Before the close of the twelfth century the Arthur of popular legend, and of the chronicles, had been transformed into a purely romantic hero. The British king, soon after the appearance of Geoffrey’s History, becomes the centre of the most profitably worked of the cycles of mediæval romance. Much of his individuality is, inevitably, lost in the process; and that loss implies, no less inevitably, a gradual obscuration of the primitive British environment which originally surrounded him. The paramount chief of early Britain, whose prowess and conquests form the prime epic theme of Geoffrey and of Layamon, appears as the king of no known realm, numbering among his retainers heroic figures drawn from the uttermost limits of the mythical world. Exalted, as a world conqueror, to a level with Alexander and Charlemagne, he becomes, like them, largely lost to sight among the crowd of fabulous characters called up around him by the professional romancers. The Arthur of the romances is no more than a primus inter pares. He does, indeed, stand above his knights by virtue of his royal dignity,—he is still “King Arthur,” and the head of a great Court. But our interest in his own personality diminishes with the increasing accumulation of exploits attributed to his knightly retinue. The glory of the king is dimmed by the general brilliance of his Court. It is as though the Round Table, originally founded to put an end to all claims of precedence among his knights, had had the result of bringing Arthur himself into the unvalued “file.” Knightly heroes, of whom little, or nothing, had been heard before, enter the Arthurian circle, and perform feats which interest us far more than anything done by the king. In early Welsh tradition, and in Geoffrey’s chronicle, Kay and Bedivere and, later, Gawain, alone figure as warriors whose deeds are at all worth mentioning by the side of Arthur’s. In the romances, Kay and Bedivere play quite subordinate parts, while Gawain becomes much more prominent, only, however, to find his high station challenged, and frequently usurped, by newcomers such as Tristram and Perceval and Lancelot.
The cause of all this change is obvious. The age of Chivalry had come, and the Arthurian stories provided “the raw material” exactly suited to its romantic literary requirements. The original Celtic legends concerning Arthur and his few primitive “knights” lent themselves, at once, to adaptation and embellishment by writers whose main concern was with knight-errantry and courtly love; while the conception of an Arthurian “court,” with its fellowship of questing knights, invited the importation into it of any and every legendary hero whose story could in any plausible way be connected with Arthur. They had another advantage which contributed to their supreme popularity in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. They had about them an element of mystery, of magic, of indefiniteness, coming as they did from the Celtic wonderland in the West. The Arthurian kingdom had no geography,—it was a “no man’s land,” which defied all cartography, and the bounds of which could be extended by each romantic writer at his will. It is true that British tradition, and the bards and chroniclers who had sought to give it literary form, associated Arthur’s name with well-known localities in Great Britain; but, even there, the “champion of Britain” had no settled capital or court. London, the chief city of the Norman kings, claimed him as her own; but so did Winchester, Lincoln, York, Chester and Carlisle. Then there was Caerleon-upon-Usk, the delectable “metropolitan city” where Geoffrey of Monmouth had definitely located his court in Wales. Moreover places in Britain with mysterious legendary associations came to be connected with Arthur’s name. Glastonbury, whither Joseph of Arimathea was fabled to have brought the Holy Grail, was reputed to be his burial-place, and the district around it was identified with the mythical Avalon. The grim old western castle of Tintagel was fixed upon as his birthplace, and the tale of the battle on the Camel led to the building, in poetic imagination,[94] of a new Arthurian court at “tower’d Camelot.” The name of Camelot at once suggests such purely romantic regions as “the wild woods of Broceliande” and “the sad sea-sounding wastes of Lyonesse.”[95] Astolat, Cameliard, Sarras, Carbonek, Joyous Gard, and other places, belong to the same romantic class, and lie quite beyond geographical identification. Stories, in which the characters thus roamed indifferently among places well known to Norman England and in regions which belonged entirely to “the land of phantasy and illusion,” lay open to the incursion of fabulous matter drawn from many varied sources. In a word, the unrivalled possibilities of “the matter of Britain” for all kinds of romantic exploitation established for it an easy supremacy over the other romantic themes, and the literary uses to which it was put by writers of romance throughout Western Europe all but robbed it, ultimately, of its distinctive features as a native British growth.
The various stages in the romantic use and adaptation of the Arthurian legends, mainly by French writers, are not difficult to trace. First of all, we get the metrical chronicles,—attempts to put Geoffrey’s quasi-historical record into a poetical form which much better suited its heroic theme than the sober garb of Latin prose. Wace’s Brut, completed in the year of Geoffrey’s death, is our earliest extant example of this poetical treatment of Arthurian story, and his work, as we have seen, was written with a much more deliberate purpose of pleasing courtly readers than Geoffrey’s. The tastes and requirements of such readers, regarded solely from the standpoint of their interest in knight-errantry and romantic love, determine the character of the second and the third phase which Arthurian literature assumes. The metrical, and the prose, French romances began to be written about the same time, and from the same motive. It is generally held, however, that the poetical romancers were in the field before the prose writers: at any rate, the most famous of the metrical romances—those of Chrétien de Troyes—are earlier than any prose romances which have come down to us. Chrétien, in whom his admirers find the greatest mediæval poet before Chaucer, wrote for the Norman aristocracy, and especially for ladies, what were practically the fashionable novels of the day. He dedicates his Chevalier de la Charrette to the countess Marie of Champagne, whose interest in everything appertaining to the French cult of l’amour courtois is well known; and all his poetical ‘novels’ are largely designed for the entertainment of women eager for literature of a more sentimental appeal than sagas of monster-slayers and warriors. The sudden appearance of the immortal love-stories of Tristan and Iseult, and of Lancelot and Guinevere, shows how triumphantly the French romancers responded to the demands made of them.
Chrétien de Troyes’ share in the literary flotation of both these stories entitles him to a place in the history of pure Arthurian romance even above that of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey can claim, beyond any question, to be the literary father of King Arthur himself as a romantic hero. But the Arthurian legend, as it emerged from mediæval romance and as we know it in its modern presentment by the poets, contains so much more than the story of Arthur that the French romantic scribes who brought Tristan and Lancelot and Perceval into Arthur’s court must be regarded as the first artistic fashioners of a purely poetic “matter of Britain.” Among them Chrétien, and—if we are to take him as the unquestioned author of the great prose Lancelot romance—Walter Map, stand pre-eminent. As to Chrétien’s signal share in the work there is, at any rate, no controversy, and his name is associated with the poetical treatment of the stories of each of the three celebrated heroes just mentioned. He is believed[96] to have been the author of a lost Tristan poem—probably his first work, composed about 1160,—which is surmised to have been the foundation of the long prose Tristan romance, whence Malory drew much of his material. It is in his Chevalier de la Charrette that we first hear of Lancelot as a lover of Guinevere. His unfinished Conte del Graal is one of the first literary presentations of the story of Perceval.
Two other poems of Chrétien are, with the Conte del Graal, of exceptional interest as bearing a close relationship to three Welsh prose romances included in The Red Book of Hergest, and translated by Lady Charlotte Guest. The Welsh analogue of the Conte del Graal is the so-called ‘mabinogi’ of Peredur, son of Evrawc; while the Welsh tales called Geraint, son of Erbin, and The Lady of the Fountain resemble, in their main features, Chrétien’s two poems entitled Erec and Le chevalier au lion. The Welsh romances, as we have them, are undoubtedly of later date than Chrétien’s poems, and bear such clear traces of Norman-French influence as to have led many critics to deny altogether their Celtic origin. But they are neither translations, nor adaptations of Chrétien’s works.[97] The only explanation that meets all the facts is that the French poems and the Welsh tales follow an older and a simpler Celtic form of the stories embodied in them, which was accessible both to Chrétien and the Welsh writers.
Although by no means the best, the Chevalier de la Charrette is perhaps the most interesting of Chrétien’s extant works, for the reason that we obtain in it our first literary introduction to the story of Lancelot of the Lake. It treats, indeed, of only an episode in that famous knight’s career, but that episode reveals him to us as the lover of Arthur’s queen, and so marks an important stage in the evolution of Arthurian romance. In Chrétien’s poem, Guinevere is abducted by Meleaguant,[98] the son of the king of a land whence no man returns. Her rescue is accomplished by Lancelot, who, in order to achieve his object, has to ride in a cart used as a tumbril to convey prisoners to execution; hence the name given to him and to the poem, ‘The Knight of the Cart.’ Welsh tradition knows nothing whatever of the loves of Lancelot and Guinevere, although, as we have seen, Guinevere did come to have in Welsh folk-lore a doubtful reputation that somewhat debased her name. It is in his Lancelot poem alone that Chrétien suggests that Guinevere was anything but a gracious and loving wife. Whence, then, did he derive the story of her illicit relations with Lancelot? Some see in it the influence of the Tristram legend, in which passionate love breaks every bond. Others attribute the invention of Lancelot as Guinevere’s lover to the personal suggestion of Marie of Champagne, who, according to Chrétien’s own account, furnished him with the material for his poem. Whatever may be the truth about its origin, the story of Lancelot is an obvious, indeed the most signal, example of the way in which the Arthurian legends were adapted to suit the conceptions of chivalry. We have in it a capital instance of what was implied in the cult of “courtly love,” and hence it is not surprising that among mediæval tales women, as Chaucer informs us, held “in ful gret reverence the boke of Lancelot de Lake.”[99] That book was not Chrétien’s poem, but, much more probably, the prose romance of Lancelot, usually assigned to Walter Map. The same prose story, or one of its adaptations, was presumably the book in which Paolo and Francesca read, as related by Dante in the Fifth Canto of his Inferno.
The prose Lancelot is a vast compilation embracing what is really a series of romances, including a version of the Grail story, and is attributed, on good MS. authority, to the courtier Walter Map. If he be indeed its author, he is entitled to as high a pedestal in the Arthurian House of Fame as either Geoffrey or Chrétien. The difficulty of accepting his authorship of the work is not so much that he was a very active public man, as that the one book of which he is the indubitable author, the De Nugis Curialium,—a sort of commonplace book in which contemporary history finds a place side by side with fairy tales, and much other odd lore,—does not afford the slightest trace of interest in Arthurian story. Map’s name was used to give a literary passport to the notorious Goliardic poems gathered from many cryptic sources in the thirteenth century, and it may very well be that the ascription to him of so wholly laudable a work as the Lancelot was dictated by some too modest scribe’s desire for high credentials.
The other great love-story of Arthurian romance, that of Tristram and Iseult, is the most poetical and the most poignant in tragic interest of all the tales that came to be included in “the matter of Britain.” The story of Lancelot, with all its charm and pathos, betrays only too obviously its origin in the artificial conventions of “courtly love.” The story of Tristram, on the other hand, is one of sheer, over-mastering, natural passion,—the first really great story of passionate romantic love in modern literature. It is also, in its scene, its characters, its colouring, a distinctively Celtic tale. Tristram[100] is known to early Welsh tradition under the name of Drystan, the son of Tallwch, as a purely mythical hero; so also is Mark, or March ab Meirchion, who, in the first literary versions of the story, appears as King of Cornwall. The “proud, first Iseult, Cornwall’s queen,”
came from Ireland; while the other Iseult,
had her home in Brittany. The entire atmosphere of the story is that of the western Celtic seaboard, where lay the mystic land of Lyonesse, then “unswallowed of the tides,” and
Whence the French romancers derived the story it is impossible to say; but it is probable that it existed in the form of scattered popular lays long before the middle of the twelfth century. Fragments of two Tristan poems by the Anglo-Normans, Béroul and Thomas, otherwise known as Thomas de Bretagne, have come down to us.[103] These two poems were the foundations, respectively, of the German metrical versions of the story by Eilhart von Oberge and Gottfried von Strassburg.
The most intricate, though not the least fascinating, problem connected with the Arthurian legends is that of accounting for the origin, and for the attachment to the original Arthurian stock, of the story of the Grail and its quest. Here, at any rate, we have presented to us, in Tennyson’s words, “Soul at war with Sense”; and it is clear enough that the gradual manipulation of the Grail stories marks a deliberate effort by ecclesiastical writers to neutralise the influence of the dangerous ideals of chivalry upon Arthurian romance. Celibacy had to be shown to be compatible with true knighthood; there was no reason why a knight-errant should make love, and, all too often, illicit love, the sole motive of his quest for adventure. So, we have ultimately created for us the character of Galahad, who
and who alone, by virtue of his purity, is allowed to “find the Holy Grail.” The earlier forms of the Grail legend know nothing of Galahad, nor is there any reason for supposing that they had any religious significance. Gawain, apparently,—he who, in his progress through the romances, degenerates so much as to be finally described as “light in life and light in death,”[104]—was the original hero of the Grail quest. It is Perceval, however, who is the central figure of the best-known versions of the story—as, for example, the Conte del Graal, the Welsh Peredur, and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. But Perceval was not immaculate, and so had to be superseded by one who “exemplified, in a yet more uncompromising, yet more inhuman, spirit, the ideal of militant asceticism,”[105]—the virginal and youngest knight of the Round Table, Galahad. And, in order to establish Galahad’s right to a place in the Arthurian fellowship, he is introduced as the son of Lancelot. Here is an artistic touch deserving much more appreciation than it has yet generally received. The sin of Lancelot is largely expiated by the unsullied purity of his son. Truly, the “militant ascetics” knew their romantic business as well as the best of the secular scribes.[106]
It is unnecessary, here, to outline the various ramifications of the Grail legend, or to summarise the conflicting theories advanced as to its origin and meaning. It comes to be connected with Arthur’s court mainly through the knightly Perceval, who, though ultimately deposed as the Grail hero by Galahad, remains to the end the real protagonist of the story. The Grail romances are usually divided into two classes,—one dealing with the “Quest” proper, and the other with the “Early History” of the Holy Grail. In the “Quest” group of stories—three of which have been named above—the main interest lies in the personality of Perceval, and in his adventures in search of certain talismans, which include a sword, a bleeding lance and a “grail,” the latter, in Chrétien’s poem, a magic vessel, in Wolfram’s, a stone. The “Early History” group—of which the chief representatives are the Joseph of Arimathea and the Merlin of Robert de Borron, and the Quête del St Graal attributed to Map,—dwell chiefly upon the origin and nature of these talismans. The Grail legends, as given in these and other romances, and so far as they can be put into a coherent whole, are undoubtedly a compound of remote mythical and pagan elements, probably Celtic,[107] and of later accretions due to monastic writers deliberately bent upon edification. A flagrant example of the way in which the legends were turned to ecclesiastical uses is furnished by the identification of the Grail with the cup of the Last Supper, which Pilate gave to Joseph of Arimathea, and in which Joseph treasured the blood that flowed from the Saviour’s wounds on the Cross. Joseph brought this cup to Britain, and thus the Grail came to be connected with the mythical story which attributed to Joseph the first evangelisation of these islands.
It has been said that Gawain was, in all probability, the original hero of the Grail quest.[108] Whatever the truth may be about that matter, there can be no doubt that Gawain is the most famous of all the knights grouped around Arthur in pre-romantic tradition. He figures largely in the Welsh Triads and in the Mabinogion under the name of Gwalchmei, and in the story of Arthur’s wars as told by Geoffrey he is the king’s most powerful lieutenant. Originally a mythical hero, he was probably the centre of a cycle of traditional stories as old as, if not older than, anything fabled or sung of Arthur.[109] No other knight of the Arthurian court is the hero of so many episodic romances and poems, while there is no more prominent figure in Arthurian literature generally. No other knight, however, is subjected to such churlish treatment at the hands of the romancers as he. In the earlier stages of Arthurian story—in the Mabinogion, especially,—Gawain appears as the very flower of chivalrous knighthood, no less courteous and gracious than brave. His degradation is due largely to the later manipulators of the Grail legends, who could not brook the importance attached to so worldly a character. Malory and Tennyson follow in their footsteps, until for modern readers Gawain is branded with the words put into the mouth of Bedivere in The Passing of Arthur,—of Bedivere, who, as one of Gawain’s oldest associates in Arthur’s service, ought to have been spared the indignity of having attributed to him so mean an aspersion upon a comrade in arms:
Gawain, however, was the favourite Arthurian hero in England up to Malory’s time,[110] and the finest contribution to English Arthurian romance in the Middle Ages,—Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight,—dealing, apparently, with an incident borrowed from the earlier traditions about Gawain, does full justice to him as a knight sans peur et sans reproche.
The most marvellous feature of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story of Arthur is the part played by the wizard Merlin in the events that led to Arthur’s birth. It is in Geoffrey’s History that we get, so far as is known, the first definite association of Merlin with the Arthurian legends. In subsequent romance Merlin stands in the first file of Arthurian characters, and his name is given to a group of romances as important as any of those dealing with the adventures of the great knights mentioned in the last few pages. In Welsh tradition Merlin, or Myrddin, was famous as both a bard and a magician, but the poetical compositions which bear his name may safely be taken as spurious. Geoffrey exalts him as a prophet as well, and the ‘Prophecies of Merlin’ contributed largely to the renown of the History of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey’s authorship is sometimes claimed for a Latin poem called the Vita Merlini, and composed about 1148, which tells much about the enchanter that is not always easy to reconcile with the account of him given in the History. The chief French romantic works dealing with the Merlin legend are a fragmentary poem, dating from the end of the twelfth century, and supposed to be by Robert de Borron, and the prose romance of Merlin, which exists in two forms known as the “ordinary” Merlin and the Suite de Merlin, of the latter of which Malory’s first four books are an abridgment. In these romances we first read of the enchanter’s own enchantment, how he was, in Malory’s words, “assotted and doted” on a “damosel of the lake,”—Ninien, or Nimue, a name that in the latest forms of the story comes to be Vivien. In these early French versions of the Merlin legend, also, appears the first suggestion that Modred was Arthur’s son. When the wife of King Lot,—the daughter of Igerne by her first husband,—came to King Arthur’s court soon after his coronation, Arthur fell in love with her, with the result that Modred was born. Modred’s rebellion, and the tragic end of Arthur himself, were thus represented as a just retribution for the king’s misconduct.
For English readers Malory’s Morte Darthur is the book in which the various strands of romantic matter reviewed in this chapter are woven into a connected, though not always a coherently artistic, texture. From a literary point of view, the relative values of the various constituents of ‘The French book’ whence Malory derived most of his material are of little consequence. What really matter are the style, the tone, the atmosphere of his own book; and these are charged to the full with the subtle magic of the enchanted land in which his borrowed characters live and move. It is here that we reap the harvest of mediæval romance, and catch, in the beautifully quaint style of the narrative, something of the fresh odour and mellow colouring of the ripened corn. Of equally small importance with the question of the precise identification and the value of his sources is that of Malory’s general motive, or plan. It may, indeed, be possible to find in the book an epic in which “may be traced a thread of destiny and providence, leading either to a happy triumph over circumstance, or to a tragic doom.”[111] But it is for no such reason that the Morte Darthur is valued by the modern reader. We read Malory now both for “his style and his love,”—his love of “King Arthur and his noble knights of the Round Table,” attested so signally by his painful zeal in garnering, and sifting, such a bewildering crop, both rich and rank, of manuscript material. His “style” is sufficiently near to the English of to-day, but at the same time retains so much in both vocabulary and grammar which the invention of printing forced the language to reject, as to be an almost ideal medium for the presentment to modern English readers of what was storied in the verse and prose of the age of high romance. Space does not allow of our giving any extended specimens of it here; but the reader may be referred, first, to a passage where Malory appropriately embroiders his narrative by expatiating upon “How true love is likened to summer,”[112] and, secondly, to the noble and pathetic chapter which tells of the passing of Arthur.[113] Incidental felicities of style could be quoted from almost every page of his book. Bedivere, when returning from his pretended attempt to “fling Excalibur,” tells Arthur that he saw “nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan.” Tristan, in a general fight, “fared among those knights like a greyhound among the conies”; while, of another fight we read that “the best of us all had been full cold at the heart-root had not Sir Launcelot been better than we.” What, again, could be in better chime with its theme than this sentence from the account of Gawain’s fight with Launcelot—“then Sir Gawaine deliberately avoided his horse, and put his shield afore him, and eagerly drew his sword, and bad Sir Launcelot, Alight, traitor knight, for if this mare’s son hath failed me, wit thou well a king’s son and a queen’s son shall not fail thee”? Or, what more pathetic than Guinevere’s words when Lancelot found her in the nunnery at Almesbury—“Sir Launcelot, wit thou well I am set in such a plight to get my soul’s health; and yet I trust, through God’s grace, that after my death to have a sight of the blessed face of Christ, and at doomsday to sit on his right side, for as sinful as ever I was are saints in heaven”? But the entire work is studded with such gems, and he who would know and revel in the richest treasures of Arthurian romance should devote his days and his nights to the reading of what is ingenuously, and truly, styled in its epilogue, “this noble and joyous book.”[114]