mine). Lancelot has not only upset the natural hierarchy of things, but he has by sinning against the private person of the king (in having an affair with Guenevere) endangered the safety of Arthur's kingship as an office; this threat, of course, implies chaos for the entire realm. Here, then, is the final point at which Malory shows the relationship between the courtly love theme and the political ideal: in such a fragilely constructed society actions of a private nature have immense public consequences. Were Arthur's kingship independent of his fellowship and immortal as an office, the personal sins of his knights could not have had such consequences. On the other hand, the tragic aspect of the story is enhanced by Arthur's total dedication (both of his public and of his private person) to the society which he has created and holds as ideal, and Malory heightens this tension throughout the final episodes.

The extent to which Malory sought to employ the story of Arthur as a warning to his contemporaries is, of course, most pronounced in the last tale. He has traced the reciprocal loss of faith in the fellowship, and the fellowship's loss of energy and power since the end of Tale V. The process seems to occur in concentric circles beginning on the inside of the Round Table where the knights lose their sense of community and ignore their mutual obligations (in the Quest), and proceeding to the disillusionment of former friends (the holy man in Tale VII), and ending with the alienation of the community outside the fellowship. Earlier defined by its imposition of order in an unstable realm, the Round Table has become the very source of instability and the agent of disorder. The passage in which Malory describes in his own voice the disloyalty of the common people to Arthur is used to show that for initially defining itself by external successes the Round Table must take the consequences of the public's instability:

for than was the comyn voyce amonge them that with kynge Arthur was never othir lyff but warre and stryff, and with Sir Mordrede was grete joy and blysse. Thus was kynge Arthur depraved, and evyll seyde off; and many there were that kynge Arthur had brought up of nought, and gyffyn them londis, that myght nat than say hym a good worde.

Lo, ye all Englysshemen, se ye nat what a myschyff here was? For he that was the moste kynge and novelyst knyght of the worlde, and moste loved the felyshyp of noble knyghtes, and by hym they all were upholdyn, and yet myght nat thes Englysshemen holde them contente with hym. Lo thus was the olde custom and usayges of thys londe, and men say that we of thys londe have nat yet loste that custom. Alas! thys ys a greate defaughte of us Englysshemen, for there may no thynge us please no terme.

(861-62)

This passage is one of the best single examples of Malory's concern for the story as a warning to his times that government should be invulnerable to the passing fancy of the common people: the public has always been inconstant, but the government has not always allowed itself to fall prey to this inconstancy. The currents of fifteenth-century political thought supplied Malory with the leverage to expose the weakness of the Arthurian ideal.

We have seen how in the “Quest” the gradual dissolution of Round Table ties under conditions of stress resulted in the formation of new groups to comfort and protect the individual. By Tale VIII this process has had extreme consequences. Lancelot forms a following of knights with a rallying speech (original with Malory) strikingly similar to those used to describe Arthur's fellowship in the first four tales: “‘Loke ye take no discomforte! For there ys no bondys of knyghtes undir hevyn but we shall be able to greve them as muche as they us, and therefore discomforte nat youreselff by no maner. And we shall gadir togyder all that we love and that lovyth us, and what that ye woll have done shall be done. And therefore lat us take the wo and the joy togydir’” (825). As the dialogue between Lancelot and his knights proceeds (825-28, largely Malory's addition), we see that the formation of splinter groups is a direct result of the growing lack of trust in Arthur as king. When Lancelot is advised that he will be able to return the queen to Arthur, he likens himself to Tristram who was murdered by the king after he returned Isolde to Mark's court. Only Bors reminds him “‘that kynge Arthur and kynge Marke were never lkye of condycions’” (828).

But Lancelot's lack of faith in Arthur is not unfounded, since in the interchange between Arthur and Gawain right after the episode mentioned above Arthur acts not as king and judge, but as a personal lord seeking revenge. Gawain's advice to the king and the ensuing dialogue between them (829-30) are greatly expanded by Malory. The passage gives Arthur a significant portion of the responsibility for the ultimate revenge of Gawain. At this point Gawain tries to dissuade the king from sending Guenevere to the stake, but Arthur is anxious for both Guenevere and Lancelot to suffer shameful deaths. In the French, Guenevere's death sentence is the baron's decision; but Malory assigns the responsibility for the whole episode to Arthur, including the fateful presence of Gareth and Gaheris. Gawain explains to Arthur that his two brothers will witness the scene only because Arthur has commanded them, and “they ar yonge and full unable to say you nay” (831, Malory's addition). The death of Gawain's brothers and Gawain's revenge are thus very largely the result of Arthur's unkingly behavior. In this passage he has totally ignored public good for the sake of private will, and Malory's changes and additions make this situation very clear.

In the light of Arthur's behavior here, it is not surprising that Gawain very easily persuades Arthur to abandon his office as judge and king and to honor instead the blood ties which will allow him to side with one of his knights against another. In this instance, again, the significance of the episode as it reflects on Arthur as a king is Malory's addition. Mr. Lumiansky has shown through source study that Malory has shifted the responsibility for Arthur's actions from Gawain to Arthur at this point.¹⁷ Arthur's love for Gawain accounts for the fact that he opposed Lancelot despite his better instincts; Gawain has threatened Arthur not with the dissolution of the realm, but with the withdrawal of his love and support: “‘therefore, as ye woll have my servyse and my love …’” (Malory's addition, 835). This interpretation by Malory is crucial, since Lancelot makes apparent later (838) that he and Arthur could be reconciled were it not for Arthur's personal loyalty to Gawain. Furthermore, in an original speech, Malory allows Lancelot to rebuke the king for the loss of honor Arthur has suffered as a result of this course of action: “‘My lorde, the kynge, for Goddis love, stynte thys stryff, for ye gette here no worshyp [italics added] and I wolde do myne utterance. But allwayes I forbeare you, and ye nor none off youres forberyth nat me …’” (840).

The code of limited loyalty and personal ties begins to work as fate directing the actions of the king until at Gawain's request he makes the crucial decision to break the truce with Lancelot. He knows he has abdicated both the dignity and sanctity of his office by doing so, and it is now clear that the failure of individual responsibility and autonomy which his knights displayed in the Quest stemmed in part from the weaknesses of Arthur himself. He cannot stand apart from his personal ties in order to make the decisions which will preserve his office, his fellowship, and his country. All of Malory's additions and manipulations of Arthur's role in Tales VII and VIII allow us to understand the causes of his unreasoned acquiescence to Gawain's influence in this crucial speech: “‘Now,’ seyde kynge Arthur, ‘wyte you well, Sir Gawayne, I woll do as ye advyse me; and yet mesemyth,’ seyde kynge Arthur, ‘hys [Lancelot's] fayre proffers were nat good to be reffused. But sytthen I am come so far upon thys journey, I woll that ye gyff the damesell her answere for I may nat speke to her for pité: for her profirs ben so large’” (835).

As the narrative progresses, Malory shows the Round Table slowly redefining its code in more realistic political terms. The experiences of Gawain, Arthur, Lancelot and the surviving members of the Round Table show their belated awareness that the failure in trust and love was ultimately a failure to account for both the individual's responsibility and his antisocial motives. Malory's final additions to the story isolate the individual in order to emphasize that the breaking of the fellowship is necessary to this discovery. The substance of Gawain's letter to Lancelot (863) is Malory's way of revealing that the conflict of loyalties was not inevitable, but indeed unnecessary. Gawain no longer defends himself on the basis of a limited code of loyalty and revenge. He at last recognizes his responsibility to a larger structure. Malory's addition of this letter implies that if the Arthurian society had actually been synonymous with Malory's fifteenth-century political ideal at the outset, Gawain's acceptance of individual responsibility and spiritual guidance would have come in time to prevent catastrophe.

The Christian dimension of the tragedy, established by the Grail quest, is not separate from the political inadequacies of the Round Table. It was Malory's genius to perceive the reciprocal relationship of political and spiritual ends. From the beginning the implicit duty of the Round Table (and by implication all good government) was the creation of a social climate which would make the quest for spiritual perfection possible. The Christian life is seen as a pilgrimage towards salvation and the kingdom of God. The journey or quest metaphor implies the necessity of movement and growth, and these are made possible by amenable political and social conditions. Far from establishing such conditions, the Arthurian community has interfered with and frozen spiritual movement.

The political failure is parallel to the spiritual collapse. According to fifteenth-century political theory, Arthur's tragedy is to have defined his fellowship so exclusively in relation to his own worship, and conversely to have defined himself and his office entirely as they relate to his fellowship, making the destiny of his public person inseparable from the destiny of the Round Table. His last moments reveal his awareness of this double mistake. As his end approaches he betrays his emptiness: “‘Jesu mercy!’ seyde the kynge, ‘where ar all my noble knyghtes becom? Alas, that ever I shulde se thys doleful day! For now,’ seyde kynge Arthur, ‘I am com to myne ende’” (867). In this sourceless passage, and in the greatly enlarged dialogue between Arthur and Bedwer, Malory expands Arthur's tragedy to include the king's gradual awareness that a society whose spiritual resources are vested in the personal magnetism of one man will not be able to sustain his fellows: “‘Comforte thyselff,’ seyde the Kynge, ‘and do as well as thou mayste, for in me ys no truste for to truste in’” (871).

The incident with Bedwer is the final and most poignant example of the king's impotence. Both Arthur and his society have lost their power to coerce individuals in a communal ideal: Bedwer, who in Tale II had been the special object of Arthur's love and concern in a passage added by Malory (161 bottom), now twice disobeys the king's final request to throw Excaliber into the water. We must remember that in the alliterative Morte (Malory's source for Tale II) Bedwer had been mortally wounded in the battle with Lucius, but Malory preserved him in Tale II, perhaps with this later episode in mind. Arthur finally realizes in the speech to Bedwer that both Bedwer's failure in trust and his desperate plea to the king for guidance are reciprocal results of the society's inadequacy both as a communal and as an individual ideal.

It is a measure of Malory's tragic sense and evidence of his political concerns that Arthur's tragedy is directly attributable to his weaknesses as a king. At the point in the French text where the king calls up the vicissitudes of fortune to explain his fall, Malory's Arthur simply declares all “erthely joy ys gone” (863). Here, as in the scene with Bedwer, the king understands that his loss of charisma is responsible for the fragmentation of his fellowship. The famous dream which occurs the night before the battle with Mordred is drastically reduced in Malory's account. The effect of this reduction is to change the interpretation of the entire tragedy implicit in the French account of the dream. The wheel of fortune in the Mort Artu is used as an explanation of the events leading up to Arthur's death, and Arthur's dream functions as a commentary on human frailty and the inevitability of the king's decline. Malory's abbreviated and cryptic version does not mention the wheel by name, and seems to work more as a description of Arthur's emotional state than as an explanation of its causes. Here as elsewhere Malory prefers to read the story as a tragedy with well defined political causes than as a generalized tragedy in which the specific human event is dwarfed by fortune and mortality.

Malory gives no credence to the myth of Arthur's return. He records the various versions of Arthur's passing with the impartial tone of the chronicler. To these he adds the only personal statement he is willing to make on the mysterious passing of the king: “rather I wolde sey here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff” (873). We are to understand by this that in death Arthur has shed the immortal part of his twinned being which was inviolable in “thys worlde.” This is the meaning Malory places on Arthur's passing. But the event carries with it another death since Arthur's fellowship is not immortal unless he is. Malory purposely extends his narrative beyond the ending in his source to record the death of the institution which is tied to both the mortal and the immortal persons of the king.

Like Arthur, Lancelot is led to at least a partial awareness of the necessary relationship between individual decision and the preservation of the community. When the code of a limited loyalty and fragmented attachments begins to work as fate in the final episodes, Lancelot realizes that he has allowed himself to be trapped by it: “‘Alas,’ seyde Sir Launcelot, ‘I have no harte to fyghte ayenste my lorde Arthur, for ever mesemyth I do not as me oughte to do.’” (841, Italics mine.) Lancelot's end as a holy man points the way to a new fellowship based on spiritual fulfillment. Like the gesture of Galahad at the end of the “Quest,” Lancelot's last request directs his fellows to cultivate the spiritual stability absent in the Arthurian code: “And anone as they had stablysshed theyr londes, for, the book saith, so syr Launcelot commaunded them for to do or ever he passyd oute of thys world, these foure knyghtes dyd many bataylles upon the myscreantes, or Turkes. And there they dyed upon a Good Fryday for Goddes sake.” (883, italics mine.) Malory projects the story beyond its ending in his sources to include an account of the new fellowship of knights in the Holy Land. Here at last the author's concerns with permanence and stability are cast in a realizable form. But far from mitigating the tragic effect of the story, the additional passage shows us that this purely spiritual fellowship is necessarily emptied of the political promise which distinguished the Round Table ideal.

The seams of the Arthurian world are exposed in Malory's version as in no other. But paradoxically the tragedy is if anything more compelling for what we know about its origins. Were the story simply a fictional vehicle for rules of government, Arthur's passing would carry no greater emotional force than the final catastrophe of Gorboduc. But instead of reducing the moral complexity of the story's themes, Malory's political rendering of the legend enriches the story by allowing its paradoxes to emerge from the shroud of myth. The political idealism and political morality of the first four books show us why the Arthurian ideal deserves its reputation for true magnificence. And as the paradoxes of the story are then allowed full play we see that the order, civility, and ritual of this society of peers is only one half of a Janus-faced creature which also contains anarchy, fratricide, and the will to potential self-destruction. The politics of the story are only incidentally instructions for good government; primarily they are used to account for all aspects of the “mysterious” collapse of a perfect society. The tragic sense of Arthur's passing is preserved and even sharpened because politics for Malory is a very large category; it subsumes the history, the morality, and to a large degree, the religion of the story. Not only do we know that Arthur's passing is an irrevocable event, but we have learned that even the re-creation of Arthurian society as a cultural model or historical ideal must be at best an illusory and dangerous comfort.

Notes

1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York, 1967), p. 221.

2. Ibid., p. 226.

3. Geoffrey Hartman, “Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure,” Yale French Studies, 36 and 37 (1966), 162.

4. Margaret Schlauch, English Medieval Literature and its Social Foundations (Warsaw, 1956), p. 285.

5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (new York, 1957), p. 122.

6. This and all subsequent page references to Le Morte Darthur refer to Eugene Vinaver (ed.), The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (Oxford, 1954).

7. Eugene Vinaver (ed.), The Works of Sir Thomas Malory (Oxford, 1947), III, 1320.

8. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (New York, 1940), p. 38.

9. Vinaver, Works of Malory, III, 1535; Charles Moorman, “The Tale of the Sangreall,” Malory's Originality, ed. R. M. Lumiansky (Baltimore 1964), p. 203.

10. H. Oskar Sommer (ed.), The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances: VI, Les Adventures Ou La Queste del Saint Graal (Carnegie Institute, 1913), p. 20, 1. 8. This passage and one immediately following it describe Arthur's tears and the tone of grief at the parting.

11. Ibid., p. 18, 1. 18.

12. Ibid., p. 45, 11. 10-12.

13. Rosemond Tuve, Seasons and Months: Studies in a Tradition of Middle English Poetry (Paris, 1933), p. 181.

14. R. M. Lumiansky, “The Tale of Lancelot and Guenevere,” Malory's Originality, ed. R. M. Lumiansky (Baltimore, 1964), p. 231.

15. Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton, 1966), p. 353.

16. Ibid., p. 351.

17. R. M. Lumiansky, “Gawain's Miraculous Strength: Malory's Use of le Morte Arthur and Mort Artu,” Etudes Anglaises, X (1957), 97-108.