English Arthurian romance before Malory, with the conspicuous exception of Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight—an alliterative poem composed in the fourteenth century by an unknown author to whom three other poems, The Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience, are ascribed,—possesses little literary charm or distinction. The wearisome monotony and the generally jejune character of the common metrical romances of his day, with their stereotyped phraseology and futile rhymes, had probably as much to do as anything with Chaucer’s attitude towards the newer romantic matters. His Tale of Sir Thopas is so openly contemptuous a burlesque of the methods of the romantic rhymers of the time that we may safely assume that the poet had little more respect for their themes.

It was scarcely possible for one who could write so irreverently as this of Elfland and its denizens to attune himself to the mood required for grave poetical treatment of Arthurian story. An Arthurian setting of a sort is indeed given to The Wife of Bath’s Tale; but the facetious tone of the opening lines only too plainly reveals Chaucer’s sense of the unreality of it all.

“In tholdë dayes of the Kyng Arthour,”

he writes,

But, he adds, there are no fairies now; “lymytours and other holy freres” have effectually driven them away.

With the elves had gone the knights-errant, and Chaucer’s poetical genius was not of the kind to restore either to their original pride of place in imaginative literature.

It was Malory who gave new life to the Arthurian legends, and to him, more than to any other writer, is due the fascination which Arthurian story has had for so many modern English poets. Malory’s book, as we know from Ascham’s testimony, was exceedingly popular in the Elizabethan age; but there were other causes of the interest then so widely felt in ancient British legends. Throughout the sixteenth century chroniclers were busy in recording, and antiquaries in investigating, the early annals of Britain; and, in the reign of Elizabeth herself, the heightened patriotic feeling of the day was a potent stimulus to all who sought to discover material for, and to reconstruct from it, the history of their country. Hence Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin chronicle in its first printed forms comes to be one of the most eagerly studied books of the time. And it is, perhaps, not fanciful to find in the new interest aroused in the annals and legends of early Britain the influence of the reigning Tudor dynasty. On what other grounds are we to account, for example, for Spenser going out of his way to remind Elizabeth that she can boast of a genuine British ancestry, and that among her forebears is no less a person than the great King Arthur himself?

Here is a compliment of which Geoffrey, could he have foreseen it, would have been as proud as of his inclusion in Chaucer’s ‘Hous of Fame.’ To have been singled out for honour as one “besy for to bere up Troy” was much; it was more to be quoted, by a poet no less illustrious, as an authority for the Arthurian descent of the greatest of British queens. The glorification of the House of Tudor, and of Elizabeth’s Welsh descent, is obvious enough in the lines in The Faerie Queene which refer to the “sparke of fire” that shall

In the second book of The Faerie Queene Spenser, following Geoffrey’s “auncient booke hight Briton moniments,” gives a versified

thus further emphasising the newly-discovered importance of early British history. The same patriotic fervour accounts for the production of such poems as William Warner’s Albion’s England and Michael Drayton’s Polyolbion. Warner is eminently practical, and, in his reproduction of Geoffrey’s Arthurian narrative, leaves out its more romantic incidents. Arthur’s

Drayton is inclined to trust Geoffrey more implicitly, and even takes up the cudgels on his behalf against the critics who were then seeking to disparage him. The “adversary says,” writes Drayton, that “Geoffrey Monmouth first our Brutus did devise,” whereas the fact is that

Drayton’s poem, so largely topographical as it is in its character, affords him many opportunities of making effective use of Arthurian traditions. When he comes, for example, to the river Camel, he remembers that Arthur was born as well as slain in that tract of western country,

Again, referring to the songs of the ancient Britons, he tells us—much in Geoffrey’s manner—of Caerleon with

With all his garrulous “asides” and prosaic disquisitions, Drayton’s Polyolbion is a well-intentioned poem, and its sympathetic treatment of the legends entitles it to an honoured place in the Arthurian library. Like Caxton, Drayton bewails the indifference of British poets to the wealth of native tradition which lay ready for their use, and regrets that a British Homer had not been found to rise to “the height of its great argument”;

Although Elizabethan poets, from patriotic and courtly motives, were so much interested in the early British legends as presented to them by the English chroniclers of their time, it is somewhat strange that these legends, and Arthurian story in particular, did not appeal strongly to the imagination of the playwrights of our greatest dramatic period. The only Arthurian drama of any consequence written during the Elizabethan period was The Misfortunes of Arthur by Thomas Hughes, which was acted before the Queen in February 1588; and the plot of that play is derived, in the main, not from Malory, but from Geoffrey. In one important detail, however, Hughes departs from Geoffrey’s narrative, and, like many of the later romancers, represents Modred as Arthur’s son; and he is in touch with Malory in making the tragedy of Arthur’s doom the nemesis that comes upon him for his sin. The drama, as a whole, is a standard example of the Senecan type of tragedy, so much in vogue at the time of its production, and action and characterisation are altogether subordinated in it to narration. Some life, however, is given to the characters of the two protagonists, Arthur and Modred; and the introduction of the ghost of Gorlois at the beginning and at the end of the play adds not a little to its general dramatic effect. In his final speech the Ghost, exulting over the ruin of the sinful house of Uther, is made to pay an adroit compliment to Queen Elizabeth,

and gives utterance to the hope that she

“Shall of all wars compound eternal peace.”

We are still without a great English drama based upon a theme drawn from Arthurian story; but what the Elizabethan dramatists, and most of their successors, rejected as either too unreal or too intractable for their purposes, continued even down to the Victorian age to haunt and challenge the imagination of the poets.

and yet we possess no great Arthurian epic in English verse any more than a drama. Milton and Dryden both cherished the ambition of writing one, but both, in different ways, found the pressure of circumstances too strong for the accomplishment of their design. When Milton, after the turmoil of the Civil Wars and his entanglement in public controversy, once more turned his attention to poetry, he had need of higher argument for his long-projected ‘heroic poem’ than

Arthurian memories, however, lingered with him to the last, for even in Paradise Regained he cannot help referring to what once charmed him in stories

Dryden, again, who had aspired to write an Arthuriad, as he tells us, “for the honour of his native country,” found himself obliged to turn to more immediately profitable forms of literature,—“being encouraged only with fair words by Charles II., my little salary ill-paid, and no prospect of a future subsistence.”[120] But it is doubtful whether he was quite the kind of poet who, in Scott’s words, could

Scott’s assumption, at any rate, is scarcely justified by the character of the “dramatic opera” called King Arthur, or the British Worthy, which Dryden composed shortly before Charles II.’s death. This “opera” was written with a courtly, if not exactly a patriotic, motive; it was meant to be a glorification of King Charles’s public policy, but, unfortunately, Charles died before any performance of it could be given. It was produced on the stage, ultimately, in 1691, to music by Purcell; but, at that time, William and Mary were the reigning sovereigns, so that the original point of the play was lost, and it had to be “improved” to suit the changed conditions of the day. Thus, what Scott calls an “ingenious political drama” was turned into “a mere fairy-tale” without “any meaning beyond extravagant adventure.”[121] The story of Arthur, also, is in many of its main features turned in this play into something very different from its familiar forms up to Dryden’s time. Several new characters are introduced into it, the most notable being a blind girl, Emmeline,—a creature of Dryden’s own invention,—who, in defiance of all tradition and of Guinevere’s well-attested rights, becomes the wife of “the British Worthy.”

The Restoration age, despite its literary pre-occupation with ‘heroic’ plays and ‘heroic’ poetry, was unpropitious for the production of a romantic epic worthy of the Arthurian, or any other similar theme. A brave attempt, however, to achieve the impossible was made by “the City Bard or Knight Physician,”[122] Sir Richard Blackmore, who in 1695 published Prince Arthur, an Heroick Poem in Ten Books, and followed it up in 1697 with another ‘epic,’ in twelve books, called King Arthur. These ponderous poems, written in heroic couplets, are really political allegories, in which Arthur stands for the Prince of Orange, and his Saxon enemy, Octa, for James the Second. But they aim at being ‘epics’ as well. Supernatural ‘machinery,’ evidently suggested in many of its details by Paradise Lost, is introduced, and just as the gods used to intervene in the struggles of the epic heroes of antiquity, so angels like Uriel and Raphael watch over the fortunes of Arthur. Indeed, the whole heavenly host befriends him, while Lucifer and the rebel angels are the patrons of his foes. Blackmore, whatever else may be said on his behalf, can claim to be at least faithful to the tradition which represents Arthur as “the chief and best of the three Christian kings,” for he makes him the supreme champion of Christendom in his day:—

But, alas, who now reads Blackmore? The world generally is quite content not to know him, and ready to echo Dryden’s pious wish—“peace be to the Manes of his Arthurs.”

Blackmore, grotesque and even ludicrous though his methods are of allegorising the Arthurian stories, could, of course, claim high poetical sanction for this particular use of them. Spenser had, long before, “laboured to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall virtues, as Aristotle hath devised,”[124] and had also, though somewhat obscurely, sought to “shadow forth” in him “a modern gentleman” of the Elizabethan court,—the Earl of Leicester. There is not much to choose between Leicester and William of Orange as “modern” types of Arthur, but Spenser has, at least, succeeded in giving a romantic glamour to his poem which helps us to forget its allegorical intent and takes us back to the legendary Arthur’s native “land of faerie.” So, in The Faerie Queene, Arthur appears in a rôle somewhat similar to that which he plays in the romances as the helper and deliverer of sorely-beset knights; and what the poet tells us about his person, his prowess, and his accoutrements is, in spirit though not always in the letter, quite in accord with romantic tradition. Delivered at birth to a faery knight, “to be upbrought in gentle thewes and martiall might,” he was put under the tutelage of Timon,[125]

and who dwelt

“Under the foot of Rauran mossy hore,”

—the Merionethshire mountain, Yr Aran, where the river Dee has its source. “Thither,” so Prince Arthur’s tale of his own history runs,—[126]

It was Merlin

who forged for Arthur his shield and sword and armour. Spenser, however, departs from the romancers in calling Arthur’s sword “Morddure,”[127] and in stating, what is nowhere told of Excalibur, that it could not be

“forst his rightful owner to offend.”

Nor do we hear in the romances of such marvellous details about the prince’s shield as those which Spenser gives; it was made of “diamond perfect, pure and cleene,” and when Arthur chose to uncover it,

Spenser, again, finds none of the knights of the Round Table suitable for the main purposes of his allegory—the only prominent one who is brought into the poem is Tristram, and he is introduced only as quite a subordinate character. As the poet expressly tells us in his prefatory letter that his purpose is to “pourtraict” Arthur “before he was king,” The Faerie Queene, even had it been completed, could hardly have contained any reference to the later, and more especially the tragic, features of Arthurian story. Neither did Spenser’s general design admit of any treatment of them. There could be no Guinevere in his poem, as Arthur was destined at the end to marry Gloriana, the Fairy Queen, in whom “I mean Glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene, and her kingdom in Faery land.” There is indeed some excuse even for Blackmore’s “particular intentions” in his egregious epics when we remember that a really great poet was capable of thus imagining Arthur, even in allegory, as the husband of Queen Elizabeth.

The uses to which Spenser and Blackmore, each in his own way, put the Arthurian legends are not, after all, so dissimilar to those which underlie the most popular, and on the whole the most successful, poetical treatment of them in the nineteenth century.[129] The Idylls of the King have a palpably symbolical, not to say an allegorical, meaning, and “a message for the times.” It may be that in no other way could any new life be infused into stories of which Swinburne says that “their day is done,”—

At any rate, Tennyson frankly confesses that what he presents in his ‘Idylls’ is a

and the new element in it is a didactic purpose suited to the moral and sentimental temper of the Victorian era, and embodying what a severe critic calls “the ethics of the rectory parlour.”[131] Tennyson himself is responsible for revealing the “particular intention” which equates the Arthur of the ‘Idylls’ with the Prince Consort; for he dedicates the poems to his memory,

It is hardly likely, however, that Tennyson, when he first thought of the Arthurian stories as a poetic theme, had any very definite idea of putting them into the form of an allegory such as most of his interpreters now discover in them; but that he, from the first, intended a “modern meaning” is plain from the lines appended to the Morte D’Arthur at the time of its original publication,—

That the ‘Idylls,’ when finally completed and put into their present order, had “an allegorical or perhaps a parabolic drift,” in them, is certain, for the words quoted are Tennyson’s own.[132] Tennyson, however, complains that critics had “taken his hobby and ridden it too hard, and have explained some things too allegorically.” “The general drift of the ‘Idylls,’” he continues, “is clear enough. ‘The whole ... is the dream of man coming into practical life and ruined by one sin. Birth is a mystery and death is a mystery, and in the midst lies the tableland of life.’” Modern though this “drift” may be, it is perennial and universal enough in its appeal to save the ‘Idylls’—notwithstanding the references to the “modern gentleman” and the Prince Consort—from being a merely Victorian poem, or series of poems. They do not, together, constitute an Arthuriad: they are not meant to represent “the epic, some twelve books” with “faint Homeric echoes” which Tennyson may have been meditating in his earlier years when he published his Morte D’Arthur. “He produced no epic, only a series of epic idyllia. He had a spiritual conception, ‘an allegory in the distance,’ an allegory not to be insisted upon, though its presence was to be felt. No longer, as in youth, did Tennyson intend Merlin to symbolise ‘the sceptical understanding,’ or poor Guinevere to stand for the Blessed Reformation, or the Table Round for Liberal Institutions. Mercifully Tennyson never actually allegorised Arthur in that fashion.”[133]

Tennyson’s King Arthur is certainly modern enough in sentiment and speech, but the position which he holds in the ‘Idylls’ is, in many ways, in harmony with that which he occupies in history and romantic legend. Tennyson himself warns his readers that they must not expect to find in the ‘Idylls’

Rather they ought to discern in him

“Ideal manhood closed in real man.”

All the same, Tennyson’s pre-occupation with “ideal manhood” did not prevent him from bestowing painful labour upon knowing the “real man,” so far as the records, historical and romantic, reveal him; and one of the outstanding features of The Idylls of the King is their remarkable fidelity to the details of Arthurian story as given in its time-honoured literary sources. “Geoffrey’s book,” and “Malleor’s,” had been carefully studied by the poet, and he had even been at pains to garner all he could from early Welsh poetry and from the Mabinogion, as presented in Lady Charlotte Guest’s charming translation. While Malory is their main source, the ‘Idylls’ contain much that shows how familiar Tennyson was with Arthurian lore generally in its most primitive forms. The story of Geraint, for example, as told by him, follows closely the Welsh version of it given by Lady Charlotte Guest.[134] Again, the description of Britain in the opening lines of The Coming of Arthur as a country where each “petty king” was ever waging war upon some other, and where the children “grew up to wolf-like men, worse than the wolves,” until

recalls vividly the bitter lamentations of Gildas over the degeneracy of his countrymen. The account which Lancelot gives of Arthur’s wars in Lancelot and Elaine is an expansion of the record in Nennius of the twelve Arthurian battles. And Tennyson’s general conception of Arthur as the flower of kings who

“Drew all the petty princedoms under him,”

and “made a realm” in Britain, is far more in keeping with that of the early chroniclers than with the picture given of him in the later romances.

But it is not in such incidental features alone that the ‘Idylls’ are true to the older Arthurian tradition. Modern in their sentiment and ethics though they may be, Tennyson’s main purpose in them of “shadowing Sense at war with Soul” is not altogether unjustified by the general literary history of the legends. Malory, at any rate, had some such purpose, for Caxton assures us that the Morte Darthur was “written for our doctrine, and for to beware that we fall not to vice nor sin, but to exercise and follow virtue.” “In Malory’s compilation, and in later mediæval romance, the fate of Arthur means the fate of the chivalrous ideal, whose irreconcilable elements were incorporated in him. In the romantic historians the fate of Arthur is the fate of the Christian Britons in conflict with heathenism from without and treason from within. Even in the old myths, his fate, if we may trust Professor Rhys, is the fate of the culture-hero combined with Father Sky, in conflict with the powers of Darkness and the Nether-world. It was by a true inspiration that Tennyson was drawn to the old legends, and reading into them his secret found it to be their own. Accordingly, this identity of feeling with his predecessors kept Tennyson on the track of the story.... Thus the ‘Idylls’ are both truer to the authorities and nearer our own feelings than any other of the adaptations of Arthurian story. Though the adventures are now regarded from a modern point of view, this point of view is in the same spiritual watch-tower from which the framers of the legend looked: but it is the platform at the top, not a loop-hole on the winding stair.”[135]

After all, however much the ‘Idylls’ may be cavilled at on the score of their modern sentiment and occasional homiletic strain, their general setting and atmosphere are genuinely romantic and in thorough keeping with the far-off things of which they sing. Tennyson is true enough to his sources in his descriptions of scenery and in his entire survey of the traditional Arthurian country. “It is no land dwelt in by bold bad men we see, when Arthur rides through the mountains and finds the diamonds; when Geraint and Enid go through the green gloom of the wood; when Galahad rides over the black swamp, leaping from bridge to bridge till he sail to the spiritual city; when Lancelot drives through the storm to the enchanted towers of Carbonek seven days across the sea.”[136] In none of the ‘Idylls’ do we perhaps breathe more of the atmosphere of pure romance than in the first and the last. Mystery and magic surround both the coming and the passing of the King;

“From the great deep to the great deep he goes.”

This “weird rhyme” of Merlin’s comes into Bedivere’s memory as he sees the barge with the three dark Queens bearing Arthur away into the distance

And the last scene closes with the faithful Bedivere left wondering whether Arthur will “come again,” and whether, “if he come no more,” the three Queens who bore him away be “friends of Arthur, who should help him at his need?” So, Tennyson, like Malory and the romancers, leaves Arthur’s “return” an open question; but Bedivere goes away comforted by what seemed an assurance that “all was well” with Arthur whither he had gone.