SOURCE: Vinaver, Eugène. Introduction to The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, edited by Eugène Vinaver, vol. I, pp. xiii-lxxxv. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1947.

[In the following essay, Vinaver presents a detailed analysis of Le Morte Darthur, including an overview of its textual history, sources, and critical reception.]

THE KNIGHT-PRISONER

Ever since 1485, when Malory's romances first appeared in print, the only clue to their authorship has been the following paragraph at the end of the book:

I praye you all Ientyl men and Ientyl wymmen that redeth this book of Arthur and his knyghtes from the begynnyng to the endyng praye for me whyle I am on lyue that god sende me good delyueraunce & whan I am deed I praye you all praye for my soule for this book was ended the ix yere of the reygne of kyng edward the fourth by syr Thomas Maleore knyght as Ihesu helpe hym for hys grete myght as he is the seruaunt of Ihesu bothe day and nyght.

Apart from the author's name, three points can be gathered from this passage: he was a knight; he completed his work in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV, i.e. between 4 March 1469 and 3 March 1470; and he was then in prison: the ‘deliverance’ for which he asks his readers to pray can only mean deliverance from prison.¹ A Sir Thomas Malory,² knight, of Newbold Revell (Warwickshire) and Winwick (Northamptonshire), is known to have lived at that time:³ he was born in the first quarter of the century and died on 14 March 1471. But whether he was in prison in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV remains uncertain.⁴ It is known that he was excluded from two successive general pardons granted by Edward IV to the Lancastrians in 1468,⁵ but exclusion from a general pardon is in itself no evidence of imprisonment,⁶ and even if the point could be conceded, a gap of at least three months would remain between the date of the second general pardon (1 December 1468) and the earliest possible date of the passage quoted above (4 March 1469). It is also known that in the course of an eventful life Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell was imprisoned several times and that the length of his detention varied from a few days to three years;⁷ but his last recorded imprisonment ended not later than November 1462, and there is no conclusive proof that he was arrested at any time after that date.

The newly discovered manuscript of Malory's romances helps to some extent to dispose of this difficulty. Two passages, neither of which appears in any printed version of the work, contain references to the author's imprisonment. One of them is an appeal for a speedy ‘good deliverance’:

And I pray you all that redyth this tale to pray for hym that this wrote that God sende hym good delyveraunce sone and hastely. Amen.⁸

These lines, obviously written in prison,⁹ occur at the end of the Tale of Sir Gareth, long before the end of the last book. On the most conservative estimate the writing of the intervening matter, which in the present edition covers some nine hundred pages, could not have taken less than a year. Hence at least a year before he concluded his work, i.e. in February 1469 at the latest, the author must have been a prisoner. Still more helpful is the statement found on f. 70 of the manuscript, at the end of the Tale of King Arthur:

And this booke endyth whereas sir Launcelot and sir Trystrams com to courte. Who that woll make ony more lette hym seke other bookis of kynge Arthure or of sir Launcelot or sir Trystrams; for this was drawyn by a knyght presoner sir Thomas Malleorré, that God sende hym good recover. Amen, etc. Explicit.

Here at last we have, instead of a mere allusion to the author's experiences, a plain admission that the Tale of King Arthur—the second in date of his romances¹⁰—was written by a knight-prisoner. Scarcely less definite is the indication that when he finished writing it he had no intention of ‘seeking any more books of Arthur, Lancelot, or Tristram’. Since at that time six of his romances were still unwritten, it stands to reason that between the passage just quoted and the resumption of the work there must have elapsed an interval of time long enough to enable him not only to change his mind but to lay his hand on a considerable amount of fresh material. He was, as he himself tells us, a prisoner before that interval; his captivity, whether continuous or intermittent, must, then, have preceded the writing of any of the remaining six romances by several months, if not years, and it seems reasonable to suppose that it began long before he wrote the concluding sentence of the Tale of Sir Gareth and at least a few years before he completed his last work.

The bearing of this on the author's identification is clear. Until now the only relevant passage in his work has been his appeal for deliverance written at least three months after the last exclusion from amnesty of Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell and six or seven years after his last recorded imprisonment. The passages quoted above can be dated well within those years, if not earlier. No doubt the identification still remains a little less than certain, for it depends upon the likely, but not altogether impregnable, assumption that between 1460 and 1470 there could have been no other ‘knight-prisoner’ of the name of Thomas Malory. But such certainty as there is does not fall short of what can reasonably be expected from the records of a fifteenth-century character who was neither a professional writer nor a prominent public figure; and it is at all events sufficient to call for some account of the few known facts of his life.¹¹

Sir Thomas Malory belonged to an old Warwickshire family. He was probably still in his early twenties when in 1433 or 1434 he succeeded to the ancestral estate. In 1436 he served in the train of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, at Calais, with one lance and two archers.¹² A few years later he married,¹³ and sometime between 1441 and 1449 acquired the estate of his sister's husband, Robert Vincent.¹⁴ So far, then, there was nothing unusual in his life, and the fact that as early as 1443 a Thomas Smythe charged him with the theft of goods and chattels is no proof that he committed any such offence.¹⁵ Nor is it necessary to assume with his latest biographer that ‘in view of the orgy of lawlessness on which he is in full career when we next meet him’, he must have been engaged in criminal activities for several years before the ‘orgy’ began.¹⁶ All we know is that in the year 1450, when he was over forty, from being a peaceable and presumably well-to-do citizen he became a law-breaker. In the course of eighteen months—from January 1450 to July 1451—he was charged with several major crimes, including a robbery, a theft, two cattle-raids, some extortions, a rape, and even an attempted murder. It would appear from the charges brought against him that on 4 January 1450 he lay in ambush with other malefactors for the purpose of murdering Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham; that on 23 May he ‘feloniously raped’ Joan Smyth and stole some property belonging to her husband, Hugh Smyth of Monks Kirby; that a week later he extorted money from Margaret Kyng and William Hales, and on 31 August dealt in like fashion with John Mylner. In the following year he is alleged to have continued his operations on a more extensive scale: to have extorted, on 4 June 1451, with the help of five other men, 7 cows, 2 calves, a cart, and 335 sheep from William Rowe and William Dowde of Shawell,¹⁷ broken into a park at Caludon on 20 July, carried off 6 does, and inflicted considerable damage on the property.¹⁸ On 23 July, before he could be charged with this last offence, he was arrested for some of his earlier felonies and kept in custody at Coleshill. Two days later he escaped by swimming across the moat, and on 28 July, so our records tell us, broke into the Abbey of the Blessed Mary of Coombe, opened two of the abbot's chests, and stole various jocalia and ornamenta as well as two bags of money. The next day, according to the same records, he repeated the assault with the help of numerous accomplices, broke eighteen doors in the abbey, insulted the abbot, and stole more money.¹⁹ With this the most eventful period of his life was, as far as we know, at an end. Soon after his alleged second attack on Coombe Abbey he was arrested again, and his detention lasted until May 1454, with a brief interval of freedom in 1452.²⁰

On 5 May 1454 Malory was released on bail to Roger Chamburleyn and nine others for six months. He promptly took advantage of this to carry off some oxen from a manor belonging to Katherine Peyto in Northants,²¹ and at the same time used his experience of cattle-raids to assist his friend and accomplice, John Aleyn, who on 21 May broke into the grounds and buildings of John Abot of Tilty at Great Easton in Essex to steal two horses; on 27 June Aleyn stole another horse from Richard Skott, vicar of Gosfield in the same county, and five days later carried off two more: one belonging to Thomas Bykenen and the other to Thomas Strete.²² Malory is reported to have ‘feloniously’ given shelter to Aleyn a few days later at Thaxted and again at Braintree, and to have plotted with him an attack on the property of William Grene of Gosfield. The attack failed, but on 16 October Malory was committed to the custody of Thomas Cobham, keeper of the jail at Colchester, and so was unable to appear at the expiration of his bail (29 October). A writ was issued to the custodian of the jail to bring him to court, and although on the next day (30 October) Malory broke out of jail,²³ the custodian succeeded in producing him on 18 November. Malory was then committed to the Marshal. For the year 1455 no records are available, but when in February 1456 Malory was produced in King's Bench by the Lieutenant of the Tower, he offered a royal patent of pardon granted on 24 November 1455, presumably by the Duke of York.²⁴ On 3 July 1456 he was able to borrow money from Thomas Greswold, and in the same year served for his shire in the Parliament then held at Westminster.²⁵ He was subsequently rearrested and detained in Ludgate (normally a prison for debtors), perhaps because of his failure to repay the debt, which could be regarded as a breach of the conditions of the pardon. On 19 October 1457 he was released on bail for two months,²⁶ and at the end of this time returned to the Marshal.

A year and three months later, at Easter 1459, he was reported at large in Warwickshire, and so far as can be ascertained remained free until the Hilary term of 1460, when he was committed to Newgate. We know neither the reason for this last arrest nor the exact length of the imprisonment, but at the end of 1462 Malory must have been free again, for his name occurs in a list of persons who went with Edward IV to Northumberland in November of that year.²⁷ There is reason to believe that, as a Warwickshire man, he followed the shifting policies of the Earl of Warwick whom he accompanied on this expedition. He was certainly with Warwick at the siege of Alnwick which ended on 30 January 1463.²⁸ When, later on, the long pending breach between Warwick and Edward IV occurred and Warwick joined the Lancastrians Malory most probably did so too. Our next records are the two general pardons granted by Edward IV to the Lancastrians in 1468. The first is dated 24 August and states that the pardon shall not extend to ‘Thomas Malorie, miles’; the second, similarly worded, is dated 1 December. We cannot be certain that Malory was in prison at the time when the pardons were issued; but if he was, he probably had to wait for his release until Henry VI's restoration on 9 October 1470. He died soon after, on 14 March 1471, and ‘lyeth buryed under a marble in the chapel of St. Francis at the Grey Friers near Newegate in the suburbs of London’.²⁹ The inscription on his tomb said simply: Dominus Thomas Mallere valens miles obiit 14 Mar. 1470 de parochia Monkenkyrkby in comitatu Warwici.³⁰

Biographical interpretation has done so much harm to literary criticism that it is a relief to find how very little room there is for it in Malory's case. No one will seriously attempt to read his life into his works or associate these with any phase or aspect of his curious career. The danger lies the other way. To those who think that criticism has some relevance for biography it may seem hardly credible that a man whose behaviour showed so little respect for conventional morality should have written a book which, according to Caxton's Preface, was designed ‘for our doctrine and for to beware that we fall not to vice or sin, but exercise and follow virtue’. The book, the Preface tells us, describes ‘the renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry’; and it may conceivably be felt that while a mere portrayal of such ‘acts’ need have no relation to the author's own record, the moral teaching, the ‘doctrine’ which they purport to illustrate makes singularly bad sense in the context of his life. This view, if carried to the point of denying the attribution of the book to the historical Thomas Malory, would be a complete perversion of method, for no interpretation of a work of fiction can be relied upon to that extent. But lest there be any temptation to question his authorship on such grounds, it might be worth while inquiring whether they exist; in other words, whether the notion that he wrote the ‘noble histories of King Arthur and his knights’ is in fact as incongruous as it seems. If on analysis the incongruity proves to be more apparent than real, the case for the identification will not, strictly speaking, be strengthened; but it will become more understandable and perhaps less likely to raise unreal problems.

The moral qualities of the ‘noble histories’ have been variously assessed by the critics. Ascham thought that ‘the whole pleasure’ of the book ‘stood in two specyall poynts, in open manslaughter and bold bawdrye’; Tennyson found that Malory's work was ‘touched by the adulterous finger of a time that hover'd between war and wantonness’; Sir Edward Strachey, while admitting that it exhibited ‘a picture of a society far lower than our own in morals’, was convinced that Malory had made a real effort to distinguish between vice and virtue and ‘morally reprobate the former’.³¹ This last view, with certain qualifications, has prevailed, and Malory has become associated in our minds with a doctrine of ‘humanity and gentleness’. Few critics have realized that the belief in his ‘morality’ is based not so much on his work as on Caxton's preface to it.³² The confusion is the less excusable because Caxton clearly distinguishes between the purpose of the work and his own object in bringing it out. While insisting that his readers should learn the ‘noble acts of chyvalrye’ and the ‘jentyl and vertuous dedes that somme knyghtes used in tho dayes’, he is truthful enough to admit that these are by no means the only ‘dedes’ recorded in the book: ‘for herein may be seen noble chyvalrye, curtosye, humanité, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love, frendshyp, cowrdyse, murdre, hate.’ From this miscellaneous array of virtues and vices Caxton begs his readers to choose all that is good and reject the rest: ‘doo after the good and leve the evyl, and it shal brynge you to good fame and renommee.’ But he does not say that this choice is necessarily implied in the text or that Malory himself intended his ‘noble histories’ to serve as a means of moral improvement.

Nor would Malory's work, in so far as it is original, bear out this view. No doubt, as long as his sources vary in their moral outlook, and as long as he follows them indiscriminately, he cannot help reproducing certain passages which suggest an idealistic inspiration. The Quest of the Holy Grail—‘the holiest that is in this world’—is a case in point. All that is ‘holy’ in Malory's version of it is translated from the French, and his own attitude to it shows itself mainly in the attempt to deprive the story of its religious significance. His Book of Sir Tristram de Lyones—by far the longest of his romances—is based on a different type of work. Its immediate source is a French prose romance which combines the original Tristan legend with a mass of thirteenth-century Arthurian material; in terms of French literary history it can be described as a mixture of pre-courtly motifs with a roman courtois and a roman d'aventures. Each of these elements has its background in contemporary thought and a certain ‘morality’ of its own; but they all seem to be equally foreign to Malory. When he stops to moralize or to enlarge on the curious adventures of his characters he almost invariably points a moral or adds a detail which has no relation to the real meaning of the story. His Tristan complains of having abandoned for the sake of his beloved ‘many lands and riches’; his Guinevere gives her knights ‘treasure enough for their expenses’; and on several occasions he makes King Arthur's knights acquire substantial sources of revenue ‘through might of arms’. These and many other similar additions seem to reveal a highly realistic view of life, a firm belief in the importance of wealth, and an almost pathetic concern with material comforts. As Malory gains more independence in the treatment of his sources, this attitude becomes more obvious. His Launcelot and Guinevere includes a whole chapter of his own composition which Caxton has inaccurately entitled ‘How true love is likened unto summer’. In reality Malory does not ‘liken love unto summer’, but elaborates in his own way the theme of the reawakening of nature. If, he remarks, ‘every lusty heart beginneth to blossom and bring out fruit’ in May, it is because ‘all herbs and trees renewen a man and woman, and likewise lovers’. ‘For winter’, he explains further, ‘with his rough winds and blasts causeth man and woman to cower and sit fast by the fire.’ This is Malory's counterpart to the idealistic doctrine of courtly romance, and his most successful escape from the oppressive atmosphere of courtoisie into a world of comfortable realities.

The least ‘moral’ of his sources were doubtless those which he chose for his first attempt at ‘reducing’ French romances into English: the continuation of Merlin and some fragments of the last part of the prose Lancelot. Both these works belonged to the most advanced stage in the development of the French Arthurian tradition and preserved few traces of its original courtly inspiration. Their distinctive feature was the ingenious elaboration of fanciful adventures. King Arthur's habit of declining to eat at supper until he had heard of a new adventure and, regardless of its purpose, entrusted it to one of his knights may be taken as a humorous but accurate expression of the tendency which prevailed in works of this type. The fact that originally—in the early days of courtoisie—adventure had been a means to an end, a vehicle of refined sentiment, was forgotten, and the curiously interwoven quests, pursuits, and battles became the real if not the only centre of interest. Knight-errantry, as treated by the prose writers of the thirteenth century, ceased to be a school of courtly service; it became primarily a peculiar mode of living, characterized by a constant search for new adventures of all kinds. The romances which Malory chose for his early adaptations³³ are good examples of this variety of fiction. Their main object is to relate on an ever-increasing scale the miscellaneous experiences of a group of fearless knights spurred to action by their indefatigable king. But what to a modern critic seems a mere succession of creuses et monotones invraisemblances³⁴ was to thirteenth-century readers a source of genuine delight, and to contemporary authors the foundation of their narrative art. Moreover, the type of mind that reacts favourably to such compositions has certainly existed at all times, although the changes of literary taste and fashion may have caused it to migrate from one category of readers to another and to descend sometimes from the highest to the lowest strata. It would not be surprising, therefore, if in fifteenth-century England a man whose moral and psychological outlook was very different from our own, and different also from that of the early courtly writers, had been attracted by the Arthurian novels of the ‘adventurous’ type. If any background of actual experience was needed to awaken interest in such works, it was not one of moral and sentimental refinement, and there is no real reason why a man totally unaffected by the accepted code of behaviour should not have been sensitive to their appeal. Nor does Malory's contribution to the narrative present any difficulty. What he seems to value above all at this stage of his work is the record of unusual and daring exploits, and his originality as a writer shows itself chiefly in the directness of exposition, in the substitution of simple manners for courtly etiquette, and in the elimination of the supernatural and the mysterious. He prefers straightforward speech to elaborate orations, human cunning to the inexplicable workings of supernatural forces, and a realistic setting to the conventional fairy-tale scenery of French romance.

It may be argued that the fairest specimens of Malory's ‘morality’ are the remarks he occasionally inserts to describe the practice and the ideals of chivalry. Some of these remarks refer to principles of chivalric behaviour seemingly distinct from the mere art of fighting. A knight, he says, should be courteous and gentle, for then ‘he has favour in every place’. Nor should he indulge in useless fighting: his bravery and skill are to be subordinate to his purpose, and those who abuse their physical superiority forfeit their claim to perfect knighthood. On the strength of such utterances Malory has been described by some as a belated but sincere exponent of the moral ideals of chivalry,³⁵ while others have suggested that he embodied these ideals ‘in actual personages and so influenced the national character of his countrymen in the best way’.³⁶

The text of Malory's writings preserved in the Winchester MS. throws new light on what chivalry really meant to him. The beginnings of his ‘doctrine’ are found in his earliest work, The Tale of the Noble King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius, of which the Winchester MS. alone gives a complete version. Caxton's rendering of it is a drastic abridgement. Puzzled by the archaic character of the Tale, Caxton, ‘simple person’, reduced it to less than half its size, with the result that until now it has not been possible to form an accurate idea either of the content of the story or of its position among Malory's romances. The narrative is based upon an English alliterative poem known as the Morte Arthure. While shortening his original and modernizing some of its vocabulary, Malory treats it with far more respect than his other sources. Its chief attraction for him lies in the record of Arthur's heroic exploits, which he expands and elaborates as best he can, so as to make Arthur appear as the true embodiment of heroic chivalry. Arthur is the ‘Conqueror’, the English counterpart of Charlemagne, and he claims by right the possession of the Roman Empire. He is the champion of the weak and the oppressed, witness his fight with the giant who had caused so much distress to the people of Brittany. But he has some of the characteristics of the primitive type of warrior. He does not shrink from a wholesale massacre of the Romans, and his cruelty in battle is equalled only by his enormous strength. Malory is careful to emphasize, however, that in spite of this cruelty to the enemy Arthur has human qualities which endear him to his own people. The implacable conqueror of the Romans mourns the death of his own knights as an irreparable loss and forgets for a moment his grim and glorious task. The Roman Emperor's challenge grieves him because he cannot tolerate unnecessary bloodshed. He is wise and prudent, anxious to take counsel with his knights, and generous in rewarding them for their services. The noble king is thus shown in all his primitive, yet human glory: not as a mere abstract centre of the fellowship of the Round Table, but as a political and military leader, conscious of his responsibility for the welfare and the prestige of his kingdom.³⁷

This idealized portrait of Arthur may well be interpreted as a tribute to Henry V. As if to strengthen the analogy Malory adds several details which make Arthur's expedition against the Romans resemble Henry V's triumphant campaign in France. Just as Henry appointed two men to rule the country in his absence—Henry Beaufort and the Duke of Bedford—so in Malory's version of Arthur's campaign Arthur appoints two chieftains for the same purpose: Baudwen of Bretayne and Cadore of Cornwall. The king's itinerary through France is altered so as to resemble the route followed by Henry.³⁸ Just as the latter became virtually King of France after Agincourt (by the Treaty of Troyes Charles VI had agreed to let Henry succeed him on his death), so Malory's Arthur, after his victory over the Romans, is ‘crowned Emperor by the Pope's hands, with all royalty in the world to weld forever’. Nor is it without significance that Malory brings his Noble Tale to an end at this point and dismisses for the time being the rest of the story which he found in the English poem: Mordred's treachery and Arthur's downfall. His intention is clear: he is anxious that the story of Arthur's triumph should remain uppermost in the reader's mind as a record of the greatest English victory of his age and that the reader should know how this victory was won. Caxton hits the mark when he says that in Malory's book his readers will see how those who ‘used gentle and virtuous deeds’ came to ‘honour’, but he mistakes—perhaps deliberately—Malory's practical intention for a moral one. The Tale of Arthur and Lucius is the first in date of Malory's extant works;³⁹ it was written at a time when the author's recollections of the great king were made particularly vivid by a dynastic dispute directed against Henry V's legitimate heir. Whether as a Lancastrian or as a follower of Warwick who had sworn allegiance to Henry VI while fighting his advisers and even resisted the Duke of York's attempt to assume the crown,⁴⁰ Malory had every reason to remember that Henry V had made the name of England glorious. His often quoted remark—‘this is a great default of us Englishmen, for there may nothing please us no term’—may well be taken to refer to those who had forgotten not only the sanctity of the royal title⁴¹ but the illustrious deeds of the great English monarch they had once acclaimed as a victor. Malory's first ‘noble history’ is a clear reminder of those deeds. Conceived in the midst of the greatest political upheaval of the century, it was an attempt to show what had been and what could still be achieved ‘through clean knighthood’.

Chivalry was, then, to Malory, at that initial stage of his work, the faculté maîtresse of a brave warrior-king and of his faithful knights; it was man's heroic devotion to a great cause. As Malory's work advanced, and as he ventured deeper and deeper into the vast labyrinth of Arthurian fiction, he found himself following the tracks of innumerable ‘warriors wrought in steely weeds’, some of whom had distinguished themselves in Arthur's victorious campaign. But as their numbers grew their chivalric ambition, as Malory understood it, steadily decreased. They were no longer concerned with the practical business of warfare; they still wore their glittering armour and were eager to use their spears and swords; but their battles seemed to be fought in the void, and there was no discernible object in their exploits. Malory soon realized that the ‘great books’ of the French Arthurian Cycle failed to provide a worthy continuation of his first Arthurian work, and proceeded to supplement them with remarks on the art and meaning of chivalry. Faithful to his original conception of knighthood, he treated it not as a vague background of adventures but as the practical function of a well-established order—the ‘High Order of Knighthood’—with its headquarters firmly fixed in the household of a great prince. Arthur naturally had to play the part of that prince. While in the French Arthurian romances Arthur's court had been but the conventional starting-point of knightly quests and Arthur himself a fantastic character, a king of Fairyland, Malory made him into the most accomplished and dignified champion of chivalry and the real founder of its great traditions. Under Arthur's leadership chivalry becomes a useful discipline which, if properly practised, can make its adherents into ‘the sternest knights to their foes’. The technique of fighting, and more particularly of single combat, is Malory's favourite topic; he speaks of it with confidence and authority. If, in addition to this, chivalry is also a matter of good breeding, gentleness, and loyalty, it is because these qualities, as shown by the example of Arthur, equip the perfect knight for his task and produce a type of warrior ready for any sacrifice and conscious of the importance of his calling. This was what Malory must have learnt both from real life and from reflection, and what he endeavoured to convey in his early work, not as a doctrine, but as a rule of conduct, more vital than ever in times of stress and struggle. The issue as he saw it was essentially a practical, not a moral one, and so far as we can judge it was in the same earnest spirit of practical heroism that in his later writings he so often attempted to commemorate in terms of imaginary knight-errantry some of the great declining traditions of his own age.

How so small a life was graced with true poetic vision, what miraculous play of character and circumstance brought the obscure knight-prisoner to his high theme, we may never know. But when all is said, it is enough to realize that in its varied human aspects his work does not belie what little can be inferred from the records of his strange destiny. The biographer may be tempted to go further and look for positive links between the author and his writings; the critic will more readily abide by Caxton's dictum: ‘For to passe the tyme thys book shal be pleasaunte to rede in, but for to gyve fayth and byleve that al is trewe that is conteyned herin, ye be at your lyberté.’

THE STORY OF THE BOOK

1. CAXTON'S ‘MORTE DARTHUR’

As long as Caxton's edition—‘enprynted and fynysshed in thabbey of Westmestre the last day of Juyl the yere of our Lord MCCCCLXXXV’—was the only available record of Malory's writings there could be little or no reliable evidence as to what Caxton did to Malory's text. That he was no mere printer, but the publisher and editor of most of his books, has never been doubted. But in the absence of any other version of his ‘copy’, his Morte Darthur has been tacitly accepted as a genuine reproduction of the original. ‘I have’, he writes in his Preface, ‘after the symple connynge that God hath sente to me, under the favour and correctyon of al noble lordes and gentylmen, enprysed⁴² to enprynte a book of the noble hystoryes of the sayd kynge Arthur and of certeyn of his knyghtes, after a copye unto me delyverd, whyche copye Syr Thomas Malorye dyd take oute of certeyn bookes of Frensshe and reduced it into Englysshe.’ Some of the damage due to Caxton's ‘symple connynge’ can now be repaired.

The essential difference between Malory's treatment of the Noble Histories and Caxton's was the difference between the methods of a medieval author or scribe and those of a modern publisher. A medieval ‘book’ could vary indefinitely in size and in content; it could be either a treatise of any size or a collection of different treatises under one cover.⁴³ There is evidence to show that in their original form Malory's works were in keeping with this traditional medieval connotation of the term. The first indication to this effect occurs in Caxton's Preface immediately before the reference to his ‘symple connynge’. Speaking of the various Arthurian romances known to him and of his own project, he remarks: ‘And many noble volumes be made of hym and of his noble knyghtes in Frensshe, which I have seen and redd beyonde the see, which been not had in our maternal tongue; but in Walsshe ben many, and also in Frensshe, and somme in Englysshe, but nowher nygh alle. Wherfore, suche as have⁴⁴late ben drawen oute bryefly into Englysshe, I have … enprysed to enprynte’, etc. If this description is correct, Caxton's copy must have consisted of many noble volumes. At no point does he refer to them otherwise than in the plural, and the conclusion naturally suggests itself that what he published was a collection of different works which had not previously been made into a single composition.

So much may be inferred from Caxton's own statement. But the inference can now be substantiated with the aid of the Winchester text. Although the manuscript is bound in one volume, it is clearly divided into several different works, and each work with the exception of the last, which lacks a gathering of eight leaves at the end, is concluded by an explicit. The first explicit is the most significant of all. In it the author bids farewell to the reader and disclaims any intention of writing another Arthurian romance: Who that woll make ony more lette hym seke other bookis of kynge Arthure or of sir Launcelot or sir Trystrams. The works which follow show that at some later date he resumed his task. But just as the texts he used were separate romances with few connecting links between them, so his adaptations of them as set out in the Winchester MS. claimed no continuity of narrative, still less of composition. The following remarks, mostly deleted by Caxton, make this abundantly clear:

• (1) F. 70.
  • (The Tale of King Arthur): And this booke endyth whereas sir Launcelot and sir Trystrams com to courte. Who that woll make ony more lette hym seke other bookis of kynge Arthure or of sir Launcelot or sir Trystrams; for this was drawyn by a knyght presoner sir Thomas Malleorré, that God sende hym good recover. Amen, etc. Explicit.
• (2) F. 96.
  • (The Tale of the Noble King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius⁴⁵): Explicit the Noble Tale betwyxt kynge Arthure and Lucius the Emperour of Rome.
• (3) F. 113.
  • (The Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake): Explicit a noble tale of sir Launcelot du Lake.
• (4) F. 148.
  • (The Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkeney): And I pray you all that redyth this tale to pray for hym that this wrote, that God sende hym good delyveraunce sone and hastely. Amen. Here endyth the tale of sir Gareth of Orkeney.
• (5) F. 346.
  • (The Book of Sir Tristram): Here endyth the secunde boke off syr Trystram de Lyones whyche drawyn was oute of Freynshe by sir Thomas Malleorré, knyght, as Jesu be hys helpe. Amen.
• (6) F. 409.
  • (The Tale of the Sankgreal): Thus endith the tale of the Sankgreal that was breffly drawy[n] oute of Freynshe, which ys a tale cronycled for one of the trewyst and of the holyest that ys in thys worlde, by sir Thomas Maleorré, knyght. O, Blessed Jesu helpe hym thorow Hys myght! Amen.
• (7) F. 449.
  • (The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere): And bycause I have loste the very mater of Shevalere de Charyot I depart frome the tale of sir Launcelot and here I go unto the Morte Arthur, and that caused sir Aggravayne. And here on the othir syde folowyth the moste pyteuous tale of the Morte Arthure Saunz Gwerdon par le shyvalere sir Thomas Malleorré, knyght. Jesu, ayedé ly par voutre bone mercy! Amen.

The last of these passages is in a category of its own: it forms a link with the work which follows (The Morte Arthur) and suggests no interruption in the process of writing. Nor are the second and third explicits of any great significance, since they may well have been inserted in the course of continuous composition. The remaining four, however, have an unmistakable air of finality: two of them (1 and 4) contain an appeal for ‘good deliverance’ or ‘good recovery’; in the other two (5 and 6) the author gives his name and appeals for God's mercy. No doubt the works to which these endings were attached may eventually have been combined—either by the author or by a scribe—into a composite ‘book’, but each work must originally have been conceived and written as a distinct ‘volume’.

It was probably for this reason that Malory's romances were allowed to retain certain peculiarities which would have been inadmissible in a continuous narrative. It has often been remarked that some of his characters appear as fully fledged knights before they are born, while some others reappear after their deaths. Tristram is an example of the former anomaly: he is a prominent character in Caxton's Book VII, although his birth is not related until Book VIII. Breunis Saunz Pity, on the other hand, is killed in Book VII and returns to life in the subsequent books. Arthur's expedition to Rome is related twice: first, at great length, in Book V, and again, much more briefly and in a different context, in Book XX. The story of Lancelot is split into two groups of episodes—Book VI and Books XVIII-XIX—but the first group refers to a later period of his life than the second. Similar incongruities occur throughout the collection; their most significant feature is that they are never found within any one of Malory's romances, but invariably between two different works separated by at least one of the explicits. Hence they are due not to any habit on Malory's part of contradicting himself, but to the fact that he regarded each of his works as an independent ‘tale’ or ‘book’ and did not think it necessary to make them consistent with one another.

When these ‘noble volumes’ fell into Caxton's hands he realized that, as a matter of practical expediency, he had to make them into a single ‘book of King Arthur’, not only for reasons of editorial economy, but because in such a form the work would best answer the demand of ‘many noble and dyvers gentylmen of thys royame of Englond’ for a ‘history of the moost renomed crysten kyng, fyrst and chyef of the thre best crysten and worthy, Kyng Arthur’. He was thus led by force of circumstance to attempt a ‘book’ in the modern sense, i.e. a homogeneous literary composition ‘of sufficient length to make a volume’.⁴⁶ Malory's collection seemed at first sight uniform enough to lend itself to such an experiment, and when Caxton undertook to print it he probably did not suspect the difficulties he was to encounter. His first stumbling-block must have been the farewell to the reader signed by the ‘knight-prisoner Sir Thomas Malleorre’. Not only was the reference to imprisonment undesirable in a book intended for moral edification, but the passage in which it occurred betrayed the composite character of the series. Naturally enough Caxton deleted the whole passage and dealt in the same way with all subsequent explicits except the very last which conveniently wound up the collection. It is, moreover, highly probable that the wording of this last explicit suggested to Caxton his most ingenious device: that of publishing the book under one general title. Malory clearly referred to the last of his romances: here is the ende of the deth of Arthur; and neither Caxton nor anyone who saw Malory's ending could think that it applied to any other work. Nothing daunted, Caxton added a colophon saying, thus endeth this noble and joyous book entytled le morte Darthur. That this was inappropriate as a general description of the various stories about Arthur and his knights he knew full well, and to make it more acceptable he composed his famous apology: ‘Notwythstondyng it treateth of the byrth, lyf, and actes of the sayd kyng Arthur, of his noble knyghtes of the Round Table, theyr mervayllous enquestes and adventures, th'achyevyng of the Sangreal, and in th'ende the dolorous deth and departyng out of thys world of them al.’

The subterfuge proved successful. Ever since Caxton's time Malory's works have been published as a single work and considered not only ‘long enough to make a volume’, but continuous enough to claim a unity of design and structure. True, only nineteenth-century editors have allowed themselves to be misled by the title Le Morte Darthur: Wynkyn de Worde (1498 and 1529), Copland (1557), East (c. 1585), and Stansby (1634) had consistently rejected it, and the first to use it after Caxton was F. Haslewood in his 1816 reprint of Stansby's text. In the following year Southey had the good sense to describe the work by the list of contents which in Caxton's colophon follows the word Notwythstondyng, but although his example was followed in Dent's edition of 1893-4, all the modern ‘standard’ texts (Wright, Strachey, Sommer, Gollancz, Pollard) have confidently adopted Caxton's fanciful heading with occasional attempts to correct its grammar. This in itself is immaterial. But it is an indication of the extent to which Caxton's stratagem has affected the modern conception of his ‘noble book’. It has been assumed that the author of each of its component parts was responsible for the attempt to combine them into a single work, and on the strength of this he has been praised by some and blamed by others in a way which now seems totally irrelevant. In his admirable essay on Malory Sir Edmund Chambers points out some defects in the ‘structure’ of the Morte Darthur and suggests that Malory ‘would have done better to have left the Tristan alone’.⁴⁷ The late R. W. Chambers, while admitting that much of the charm of Malory lies in the ‘variety of ideals animating the different stories which he has taken over’, remarks that ‘this variety does not make for elaborate or consistent drawing of characters’.⁴⁸ At the other end of the scale Malory's readers have endeavoured, with varying degrees of success, to find in the Morte Darthur a dramatically developed plot⁴⁹ and to credit Malory with the intention of producing an epic of Arthur—a vast composition commemorating the rise and fall of Arthur's kingdom and thus presenting, as Andrew Lang puts it, a ‘very complete and composite picture of a strangely inherited ideal’.⁵⁰ Saintsbury even goes so far as to say that although sometimes Malory ‘may put in what we do not want’ (sic), ‘what is certain is that he, and he only in any language, makes of this vast assemblage of stories one story, and one book’.⁵¹

In writing this Saintsbury, ‘Malory's keenest advocate’,⁵² was far from realizing that he was paying a compliment to Caxton, not to Malory. Nor did it ever occur to him or to anyone else that if this view of the Morte Darthur were correct, most of what Malory wrote would be irrelevant and useless. For judged as a continuous composition, the work would have been ‘better’ not only without the Tristan, but without at least five of the eight romances. Their raison d'être is precisely what has been consistently denied them: the distinctive character of each romance. Caxton thought he could improve on them by using the ‘simple cunning’ of a practical-minded publisher, and it is only fair to say that the appearance of continuity which he gave them enhanced their popularity both in his own time and after. But what Malory's romances have gained from the lucky discovery at Winchester, though it might not have satisfied the ‘noble and divers gentylmen of thys royame’ in Caxton's day, has for us an attraction of a higher order. For instead of a single work subordinate to an imaginary principle of ‘structure’, we now have before us a series of works reflecting in an ever-changing panorama of incident and character a genuine variety of narrative forms and fancies. And while this makes their ‘assemblage’ less harmonious, it brings out a diversity and richness of tone expressive of the author's design and true to the nature of each of his ‘noble volumes’.

2. THE SEQUENCE OF MALORY'S ‘VOLUMES’

The foregoing account of Caxton's part in the production of the Morte Darthur⁵³ raises a new problem: if there is neither unity nor continuity in the series of works which Caxton published under that title, there is no need to assume that they were all written in the order in which he placed them. True, the order is the same in Caxton and in the Winchester MS., and was presumably the same in their common source; but that source, as our textual data clearly show,⁵⁴ was not Malory's own manuscript: each of his works must have been transcribed more than once before any of them reached either Caxton or the Winchester scribe, and their arrangement in the two extant texts may easily be due to some intervening compiler.⁵⁵ What, then, was their original sequence?

A possible approach to the problem is suggested by Malory's habit of reproducing passages and scenes from his own work—a curious variety of amplificatio.⁵⁶ An example is found in an episode of the Tale of King Arthur. An earl offers hospitality to Marhalt and asks him to challenge a redoubtable giant who ‘destroys all his lands’. Marhalt wonders whether the giant would fight on horseback or on foot. ‘There may no horse bear him’, says the earl, and Marhalt, leaving his own horse behind, sets out the next morning to fight the giant. Their battle is described thus:

So on the morne sir Marhaute prayde the erle that one of his men myght brynge hym where the gyaunte was, and so one brought hym where he syghe hym sytte undir a tre of hooly, and many clubbis of ironne and gysernes about hym. So this knyght dressed hym to the gyaunte and put his shylde before hym, and the gyaunte toke an ironne club in his honde, and at the fyrste stroke he clave syr Marhautis shelde. And there he was in grete perell, for the gyaunte was a sly fyghter. But at the laste sir Marhaute smote of his ryght arme aboven the elbow. Than the gyaunte fledde and the knyght affter hym, and so he drove hym into a watir.

All that Malory's French source can offer by way of parallel to this episode is a story of how Gaheriet fought with a giant to rescue a damsel. But the circumstances and the nature of the battle are entirely different: Gaheriet strikes the giant down, rides over his body crushing it with the horse's hoofs, and, finding that he is still alive, cuts off his head.⁵⁷ To discover the real model of Malory's description we must turn from his ‘French book’ to his own work, the Tale of the Noble King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius, and the curious account of Arthur's fight with the giant:

‘Now, felow,’ seyde Arthure, ‘wouldist thow ken me where that carle dwellys?’ … ‘Sir conquerrour’, seyde the good man, ‘beholde yondir two fyrys, for there shalte thou fynde that carle.’ … Than he paste forth to the creste of the hylle and syghe⁵⁸ where he sate at his soupere alone. … And therwith sturdely he sterte uppon his leggis and caughte a clubbe in his honde all of clene iron. Than he swappis at the kynge with that kyd⁵⁹ wepyn. He cruysshed downe with the club the coronal⁶⁰ doune to the colde erthe. The kynge coverde hym with his shylde and rechis a boxe evyn infourmede⁶¹ in the myddis of his forehede, that the slypped blade unto the brayne rechis. Yet he shappis at sir Arthure, but the kynge shuntys⁶² a lytyll and rechis hym a dynte hyghe uppon the haunche. … With that the warlow⁶³ wrath Arthure undir, and so they waltyrde and tumbylde over the craggis and busshys … and they never leffte tyll they fylle⁶⁴ thereas the floode marked.

The analogies are obvious. They are found both in the general trend of the two passages and in every important detail, including the landmarks which help the hero to find the giant (‘firs’ in the second passage, ‘holly tree’ in the first) and the manner of the giant's death. Just as Arthur coverde hym with his shylde, so Marhalt put his shylde before hym, and although Marhalt puts his opponent to flight while Arthur drags him down the hill, in both cases the giant meets with his doom ‘in a watir’. But perhaps the two most striking points in the first passage are the vision of many clubbis of ironne, a typically epic weapon which Malory could not have found mentioned in any French romance, but which figures prominently in his adaptation of the alliterative Morte Arthure, and the alliterative phrase syghe hym sitte, paralleled by syghe where he sate in the second passage.

Since the parallelism between the two descriptions cannot be accidental, either one must have been modelled on the other or both must have had the same source. Now the source of the second passage is known: it is the English alliterative Morte Arthure. If it were also the source of the first, it would be impossible to account for the fact that in both cases Malory has made exactly the same choice of words and phrases and has adapted them in the same way (cf. where he syghe hym sytte in the first passage, syghe where he sate in the second, and the syghte had he rechide how unsemly þat sott satt sowpande in the Morte Arthure). The only reasonable theory seems to be that the first passage was modelled on the second, i.e. on Malory's own version of the Tale of Arthur and Lucius. This work must, therefore, have been written before the Tale of King Arthur.

A similar test applied to Malory's other works will show that they were all written after the Tale of King Arthur. The Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot (Caxton's Book VI) refers to ‘Sir Pelleas the good knight’ as one of the three strongest knights, the other two being Tristram and Lancelot. The character of Sir Pelleas occurs in none of the extant branches of Arthurian romance except the Suite du Merlin⁶⁵ which Malory used for his Tale of King Arthur: until he had read it he could not have thought of the obscure ‘chevalier Pellias’ as being the equal of Tristram and Lancelot. In the Tale of Gareth the hero's mother is erroneously called Morgawse;⁶⁶ the error goes back to a passage peculiar to Malory's adaptation of the French Merlin (The Tale of King Arthur). He resorts to this work again in the Book of Tristram, in the Grail, and in the Book of Launcelot and Guinevere.⁶⁷ As for his Morte Arthur, both the arrangement of the narrative and one of the explicits quoted above⁶⁸ make it clear that it was a continuation of the Book of Launcelot and Guinevere.⁶⁹

If, then, the Tale of King Arthur is later than the Tale of Arthur and Lucius and earlier than the rest of Malory's romances, the Tale of Arthur and Lucius must be his first extant work and the Tale of King Arthur his second. There is no means of ascertaining whether the next in order was the Launcelot or the Gareth, but it is clear that these were followed by the Tristram and the Grail and that the Book of Launcelot and Guinevere and the Morte Arthur, completed in 1469 or 1470, were written last.⁷⁰

These few facts added to the knowledge we now have of Malory's sources make it possible to see more clearly how he built up his collection. He began by adapting an English poem which appealed to him mainly because of its bearing on the events of his own time. He did not treat it as a branch of a cycle, but as material for a self-contained work, and as soon as he reached the heroic climax of the story—Arthur's victory over the Romans—he brought it to an end, dismissing the traditional unhappy ending. This was his Tale of the Noble King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius,⁷¹ the least ‘romantic’ of his works and the least refined, but one which had a decisive influence both on the formation of his style and on his subsequent choice of material. There is every reason to believe that it induced him to ‘seek other books of Arthur’ and to ‘draw from the French’ part of the Suite du Merlin, a voluminous collection of stories about Arthur, ranging from his coronation to the most fanciful exploits of his knights. Malory was clearly sensitive to the appeal of this type of roman d'aventures; but he could not fully accept its ‘cyclic’ structure, and in his Tale of King Arthur he evolved, as it were by reaction, his own narrative technique. When, after an interval, he came back to his task with The Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot and The Tale of Sir Gareth he was able to apply that technique with great effect, though on a comparatively small scale. In the next stage he turned to the Tristram and the Grail and set out, as he himself tells us, to rewrite in English the French Tristan de Léonois and the Queste del Saint Graal. In extent this was his most ambitious enterprise; but in point of method it was less original than any of his previous adaptations from the French. Its chief importance lay in the fact that the very nature of the sources he had to use suggested to him a new approach to the art of writing. In spite of the vast amount of spurious episodic matter which had clustered round their basic themes, the French prose Tristan and the Queste del Saint Graal had preserved the essentials of the two greatest medieval stories and something of their original significance. Through these two romances, and with their aid, Malory was able to discover what he needed above all: his own method of conveying sentiment through fiction. And so his last two works—The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere and the Morte Arthur—could reach a degree of independence and convincingness unparalleled in his earlier books, or indeed in any earlier prose version of Arthurian romance, and retain their appeal long after their models had been forgotten.

THE WRITER'S PROGRESS

1. STYLE

Perhaps the most significant conclusion to be drawn from the previous chapter is that Malory began his work with the Tale of King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius. It would be tempting to dwell at length on the implications of this change in the traditional idea of the order of his romances. For it suggests that, contrary to the generally accepted view, he first became familiar with the Arthurian legend not through ‘French books’ but through an English poem, the alliterative Morte Arthure. The epic mood of the fourteenth-century poet, so characteristic of the alliterative revival, his combination of stirring realism with heroic feeling, and above all the consistent archaism of metre, manner, and spirit—these were indeed worthy models for a writer who endeavoured to raise the romantic tales of Arthur to a heroic level. That Malory's whole conception of his theme was formed under the influence of the English epic of Arthur now seems certain, and it is a new and helpful sidelight on the continuity of the English tradition that by the time Malory came to ‘reduce’ his French books into English his attitude to Arthurian knighthood had been fixed in his mind by his reading of native poetry.

No less decisive was the effect of the alliterative poem on the formation of his style. Historians of English prose have put him ‘out of the general line of progress’, both as regards matter and form.⁷² ‘The world to which the Morte Darthur belongs’, writes R. W. Chambers, ‘had passed away before the book was finished’, and ‘there was little room for Arthurian knighthood in the England of the Paston Letters’.⁷³ And yet—‘such is the power of style that Malory, at the eleventh hour, was able to go over the old ground, and make it live once more’. Is this revival of a long-forgotten world to be regarded simply as a miracle performed by a genius without antecedents, by a writer ‘out of the general line of progress’, who wrought his language in the void? Such a thought would be contrary to all we know of the history of prose, for whatever individual greatness it may achieve, literary prose, unlike poetry, is, in the noblest sense of the term, an ‘institution’, ‘part of the equipment of a civilization, part of its heritable wealth, like its laws, or its system of schooling, or its tradition of skilled craftsmanship’.⁷⁴ This view has been corroborated by the emphasis recently placed on the continuous development of English prose from the earliest times to the Renaissance. Yet the critic to whom we owe the best account of the problem finds no room for Malory in the lineage of English writers and leaves him in complete, if enviable, isolation. The achievements of Peacock, of Fortescue, of Tyndale and Coverdale, and the succession of translations of the Bible closed by the Authorized Version of 1611 can all be properly understood ‘when we see them against the continuous background of English devotional prose’;⁷⁵ but no such background exists for Malory. Nor can he claim the universal heritage of Latin diction and syntax—the training-ground of most of his contemporaries. How, then, does he succeed in the solitary task of producing ‘as finished an instrument in its way as any prose the sixteenth century can show, but with the freshness of the early world still upon it’?⁷⁶

To this there was no answer as long as it was thought that Malory began his work with a translation from the French. But once it is realized that his first experience as a prose writer was an adaptation of an English poem, the possibility of accounting for what he did will appear far less remote. His object in adapting the Morte Arthure was to rewrite an alliterative poem in a form accessible to fifteenth-century readers. To do this it was not enough to reduce the amount of alliteration and modernize the vocabulary. The whole texture of the poem had to undergo a radical change, similar to that which occurred in the transition from verse to prose romances in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France. Of the numerous devices which facilitated this transition one was of particular importance: the reduction of rhetorical matter. It is perhaps best illustrated by the opening paragraph of the French prose romance entitled Le Chevalier au Cygne. The author states that he has unrhymed his verse original for the sake of brevity: poetry, he adds, is ‘very enjoyable and very beautiful, but very lengthy’.⁷⁷ At first one may wonder why he should blame poetry for its ‘length’ when it is well known that in nearly every case the prose renderings of early poems far exceeded them in volume. The answer is that by ‘length’ he means something other than volume. What he dislikes is not the size of the poem, but the rhetorical elaboration which had become an integral part of the art of poetry. To ‘shorten’ a work means to him and to his contemporaries to relieve it of such unnecessary burdens as ornaments of description, the artificial lengthening of speeches, and the inflated phraseology used in descriptions and speeches alike. The total length of the work need not be reduced; it may in fact be considerably increased by the addition of fresh narrative material, provided that the story is told, as another anonymous prose writer puts it, ‘in clearer and more intelligible language’.⁷⁸

Malory no doubt thought likewise, for his problem was similar to that which confronted all late medieval prose writers. The stylistic and narrative patterns of the Morte Arthure must have appeared to him too ornate and too diffuse—‘too lengthy’, as the author of Le Chevalier au Cygne would have said. This type of ‘length’ could not have been remedied by sheer omission of complete passages. The simplification had to be both more radical and less mechanical: it had to be applied on a strictly selective principle to the entire text of the poem. And the most remarkable result of it was that the word-material of the alliterative epic aided by the author's instinctive choice produced a new and powerful prose style, a style ‘too straightforward to be archaic’,⁷⁹ and yet ‘just old enough to allure and mark the age’.⁸⁰

Placed side by side with its source, the newly discovered text of Malory's Tale of King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius reveals the nature of this process and the subtle working of the stylistic genius which directed its application. A few examples will suffice.⁸¹ As Arthur approaches the walls of a beleaguered city, ‘without shield save his bare harness’, he is warned by Sir Florence that it is folly to face the enemy unarmed. In Malory's version this is his reply:

‘And thow be aferde’, seyde kyng Arthure, ‘I rede the faste fle, for they wynne no worshyp of me but to waste their toolys. For there shall never harlot⁸² have happe, by the helpe of oure Lord, to kylle a crowned kynge that with creyme is anoynted.’

The ‘longer’ version—that of the poem—is as follows:

‘Ife thow be rade’, quod the kyng, ‘I rede thow ryde vttere,
Lesse þat þey rywe the with theire rownnd wapyn.
Thow arte bot a fawntkyn, no ferly me thynkkys!
Þou will be flayede for a flye, þat on thy flesche lyghttes.
I am nothynge agaste, so me Gode helpe!
Þof siche gadlynges be greuede, it greues me bot lyttill;
Thay wyn no wirchipe of me bot wastys theire takle;
They sall wante, or I weende, I wage myn hevede!
Sall neuer harlotte haue happe, thorowe helpe of my Lorde,
To kyll a corownde kynge, with kyrsom enoynttede!’(83)

Out of the ten lines of the poem Malory has only taken four, but with what a remarkable sense of stylistic emphasis! The choice alone suffices for his purpose, and he need make no change in the lines he borrows: they fully convey the sense of the speech, and more. And thow be aferde I rede the faste fle does not only cover the meaning of the first six lines, but gains enormously from being relieved of epic ornamentation. Malory's Arthur need not say that he is ‘nothynge agaste’; his fearlessness is brought home more forcibly by his proud retort to the coward. Nor is there any room in Malory's context for such nerveless phrases as I wage myn hevede. And while the last two lines of the speech, which bear the full weight of Arthur's unflinching faith in the sanctity of his crown, remain intact, they are thrown into greater relief: in the Morte Arthure they are but the tail end of a long discourse; in Malory they sound like a call to arms.

But the selection of complete lines is by no means Malory's only method of ‘reduction’. Some of his sentences consist of words and phrases which in his source are scattered over long passages. When, after his victory over the giant, Arthur divides the spoils among his people he says: ‘Looke that the goodys be skyffted,⁸⁴that none playne of his parte’—a perfect example of Malory's sentence-structure with its characteristic cadence and crisp idiom. And yet it is but a mosaic of words borrowed from half a dozen lines of the poem:

          He somond þan þe schippemen scharpely þeraftyre
To schake furthe with þe schyremen to schifte þe gudez:
‘All þe myche tresour, þat traytour had wonnen,
To comouns of the contré, clergye and oþer,
Luke it be done and delte to my dere pople,
That none pleyn of theire parte, o peyne of ȝour lyfez.’(85)

Used in this way the words and phrases lifted from the text cannot always preserve their original meaning, but from the prose writer's point of view this is not too high a price to pay for brevity. Malory's doleful dragon which Arthur sees in his dream is a contraction of two alliterative lines in which the two words stand far apart,⁸⁶ while the description of the ‘careful widow’ who ‘sate sorowyng’ is but an adaptation of a passage relating how the king greeted the widow with sittande wordez.⁸⁷ Such transpositions are, however, much less frequent than genuine abridgement, by means of which words and phrases selected from the poem are woven into the most astonishing tissue of pure and straightforward prose. Than the kynge yode up to the creste of the cragge, and than he comforted hymself with the colde wynde. Few masters of style have matched the descriptive force of this sentence. But to see how it was made we need but glance at the corresponding lines in the Morte Arthure:

The kyng coueris þe cragge wyth cloughes full hye,
To the creste of the clyffe he clymbez on lofte;
Keste vpe hys vmbrere, and kenly he lukes,
Caughte of þe colde wynde, to comforthe hym seluen.

Every now and then, lulled by the cadence of the poem, Malory reproduces complete groups of three or four lines with few, if any, alterations; but he never abandons his real task for more than a brief spell. With a persistence amounting to genius he manufactures out of a somewhat common-place web of alliterative verse a language endowed with a simplicity and power all its own. And when towards the end of the Tale he abandons his source, his prose retains all the robust eloquence of epic and all the natural freshness of a living idiom:

‘Ye say well’, seyde the kynge, ‘for inowghe is as good as a feste, for to attemte God overmuche I holde hit not wysedom. And therefore make you all redy and turne we into Ingelonde.’ Than there was trussynge of harneyse with caryage full noble, and the kynge toke his leve of the holy fadir the Pope and patryarkys and cardynalys and senatoures full ryche, and leffte good governaunce in that noble cité and all the contrays of Rome for to warde and to kepe on payne of deth, that in no wyse his commaundement be brokyn.

It has been said of Goldsmith that he was ‘Augustan and also sentimental and rural without discordance’, because he had ‘the old and the new in such just proportion that there was no conflict’.⁸⁸ It is a similar kind of harmony that we find in Malory when by a judicious arrangement of word-material he creates the new out of the old.⁸⁹ The secret of it escapes analysis; but in the light of the new text of Malory we can at least observe the beginning and the end of the process, gauge the distance between them, and so approach, with a keener sense of its magnitude, the unexpounded miracle of style.⁹⁰

2. STRUCTURE

Next after the Tale of Arthur and Lucius came the Tale of King Arthur—a retrospective account of the early history of Arthur's kingdom, from the maryage of Kynge Uther unto Kyng Arthure that regned aftir hym and ded many batayles. But when Malory opened his first ‘French book’ in the hope of finding some material for the story, he encountered difficulties for which the simple technique he had so far acquired offered no solution. His English source was, in spite of its ‘length’, a straightforward account of certain pseudo-historical episodes placed in their natural order, and it was comparatively easy, by a mere process of ‘reduction’, to quicken its pace and remove some of the ornaments of epic style. The problem Malory now had to face was of a totally different kind.

His French romance was a combination of the prose Merlin with its sequel, the Suite du Merlin.⁹¹ Both were late compositions, the last in date of all the branches of the Arthurian prose Cycle. Their main attraction for Malory was that they supplied the natural beginning of the Arthur story by elaborating some of the episodes recorded in the chronicles of Wace and Geoffrey of Monmouth. But he soon found to his dismay that their treatment of the chronicle material was singularly unlike what he had seen in the Morte Arthure; for not only did they lengthen the pseudo-historical matter by the addition of episodes completely foreign to it, but their method of presenting these episodes was anything but normal. Adventures were piled up one upon the other without any apparent sequence or design, and innumerable personages, mostly anonymous, were introduced in a wild succession. Every now and then they stopped to lay lance in rest and overthrow one another, and then swore eternal friendship and rode away.⁹² The purpose of their encounters and pursuits was vague, and their tasks were seldom fulfilled: they met and parted and met again, each intent at first on following his particular ‘quest’, and yet prepared at any time to be diverted from it to other adventures and undertakings. As a result, ‘the basic thought became subsidiary, the episode increasingly prominent, the slowing of the action defeated any attempt to reach an end, and the story lost all purpose’. In these words Gustav Gröber described half a century ago the methods used by medieval prose writers.⁹³ But there is reason to believe that at a much earlier date their methods were condemned on similar grounds, and the often quoted remark of the Canon of Toledo in Don Quixote remains to this day the most characteristic expression of the modern view: ‘I have never yet’, he says, ‘seen a book of chivalry complete in all its parts, so that the middle agrees with the beginning and the end with the beginning and the middle; but they seem to construct their stories with such a multitude of members as though they meant to produce a monster rather than a well-proportioned figure.’⁹⁴

Few readers of the French Arthurian Cycle would disagree with this criticism.⁹⁵ Still fewer would wonder whether neglect of structure in the modern sense of the term necessarily implied the absence of a method of composition. Gröber may have blamed the cyclic works for their lack of a Grundgedanke, and Cervantes may have thought them ‘monstrous’ because they formed no consistent whole; but it remains to be seen whether the criteria of a Grundgedanke or of a ‘well-proportioned figure’ are not in this case misleading, and whether behind the apparent deformity and incoherence of the prose romances there is not to be found an architectural design so unlike our own conception of a story that we inevitably fail to perceive it. One a priori reason for suspecting the existence of such a design is that if each branch of the Cycle were a mere collection of episodes haphazardly put together, the Cycle would naturally fall into as many independent sections. In reality, the reverse is the case: none of the branches of the Cycle can be conveniently subdivided, and no subdivisions exist in the manuscripts. Apart from certain interpolations which can easily be detached from the main body of the work, few of the episodes, if any, appear as self-contained units. ‘Aucune aventure’, writes Ferdinand Lot, ‘ne forme un tout se suffisant à lui-même. D'une part, des épisodes antérieurs, laissés provisoirement de côté, y prolongent des ramifications; d'autre part, des épisodes subséquents, proches ou lointains, y sont amorcés.’⁹⁶ Judged by our standards this would seem to be a strange paradox. On the one hand, the prose romances are admittedly the very negation of the classical principle of composition: the beginning does not ‘agree’ with the middle, nor the middle with the end; on the other, they seem to obey the agelong rule that no part can be removed without affecting the whole. There must, then, be something which binds them together, invisible though it is to the modern eye: some peculiar device which, while making the various parts of the Cycle inseparable from one another, fails to weld them into a harmonious whole.

Perhaps the easiest way to discover the nature and the working of this device is to draw an analogy with the technique of tapestry. Just as in a tapestry each thread alternates with an endless variety of others, so in the early prose romances of the Arthurian group numerous seemingly independent episodes or ‘motifs’ are interwoven in a manner which makes it possible for each episode to be set aside at any moment and resumed later. No single stretch of such a narrative can be complete in itself any more than a stitch in a woven fabric; the sequel may appear at any moment, however long the interval. But the resemblance goes no further, for unlike the finished tapestry a branch of a prose romance has as a rule no natural conclusion; when the author brings it to a close he simply cuts the threads at arbitrarily chosen points, and anyone who chooses to pick them up and interweave them in a similar fashion can continue the work indefinitely. Hence the ‘multitude of members’ and the prodigious growth of the Arthurian tradition enlarged at each stage of its progress by continuations of earlier works.

The origin of this process may be sought in the combination of two rules of literary composition laid down by contemporary theorists: the ordo artificialis and the digressio. The former goes back to classical rhetoric;⁹⁷ the latter is a characteristically medieval invention and has no exact parallel in classical treatises. Geoffroi de Vinsauf was one of the first to insist on its usefulness and to distinguish two kinds of digressio: Unus modus digressionis est quando digredimur in materia ad aliam partem materiae; alius modus, quando digredimur a materia ad aliud extra materiam.⁹⁸ It is doubtful whether Geoffroi de Vinsauf or any other medieval rhetorician had in mind anything approaching the methods of thirteenth-century romance writers,⁹⁹ but as long as theoretical precepts were applied literally, without much regard for their purpose,¹⁰⁰ the advice to proceed both ad aliam partem materiae by way of anticipation, and ad aliud extra materiam by way of digression proper, combined as it was with the various prescriptions of the ordo artificialis,¹⁰¹ could well induce the romance writers to build up their narrative in such a way that each episode appeared to be a digression from the previous one and at the same time a sequel to some earlier unfinished story. There are good examples of this technique in the poems of Chrestien de Troyes; in the works of his successors—particularly in the continuations of his Conte del Graal—it assumes still greater importance; and with the romances centring on the Lancelot-Graal it asserts itself as the dominating feature of the genre.¹⁰²

Malory's handling of his sources shows how strongly he disliked this type of composition. With varying degrees of success, but with remarkable consistency, he endeavoured to do two things: to reduce the bulk of the stories and to alter their arrangement. Of the processes he employed the simplest was mechanical reduction: he seldom reproduced an episode in full and frequently omitted entire sections of his source.¹⁰³ More elaborate was the device of ‘telescoping’: whereas the French prose writers deliberately complicated their material by duplicating episodes and inventing new characters, Malory often simplified his by making either two different scenes or two characters into one.¹⁰⁴ But his most successful and historically most significant contribution to the technique of the prose tale was his attempt to substitute for the method of ‘interweaving’ a more modern treatment of narrative.

The source of his Tale of King Arthur contained three main groups of episodes interspersed with various adventures of Arthur's knights: Arthur's wars against the enemies of his kingdom, the life and death of Merlin the enchanter, and the treacherous machinations of Morgan le Fay, Arthur's half-sister. How these three themes were interwoven with

Sunt hujus morbi medici: speculeris in illis;
Invenietur ibi qua purges luce tenebras,
Quo pede transcurras salebras, qua clave recludas
Ostia, quo digito solvas nodosa. Patentem
Ecce viam!

one another may be seen from the following brief summary of the middle portion of the story (Huth Merlin, ff. 184-220):

While Merlin and Nivene—‘la damoisele chaceresse’, with whom Merlin is in love—are visiting the land of King Ban of Benoic, they discover the Lake of Diana. Merlin tells Nivene how the great huntress disposed of her unfortunate lover Faunus by shutting him up in a tomb, and how she was afterwards punished for it. He also tells Nivene that Arthur is in imminent danger from his foes. Nivene urges him to return to Great Britain and rescue the king. Meanwhile Arthur repulses the attack of five hostile kings who have invaded his lands and massacred his men. One day he goes hunting in the forest of Camelot with Urience and Accolon; as they are busy quartering the stag by the side of a river, they see a beautifully decorated ship approaching the bank. Twelve damsels welcome them on board and offer them hospitality. The next morning the three hunters find themselves transported by enchantment to three different places: Urience to his own bed, Arthur to a prison, and Accolon to a meadow, where he is met by a dwarf who brings him Arthur's sword, Excalibur. Arthur's fellow prisoners tell him that their captor, Domas, would release them if he could find among them a champion ready to fight his brother. Arthur takes up the challenge. Nivene having rid herself of Merlin by shutting him up in a rock, ‘qu'il ne fu puis nus qui peust veoir Merlin ne mort ne vif’, goes to watch Arthur's battle with Domas's brother. But Morgan le Fay has in the meantime substituted Accolon for Arthur's original opponent. Armed with Arthur's sword, Accolon at first proves the stronger, but Nivene casts a spell upon him and makes him drop the magic weapon. Arthur picks it up and defeats Accolon with a few strokes. Morgan then attempts to murder in their sleep first her husband Urience, then Arthur. The former is saved by Morgan's own son, Ivain, while the latter escapes by waking up. Morgan and her men are put to flight, and Ivain is banished from the court: ‘Car certes’, says Arthur, ‘je ne porroie pas cuidier que vous peuussiés estre preudom ne loial, pour le dyable dont vous estes issus.’ This is the beginning of a new series of adventures in which Ivain, Gauvain, and Morhout play the leading parts.

It will be observed that the three basic themes alternate here in the following order: Merlin and Nivene (a¹), Arthur's wars (b), Morgan le Fay (c¹), Merlin and Nivene (a²), Morgan le Fay (c²). Now in Malory's account these themes, instead of being interwoven, are separated from one another and related in strict sequence. The order of events is not a¹b c¹a²c², but a¹a²b c¹c²; the three threads of the narrative are unravelled and straightened out so as to form in each case a consistent and self-contained set of adventures. The same process is applied on a smaller scale in each important subdivision of the story. After the story of the magic ship the French source gives a brief account of the situation of the three hunters, Urience, Arthur, and Accolon, on their awakening, and then deals with their particular adventures in the reverse order: Accolon, Arthur, Urience. Malory, on the other hand, first disposes of Urience, then combines two series of Arthur's adventures into one (the awakening and the resolve to fight for Domas), and lastly deals in a similar fashion with Accolon. Thus a simple narrative, with each sequence of events beginning when the other is at an end, is substituted for the elaborate chain of interlocked episodes.

The unravelling of a fabric such as that of the French romance is, however, no easy process, and every now and then, having failed to disentangle the full length of the thread at the proper time, Malory finds himself with the loose end of it on his hands. The story of Morgan le Fay may again be used as an example. In the French version Morgan's attempt to murder Urience is a natural sequel to the adventure of the magic ship. In Malory the connexion is broken, and the scene of the attempted murder is introduced without any reference to its antecedent:

The meanewhyle Morgan le Fay had wente kynge Arthure had bene ded. So on a day she aspyed kynge Uryence lay on slepe on his bedde; than she callyd unto hir a mayden of her counseyle and sayde, ‘Go fecche me my lordes swerde, for I saw never bettir tyme to sle hym than now’.

Malory was well aware that in the original story Morgan le Fay did not discover Urience in his bed by chance ‘on a day’, but caused him to be brought there from the ship in order to murder him. The deliberate removal of the connecting link between the adventure of the ship and the attempted murder shows how anxious Malory was to avoid what the French romance writers valued above all: the impression that each episode either anticipated or continued aliam partem materiae with long intervals of extraneous matter between them. When this had not been achieved by means of a rearrangement of material, that is to say, when one or more elements of a sequence still remained separated from the rest, Malory either omitted them altogether or presented them as independent episodes: the pattern a¹b c¹a²c², if not already simplified by a consistent grouping of its component parts, was reduced to either a¹b c¹ or a¹b c¹d e, thus closely approximating to the modern type of narrative.

The Tale of King Arthur was but the first attempt in this direction, highly characteristic of Malory's attitude to his task, yet hardly comparable to his ultimate achievement. His next two ‘tales’—the Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake and the Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkeney—reveal a real mastery of technique. In the opening chapters of the Noble Tale Lancelot, accompanied by Lionel, starts on his quest of adventures. As they lie asleep under a tree on a hot day there begin two distinct series of episodes: Lionel is captured by Tarquyn, and Lancelot by four queens who keep him prisoner in one of their castles. There Lancelot finds himself faced with the choice of either remaining a prisoner to the end of his days or becoming a paramour of one of the queens. Aided by a damsel he escapes, and to reward her for her service goes to a tournament and defeats the opponents of her father, King Bagdemagus. At this point the French romance introduces a digression equal in length to 500 pages of our text. Malory boldly dismisses it and, determined as he is to keep to the initial episode of his Tale, passes straight on to Lancelot's quest of Lionel: Lancelot kills Lionel's captor, Tarquyn, releases the other prisoners, and to reward another damsel for her assistance disposes of Perys de Foreste Savage, an enemy of knights-errant. Finally he rids the people of the Castle of Tintagel of the tyranny of two giants by cleaving the head of one and cutting the other in two. All this forms a consistent account, with ‘a beginning, a middle and an end’. Some traces of ‘interweavings’ still remain, for Malory cannot altogether dismiss all the allusions, anticipations, and ‘cross-links’ which abound in his source; but he succeeds in disentangling from the mass of material which it contains the outline of a continuous narrative without depriving it of its essentially adventurous character. The result is a roman d'aventures rebuilt in accordance with a new principle of composition, and more palatable to the modern reader than any part of the original Lancelot-Graal.

A similar result was sometimes achieved by the French writers themselves. As the threads of the narrative lengthened and its pattern grew both in size and in complexity, the tendency arose to isolate certain episodes from their context and to treat them as ‘stories in a story’. This was primarily the result of an excessively elaborate use of the ‘tapestry’ technique; but it was also the beginning of a new genre. Each composition as a whole became more and more unwieldy, but its various parts gradually acquired more shape and sequence; and the cohesion which was no longer discernible in the larger works occasionally reappeared in what remained of their component elements. And so by a mere process of internal multiplication the over-developed varieties of medieval romantic fiction gave rise, and eventually yielded their place, to simpler and more enduring forms of narrative art.

There is reason to believe that the source of Malory's Tale of Gareth was an example of this process. It formed a branch of the prose Tristan,¹⁰⁵ but was virtually independent of it. Like Malory's Tale of Gareth it was to all intents and purposes a self-contained account of the progress of a young nobleman who on his arrival at Arthur's court was ridiculed by Kay, the traditional jester, entered Arthur's service as an obscure page, soon distinguished himself by a series of daring exploits, and finally achieved a degree of fame equalled only by Lancelot and Tristram. In the development of prose fiction this was a transition type inasmuch as it still retained some connexion with the romance of which it was a branch. By separating it from the Tristan and giving it an independent place Malory merely went a step farther in the direction suggested by his French models. But the result was a story with a well-circumscribed plot, a real sense of completeness, and a harmonious working out of the central theme; a story which can serve as a genuine example of the technique of a modern tale applied to medieval romance.

From these three works—the Tale of King Arthur the Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake, and the Tale of Sir Gareth of Orkeney—Malory's role in literary history would thus appear to be the very opposite of that which has hitherto been assigned to him. His contribution would seem to consist not in making one story out of a ‘vast assemblage’ of stories, but in breaking up the complicated structure of earlier fiction and in using its fragments for smaller narrative patterns. He no doubt had, as Saintsbury aptly puts it, ‘the sense of grasp, the power to put his finger and to keep it on the central pulse and nerve of the story’.¹⁰⁶ But the ‘story’ should not be taken to mean the entire collection of his works, for neither he nor anyone else familiar with the structural peculiarities of Arthurian romances could have conceived of them as a single whole or attempted to put them together in sufficient shape. What was uppermost in the minds of their authors and readers was not their general design but the opportunity they offered of following innumerable diverging tracks of narrative one after another.¹⁰⁷ Little could have been gained by reducing these to a carefully balanced structure with a strict subordination of all its parts to a single leitmotiv. Malory's conception of his task was more realistic. He did not try, as others have done since, to fuse all his French books into a single Arthurian epic. What he endeavoured to do was to extract from them a series of short and well-defined tales. In so far as he succeeded he found himself in harmony with the general trend of prose fiction. For in the history of prose the natural outcome of cyclic romances was not the long novel of to-day but the nouvelle, or the short novel, of the last centuries of the Middle Ages.¹⁰⁸ Even at a later period the romans à tiroirs—that curious modern replica of the medieval prose cycles¹⁰⁹—did not themselves become novels in the modern sense of the term, but produced, by a process of differentiation, short prose works, each centring on a particular theme or episode.¹¹⁰ The fact that Malory anticipated this development ensured the survival of his rendering of Arthurian romances, just as the inability of French writers to turn the Cycle into a series of nouvelles was one of the causes of its eclipse in France. ‘Au XV^e siècle’, writes Paul Morand, ‘avec Sir Thomas Malory, dans la Morte d'Arthur, la nouvelle sert à traduire, sous une forme portative, ces traditions celtiques et chevaleresques dont l'influence devait être si grande sur Tennyson et les Préraphaélites.’¹¹¹ Barring the erroneous and somewhat contradictory reference to ‘Celtic chivalric traditions’, this remark aptly sums up Malory's position, much more accurately, it may be said, than does Professor E. A. Baker's elaborate account of the ‘growth of Arthurian romance, from its hazy beginnings in myth and folk-lore to its embodiment in a single orderly narrative by Malory’.¹¹² Like Thomas Nash in his Unfortunate Traveller,¹¹³ Malory gives us mere disjectae membra novellae, and for this very reason stands in a direct line of descent from the ‘cyclic’ technique of his medieval predecessors to the individualized nouvelle—the real, if unacknowledged, starting-point of modern fiction.

3. INTERPRETATION

‘Make use of the emotions. Relate the familiar manifestations of them. … These details carry conviction.’

Aristotle, Rhetorica, iii. 16

It is a commonplace of literary history to describe medieval romance as the prototype of the modern novel. Courtly romance writers, we are told, introduced into the realm of fiction the analysis of the mental reactions of the characters to the story and by so doing laid the foundations of the story of ‘character and motive’. ‘There is little incident’, writes W. P. Ker, ‘sensibility has its own way, in monologues by the actors and digressions by the author on the nature of love. It is rather the sentiment than the passions that is here expressed in the “language of the heart”, but however that may be, there are both delicacy and eloquence in the language. The pensive Fénice who debates with herself for nearly two hundred lines in one place (Chrestien de Troyes' Cligès, 4410-4574) is the ancestress of many late heroines.’¹¹⁴ Gaston Paris states the case less enthusiastically but no less strongly. Referring to the immediate successors of Chrestien de Troyes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries he remarks: ‘L'analyse psychologique parfois très fine à laquelle, d'après l'exemple de Chrétien, ils soumettent les sentiments et surtout les conflits de sentiments de leurs personnages, ils l'expriment dans des monologues, souvent d'une subtilité fatigante, d'une forme recherchée et d'une fastidieuse longueur, mais qui souvent aussi joignent à une certaine profondeur une vraie naïveté. Par là ces romans sont les véritables précurseurs du roman moderne.’¹¹⁵ And a more recent critic, Alfons Hilka, asserts with equal conviction that Chrestien's method of characterization through reflective monologues is identical with that used in the modern novel.¹¹⁶

If there is any truth in these statements, two cardinal questions come to mind: how did the poets of the courtly school, with no background of narrative literature other than the epic, come so near the modern conception of the novel? And if the similarity is no mere accident, if one genre is descended from the other, what were the stages of its descent? Neither question can be answered here fully; but as Malory's contribution to the ‘story of character and motive’ can only be seen against the background of these wider issues, it seems necessary to give some account of them, even at the risk of a digression ad aliud extra materiam.

(A) THE ORIGINS OF ‘SENTIMENT’

Perhaps the most obvious difference between Old French epic and romance is that the latter, not content to narrate events, endeavours to interpret them.¹¹⁷ That this procedure should have been adopted in what was essentially a ‘learned’ type of work—and French courtly romance was primarily un genre savant—is not in itself unnatural, but what made it inevitable was the peculiar intellectual background of courtly poets.¹¹⁸ The search for the unexpressed meaning was perhaps the principal feature of twelfth-century thought, almost equally noticeable in all spheres of learning. It may have been considered by some a waste of time to indulge in such subtleties as the attempt to find in the statement that Hyllus was the son of Hercules the inner meaning that a valid argument comes from a bold and vigorous disputant, or in the five vowels the five pleas of the crown, the names of which happened each to have a different vowel in the second syllable;¹¹⁹ interpretation remained none the less the most widely recognized intellectual pursuit. Excellent practice in it was provided by grammatica, the first member of the Trivium, which had pride of place in the schools of Gaul from the seventh century to the eleventh and reigned supreme in the heyday of the school of Chartres, from 1050 to 1150. According to the definition given in the fourth century by Donatus (scientia interpretandi poetas atque historicos et recte scribendi loquendique ratio), repeated almost word for word in the ninth century by Rabanus,¹²⁰ and amplified by John of Salisbury in the twelfth, grammatica was primarily concerned with the elucidation of ancient authors; the proper use of language, both spoken and written, was a means to this end. John of Salisbury's famous chapter De usu legendi et prelegendi shows how the subject was taught at Chartres. Pupils were encouraged above all to develop and perfect the crude substance (rudem materiam) of a story or an argument ‘with such abundance of learning and such elegance of composition and ornament that the work, brought to the highest perfection, seemed as it were the image of all arts’.¹²¹ The practice of grammatica, dulcis secretorum comes, thus instilled in the pupils' minds what few, if any, French epic poets possessed: the habit of expounding and elaborating a narrative or a discourse, of bringing out its significance, and so giving it new weight and attraction.¹²² This was at first a habit of mind; but it soon became a habit of conception, equally prominent in religious and secular writings. The ‘otherworldliness’ of medieval preaching was not an attitude of indifference to physical facts, but a call to see through them: in St. Bernard's words, to conceive of the visible world as ‘full of supernal mysteries, abounding each in its special sweetness, if the eye that beholds be but attentive’;¹²³ and in the opening lines of the twelfth-century Livres des Rois the promise of a similar benefit was held out to readers of any ‘simple’ story:

Servants of God, listen to the story: it is very simple and seems unadorned, but it is full of meaning (sens) and matter. The story is chaff, the meaning wheat; the meaning is the fruit, the story the branch. This book is as a chest in which are locked the hidden things of God.¹²⁴

Applied to narrative poetry, this attitude of mind produced at first a strangely inflated form of explanatory digression such as is found in the early romans d'antiquité: Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe became in its twelfth-century French adaptation a series of redundant soliloquies; and in the French Roman de Troie Achilles, the silent lover of Polyxena, was made to describe at unnecessarily great length the devastating effects of his passion.¹²⁵ But less than two decades later, in the romances of Chrestien de Troyes, the same method led to some truly remarkable results: in recording their reactions to each important turn of events the characters of Chrestien's stories were able to display a subtlety of thought and feeling far beyond any earlier attempts at characterization. The ‘hidden things’, once skilfully revealed, ceased to be a mere subject of school exercises; they became a vital element of a new form of narrative art.

But it is doubtful whether the literary genre thus created would have prospered as it did if it had not inherited at an early stage another feature of contemporary learning. If grammatica can be said to have shown how a given set of incidents could be explained and expanded, rhetorica, the second part of the Trivium, taught poets and story-tellers the proper use of imagination. The discipline which in the later Middle Ages was to be largely reduced to mere stylistic ornamentation¹²⁶ had not at that time lost its original composing function. In a number of important works embodying the doctrine of the rhetoricians from Quintilian onwards the term colores rhetoricae refers, as in Cicero, not so much to formal elaboration as to the ‘treatment of the matter’ from the speaker's or the writer's point of view. There is a significant agreement in this respect between Quintilian and the three great medieval scholars closely connected with the Gallic tradition of rhetoric: Sidonius Apollinaris, Martianus Capella, and John of Salisbury. Sidonius Apollinaris insists on the use of ‘colours’ because they ‘provide boys' themes with pieces to weave in’ and enable the orator to display his talent despite the meagreness of his case.¹²⁷ Martianus Capella in his allegorical description of the seven arts speaks of rhetoric as rerum omnium regina who has shown ‘the power to move men whither she pleases, or whence, to bow them to tears, to incite them to rage, to transform the mien and feeling’.¹²⁸ And John of Salisbury goes so far as to attribute to rhetoric the function normally assumed by dialectica: he uses the term probandi colores in the sense of ‘amplification of proof’, and looks to rhetoric not only for brilliance of style but for means of persuasion.¹²⁹

In their school practices prospective romance writers could learn how to apply these precepts. First they were shown how to paraphrase some speeches in the Aeneid (loci Vergiliani); next came the dictiones ethicae, or soliloquies with which persons in history or mythology could be credited on certain occasions.¹³⁰ The third and most advanced stage of rhetorical training was reached in the controversiae, or disquisitions on general subjects, of which there are many striking examples in the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris.¹³¹ All this was, of course, originally intended for use in discourses, not in works of fiction, but the common confusion between the notion of narratio (‘statement of facts in a discourse’) and ‘narrative’,¹³² which can be traced as far back as Quintilian, helped to transfer to imaginative literature what was in reality a method of declamation, and the process was further facilitated by the fact that, as some passages in Sidonius clearly suggest, declamatio was itself treated as a literary form alongside with the epos tragoediarum, the comoedia, and the satira.¹³³ Nothing seems more natural, therefore, than that rhetorical devices should have been used for purposes of original composition. And so, after having been trained by the grammarians to react in an articulate manner to works of Latin antiquity, romance writers were able to discover from the rhetoricians a still more vital principle of the art they were to practise: the habit of expressing through a fabula or a historia a point of view of their own.

This habit soon became the very essence of courtly romance. Whatever the subject of the narrative, its primary function as conceived by twelfth- and thirteenth-century poets was to serve as an expression of the thoughts and emotions inspired by courtly idealism, to translate in terms of actions and characters the subtle varieties of courtly sentiment and the highly sophisticated code of courtly behaviour. A romance might recall the legendary exploits of King Arthur's knights, or some imaginary event at the court of Byzantium, or again some episode placed in a contemporary French setting; what it primarily endeavoured to do was not to give an impression of life in the lands and the times to which its subject-matter ostensibly belonged, but to use this subject-matter as a means of conveying a new philosophy. Hence its inherent duality and the marked opposition of thought and matter so clearly expressed in the opening passage of Chrestien's Conte de la Charrete:

Matiere et san l'an done et livre
La contesse, et il s'antremet
De panser si que rien n'i met
Fors sa painne et s'antancion.(134)

With a modesty characteristic of contemporary etiquette Chrestien here credits his patroness, Marie de Champagne, with both the matter (matiere) and the spirit (sen) of the work. Matiere and sen are to him the two distinct constituent elements of courtly fiction. Sen is no longer used in the sense in which it is found in the extract from the Livres des Rois quoted above: it is not ‘meaning’ or signification, but the ‘theme’, or ‘purpose’, or ‘intention’ of the work;¹³⁵ not part of a given matter, or a sense inherent in the story, but an idea brought in as it were from outside and expressed through the story, or the way in which the story has been remodelled by the poet to suit his purpose. Just as the colours of rhetoric were a means of developing and conveying the orator's conception of a case,¹³⁶ so sen stands here for the intellectual, emotional, and sometimes material content added by the author in accordance with his own interpretation of the original matter.

This conception of narrative had a far-reaching effect on its evolution. Superimposed as it was on the matiere, the sen was naturally regarded as something extraneous to it and therefore easily replaceable. A further consequence was this typical medieval phenomenon: the frequent recurrence of the same narrative theme with varying and sometimes conflicting ‘colours’ supplied by individual remanieurs. There is in the French twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries romances a striking contrast between the continuity in the transmission of the matiere and the corresponding degree of instability in the position of the sen. Lancelot's sacrifice of his knightly honour in the attempt to save Guinevere from captivity, as described in Chrestien's Conte de la Charrete, has a clear and unequivocal motivation: the service of love must come before all else. When Lancelot has to choose between being driven in a cart like a convict and failing to rescue his lady, he does not hesitate for more than ‘two steps’; but even this momentary hesitation is enough to arouse Guinevere's anger: after rescuing her from Meleagant, Lancelot finds himself rebuked by her in spite of all the humiliations and trials he has faced for her sake, and his grief is the greater because for a long time he does not know, and cannot even guess, the cause of her displeasure. It was only natural that Chrestien's successors should have found this somewhat far-fetched; but while they objected to Chrestien's highly artificial sen, they found his matiere attractive enough to be used again. And so in the next version of the story—the thirteenth-century prose Lancelot—the matiere was reproduced and expanded, while the sen was altered beyond recognition. The Guinevere of the prose romance still rebukes Lancelot: this is part of the matiere. But she rebukes him for a very different reason. She is no longer the haughty lady of Chrestien's story with a logic that makes her actions seem unreal. Instead of blaming Lancelot for his would-be offence against the courtly code, she sends him away because she thinks that she has reason to be jealous. The readers of the prose romance no doubt preferred this simple motive to the one which had prompted Guinevere's action in Chrestien; but judged impartially, it does not blend with the narrative any more effectively than did the original theme. In nearly every important instance the same essential weakness can be observed: the sen, this cherished product of learning, appears as a superstructure, often attractive and significant in itself, but invariably detachable from its foundation.

If, in spite of this, courtly poetry, through its survivals and adaptations, became the ancestor of the psychological novel, it was because the cardinal elements of psychological fiction were there, even though they were lacking in cohesion and unity of purpose, as were the non-harmonized voices before the discovery of plural melody; and perhaps the main importance of Malory's work lies in the fact that it is an example of their gradual harmonization. It was in writing his two longest romances—the Tristram and the Grail—that he discovered and learned the medieval art of reinterpretation and began to discover his own way of blending matter and sentiment; and it was in his last two works—the Book of Launcelot and Guinevere and the Morte Arthur—that he was able to make the component elements of early fiction into an organic whole. This was not only, as Saintsbury and other historians of the novel have described it, a transition ‘from the story of incident to the story of character and motive’; it was a new and significant attempt to overcome an aesthetic anomaly inherent in the very foundations of medieval romance. All that made it possible is part of a process which is well worth our understanding, for it affects the whole development of imaginative literature. In these pages we can do little more than notice its bare outline, and that only so far as it is visible in Malory's great books of Tristram, of the Grail, of Lancelot, and of Arthur.

(B) EXPERIMENTS IN THE USE OF ‘SEN’

Caxton's remark that Malory took his ‘copy’ out of ‘certain books of French’ and ‘reduced it into English’ is a paraphrase of two passages from Malory's book, neither of which was intended to refer to the entire collection of his romances. At the end of the Book of Sir Tristram Malory says that it was ‘drawyn oute of Freynshe’; and he concludes the Tale of the Sankgreal by the words ‘Thus endith the Tale of the Sankgreal that was breffly drawy[n] oute of Freynshe’.¹³⁷ The fact that the author himself only uses the phrase ‘drawn out of French’ in reference to these two works is no mere accident: none of his other compositions is as fully accounted for by its sources, and none can provide a better illustration of the twofold principle of condensed translation.¹³⁸ This is not to say that in ‘reducing’ his Tristram and his Tale of the Sankgreal from the French Malory abandons the narrative technique which he evolved in his earlier works; if anything, he uses more consistently, and on a larger scale, the devices which he had occasion to practise before, such as the telescoping of scenes and characters, the unravelling of interwoven motifs, and the division of large compositions into smaller narrative units. But on the whole he seems to be more inclined than ever before—with the possible exception of the Tale of Arthur and Lucius—to treat his sources as material for translation. His additions are timid in character and few in number. Never in the whole of the Book of Tristram or, for that matter, in the Tale of the Sankgreal does he use his inventive powers as freely as he did at the end of the Tale of King Arthur; nor does he ever select his material with as little respect for the original as he showed in the Tale of Sir Launcelot. Patiently and consistently he ‘draws briefly’ upon the French prose Tristan and the Queste del Saint Graal. Scott's remark that ‘the collection called the Morte Arthur’ was ‘extracted at hazard, and without much art or combination, from the various French prose folios’,¹³⁹ is as true of these two works as it is inapplicable to the others.

But while doing a translator's work, Malory had neither the attitude of mind nor the temperament of a translator. However slight his alterations and additions may appear compared to the bulk of the narrative, they are enough to show that he read his sources with the inquisitiveness of an artist, and that in the process of ‘reducing’ them he was not merely observing their manner: he was gradually and consistently fashioning his own.

One peculiarity of the French Tristan and of the Queste seems to have made a particularly strong and lasting impression on his mind. Practically the whole of the Queste was a series of seemingly simple incidents which served as illustrations of a theological doctrine, and most such incidents were followed, with remarkable regularity, by a discussion of their significance. The prose Tristan was less consistent and correspondingly less monotonous. Its author was on the whole more concerned with the stories he had to tell than with any significance they might possess. But he could neither ignore nor indeed escape the tradition which lay immediately behind his work, the tradition of courtly romance with its characteristic use of direct speech and digression as a means of organizing and elucidating the narrative matter. And so the vast store of material which Malory found in the principal branches of the Arthurian Cycle and in the prose Tristan brought him face to face with the main issue of narrative art: the relation between matter and meaning. In reading the French Tristan and the Queste he realized—perhaps for the first time—that a story was incomplete without some account of its human motives or some emotional content; he also realized that neither the ‘glosses’ nor the themes contained in those two works were necessarily the most appropriate or the most acceptable that could be found. When his English predecessors—the poets who wrote Ywain and Gawain and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—were faced with similar difficulties they generally took the line of least resistance and dismissed the comments which they thought unsuitable without replacing them by their own.¹⁴⁰ They were, as W. P. Ker rightly remarks, ‘plainly unable to follow the French in all the effusive passages’.¹⁴¹ Malory must have experienced the same difficulty. But what he disagreed with was not the ‘effusiveness’ of the French romances, nor indeed their insistence on sentiment; his quarrel was with the content and orientation of some of the ‘effusive passages’ and with the treatment of some of the traditional romantic themes. And so he proceeded, at first very tentatively, but in the end with a genuine sense of purpose, to remodel their sen and amend what Villon would have called their mesfait. The most striking example of his endeavour to reinterpret the story of Tristan and Iseult is his account of how their love began. It will be remembered that in the earliest version of the legend the lovers were the victims of a magic potion which they drank by mistake on their journey from Ireland to Cornwall, where Iseult was to marry King Mark.¹⁴² A later and more rationalistically minded poet, Thomas, seeking to avoid this purely supernatural explanation, added a new beginning: once, while Tristan was still at the court of the King of Ireland, ‘Iseult beheld him with enamoured eyes’; and, in the words of Thomas's German remanieur, Gottfried von Strassburg, ‘everything about him pleased her well, and she approved of him in her heart’.¹⁴³

The author of the French prose romance of Tristan knew both these versions, but adopted neither. In order to account for the love motif he resorted to an expedient which was in keeping with the ‘adventurous’ spirit of his work, but singularly incongruous in the context of a Tristan romance: as Tristan was about to take part in the tournament of the Château de la Lande he realized, according to the prose writer, that another knight, Palomides (Palamedes), was in love with Iseult. Out of sheer love of rivalry he promptly decided to become Iseult's knight.¹⁴⁴ The same story reappears in Malory who knew no other version of it, but with a curious difference: Tristram's rivalry with Palomides, instead of being the motive which prompts Tristram's decision, becomes a mere consequence of his love for Iseult. In a passage which precedes the description of the tournament Malory remarks that Tristram ‘cast great love to La Beale Isode’,

for she was at that tyme the fayrest lady and maydyn of the worlde. And there Tramtryste learned hir to harpe, and she began to have a grete fantasy unto hym.¹⁴⁵

It is not until the next paragraph that we are told how Palomides ‘drew unto La Beale Isode and proffered her many gifts’, and how Tristram ‘espied’ him:

And wete you well sir Tramtryste had grete despyte at sir Palomydes, for La Beale Isode tolde Tramtryste that Palomydes was in wyll to be crystynde for hir sake. Thus was there grete envy betwyxte Tramtryste and sir Palomydes.

In this way the normal sequence of incidents is re-established and the true ‘colour’ restored. The love motif, instead of being a mere adjunct to chivalric contests, becomes once more the dominating theme. Nor is this the only instance of Malory's preference for emotional motivation. The first parting of the lovers,¹⁴⁶ Tristram's madness, his life in the wilderness,¹⁴⁷ his recognition by Isode in the garden of Tintagel, when she begs him to leave her and ‘grant King Mark his will’ in order to save his own life,¹⁴⁸ all these and other similar episodes acquire in Malory's rendering a new significance. They are among his finest contributions to the otherwise uninspired matter of his Book of Sir Tristram, and they do much to relieve its tedium.¹⁴⁹

But perhaps the type of ‘colour’ that Malory uses most effectively is the half-humorous dialogue—his favourite form of narrative ornamentation. Its purpose is the same as that of a digression or a monologue, namely to give the narrative some human interest. Here is one example out of many. Tristram tells Isode that they must both attend a gathering at Arthur's court ‘at Pentecost nexte folowynge’. ‘“Sir”, seyde dame Isode, “and hyt please you, I woll nat be there, for thorow me ye bene marked of many good knyghtes, and that causyth you for to have much more laboure for my sake than nedyth you to have”’—a surprising thought for a courtly lady: instead of encouraging her knight to perform feats of prowess on her behalf she seems to object to any excess of ‘labour for her sake’; she is clearly more concerned about Tristram's safety than about his fighting record. But she is by no means indifferent to his reputation, and when Tristram refuses to go without her (‘Than woll I nat be there but yf ye be there’) she urges him to do his social duty:

‘God deffende’, seyde La Beall Isode, ‘for than shall I be spokyn of shame amonge all quenys and ladyes of astate; for ye that ar called one of the nobelyste knyghtys of the worlde and a knyght of the Rounde Table, how may ye be myssed at the feste? For what shall be sayde of you amonge all knyghtes? “A! se how sir Trystram huntyth and hawkyth, and cowryth within a castell wyth hys lady, and forsakyth us. Alas!” shall som sey, “hyt ys pyté that ever he was knyght, or ever he shulde have the love of a lady.” Also, what shall quenys and ladyes say of me? “Hyt ys pyté that I have my lyff, that I wolde holde so noble a knyght as ye ar frome hys worshyp.”’

‘So God me helpe’, seyde sir Trystram unto La Beall Isode, ‘hyt ys passyngly well seyde of you and nobely counceyled. And now I well undirstonde that ye love me.’¹⁵⁰

Chrestien de Troyes uses a very similar ‘colour’ in his Erec et Enide¹⁵¹ to motivate the subsequent adventures of his hero. Here it has no such purpose. The dialogue is designed merely to throw some light on Isode's character. She is neither the ‘Iseut douloureuse et forte’ of the old poems, nor the sophisticated courtly queen of the French prose romance, but an affectionate and ingenious amie, devoted enough to put Tristram's comfort and safety before excessive bravery, and yet thoughtful enough to protect his and her good name. It is she who begs Tristram, on another occasion, to carry arms when he goes hunting in the forest, a precaution which in the French romance he takes of his own accord.¹⁵² Such details are few and far between; but they suggest important possibilities.

As for the Book of Sir Tristram as a whole, it remains true that in reinterpreting the story in his own way, as each medieval writer had done before him, Malory failed to give it a meaning, a sen, capable of supporting its complex and delicate narrative frame. He failed above all to grasp and bring out the tragic theme, essential to any coherent form of the Tristan legend and still discernible in its prose version.¹⁵³ Mark is Tristan's overlord whom he respects, as he respects the bond of feudal service. ‘Il ne conteste pas’, writes Joseph Bédier, ‘la loi de l'honneur vassalique, il la viole et, la violant, il souffre.’ Without this notion of an involuntary breach of a sacred tie the traditional données of the legend cannot survive. Already in the French prose romance an important change takes place: love, instead of being the cause of an insoluble conflict, becomes the sacred obligation of a knight-errant; from being un pechié (the word in Old French characteristically combines the meanings of ‘sin’ and ‘misfortune’) it becomes a virtue, and the story of Tristan and Iseult degenerates into a much protracted heroic comedy, in which the heroes successfully outwit the villains. Mark, instead of being an intensely human and almost likeable character, turns into a traitor, and the whole moral weight of Arthurian knighthood is thrown against him. In opposing him Tristan violates no sacred trust; he merely upholds his own honour and the rights of ‘true love’. In all this Malory whole-heartedly follows his source; it is with genuine delight that he relates the blissful retirement of the lovers to Joyous Gard and leaves them there at the close of the romance so that, in his favourite phrase, they may live ‘cheerfully’ for ever after. The happy ending is achieved here as in the Tale of King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius by the omission of the concluding portion of the original: ‘Here endyth the secunde boke off Syr Trystram de Lyones whyche drawyn was oute of Freynshe by Sir Thomas Malleorre, knyght, as Jesu be hys helpe. Amen. But here ys no rehersall of the thirde booke.’ The ‘thirde booke’ contained, among other things, the story of the death of the lovers,¹⁵⁴ but Malory prefers to end the work with a picture of their happiness in their peaceful abode: ‘And than sir Trystram returned unto Joyous Garde, and sir Palomydes folowed after the questynge beste.’ In all essentials, then, Malory's Tristram is but another example of a medieval romance in which the author's sen fails to harmonize with the matiere, and the fairest approach to it is to regard it not as an achievement, but as an experiment: as the first and necessarily timid attempt at reinterpreting a traditional narrative.

When, after the Tristan, Malory turned to the Queste del Saint Graal he found himself more out of his element than ever before. With the Tristan he may have occasionally disagreed, but the story was not in itself alien to his tastes and tendencies: it belonged to a world in which he could live and move freely, even though it was not his own. With the Queste he entered a totally unfamiliar sphere. It was not merely a work of religious inspiration: it was a dogmatic exposition of a doctrine. In a long series of sermons to which the characters patiently listened in the intervals of their monotonous wanderings, it put forward and illustrated the notion that the coming of the Grail was the final and irrevocable test of good and evil and the triumph of heavenly over earthly chivalry. For this kind of ‘interpretation’ Malory had little use; but instead of replacing it by his own, he simply ‘reduced’ all doctrinal comment, shifted the emphasis from theological disquisitions to poetical representation, and so made the Grail quest appear as a mere pageant of picturesque visions. Such at least is the immediate impression one gets from a comparison of his work with the French Queste, and to some readers it may be a relief to find that Malory spares them the unnecessary elaboration of ‘symbolic adventures and still more symbolic visions, with a hermit waiting at every road-side to expound the symbolism in the bitterest detail’.¹⁵⁵ ‘Do not our hearts,’ asks Sir Edmund Chambers, ‘in these long books, sometimes go down the hill with Gawain?’ There is, perhaps, more to it than that.¹⁵⁶ It may well be, as Mr. C. S. Lewis has pointed out in a memorable essay,¹⁵⁷ that Malory is not simply for the Round Table and against the Grail, that he has ‘a three-storeyed mind—a scale of bad-good-best (Mark—Lancelot—Galahad)’. The fact remains that while he is perfectly serious about the nobility of Lancelot and of Arthurian chivalry, he is simply not concerned with the yet higher law which cuts across the courtly world in the Grail books. In the French Queste Lancelot appears as a sinner who has offended God in his earlier life by adopting the standards of courtoisie: if he is more favourably treated than some other sinners, it is not because his former life was better than theirs, but because he is willing to repent. He is a clear illustration of a dichotomy of worldly and spiritual, pointing ‘from the way of earthly achievement to the way of spiritual illumination’.¹⁵⁸ With this point of view Malory has little sympathy. He reproduces both the condemnation and the contrition of Lancelot, but sets them against the background of Lancelot's glorious deeds in the days before the Quest, so that his former fame may be constantly borne in mind. When Lancelot is told that he will ‘never see of the Sankgreall more than he has seen’, his answer is, ‘Now I thanke God for Hys grete mercy of that I have sene, for hit suffisith me. For, as I suppose, no man in thys worlde have lyved bettir than I have done to enchyeve that I have done.’ This does not mean that a triple scale of values is introduced where the French author is using only a double one;¹⁵⁹ it means that if there were a conflict, it would be between ‘good’ and ‘best’, not between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. But no such conflict exists in Lancelot's mind. He is not seen in Malory, as he so often is in the French Queste, in an attitude of abject humiliation. He knows that his former life was ‘good’; and it matters little to him that because it was not ‘best’ the supreme reward of the Grail is denied him. Hence a significant misrepresentation of the theological issue, and a new treatment of the character of the protagonist. The author of the Queste, imbued with Cistercian mysticism, would no doubt have severely censured Malory's frequent confusion of chevalerie celestienne with ‘virtuous living’¹⁶⁰ and denounced as sacrilegious the scene in which the sick knight goes on his hands and knees ‘so nyghe that he towched the holy vessel and kyst hit’.¹⁶¹ But all this helps to place the action on a human level. While in the French the singing of the birds is but a means of bringing home to Lancelot his sense of wretchedness,¹⁶² in Malory the same experience ‘comforts’ him: ‘So thus he sorowed tyll hit was day, and harde the fowlys synge; than somwhat he was comforted.’¹⁶³ And when in the adventure of the magic ship he achieves what by the standards of the Queste is a state of grace, Malory sends him off ‘to play by the watirs syde, for he was somwhat wery of the shippe’.¹⁶⁴ The most striking ‘colour’ in Malory's treatment of Lancelot is, however, the concluding passage of the Tale, deliberately added to make him appear in all his human greatness, undiminished by his experiences in the course of the Grail-quest:

… than sir Launcelot tolde the adventures of the Sangreall that he had sene. And all thys was made in the grete bookes and put up in almeryes at Salysbury. And anone sir Bors seyde to sir Launcelot, ‘Sir Galahad, youre owne sonne, salewed you by me, and aftir you my lorde kynge Arthure and all the hole courte. And so ded sir Percivale. For I buryed them both myne owne hondis in the cité of Sarras. Also, sir Launcelot, sir Galahad prayde you to remembir of thys unsyker worlde, as ye behyght hym whan ye were togydirs more than halffe a yere.’ ‘Thys ys trew’, seyde sir Launcelot, ‘now I truste to God hys prayer shall avayle me.’ Than sir Launcelot toke sir Bors in hys armys and seyde, ‘Cousyn, ye ar ryght wellcom to me! For all that ever I may do for you and for yours, ye shall fynde my poure body redy atte all tymes whyle the spyryte is in hit, and that I promyse you feythfully, and never to fayle. And wete ye well, gentyl cousyn sir Bors, that ye and I shall never departe in sundir whylis oure lyves may laste.’¹⁶⁵

This, like most of Malory's additions, contradicts both the letter and the spirit of the French. Not only does the Queste omit to mention Lancelot at this point, but the part which it assigns to him throughout the story would preclude him from joining the Grail knights—Galahad, Perceval, and Bors—and placing on record the events of the holy quest. No such obstacle exists in Malory's version: Lancelot remains to the end the dominating figure, and because he is spared the impersonal fate of a condemned sinner, he develops into something approaching a living character. No doubt, he speaks like a man who knows the significance of the mysteries which have been revealed to him. But his last promise to Bors—‘never to depart in sundir’ while their lives last—comes primarily from a faithful friend, from a true champion of all the good and noble knights of King Arthur, more conscious than ever of the bond which unites him to the other heroes of the great adventure, ‘redy atte all tymes’ while the spirit lives in his ‘poure body’. These may be but occasional glimpses of character; but the rudiments of the art are there, and the sentiments brought into play are sufficiently true and delicate to remain attached to the story and its protagonist. They are of the order of those ‘familiar manifestations of emotions’ which, in Aristotle's words, ‘carry conviction’.

(C) THE TRAGIC CONCEPTION

If Malory's rejection of the theology of the Queste set him free to attempt a delineation of character, it led to an even more striking result in his adaptation of the next and last branch of the Cycle, the Mort Artu. The decisive factor in his approach to this work was his drastic simplification of the spiritual tangle in which the traditional story of Arthur had become involved. In the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth and of Wace the downfall of Arthur's kingdom had no relation to any religious or moral doctrine: it was a typical epic story of the ‘defence of a narrow place against odds’. But when in the second quarter of the thirteenth century French prose writers introduced it in the Arthurian Cycle and placed it immediately after the Queste they found it necessary to read a new meaning into it. The Queste condemned the Round Table in no uncertain terms: ‘In this quest your knighthood will avail you nothing if the Holy Ghost does not open the way for you in all your adventures.’ The knights destined to achieve the holy quest—li encerchemenz des grans secrez et des privetez Nostre Seignor¹⁶⁶—were those who had hitherto had little or no part in the adventures of the Round Table: Galahad, Bors, and Perceval. The great heroes of Arthurian chivalry were disqualified either wholly, like Gawain, or partly, like Lancelot, who was permitted to enter the Grail castle, but not to see the Grail or even cross the threshold of the sanctuary. It was only natural, therefore, that the compilers of the Cycle should have imagined that in the end the Round Table perished because it had offended God. Thus a link was established between the religious teaching of the Queste and the events related in the Mort Artu. The issue was complicated rather than clarified by the addition of the ‘wheel of Fortune’ motif. To this the author of the Mort Artu gave considerable prominence. The idea of the relentless motion of the fatal wheel causing the downfall of those who rise too high—a christianized conception of Fortuna—had been common enough throughout the Middle Ages,¹⁶⁷ but it was quite distinct from the doctrine of the Queste. As, however, it provided an additional reason for the fall of Arthur it was tacked on to the story with the result that in the Mort Artu the disaster was interpreted partly as a retribution for the sins of Arthur's knights and partly as a sequel to their rise: ‘Tel sont li orgueil terrien qu'il n'i a nul si haut assiz qu'il ne le conviegne cheoir de la poesté del monde.’¹⁶⁸

Of this elaborate attempt to give the story of Arthur's death a spiritual background nothing of importance remains in Malory's version.¹⁶⁹ Despite the French Cycle he treats the Queste and the Mort Artu as self-contained works and suppresses every link between them.¹⁷⁰ To understand his account of the tragedy of Lancelot and of the destruction of the Round Table it is enough to read his last two romances, The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere and the Morte Arthur—the only two that form together a coherent whole.¹⁷¹ The Morte Arthur is built round a theme which is suggested in the seemingly disconnected episodes of the Book of Launcelot and Guinevere: in the opening dialogue between Lancelot and Guinevere, in the story of the ‘Maid of Astolat’, and in the adventure of the ‘Knight of the Cart’. On the familiar bright landscape with its smiling meadows, on the glittering armour of knights riding in search of adventure, dark and ominous shadows begin to fall. We no longer see Arthur's companions perform endless feats of bravery; we hear less of their glorious record, of their ultimate reward. Lancelot is still the greatest of all knights; but with each new episode he seems to lose something of his early enthusiasm, of his faith in the glory of knight-errantry.¹⁷² ‘Do ye forthynke yourselff of youre dedis?’ Guinevere asks him. There is a strange foreboding in these simple words. The last adventure in the Book of Launcelot and Guinevere shows Lancelot at the height of his knightly renown. Of all the knights of the Round Table he alone is privileged to heal the wounds of Sir Urry. But when the adventure is over, ‘Sir Launcelot wepte as he had bene a chyld that had bene betyn’. The peripety, the ‘tragic reversal of fortunes’, is now upon us.¹⁷³ It is brought to its climax in the terms of the traditional story of the downfall of Arthur's kingdom, reinterpreted and reshaped in accordance with Malory's own sen.¹⁷⁴ Geoffrey of Monmouth had been the first to describe how Arthur, having subdued the peoples of the British Isles, was crowned in Caerleon upon Usk, how he then extended his sway to Norway, to Gaul, and to Rome, how during the Roman campaign his nephew Mordred started a rebellion, and how on his return to England Arthur fell in the final contest with the traitor. French prose writers had endeavoured to give this story a deeper significance by complicating both its narrative content and its motivation, and above all by linking it up with the spiritual doctrine of the Grail and with the symbolism of the ‘wheel of Fortune’. Malory went further. Externally, his Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Arthur Sanz Gwerdon may seem to be a mere abridgement of the French Mort Artu, supplemented by drafts on the English stanzaic Le Morte Arthur; in actual fact it is a work of striking originality. Its dominating theme is neither a mere accident of warfare as in the Arthurian chronicles, nor a somewhat forced conclusion of a confused moral issue as in the French Cycle; it is primarily a conflict of two loyalties, both deeply rooted in the medieval conception of knightly service: on the one hand, the heroic loyalty of man to man, ‘the mutual love of warriors who die together fighting against odds’, a loyalty ‘more passionate and less ideal than our patriotism’,¹⁷⁵ more sacred even than the ties of nature;¹⁷⁶ on the other, the blind devotion of the knight-lover to his lady, the romantic self-denial imposed by the courtly tradition and inseparable from any form of courtly romance. The clash between these conceptions of human love and service is neither an accident nor a caprice of destiny; it is inherent in the very structure of medieval idealism. And in Malory's rendering of the story of Arthur's death it brings about, for the first time in the history of the legend, a clear and convincing interplay of emotions, infinitely more significant than any encounter with chance.

This result is achieved by subtle, though simple, means. The essential motif—the breach of one sacred trust through a whole-hearted acceptance of another—was already implicit in the French Mort Artu and in the English Le Morte Arthur. But each of the two conflicting forces—the power of the love of man for man and the power of courtly devotion—had to be brought out more convincingly. It was not enough that in rescuing Guinevere Lancelot should have unwittingly killed Gawain's half-anonymous brothers as he does in Malory's sources; one of his victims had to be Gareth, the noble knight, who loved Lancelot ‘bettir than all hys brethirn and the kynge bothe’.¹⁷⁷ This is part of Malory's own narrative design, of a sen unknown to his models, as original as Lancelot's premonition of the coming disaster: ‘And peradventure I shall there destroy som of my beste fryndis, and that shold moche repente me. And peradventure there be som, and they coude wel brynge it aboute, or disobeye my lord kynge Arthur, they wold sone come to me, the which I were loth to hurte.’¹⁷⁸ But Lancelot's duty is clear, even though ‘that ys hard for to do’.¹⁷⁹ When the news is brought to Gawain that his brothers Gaheris and Gareth have been killed by Lancelot, he at first refuses to believe it. He is bound to Lancelot by ties of friendship and comradeship which have so far stood the hardest tests. He has forgiven him the deaths of Agravain, of Florens, and of Lovell, even though Arthur had told him that he had ‘no cause to love Lancelot’. But when he knows for certain that his two beloved brothers, Gaheris and Gareth, are dead he makes a vow upon which eventually the fortunes of the whole of Arthur's kingdom will break: ‘From thys day forewarde I shall never fayle sir Launcelot untyll that one of us have slayne the othir.’¹⁸⁰ The fratricidal struggle then begins, with each opponent keenly conscious of his profound attachment to the other. ‘I requyre and beseche you’, says Lancelot,¹⁸¹ ‘sytthyn that I am thus requyred and conjoured to ryde into the fylde, that neyther you, my lorde kyng Arthur, nother you, sir Gawayne, com nat into the fylde.’ And when he is forced to fight his dearest friend, Gawain, to throw him off his horse and wound him, he still refuses to put him to death, for it is shame ‘to smite a wounded man that may not stand’.¹⁸² But the harm is done. Gawain dies of his old wound, repenting on his death-bed of his ‘hastiness and wilfulness’: ‘For I am smyten upon the old wounde the whiche sir Launcelot gave me, on the which I fele well I muste dye. And had sir Launcelot bene with you, as he was, this unhappy werre had never begonne, and of all thys I am causar.’ The ‘unhappy war’ is not at an end, and the ‘piteous tale’ goes on until the Round Table becomes a mere memory. Early in the day Arthur knows that disaster is at hand: ‘Wyte you wel, my herte was never so hevy as hit ys now. And much more I am soryar for my good knyghtes losse than for the losse of my fayre queen; for quenys I myght have inow, but such felyship of good knyghtes shall never be togydirs in no company.’ Only Malory's Arthur can say with such characteristic abruptness, ‘quenys I myght have inow’; but perhaps for this very reason only Malory's Arthur can gauge the full depth of his grief at the destruction of his fellowship, the equal of which has not been seen in any Christian land, and the significance of his own defeat by the traitor Mordred in that last of all battles when ‘of all the good knights are left no more alive but two’, and a hundred thousand lie dead upon the down. The action which leads to this ending is swift, inevitable, relentless; the tragic circle of fear and pity is complete. And the aftermath brings home the profound humanity of it. When Lancelot comes to avenge the King and the Queen he finds that the Queen has retired from the world. To share her fate he becomes a hermit; not for the love of God, but for the love of the Queen: ‘And therefore, lady, sithen you have taken you to perfection I must needs take me to perfection of right.’ A year later he is allowed to bury her. And although it may be as a hermit that at first ‘he wepte not gretelye, but syghed’, it is as her faithful lover that ‘when she was put in the erth syr Launcelot swouned and laye longe stylle’. To the hermit who reproves him for thus displeasing God he replies:

‘My sorow may never have ende, for whan I remembre of his beaulté and of hir noblesse that was bothe wyth hyr Kyng and wyth hyr, so whan I sawe his corps and hir corps so lye togyders, truly myn herte wold not serve to susteyne my careful body. Also whan I remembre me how by my defaute and myn orgule and my pryde that they were bothe layed ful lowe that were pereles that ever was lyvyng of Cristen people, wyt you wel,’ sayd syr Launcelot, ‘this remembred of there kyndenes and myn unkyndenes sanke so to myn herte that I myght not susteyne myself.’

He repents not of the sins he has committed against God, but of the griefs he has caused his lady and King Arthur. And so there is no relief to his pain: ‘Ever he was lyeng grovelyng on the tombe of kyng Arthur and queen Guenever, and there was no comforte that the bysshop nor syr Bors nor none of his felowes coude make hym, it avaylled not.’ Death alone brings him comfort, and as he lay on his death-bed it seemed as though ‘he had smyled, and the sweetest savour aboute hym’. In the earlier scene of Arthur's last farewell there is the same sense of unrelieved loneliness. ‘Comfort thyself’, Arthur says to Bedwere, ‘and doo as wel as thou mayst, for in me is no truste for to truste in. For I wyl to the vale of Avylyon to hele me of my grievous wounds.’ There is no remedy for Arthur's wounds, and no truth in the belief in his eventual return. ‘I wyl not say that it shal be so.’ And when night falls on the plain of Salisbury there is no ‘trust left to trust in’, no comfort to be found in religious explanations; all doctrine shrivels before the conflict of ‘two goods’ and the desolation it brings. It is not through sin or weakness of heart that this comes about, but through the devotion of the truest friend and the truest lover, through a tragic greatness which fixes for ever the complex and delicate meaning of Arthur's epic. And in the noble close of Malory's final chapter, in the threnody of Hector over Lancelot's dead body, the pure and passionate chord is struck again, enriched and sustained by harmonies unknown to lesser writers: ‘Thou, sir Launcelot, there thou lyest, that thou were never matched of erthely knyghtes hande! And thou were the curtest knyght that ever bare shelde, and thou were the truest frende to thy lover that ever bestrade hors, and thou were the trewest lover of a synful man that ever loved woman, and thou were the kyndest man that ever strake wyth swerde.’

Notes

1. Cf. my Malory [Oxford, 1929], p. 115.

2. The variants of spelling are: Malore, Mallore, Mallere, Malery, Malorie, Malarie, Malorey, Malory.

3. Cf. G. L. Kittredge, Who was Sir Thomas Malory? Boston, 1897. The discovery was first announced in Johnson's Universal Cyclopaedia in March 1894.

4. Surprising though it may seem, the fact of Malory's imprisonment in 1469 has so far been taken for granted. Cf. my Malory, p. 116.

5. On 24 August and 1 December (cf. Liber Albus ii, ff. 199-200, and iii, ff. 227-8). The pardon granted in December 1468 was first published by the Historical MSS. Commission and quoted by Sir Edmund Chambers in his essay on Malory (English Association, Pamphlet No. 51), 1922, p. 16.

6. Sir Humphrey Nevill, similarly excluded, was not in prison at the time when the pardon was granted.

7. Cf. E. Hicks, Sir Thomas Malory, his Turbulent Career, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1928, and A. C. Baugh, ‘Documenting Sir Thomas Malory’, Speculum, vol. viii, pp. 3-29.

8. f. 148.

9. The Book of Sir Tristram (v. infra, p. 540) contains some remarks on the hardships of imprisonment, but it is not clear that they refer to the author's own experiences.

10. Cf. infra, pp. xxxv-ix. The Tale of Sir Launcelot, The Tale of Sir Gareth, The Book of Sir Tristram, The Tale of the Sankgreal, The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere and The Morte Arthur were all produced after The Tale of King Arthur.

11. Unless otherwise stated my narrative is based on the records published by G. L. Kittredge, E. Hicks, and A. C. Baugh, and on some of the materials contained in Appendix I of my Malory. I am also much indebted to Sir Edmund Chambers for numerous useful suggestions on the whole problem.

12. According to Dugdale (Antiquities of Warwickshire, London, 1656, p. 56), this occurred at the siege of Calais, in Henry V's time. There was no siege of Calais under Henry V, but in 1436 Calais was threatened with siege, if not actually besieged, and Dugdale's K.H.5 time is probably a misprint for K.H.6 time. I owe this correction to Sir Edmund Chambers.

13. His wife Elizabeth bore him one son, Robert, who died in Sir Thomas's lifetime.

14. Cf. my Malory, p. 121.

15. It is not known what came of this charge, but it seems probable that it fell through.

16. A. C. Baugh, op. cit., p. 4.

17. All the charges so far mentioned were brought against Malory at an Inquisition held at Nuneaton on 23 August 1451. The relevant documents have been published by E. Hicks (op. cit., pp. 93-102), but in dating the events to which they refer I have taken into account the corrections proposed by A. C. Baugh in an article in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, xxix, pp. 452-7.

18. Cf. Baugh, ‘Documenting Sir Thomas Malory’, Speculum, viii, pp. 20-2. The document referring to this offence is Coram Rege Roll 763, Hilary, 30 Hen. VI, m. 23 dorso. The plaintiffs are the Archbishop of Canterbury, Humphrey, Duke of Buckingham, and the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk. The damage done to the property is said to amount to £500—clearly an impossible figure in the circumstances.

19. This is one of the items in the Nuneaton Inquisition. It gives the names of fourteen men who accompanied Malory on his second attack on the abbey and states that about a hundred others took part in it. Cf. Hicks, loc. cit.

20. He was certainly at liberty on 26 March 1452 when, according to an entry in the Patent Rolls, the Duke of Buckingham, Sir Edward Grey of Groby, and the Sheriffs of Warwick and Leicester were directed to arrest him ‘to answer certain charges’. The date of this commission is wrongly given in my Malory (p. 6, note 3) as 1453.

21. The petition of Katherine Peyto was found by A. C. Baugh (op. cit., pp. 19-20) among the Early Chancery Proceedings (C/1/15/780). Its dating presents some difficulty, but of the alternatives suggested by Baugh the more likely seems the period 1452-6, not 1442-50.

22. A full account of these offences is given in a record of the Ancient Indictments, K.B. 9/280 m. 43. Cf. Baugh, op. cit., pp. 22-5.

23. The record describing Malory's escape from Colchester prison (K.B. 9/280 m. 44) specifies that ‘predictus Thomas Mallory … eandem gaolam sive prisonam domini Regis … vi et armis, videlicet gladiis, langodebeves et daggariis felonice fregerit et sic extra eandem gaolam felonice adtunc et ibidem evaserit et ad largum exierit’.

24. The king's incapacity lasted from 12 November 1455 to 25 February 1456, and during this period York acted as Protector. The pardon seems to have been disregarded in later proceedings.

25. Cf. Dugdale, loc. cit.

26. To William Neville, Lord of Fauconberg. The bail expired on 28 December 1457.

27. Brief Notes of Occurrences under Henry VI and Edward IV from MS. Lambeth 448, in Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, etc., ed. by James Gairdner, Camden Society, 1880, p. 157.

28. He may also have been at the siege of Bamborough until its surrender on Christmas Eve 1462. The references to Bamborough and Alnwick in his last book (infra, p. 1257) are not without significance.

29. Dugdale, loc. cit.

30. Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica, vol. iii, p. 287.

31. Le Morte Darthur, ed. by Sir Edward Strachey, 1919, p. xxiii.

32. The most recent example of this misconception is the chapter on The Genius of Chivalry in my monograph on Malory. See especially p. 59.

33. The Tale of King Arthur and The Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake.

34. Merlin, ed. G. Paris et J. Ulrich, p. lxix.

35. Cf. my Malory, pp. 55-69.

36. Strachey, op. cit., p. xxi.

37. Cf. my article on ‘Malory's Morte Darthur in the Light of a Recent Discovery’ in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. xix, No. 2, July 1935.

38. For details of these changes see the relevant section of the Commentary.

39. Cf. infra, pp. xxxvi-viii.

40. On 16 October 1460.

41. In the thirteenth-century French version of the Tristan romance which Malory followed very closely there is a story of a rebellion against King Mark. In trying to persuade the rebels to lay down their arms Mark says that the land they have invaded belongs to the Pope and that their action might jeopardize ‘la saincte terre de Jerusalem’. In Malory's otherwise faithful rendering of this incident Mark offers, as a price of peace, to go to war against the infidels, for, he says, ‘I trow that is fayrer warre than thus to areyse people agaynste youre kynge’ (p. 680).

42. = ‘undertaken’.

43. Cf. Oxford Eng. Dict. s.v. ‘book’, 1a and b. The other possible meaning of the term was ‘a mechanical or logical sub-division of a treatise’. Both meanings were, however, often confused with that of ‘volume’. Cf. Horman (Vulg. 84): ‘A whole boke is comenly called indifferentlye a volume, a boke, a coucher.’ Horman attempts to distinguish between them by saying that ‘a volume is lesse than a boke, and a boke lesse than a coucher’. Caxton's reference to Malory's ‘noble volumes’ and to the fact that he made them into a ‘book’ is a good example of this distinction

44. = ‘in so far as they have’.

45. See p. xxxix, footnote 2.

46. Cf. E. Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, s.v. ‘livre’.

47. Op. cit., p. 5.

48. On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School, London (E.E.T.S.), 1932, p. clii.

49. Cf. my Malory, pp. 93-5.

50. Le Morte Darthur, ed. H. O. Sommer, vol. iii, p. xix.

51. The English Novel, London, 1913, p. 25.

52. R. W. Chambers, op. cit., p. cxxxviii.

53. The more detailed study of Caxton's treatment of Malory's text, which the discovery of the Winchester MS. now allows to be made, does not fall within the scope of this essay; but some of the essential material will be found in my critical apparatus.

54. Cf. infra, pp. lxxxvi-xci.

55. This order is not confirmed by what we know of Malory's sources. To give but one example out of many, the story of Arthur's Roman expedition which in all Arthurian romances serves as a prelude to the concluding episodes of the Cycle—Mordred's treachery and Arthur's death—is more than 900 pages distant from its natural sequel.

56. Cf. my Malory, pp. 39-41.

57. MS. B.N. fr. 112, f. 54^v: ‘Quant Gaheriet voit le jayant a la terre, il n'est pas esbais, ains met la main a l'espee et li court sus tout a cheval. Et la ou il se vouloit relever a quelque paine, il le fiert si du pis du cheval qu'il le fait revoler a terre, et li met le cheval tantes fois par dessus le corps que tout le debrise. Et cil se pasme de la grant angoisse qu'il sent, et est tel atornés qu'il ne puet traire a soy ne pié ne main. Et lors descent Gaheriet et li trenche les las du heaume, et trouve que cil estoit en poismoison. Et il pense qu'il en delivrera le païs maintenant. Si dresse l'espee contremont et fiert a deus mains si durement qu'il li fait la teste voler plus d'une lance loing du bu.’

58. = ‘saw’.

59. = ‘famous’.

60. = ‘crown’.

61. = ‘well-aimed’.

62. = ‘steps aside’.

63. = ‘traitor’.

64. = ‘fell’.

65. The relevant portion of the Suite is found in MS. B.N. fr. 112. On Malory's treatment of it see the introductory remarks in the first section of my Commentary and Dr. F. Whitehead's article in Medium Aevum, ii, pp. 199 ff.

66. In all French versions Gareth's mother (the wife of King Lot of Orcanie) is anonymous; Morgans is the name of her sister, wife of King Nentres of Sorhaut.

67. In the episode of the healing of Sir Urre which has no counterpart in Malory's sources.

68. The explicit of the Book of Launcelot and Guinevere, p. xxxi.

69. In using Malory's borrowings from his own works as indications of the chronological sequence of his romances I have attached no importance to the frequent enumerations of Arthur's knights which the scribes seem to have lengthened at will. A good example is the inclusion, in the Winchester version of the Tale of Arthur and Lucius, of Ector de Mares and Pelleas among the knights who fought on Arthur's side against the Roman Emperor (p. 221). Pelleas belongs to the Tale of King Arthur, Ector de Mares first appears in the Tale of Sir Launcelot. But if on the strength of this we put the passage in question later than these two works, we should be unable to explain either the story of the fight with the giant in the former or the reference to Arthur's Roman campaign in the latter (p. 253: ‘Sone aftir that kynge Arthure was com from Rome,’ &c.). The Winchester scribe who had the whole collection of Malory's works before him must have added these two names, as well as some others, of his own accord. The examples of ‘self-imitation’ quoted above are in a different category: they occur in Caxton as well as in the Winchester MS. and bear the unmistakable stamp of Malory's workmanship.

70. As the Winchester MS. is incomplete at the end we have only Caxton's authority for the concluding lines of the Morte Darthur. The words Here is the end of the booke of kyng Arthur & of his noble knyghtes of the rounde table that whan they were hole togyders there was euer an C and xl may well have been inserted by Caxton. If, however, they belong to Malory, they must refer to his last two works. It is noteworthy that all the attempts hitherto made to analyse the ‘dramatic structure’ of the Morte Darthur bear almost exclusively on the Book of Launcelot and Guinevere (Caxton's Bks. XVIII-XIX) and the Morte Arthur (Bks. XX-XXI). That these two works form a coherent whole is obvious; but it is perhaps too often forgotten that they represent less than one sixth of the entire collection.

71. I have adopted this title and its abbreviations in order to avoid confusion with the Tale of King Arthur. The title given in Malory's colophon is the Tale of the noble kynge Arthure that was Emperoure hymself thorow dygnyté of his hondys. Cf. infra, p. 247.

72. G. Saintsbury, A First Book of English Literature, 1914, p. 60.

73. R. W. Chambers, On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School, 1932, p. cxxxix.

74. J. S. Phillimore, ‘Blessed Thomas More and the Arrest of Humanism in England’, Dublin Review, vol. cliii, p. 8.

75. R. W. Chambers, op. cit., p. cxxxv.

76. E. K. Chambers, Sir Thomas Malory, pp. 6-7.

77. ‘moult plaisans et moult bele, mais moult est longue’ (MS. B.N. fr. 781).

78. ‘en plus cler et entendible langaige’ (Maugis d'Aigremont, Paris, Michel le Noir, 1518, f. LVII^r, col. A).

79. Cambridge History of English Literature, ii. 337.

80. Andrew Lang, Le Morte Darthur (Introduction to Sommer's edition), vol. iii, p. xxi.

81. In his History of the English Prose Rhythm (London, 1912) G. Saintsbury has given interesting examples of Malory's treatment of the stanzaic Morte Arthur and of the way in which ‘out of the substance of verse he has woven quite a new rhythm, accompanying and modulating graceful and almost majestic prose of the best type’. But as Malory did not discover the stanzaic Morte Arthur until he had begun his very last work, comparisons with this poem are of little value for the study of the genesis of his style. The alliterative Morte Arthure and Malory's adaptation of it provide far more significant instances of his method of ‘patching in’ some of the bright stitches of his predecessor, ‘not fearing but welcoming, and mustering them into a distinct prose rhythm—treating them, in fact, just as Ruskin does his doses of blank verse’.

82. = ‘rascal’.

83. Morte Arthure, ed. Björkman, 2438-47. Here is a literal translation: ‘If you are afraid’, said the king, ‘I advise you to ride away, lest they wound you with their round weapons. You are but a child and no wonder, as it seems to me. You would be afraid of a fly if it alighted on your flesh. I am not afraid, so may God help me! I do not mind if such worthless creatures come to grief. They will gain no honour from me, but they will waste their weapons. I will wager my head that before I go away they will fail. The Lord will never allow a rascal to succeed in killing a crowned king who has been anointed with chrism.’

84. = ‘divided’.

85. ‘Thereupon he quickly summoned the sailors to go with the sheriffs to divide the treasure: “See to it that all this great treasure which that traitor gained is divided among my dear people, whether they be commoners, clergy, or others, so that no one complains of his share, on peril of your lives”’ (ll. 1212-17).

86. … a dragone engowschede, dredfull to schewe,

    Deuorande a dolphyn with dolefull lates (Morte Arthure, 2054-5).

87. = ‘fitting words’. Further examples will be found in the Commentary. From this method of transcription there is but one step to another device which may be illustrated by the following parallels:

    MORTE ARTHURE

    Laughte hym vpe full louelyly

    (2292)

    sette thane appon oure Sere knyghttez

    (1847)

    MALORY

    Lyffte hym up lordely

    (p. 225)

    sette Sore on oure knyghtes

    (p. 216)

    When Malory applies this device to his French sources the result is even more startling. On one occasion the French entre becomes under, and on another Balin and his companion ‘stable their horsis’ because the French has la feste estoit par tel maniere establie. The mysterious adjective amyvestyall which no commentator has yet been able to explain (p. 152: his amyvestyall countenaunce) is a compound of three French words totally meaningless outside their context: ‘Nous n'aviens nes poissanche de metre fors nos alainnes, ains estions del tout aussi comme mors’ (see Commentary, note 152. 4).

88. T. S. Eliot, Introduction to London, by Samuel Johnson.

89. I have deliberately refrained from analysing the most elusive aspect of Malory's style, its rhythm. Saintsbury's attempt to reduce it to metrical patterns has led him to the unsatisfying conclusion that ‘you may resolve sentence after sentence into iambs pure, iambs extended by a precedent short into anapæsts and iambs, or curling over with a short suffix into amphibrachs, and so getting into the trochee’ (A History of English Prose Rhythm, p. 90). This leaves singularly few metres into which Malory's prose could not be resolved. More helpful is the remark that ‘the dominant of Malory's rhythm is mainly iambic, though he does not neglect the precious inheritance of the trochaic or amphibrachic ending’ (ibid.). Malory's use of the alliterative Morte Arthure may well account for this. In the poem the metre most frequently used in the first half of the line is the amphibrach, and in a number of cases Malory either preserves it intact or shortens it to an iamb.

90. Of the numerous attempts to account for the survival of Malory's work the following is the most worthy of note: ‘Le hasard voulut qu'il fût bon écrivain, si bon que sa prose n'a presque pas vieilli. Aussi cette ample composition, la Morte d'Arthur, comme il l'avait intitulée, imprimée d'abord en 1485 par les presses vénérables de Caxton, maintes fois réimprimée au temps d'Elisabeth et jusqu'en plein dix-septième siècle, et tout au long du dix-neuvième en des éditions sans nombre, demeure-t-elle un livre classique, l'un des joyaux du trésor qui forme, en Angleterre, le patrimoine spirituel de la nation. … Mystérieux pouvoir du goût, d'une langue saine, d'un bon style! Ce Malory ne fut qu'un traducteur, un adaptateur: sans lui pourtant, dans l'Angleterre d'aujourd'hui, ni la poésie, ni la pensée, ni l'art ne seraient tout à fait ce qu'ils sont’ (Joseph Bédier, Préface aux Romans de la Table Ronde nouvellement rédigés par Jacques Boulenger, pp. iv-v).

91. For details see the relevant section of the Commentary.

92. Cf. E. K. Chambers, Sir Thomas Malory, p. 6.

93. Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, ii, p. 726.

94. Don Quixote, Part I, ch. xlvii.

95. M. Jean Frappier, who has recently edited the French Mort Artu (Paris, 1936), enters a special plea for this work: ‘Le judicieux chanoine de Tolède ne connaissait pas notre Mort Artu; sinon, il est permis de penser qu'il aurait volontiers donné l'absolution à ce livre de chevalerie en vertu de l'unité et de la robuste structure de son plan.’ For a statement of the opposite view see F. Lot, Étude sur le Lancelot en prose, pp. 268-76.

96. Ferdinand Lot, Étude sur le Lancelot en prose, Paris, 1918, p. 17.

97. Cf. Horace, Ars poetica, 42-5; Martianus Capella, De Rhetorica, 30 (ed. Halm, Rhet. min., p. 472); Sulpicius Victor, Institutiones oratoriae, 14 (Halm, p. 320). For the medieval treatment of ordo artificialis see Scholia vindobonensia ad Horatii artem poeticam, ed. Zechmeister (1877); Mathieu de Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria (ed. Faral, Les Arts poétiques du xii^e et du xiii^e siècle), i. 3-13; Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, 101-25.

98. Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi (ed. Faral, op. cit.), ii. 2, 17. The first kind of digression is further explained as follows: ‘A materia ad aliam partem materiae, quando omittimus illam partem materiae quae proxima est et aliam quae sequitur primam assumimus.’

99. The second kind of digression—ad aliud extra materiam—was primarily intended for purposes of comparison or simile (cf. loc. cit. ii. 2, 21: ‘Digredimur etiam a materia ad aliud extra materiam, quando scilicet inducimus comparationes sive similitudines, ut eas aptemus materiae’), but it was applied on a larger and more varied scale. Its extreme form was, and still is, ‘the story in the story’.

100. Cf. Faral, op. cit., p. 60: ‘L'enseignement des arts poétiques, qui ne brille pas par l'envergure des conceptions, paraît avoir agi précisément par ce qu'il contenait de plus superficiel et de plus mécanique; mais ç'a été une action très réelle, dont la littérature porte les marques.’

101. Cf. Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, 101 ff.:

     Ordinis est primus sterilis, ramusque secundus
     Fertilis et mira succrescit origine ramus
     In ramos, solus in plures, unus in octo.
     Circiter hanc artem fortasse videtur et aer
     Nubilus, et limes salebrosus, et ostia clausa,
     Et res nodosa. Quocirca sequentia verba

102. Cf. F. Lot, loc. cit.: ‘De ce procédé de l'entrelacement les exemples se pressent sous la plume. Ils sont si nombreux qu'à les vouloir énumérer on raconterait le Lancelot d'un bout à l'autre.’

103. The rate of condensation varies from 1:2 to 1:8. Cf. my Malory, pp. 30-1.

104. Cf. ibid., pp. 34-8. Numerous other illustrations will be found in the Commentary.

105. Cf. my article on the ‘Romance of Gaheret’ in Medium Aevum, vol. i, pp. 157-67 and the relevant section of the Commentary.

106. History of the English Novel, p. 27.

107. In Rilke's words, ‘wie ein Mädchen das Blumen bindet, nachdenklich Blume um Blume probt, und doch nicht weiss was aus dem Ganzen wird’ (Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke, Leipzig, 1899, p. 9).

108. Cf. C. S. Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic, p. 268: ‘Such singleness as the middle age cultivated in romance must be sought in the parts considered as separate stories, and will be found oftener in the shorter romances that remained by themselves.’

109. Hence their inordinate size and the absence of proper endings. ‘Le roman s'est donné pour loi, pendant tout le XVII^e siècle et une partie du XVIII^e, de n'avoir aucune loi de composition. … C'est pour cela que les romans paraissent en six, dix, douze volumes, dont la publication s'espace sur un certain nombre d'années et parfois (comme pour l'Astrée, la Marianne de Marivaux, etc.) ne s'achève pas. Personne n'est pressé de connaître la fin, puisqu'il n'y a pas de fin' (Daniel Mornet, Histoire de la clarté française, p. 135).

110. Perhaps the most famous example is Manon Lescaut, originally the seventh volume of Prévost's Mémoires et Avantures d'un homme de qualité.

111. L'Heure qu'il est, Paris, 1938, p. 211.

112. The History of the English Novel, vol. 1, p. 304.

113. Cf. J. J. Jusserand, Le Roman au temps de Shakespeare (Paris, 1887), pp. 123-4: ‘Il a le défaut de tous les romans du temps, aussi bien en Angleterre qu'ailleurs: il est incohérent et mal composé. Mais il présente des fragments excellents, deux ou trois bons portraits d'individus bien observés et quelques scènes, comme la vengeance de Cutwolfe, solidement construites, qui permettent de prévoir qu'un jour la puissance dramatique du génie anglais, exténuée sans doute par une longue carrière sur le théâtre, pourra, au lieu de s'éteindre, revivre dans le roman.’

114. Epic and Romance, p. 358.

115. Histoire littéraire de la France, t. xxx, p. 16.

116. Cf. Die direkte Rede als stilistisches Kunstmittel in den Romanen des Kristian von Troyes (Halle, 1903), p. 64: ‘Im Volksepos bestehen sie (die Reflexionen) in der kurzen Andeutung der Gedanken der vor einem schnellen Entschlusse stehenden Person, so recht passend zur reflexionslosen Plastik des alten Liederstils; bei Kristian aber haben wir lang fortgesponnene, in spitzfindigen Betrachtungen des eigenen Ich sich gefallende und zugleich kunstvoll durchgebildete, nicht selten sogar dramatisch gestaltete Monologe. Bei ihm sind die Monologe immer ein beliebtes Kunstmittel, um uns neben seinen subjektiven (oft gleichfalls sehr ausgedehnten) Reflexionen einen Einblick in das Innere seiner Personen zu geben, die selbst ihre innersten Gedanken zergliedern und sich von ihrem quälenden Zustande voll aufund abwogender Gedanken Rechnung ablegen, gerade wie dies in den modernen Romanen geschieht.’

117. Cf. Joseph Bédier, Les Légendes épiques, t. iii, p. 418: ‘Un romancier a le droit d'intervenir pour expliquer ses intentions. Homère, Virgile interviennent sans cesse; non pas Turold. Son art, sobre, elliptique, s'interdit toute glose.’

118. The theory which holds the field at present is that the ‘explanatory’ lyrical monologue came from Ovid. Suggested by Gaston Paris (Journal des Savants, 1902) and adopted by A. Hilka (op. cit., pp. 62 and 71 ff.), this view has been substantiated with reference to the Enéas by M. Edmond Faral (Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans courtois du moyen âge, pp. 150-4). The influence of Ovid is undeniable, but it does not suffice to account for the complex processes involved in the technique of courtly narrative. What follows is but a brief summary of some of the salient points which have not so far received enough attention and with which I hope to deal more fully in a forthcoming study.

119. John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, ed. C. C. J. Webb, 829 a (p. 10): ‘Ylum esse ab Hercule, ualidum scilicet argumentum a forti et robusto argumentatore, potestates uocalium quinque iura regnorum, et in hunc modum docere omnia, studium illius etatis erat.’

120. De Clericorum Institutione, III. xviii, in Migne, Patrologia latina, vol. cvii, col. 395 b.

121. Metalogicon, ed. C. C. J. Webb, 854 a-b, p. 54: ‘Illi enim per diacrisim, quam nos illustrationem siue picturationem possumus appellare, cum rudem materiam historie aut argumenti aut fabule aliamue quamlibet suscepissent, eam tanta disciplinarum copia et tanta compositionis et condimenti gratia excolebant, ut opus consummatum omnium artium quodammodo uideretur imago.’

122. Cf. ibid., 856 d, pp. 58-9: ‘Ne quis tamquam parua fastidiat grammatices elementa; non quia magne sit opere discernere a uocalibus consonantes, easque ipsas in semiuocalium numerum mutarumque partiri, sed quia interiora uelut sacri huius aduentibus apparebit rerum multa subtilitas, que non modo acuere ingenia puerilia sed exercere altissimam quoque eruditionem ac scientiam possit.’

123. De Laudibus Virginis Matris, in Migne, Patrologia latina, vol. clxxxiii, col. 56.

124. ‘Fedeil deu, entend l'estorie: asez est clere e semble nue, mais pleine est de sens et de meule. L'estorie est paille, le sen est grains; le sen est fruit, l'estorie raims. Cist livres est cum armarie des secreiz Deu’ (Livre des Rois, ed. Curtius, p. 5). Cf. Professor W. A. Nitze's comment on this passage in his article on ‘Sens et Matière’, Romania, xliv, pp. 25-6.

125. Le Roman de Troie par Benoît de Sainte Maure, ed. L. Constans, vol. iii, pp. 151 ff., ll. 17638-746.

126. Cf. Brunetto Latini, Tresor, ed. Chabaille, p. 486: ‘Tout ce que l'om porroit en iii moz ou a moult po de paroles dire il (le aornement) les acroist par autres paroles plus longues et plus avenans qui dient ce meisme.’ For less humorous definitions of rhetorical amplification see Rhetorica ad Herennium, iv. 28, and Edmond Faral, Les Arts poétiques du XII^e et du XIII^e siècle, pp. 61-85 et passim.

127. ‘Sic adulescentum declamatiunculas pannis textilibus comparantes intellegebant eloquia iuvenum laboriosius brevia produci quam porrecta succidi’ (ed. Mohr, I. iv. 3). ‘Sic et magnus orator, si negotium aggrediatur angustum, tunc amplum plausibilius manifestat ingenium’ (ibid. VIII. x. 3).

128. ‘Nam ueluti potens rerum omnium regina et impellere quo uellet et unde uellet deducere, et in lacrimas flectere et in rabiem concitare, et in alios etiam uultus sensusque conuertere tam urbes quam exercitus proeliantes, quaecumque poterat agmina populorum’ (De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, ed. Dick, v. 426-7).

129. ‘Siquidem Gramatica Poeticaque se totas infundunt, et eius quod exponitur totam superficiem occupant. Huic, ut dici solet, campo Logica, probandi colores afferens, suas immittit rationes in fulgore auri; et Rethorica in locis persuasionum et nitore eloquii candorem argenteum emulatur’ (Metalogicon, ed. C. C. J. Webb, 854 b, p. 54).

130. e.g. Juno's words when she saw Antaeus matched with Hercules or Thetis before the body of Achilles. Ennodius (Dictiones xxvii) gives as examples of this type of exercise Verba Didonis cum abeuntem videret Aeneam, Verba Menelai cum Troiam videret inustam, etc. A similar purpose was served by sermocinatio, one of the nineteen colores sententiarum, which is given considerable prominence by Geoffroi de Vinsauf in his Poetria Nova (1210), ll. 1265-6 and 1305-24.

131. See also Ennodius, op. cit., xx.

132. Johannes de Garlandia places fabula and historia among the kinds of narratio ‘remote from legal pleading’ (ed. G. Mari, Romanische Forschungen xiii, p. 926).

133. Et nunc inflat epos tragoediarum,
     Nunc comoedia temperat iocosa,
     Nunc flammant satirae et tyrannicarum
     Declamatio controversiarum.

     (VII. xi. 3)

134. ‘The countess having given him (= the poet) both the matter and the spirit [of the work], he undertakes to proceed with it adding nothing but his own labour and exertion.’

135. Grundidee, according to the editor of the text, W. Foerster; la nature de la thèse, according to M. Gustave Cohen: ‘la thèse qui consacre le pouvoir absolu, despotique, tyrannique de la dame sur l'amant’ (Chrétien de Troyes, sa vie et son æuvre, pp. 226 and 276). In the Prologue to her Lais Marie de France says that ‘it was the custom of the ancients to speak obscurely so that those who came after them and were to study them might construe their writing (gloser la letre) and add to it as they thought fit (de lur sen le surplus metre)’. The two processes correspond to the two varieties of sen noted above: the meaning implicit in the matter, and such fresh meaning or thoughts as may be added to it by the author or the remanieur.

136. Gaston Boissier defines them as ‘la façon dont l'orateur comprend la cause qu'il va plaider et le tour qu'il lui donne, sa manière de présenter les événements, l'attitude qu'il attribue aux personnages’ (‘Les Écoles de déclamation à Rome’, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1902, t. xi, p. 491).

137. See facsimile facing p. xxx. Caxton adds in each case: in to Englysshe.

138. Caxton's ‘to reduce’ is obviously a synonym of Malory's ‘to draw briefly’, and this alone should suffice to dispose of E. Brugger's suggestion that the former must be taken to mean, in Caxton's context, ‘to bring into another language without any idea of shortening’ (Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, vol. li, pp. 133-69).

139. Introduction to Sir Tristrem, 4th edition, Edinburgh, 1819, p. lxxxi.

140. The following parallel is an instance in point:

     CHRESTIEN'S YVAIN (2639-50)

     Mes sire Yvains mout a anviz
     S'est de la dame departiz
     Einsi, que li cuers ne s'an muet.
     Li rois le cors mener an puet,
     Mes del cuer n'an manra il point;
     Car si se tient et si se joint
     Au cuer celi, qui se remaint,
     Qu'il n'a pooir, que il l'an maint.
     Des que li cors est sanz le cuer,
     Donc ne puet il vivre a nul fuer;
     Et se li cors sanz le cuer vit,
     Tel mervoille nus hon ne vit.

     YWAIN AND GAWAIN (1551 FF.)

     No lenger wald syr Ywayne byde,
     On his stede sone gan he stride,
     And þus he has his leue tane.

141. English Literature: Mediaeval (Home University Library), p. 108.

142. When the hermit urges the lovers to repent Tristan says:

                                             ‘Sire, par foi,
     Que ele m'aime en bone foi,
     Vos n'entendez pas la raison:
     Q'el m'aime, c'est par la poison.
     Ge ne me pus de lié partir,
     N'ele de moi, n'en quier mentir.’

     (Béroul, Tristran, ll. 1381-6)

143. ‘… gevíel ir allez an im wol und lobte ez in ir muote’ (Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, ed. R. Bechstein, ll. 10006-7). The Norse Saga (Tristrams Saga ok Isondar, ed. E. Kölbing) describes the scene in similar terms: ‘leit hun þá á hit fríða andlit hans með ástsamligum augum’ (ch. xliii). Thomas's own rendering of this scene is not extant, but it can be reconstructed with tolerable certainty from these two adaptations.

144. ‘Tant regarde Palamedes Yseult que Tristan s'en aperchoit a son semblant qu'il l'ayme de tout son cuer. Tristan si l'avoit par maintes fois regardee, maiz ce n'estoit pas pour amour qu'il y eust. Et puis qu'il vist que Palomedes la regardoit si merveilleusement, il dit qu'il l'avra ou qu'il mourra, ne ja Palamedes pour povoir qu'il ait n'y advendra’ (MS. B.N. fr. 103, f. 39^r, col. 1). Paraphrasing this passage, E. Löseth (Le Roman en prose de Tristan, analyse critique d'après les manuscrits de Paris, p. 22) writes: ‘Tristan, qui jusque-là n'avait guère éprouvé de sentiments pour elle, s'éprend sérieusement en voyant l'amour de Palamède.’

145. Infra, p. 385.

146. Infra, p. 392.

147. Infra, p. 496: ‘So thys lady and damesell brought hym mete and drynke, but he ete lityll thereoff. Than uppon a nyght he put hys horse frome hym and unlaced hys armour, and so yeode unto the wyldirnes and braste downe the treys and bowis. And othirwhyle, whan he founde the harpe that the lady sente hym, than wolde he harpe and play thereuppon and wepe togydirs. And somtyme, whan he was in the wood, the lady wyst nat where he was. Than wolde she sette hir downe and play uppon the harpe, and anone sir Trystramys wolde com to the harpe and harkyn thereto, and somtyme he wolde harpe hymselff. Thus he there endured a quarter off a yere, and so at the laste he ran hys way and she wyst nat where he was becom.’ Cf. Commentary, note 495-501.

148. Infra, p. 502. Isode ends by saying ‘And ever whan I may I shall sende unto you, and whan ye lyste ye may com unto me, and at all tymes early and late I woll be at youre commaundement, to lyve as poore a lyff as ever ded quyene or lady’.

149. It is of course possible to set against these passages a number of equally ‘effusive’ ones which Malory has mercilessly cut out. In describing the days when the lovers were free from suspicion and restraint the French prose-writer says: ‘oncques mes ne furent tant aise com si sont orendroit, car, quant il vont ore recordant les maux et les paines que chascun a souffert endroit soi, et il se voient ensemble, que il poent fere toute lor volenté, il dient que il fussent buer nes s'il peussent toz jor mes vivre et mener tel joie et tel feste.’ Malory writes instead: ‘Than sir Trystram used dayly and nyghtely to go to quene Isode whan he myght.’ But this only goes to show that while adopting the French author's method Malory used it in his own way and for his own purposes. For further examples see Commentary, notes 592_4-14 and 779_16-18.

150. Infra, pp. 839-40.

151. Cf. lines 2561-5:

     Blasmee an sui, ce poise moi,
     Et dïent tuit reison por quoi,
     Que si vos ai lacié et pris
     Que tot an perdez vostre pris,
     Ne ne querez a el antandre.

152. Cf. infra, p. 757, and MS. B.N. fr. 99, f. 409^r, col. 1.

153. Cf. the remarks on the love potion (MS. B.N. fr. 103, f. 56^v, col. 1): ‘Yseut boit. Ha! Dieu! Quel boire! Or sont entrez en la rote qui ja mais ne leur fauldra jour de leur vies, car ilz ont beü leur destruction et leur mort. Cil boire leur a semblé bon et moult doulz, mais oncques doulceur ne fu si chier achetee comment ceste sera.’

154. That Malory knew this ending is shown by his reference to it in the Healing of Sir Urre (p. 1149): ‘Also that traytoure kynge slew the noble knyght sir Trystram as he sate harpynge afore hys lady, La Beall Isode, with a trenchaunte glayve, for whos dethe was the moste waylynge of ony knyght that ever was in kynge Arthurs dayes.’ This is not, of course, the ‘pathetic and imaginative story of the black sail’, but a reminiscence of its somewhat crude rendering in the French prose romance. On the prose writer's attitude and method see my Études sur le Tristan en prose, pp. 17-20.

155. E. K. Chambers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Essays, p. 32.

156. Possibly more than I imagined when I wrote in my monograph on Malory that ‘faced with two main themes and forced to subordinate one, Malory made Corbenic a province of Camelot’ (Malory, p. 84).

157. Review of Sir Thomas Wyatt, etc., in Medium Aevum, vol. iii (1934), pp. 238-9.

158. E. K. Chambers, loc. cit.

159. I cannot follow Mr. C. S. Lewis in his attempt to attribute the triple scale of values to ‘mediaeval writers’ generally (loc. cit.). There is certainly no such thing in the French Queste. Cf. A. Pauphilet, Etudes sur la Queste del Saint Graal, p. 17.

160. Cf. Commentary, notes 886₁₈ and 891_33-4.

161. Cf. infra, p. 894. According to the Queste, no one can touch the Grail, and the sick knight only touches the table on which the Grail stands: ‘fait tant qu'il baise la table d'argent et touche a ses yeulx.’

162. The bright spring morning and the sunshine make him realize that ‘Nostre Sire s'est courrouciés a lui’.

163. Infra, p. 896.

164. Infra, pp. 1011-12.

165. Infra, pp. 1036-7.

166. ‘The seeking out of the high secrets and hidden things of our Lord.’

167. On its diffusion see R. Patch, The Goddess Fortune in Mediaeval Literature, Harvard University Press, 1927. On the treatment of the theme in the Mort Artu see Jean Frappier, Etude sur la Mort le Roi Artu, pp. 258 ff.

168. La Mort le Roi Artu, ed. Frappier, p. 201. Cf. also the editor's remark in his Etude, etc., p. 288: ‘L'auteur a repris à sa façon l'idée de la fatalité antique: il ne pouvait guère l'envisager que dans les limites de la religion. Mais cette contrainte relative n'a peut-être pas nui à la richesse psychologique de son œuvre, car elle ajoute des nuances chrétiennes au vieux thème du Destin.’

169. The description of the wheel of Fortune seen by Arthur in his dream is reproduced, but all comment is omitted, and no attempt is made to relate the symbolism of the wheel to Arthur's fate.

170. Mr. C. S. Lewis (loc. cit.) thinks that ‘it is an essential part of the tragedy of Launcelot that he should be given the chance of escaping from this human level on which tragedy is foredoomed, and should have failed to take it’. This is probably true of the French Cycle, but there is no evidence that Malory held any such view or that he regarded Lancelot's return to Guinevere as a ‘relapse’. Rightly or wrongly he refrained from relating the tragedy of Lancelot to his condemnation in the Queste, and the references to the Tale of the Sankgreal in the opening paragraphs of the Book of Launcelot and Guinevere have no ‘moral’ significance.

171. This is partly the effect of Malory's choice and arrangement of the material he found in his sources. The Book of Launcelot and Guinevere is based on two French romances: the Mort Artu, and a still undiscovered version of the prose Lancelot. The Morte Arthur is derived partly from the French Mort Artu and partly from the English stanzaic Le Morte Arthur; but instead of using these two sources one after the other, Malory uses them simultaneously, with a degree of freedom and independence unparalleled in his earlier works.

172. There is a similar development in the Mort Artu, but it is treated as a consequence of Lancelot's experiences in the quest of the Grail. ‘Il n'ose pas recommencer au su de tous ses exploits chevaleresques ni se montrer publiquement soucieux de cette gloire mondaine si contraire à l'esprit de la Quête. Amour-propre, pudeur morale, scrupule religieux peut-être, Lancelot éprouve à la fois tous ces sentiments’ (Jean Frappier, Etude sur la Mort le Roi Artu, p. 230).

173. E. K. Chambers, loc. cit.

174. In my monograph on Malory (Oxford, 1929) I took the view that Malory merely disengaged the dramatic curve from unnecessary ramifications and by so doing produced his ‘New Arthuriad’ (pp. 95 ff.). This no longer seems to me to do him justice. Mere condensation of narrative is too mechanical a process to account for what appears to be, in the light of a more detailed study, the essential quality of his rendering. The difference between him and his predecessors is not in the matiere alone; it lies predominantly in the sen.

175. C. S. Lewis, Allegory of Love, p. 10.

176. Cf. A. J. Carlyle, Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, vol. iii, p. 25.

177. Infra, p. 1185.

178. Infra, p. 1172.

179. Infra, p. 1173.

180. Infra, p. 1186.

181. There is no counterpart to this speech in Malory's sources.

182. The reason given in the French Mort Artu is slightly different: ‘De ce est Lancelos trop dolenz, car il ne volsist en nule maniere que messire Gauvains moreust par lui; car il l'avoit tant esprouvé qu'il ne cuidoit pas au matin qu'il eüst en li tant de proesce comme il i avoit le jor trovee; et ce fu li hom del monde qui plus ama bons chevaliers que Lancelos’ (ed. Frappier, pp. 176-7).