A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1

A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 Page 5

by George Saintsbury

  CHAPTER II

  THE MATTERS OF FRANCE, ROME, AND BRITAIN

  It has been said already that the Saint's Life, as it seems mostprobable to the present writer, started the romance in France; but ofcourse we must allow considerable reinforcement of one kind or anotherfrom local, traditional, and literary sources. The time-honoureddistribution, also given already, of the "matter" of this romance doesnot concern us so much here as it would in a history of Frenchliterature, but it concerns us. We shall indeed probably find that thehome-grown or home-fed _Chanson de Geste_ did least for the novel in thewide sense--that the "Matter of Rome" chiefly gave it variety, change ofatmosphere to some extent, and an invaluable connection with olderliteratures, but that the central division or "Matter of Britain," withthe immense fringes of miscellaneous _romans d'aventures_--which aresometimes more or less directly connected with it, and are alwaysmoulded more or less on its patterns--gave most of all.

  [Sidenote: The _Chanson de Geste_.]

  Of these, however, what has been called the family or patriotic part wasundoubtedly the earliest and for a long time the most influential. Thereis, fortunately, not the least need here to fight out the old battle ofthe _cantilenae_ or supposed _ballad_-originals. I see no reason toalter the doubt with which I have always regarded their existence; butit really does not matter, _to us_, whether they existed or not,especially since we have not got them now. What we have got is a vastmass of narrative poetry, which latterly took actual prose form, andwhich--as early certainly as the eleventh century and perhapsearlier--turns the French faculty for narrative (whether it was actuallyor entirely fictitious narrative or not does not again matter) intochannels of a very promising kind.

  The novel-reader who has his wits and his memory about him may perhapssay, "Promising perhaps; but paying?" The answer must be that thepromise may have taken some time to be fully liquidated, but that theimmediate or short-dated payment was great. The fault of the _Chansonsde Geste_--a fault which in some degree is to be found in Frenchliterature as a whole, and to a greater extent in all mediaevalliterature--is that the class and the type are rather too prominent. Thecentral conception of Charlemagne as a generally dignified but toofrequently irascible and rather petulant monarch, surrounded by valiantand in a way faithful but exceedingly touchy or ticklish paladins, is nodoubt true enough to the early stages of feudalism--in fact, to adaptthe tag, there is too much human nature in it for it to be false. But itcommunicates a certain sameness to the chansons which stick closest tothe model.

  [Sidenote: The proportions of history and fiction in them.]

  The exact relation of the _Chansons de Geste_ to the subsequent historyof French fiction is thus an extremely important one, and one thatrequires, not only a good deal of reading on which to base any opinionthat shall not be worthless, but a considerable exercise of criticaldiscretion in order to form that opinion competently. The present writercan at least plead no small acquaintance with the subject, and a full ifpossibly over-generous acknowledgment of his dealings with it on thepart of some French authorities, living and dead, of the highestcompetence. But the attractions of the vast and strangely long ignoredbody of _chanson_ literature are curiously various in kind, and theycannot be indiscriminately drawn upon as evidence of an early mastery oftale-telling proper on the part of the French as a nation.

  There is indeed one solid fact, the importance of which can hardly beexaggerated in some ways, though it may be wrongly estimated in others.Here is not merely the largest part proportionately, but a very largebulk positively, of the very earliest part of a literature, devoted to akind of narrative which, though some of it may be historic originally,is pretty certainly worked up into its concrete and extant state byfiction. The comparison with the two literatures which on the whole bearsuch comparison with French best--English and Greek--is here verystriking. People say that there "must have been" many _Beowulfs_: it canhardly be said that we have so much as a positive assertion of theexistence of even one other, though we have allusions and glances whichhave been amplified in the usual fashion. We have positive and notreasonably doubtful assertion of the existence of a very large body ofmore or less early Greek epic; but we have nothing existing except the_Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.

  [Sidenote: The part played by language, prosody, and manners.]

  On this fact, be it repeated, if we observe the canons of soundcriticism in the process, too much stress in general cannot be laid.There must have been some more than ordinary _nisus_ towardsstory-telling in a people and a language which produced, and for threeor four centuries cherished, something like a hundred legends, sometimesof great length, on the single general[14] subject of the exploits,sufferings, and what not of the great half-historical, half-legendaryemperor _a la barbe florie_, of his son, and of the more legendary thanhistorical peers, rebels, subjects, descendants, and "those about both"generally. And though the assertion requires a little more justificationand allowance, there must have been some extraordinary gifts for more orless fictitious composition when such a vast body of spiritedfictitious, or even half-fictitious, narrative is turned out.

  But in this justification as to the last part of the contention a gooddeal of care has to be observed. It will not necessarily follow, becausethe metal is attractive, that its attractiveness is always of the kindpurely belonging to fiction; and, as a matter of fact, a large part ofit is not. Much is due to the singular sonority and splendour of thelanguage, which is much more like Spanish than modern French, and whichonly a few poets of exceptional power have been able to reproduce inmodern French itself. Much more is imparted by the equally peculiarcharacter of the metre--the long _tirades_ or _laisses_, assonanced ormono-rhymed paragraphs in decasyllables or alexandrines, which, to thosewho have once caught their harmony, have an indescribable andunparalleled charm. Yet further, these attractions come from the strangeunfamiliar world of life and character described and displayed; from thebrilliant stock epithets and phrases that stud the style as if with astiff but glittering embroidery; and from other sources too many tomention here.

  [Sidenote: Some drawbacks.]

  Yet one must draw attention to the fact that all the named sources ofthe attraction, and may perhaps ask the reader to take it on trust thatmost of the unnamed, are not essentially or exclusively attractions offiction--that they are attractions of poetry. And, on the other hand,while the weaving of so vast a web of actual fiction remains "tocredit," there are not a few things to be set on the other side of theaccount. The sameness of the _chanson_ story, the almost invariablerecurrence of the stock motives and frameworks--of rebellion, treason,paynim invasion, petulance of a King's son, somewhat too "coming"affection of a King's daughter, tyrannical and Lear-like _impotentia_ ofthe King himself, etc.--may be exaggerated, but cannot be denied. In thegreatest of all by general acknowledgment, the far-famed _Roland_, theeconomy of pure story interest is pushed to a point which in a lessunsophisticated age--say the twentieth instead of the twelfth oreleventh century--might be put down to deliberate theory or crotchet.The very incidents, stirring as they are, are put as it were inskeleton argument or summary rather than amplified into full story-fleshand blood; we see such heroine as there is only to see her die; even thegreat moment of the horn is given as if it had been "censored" bysomebody. People, I believe, have called this brevity Homeric; but thatis not how I read Homer.

  In fact, so jealous are some of those who well and wisely love the_chansons_, that I have known objections taken to ranking as pureexamples, despite their undoubted age and merit, such pieces as _Amis etAmiles_ (for passion and pathos and that just averted tragedy which isso difficult to manage, one of the finest of all) and the _Voyage aConstantinoble_, the single early specimen of mainly or purely comicdonnee.[15] This seems to me, I confess, mere prudery or else mistakenlogic, starting from the quite unjustifiable proposition that nothingthat is not found in the _Chanson de Roland_ ought to be found in any_chanson_. But we may admit that the "bones"--the simplest terms of the_chanson_-fo
rmula--hardly include varied interests, though they allowsuch interests to be clothed upon and added to them.

  [Sidenote: But a fair balance of actual story merit.]

  Despite this admission, however, and despite the further one that it isto the "romances" proper--Arthurian, classical, and adventurous--ratherthan to the _chansons_ that one must look for the first satisfactoryexamples of such clothing and addition, it is not to be denied that the_chansons_ themselves provide a great deal of it--whether because ofadulteration with strictly "romance" matter is a question for debate inanother place and not here. But it would be a singularly ungratefulmemory which should, in this place, leave the reader with the idea thatthe _Chanson de Geste_ as such is merely monotonous and dull. Theintensity of the appeal of _Roland_ is no doubt helped by that approachto bareness--even by a certain tautology--which has been mentioned._Aliscans_, which few could reject as faithless to the type, contains,even without the family of dependent poems which cluster round it, avivid picture of the valiant insubordinate warrior in William of Orange,with touches of comedy or at least horse-play.

  [Sidenote: Some instances of this.]

  The striking, and to all but unusually dull or hopelessly "modern"imaginations as unusually beautiful, centre-point of _Amis etAmiles_,--where one of the heroes, who has sworn a "white" perjury tosave his friend and is punished for it by the terror, "white" in theother sense, of leprosy, is abandoned by his wife, and only healed bythe blood of the friend's children, is the crowning instance of anotherset of appeals. The catholicity of a man's literary taste, and his morespecial capacity of appreciating things mediaeval, may perhaps be betterestimated by his opinion of _Amis et Amiles_ than by any othertouchstone; for it has more appeals than this almost tragic one--a muchgreater development of the love-motive than either _Roland_ or_Aliscans_, and a more varied interest generally. Its continuation,_Jourdains de Blaivies_, takes the hero abroad, as do many other_chansons_, especially two of the most famous, _Huon de Bordeaux_ and_Ogier de Danemarche_. These two are also good--perhaps thebest--examples of a process very much practised in the Middle Ages andleaving its mark on future fiction--that of expansion and continuation.In the case of Ogier, indeed, this process was carried so far thatenquiring students have been known to be sadly disappointed in thealmost total disconnection between William Morris's beautiful section of_The Earthly Paradise_ and the original French, as edited by Barrois inthe first attempt to collect the _chansons_ seventy or eighty years ago.The great "Orange" subcycle, of which _Aliscans_ is the most famous,extends in many directions, but is apt in all its branches to cling moreto "war and politics." William of Orange is in this respect partlymatched by Garin of Lorraine. No _chanson_ retained its popularity, inevery sense of that word, better than the _Quatre Fils d'Aymon_--thehistory of Renaut de Montauban and his brothers and cousin, the famousenchanter-knight Maugis. As a "boy's book" there is perhaps none better,and the present writer remembers an extensive and apparently modernEnglish translation which was a favourite "sixty years since." _Berteaux grands Pies_, the earliest form of a well-known legend, has theextrinsic charm of being mentioned by Villon; while there is no moreagreeable love-story, on a small scale and in a simple tone, than thatof Doon and Nicolette[16] in _Doon de Mayence_. And not to make a merecatalogue which, if supported by full abstracts of all the pieces, wouldbe inordinately bulky and would otherwise convey little idea to readers,it may be said that the general _chanson_ practice of grouping togetheror branching out the poems (whichever metaphor be preferred) after thefashion of a family-tree involves of itself no inconsiderable call onthe tale-telling faculties. That the writers pay little or no attentionto chronological and other possibilities is hardly much to say againstthem; if this be an unforgivable sin it is not clear how either Dickensor Thackeray is to escape damnation, with Sir Walter to greet them intheir uncomfortable sojourn.

  But it is undoubtedly true that the almost exclusive concentration ofthe attention on war prevents the attainment of much detailednovel-interest. Love affairs--some glanced at above--do indeed make, insome of the _chansons_, a fuller appearance than the flashlight view oflost tragedy which we have in _Roland_. But until the reflex influenceof the Arthurian romance begins to work, they are, though not alwaysdisagreeable or ungraceful, of a very simple and primitive kind, asindeed are the delineations of manners generally.

  * * * * *

  [Sidenote: The classical borrowings--Troy and Alexander.]

  The "matter of Rome the Great," as the original text has it (though, infact, Rome proper has little to do with the most important examples ofthe class), adds very importantly to the development of romance, andthrough that, of novel. Its bulk is considerable, and its examples haveinterest of various kinds. But for us this interest is concentratedupon, if not exclusively confined to, the two great groups (undertakenby, and illustrated in, the three great literary languages of theearlier Middle Ages, and, as usual, most remarkably and originally inFrench) of the Siege of Troy and the life of Alexander. It should bealmost enough to say of the former that it introduced,[17] withpractically nothing but the faintest suggestion from really classicalsources, the great romance-novel of the loves of Troilus and Cressida tothe world's literature; and of the second, that it gives us the firstinstance of the infusion of Oriental mystery and marvel that we candiscern in the literature of the West. For details about the books whichcontain these things, their authors and their probable sources anddevelopment, the reader must, as in other cases, look elsewhere.[18] Itis only our business here to say something about the general nature ofthe things themselves and about the additions that they made to thecapital, and in some cases almost to the "plant," of fiction.

  [Sidenote: _Troilus._]

  That the Troilus and Cressida romance, with its large provision and itsmore large suggestion of the accomplished love-story, evolved from oldertale-tellers by Boccaccio and Chaucer and Henryson and Shakespeare, isnot a pure creation of the earlier Middle Ages, few people who patientlyattend to evidence can now believe. Even in the wretched summaries ofthe Tale of Troy by Dictys and Dares (which again no such person as theone just described can put very early), the real novel-interest--eventhe most slender romance-interest--is hardly present at all. Benoit deSainte-More in the twelfth century may not have actually invented this;it is one of the principles of this book, as of all that its writer haswritten, that the quest of the inventor of a story is itself the vainestof inventions. But it is certain that nobody hitherto has been able to"get behind him," and it is still more certain that he has given enoughbase for the greater men who followed to build upon. If he cannot becredited with the position of the pseudo-Callisthenes (see below) inreference to the Alexander story, he may fairly share that of hiscontemporary Geoffrey of Monmouth, if not even of Nennius, as regardsthat of Arthur. The situation, or rather the group of situations, is ofthe most promising and suggestive kind, negatively and positively. Inthe first place the hero and heroine are persons about whom the greatold poets of the subject have said little or nothing; and what animmense advantage this is all students of the historical novel of thelast hundred years know. In the second, the way in which they are put inaction (or ready for action) is equally satisfactory, or let us saystimulating. In a great war a prince loves a noble lady, who by birthand connections belongs to the enemy, and after vicissitudes, which canbe elaborated according to the taste and powers of the romancer, gainsher love. But the course of this love is interrupted by her surrender orexchange to the enemy themselves; her beauty attracts, nay has alreadyattracted, the fancy of one of the enemy's leaders, and being not merelya coquette but a light-o'-love[19] she admits his addresses. Herpunishment follows or does not follow, is accomplished during the lifeof her true lover or not, according again to the taste and fancy of theperson who handles the story. But the scheme, even at its simplest, isnovel-soil: marked out, matured, manured, and ready for cultivation, andthe crops which can be grown on it depend entirely upon the skill of thecultivator.<
br />
  For all this some would, as has been said above, see sufficientsuggestion in the Greek Romance. I have myself known the examples ofthat Romance for a very long time and have always had a high opinion ofit; but except what has been already noticed--the prominence of theheroine--I can see little or nothing that the Mediaeval romance couldpossibly owe to it, and as a matter of fact hardly anything else incommon between the two. In the last, and to some extent the mostremarkable (though very far from the best if not nearly the worst), ofthe Greek Romances, the _Hysminias and Hysmine_ of Eustathius, we haveindeed got to a point in advance, taking that word in a peculiar sense,even of Troilus at its most accomplished, that is to say, the Marinismor Marivaudage, if not even the Meredithese, of language and sentiment.But _Hysminias and Hysmine_ is probably not older than Benoit deSainte-More's story, and as has just been said, Renaissance, naypost-Renaissance, not Mediaeval in character. We must, of course,abstain from "reading back" Chaucer or even Boccaccio into Benoit orinto his probable plagiarist Guido de Columnis; but there is nothinguncritical or wrong in "reading forward" from these to the laterwriters. The hedge-rose is there, which will develop into, and serve asa support for, the hybrid perpetual--a term which could itself bedeveloped in application, after the fashion of a mediaeval _moralitas_.And when we have actually come to Pandaro and Deiphobus, to the "verseof society," as it may be called in a new sense, of the happier part ofChaucer and to the intense tragedy of the later part of Henryson, thenwe are in the workshop, if not in the actual show-room, of the completednovel. It would be easy, as it was not in the case of the _chansons_,to illustrate directly by a translation, either here from Benoit orlater from the shortened prose version of the fourteenth century, whichwe also possess; but it is not perhaps necessary, and would require muchspace.

  [Sidenote: _Alexander._]

  The influence of the Alexander story, though scarcely less, is of awidely different kind. In _Troilus_, as has been said, the Middle Age isworking on scarcely more than the barest hints of antiquity, which itamplifies and supplements out of its own head and its own heart--a headwhich can dream dream-webs of subtlest texture unknown to the ancients,and a heart which can throb and bleed in a fashion hardly shown by anyancient except Sappho. With the Alexander group we find it much morepassively recipient, though here also exercising its talent for varyingand amplification. The controversies over the pseudo-Callisthenes,"Julius Valerius," the _Historia de Praeliis_, etc., are once more notfor us; but results of them, which have almost or quite emerged from thestate of controversy, are. It is certain that the appearance, in theclassical languages, of the wilder legends about Alexander was as earlyat least as the third century after Christ--that is to say, long beforeeven "Dark" let alone "Middle" Ages were thought of--and perhapsearlier. There seems to be very little doubt that these legends were ofEgyptian or Asiatic origin, and so what we vaguely call "Oriental." Theylong anticipated the importing afresh of such influences by theCrusades, and they must, with all except Christians and Jews (that is tosay, with the majority), have actually forestalled the Orientalinfluence of the Scriptures. Furthermore, when Mediaeval France began tocreate a new body of European literature, the Crusades had taken place;the appetite for things Oriental and perhaps we should say thehalf-imaginative power of appreciating them, had become active; and aconsiderable amount of literature in the vernacular had already beencomposed. It was not wonderful, therefore, that the _trouveres_ shouldfly upon this spoil. By not the least notable of the curiosities ofliterature in its own class, they picked out a historical but not veryimportant episode--the siege of Gaza and Alexander's disgraceful crueltyto its brave defender--and made of this a regular _Chanson de Geste_ (inall but "Family" connection), the _Fuerres de Gadres_, a poem of severalthousand lines. But the most generally popular (though sometimessquabbled over) parts of the story, were the supposed perversion ofOlympias, not by the God Ammon but by the magician-king Nectanabuspersonating the God and becoming thereby father of the Hero; the Indianand some other real campaigns (the actual conquest of Persia was veryslightly treated), and, far above all, the pure Oriental wonder-tales ofthe descent into the sea, the march to the Fountain of Youth, and othermyths of the kind.

  Few things can be more different than the story-means used in these twolegends; yet it must be personal taste rather than strict criticalevaluation which pronounces one more important to the development of thenovel than the other. There is a little love interest in the Alexanderpoems--the heroine of this part being Queen Candace--but it is slight,episodic, and rudimentary beside the complex and all-absorbing passionswhich, when genius took the matter in hand, were wrought out of thetruth of Troilus and the faithlessness of Cressid. The joys of fightingor roaming, of adventure and quest, and above all those of marvel, arethe attractions which the Alexander legend offers, and who shall saythat they are insufficient? At any rate no one can deny that they havebeen made the seasoning, if not the stuff and substance, of an enormousslice of the romance interest, and of a very large part of that of thenovel.

  [Sidenote: The Arthurian Legend.]

  It is scarcely necessary to speak of other classical romances, and it isof course very desirable to keep in mind that the Alexander story, in noform in which we have it, attempts any _strictly_ novel interest; whilethough that interest is rife in some forms of "Troilus," those forms arenot exactly of the period, and are in no case of the language, withwhich we are dealing. It was an Italian, an Englishman, and a Scot whoeach in his own speech--one in the admirable vulgar tongue, of which atthat time and as a finished thing, Italian was alone in Europe aspossessor; the others in the very best of Middle English, and, as somethink, almost the best of Middle Scots verse--displayed the fullpossibilities of Benoit's story. But the third "matter," the matter ofBritain or (in words better understanded of most people) the ArthurianLegend, after starting in Latin, was, as far as language went, for sometime almost wholly French, though it is exceedingly possible that atleast one, if not more, of its main authors was no Frenchman. And inthis "matter" the exhibition of the powers of fiction--prose as well asverse--was carried to a point almost out of sight of that reached by the_Chansons_, and very far ahead of any contemporary treatment even of theTroilus story.

  [Sidenote: Chrestien de Troyes and the theories about him.]

  Before, however, dealing with this great Arthurian story as a stage inthe history of the Novel-Romance in and by itself, we must come to afigure which, though we have very little substantial knowledge of it,there is some reason for admitting as one of the first named and "coted"figures in French literature, at least as regards fiction in verse. Itis well known that the action of modern criticism is in some respectsstrikingly like that of the sea in one of the most famous and vividpassages[20] of Spenser's unequalled scene-painting in words withmusical accompaniment of them. It delights in nothing so much as instripping one part of the shore of its belongings, and hurrying them offto heap upon another part. Chrestien de Troyes is one of the luckypersonages who have benefited, not least and most recently, by thisfancy. It is true that the actual works attributed to him have remainedthe same--his part of the shore has not been actually extended like partof that of the Humber. But it has had new riches, honours, anddecorations heaped upon it till it has become, in the actual Spenserianlanguage of another but somewhat similar passage (111. iv. 20), a "richstrond" indeed. Until a comparatively recent period, the opinionentertained of Chrestien, by most if not all competent students of him,was pretty uniform, and, though quite favourable, not extraordinarilyhigh. He was recognised as a past-master of the verse _romand'aventures_ in octosyllabic couplet, who probably took hisheterogeneous materials wherever he found them; "did not invent much"(as Thackeray says of Smollett), but treated whatever he did treat in asingularly light and pleasant manner, not indeed free from the somewhatundistinguished fluency to which this "light and lewed" couplet, asChaucer calls it, is liable, and showing no strong grasp either ofcharacter or of plot, but on the whole a very agreeable writer, and aqui
te capital example of the better class of _trouvere_, far above the_improvisatore_ on the one hand and the dull compiler on the other; butbelow, if not quite so far below, the definitely poetic poet.

  To an opinion something like this the present writer, who formed it longago, not at second hand but from independent study of originals, and whohas kept up and extended his acquaintance with Chrestien, still adheres.

  Of late, however, as above suggested, "Chrestiens" have gone up in themarket to a surprising extent. Some twenty years ago the late M. GastonParis[21] announced and, with all his distinguished ability and hisgreat knowledge elaborately supported, his conclusions, that the greatFrench prose Arthurian romances (which had hitherto been considered bythe best authorities, including his own no less admirable father, M.Paulin Paris, slightly anterior to the poet of Troyes, and in allprobability the source of part at least of his work) were posterior andprobably derivative. Now this, of itself, would of course to some extentput up Chrestien's value. But it, and the necessary corollaries fromit, as originality and so forth, by no means exhaust the additionalhonours and achievements which have been heaped upon Chrestien by M.Paris and by others who have followed, more or less accepted, and insome cases bettered his ascriptions. In the first and principal place,there has been a tendency, almost general, to dethrone Walter Map fromhis old position as the real begetter of the completed Arthurianromance, and to substitute the Troyan. Then, partly in support, but alsoto some extent, I think, independently of this immense ennoblement,discoveries have been made of gifts and graces in Chrestien himself,which had entirely escaped the eyes of so excellent a critic, so eruditea scholar, and so passionate a lover of Old French literature as theelder M. Paris, and which continue to be invisible to the far inferiorgifts and knowledge, but if I may dare to say so, the equal good willand the not inconsiderable critical experience, of the presenthistorian.

  Now with large parts of this matter we have, fortunately enough, nothingto do, and the actual authorship of the great Arthurian conception,namely, the interweaving of the Graal story on the one hand and theloves of Lancelot and Guinevere on the other, with the Geoffrey ofMonmouth matter, concerns us hardly at all. But some have gone evenfurther than has been yet hinted in the exaltation of Chrestien. Theyhave discovered in him--"him-by-himself-him"--as the author of hisactual extant works and not as putative author of the real Arthuriad,not merely a pattern example of the court _trouvere_--as much as this,or nearly as much, has been admitted here--but almost the inventor ofromance and even of something very like novel, a kind of mediaevalScott-Bulwer-Meredith, equally great at adventure, fashion, andcharacter-analysis; subject only, and that not much, to the limitationsof the time. In fact, if I do not do some of these panegyristsinjustice, we ought to have a fancy bust of Chrestien, with the titlesof his works gracefully inscribed on the pedestal, as a frontispiece tothis book, if not even a full-length statue, robed like a small St.Ursula, and like her in Memling's presentation at Bruges, sheltering inits ample folds the child-like figures of future French novelists andromancers, from the author of _Aucassin et Nicolette_ to M. AnatoleFrance.

  Again, some fifty years of more or less critical reading of novels ofall ages and more than one or two languages, combined with nearly fortyyears reading of Chrestien himself and a passion for Old French, leavethe present writer quite unable to rise to this beatific vision. But letus, before saying any more what Chrestien could or could not do, see, inthe usual cold-blooded way, what he _did_.

  [Sidenote: His unquestioned work.]

  The works attributed to this very differently, though neverunfavourably, estimated tale-teller--at least those which concernus--are _Percevale le Gallois_, _Le Chevalier a[22] la Charette_, _LeChevalier au Lyon_, _Erec et Enide_, _Cliges_, and a much shorter_Guillaume d'Angleterre_. This last has nothing to do with the Conqueror(though the title has naturally deceived some), and is a semi-mysticalromance of the group derived from the above-mentioned legend of St.Eustace, and represented in English by the beautiful story of _SirIsumbras_. It is very doubtfully Chrestien's, and in any case veryunlike his other work; but those who think him the Arthurian magicianmight make something of it, as being nearer the tone of the older Graalstories than the rest of his compositions, even _Percevale_ itself. Ofthese, all, except the _Charette_, deal with what may be called outliersof the Arthurian story. _Percevale_ is the longest, but its immenselength required, by common confession, several continuators;[23] theothers have a rather uniform allowance of some six or seven thousandlines. _Cliges_ is one of the most "outside" of all, for the hero,though knighted by Arthur, is the disinherited heir of Constantinople,and the story is that of the recovery of his kingdom. _Erec_, as thesecond part of the title will truly suggest, though the first maydisguise it, gives us the story of the first of Tennyson's original_Idylls_. The _Chevalier au Lyon_ is a delightful romance of the Gawaingroup, better represented by its English adaptation, _Ywain_, than anyother French example. _Percevale_ and the _Charette_ touch closest onthe central Arthurian story, and the latter has been the chiefbattlefield as to Chrestien's connection therewith, some even beggingthe question to the extent of adopting for it the title _Lancelot_.

  [Sidenote: Comparison of the _Chevalier a la Charette_ and the prose_Lancelot_.]

  The subject is the episode, well known to English readers from Malory,of the abduction of Guinevere by Meleagraunce, the son of KingBagdemagus; of the inability of all knights but Lancelot (who has beenabsent from Court in one of the lovers' quarrels) to rescue her; and ofhis undertaking the task, though hampered in various ways, one of theearliest of which compelled him to ride in a cart--a thing regarded, byone of the odd[24] conventions of chivalry, as disgraceful to a knight.Meleagraunce, though no coward, is treacherous and "felon," and allsorts of mishaps befall Lancelot before he is able for the second timeto conquer his antagonist, and finally to take his over and over againforfeited life. But long before this he has arrived at the castle whereGuinevere is imprisoned; and has been enabled to arrange a meeting withher at night, which is accomplished by wrenching out the bars of herwindow. The ill chances and _quiproquos_ which result from his havingcut his hands in the proceeding (though the actual visit is notdiscovered), and the arts by which Meleagraunce ensnares the destinedavenger for a time, lengthen out the story till, by the final contest,Meleagraunce goes to his own place and the Queen is restored to hers.

  Unfortunately the blots of constant tautology and verbiage, with notinfrequent flatness, are on all this gracious story as told byChrestien.[25] Among the traps and temptations which are thrown inLancelot's way to the Queen is one of a highly "sensational" nature. Inthe night Lancelot hears a damsel, who is his hostess, though he hasrefused her most thorough hospitality, shrieking for assistance; and oncoming to the spot finds her in a situation demanding instant help,which she begs, if the irreparable is not to happen. But the poet notonly gives us a heavily figured description of the men-at-arms who barthe way to rescue, but puts into the mouth of the intending rescuer aspeech (let us be exact) of twenty-eight lines and a quarter, duringwhich the just mentioned irreparable, if it had been seriously meant,might have happened with plenty of time to spare. So, in the crowningscene (excellently told in Malory), where the lover forces his waythrough iron bars to his love, reckless of the tell-tale witness of hisbleeding hands, the circumlocutions are _plusquam_ Richardsonian--and donot fall far short of a serious anticipation of Shakespeare's burlesquein _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. The mainly gracious description isspoilt by terrible bathetics from time to time. Guinevere in her whitenightdress and mantle of scarlet and _camus_[26] on one side of thebars, Lancelot outside, exchanging sweet salutes, "for much was he fainof her and she of him," are excellent. The next couplet, or quatrain,almost approaches the best poetry. "Of villainy or annoy make they noparley or complaint; but draw near each other so much at least that theyhold each other hand by hand." But what follows? That they cannot cometogether vexes them so immeasurably that--what? They blame the iron workfor it. Th
is certainly shows an acute understanding[27] and a verycreditable sense of the facts of the situation on the part of bothlovers; but it might surely have been taken for granted. Also, it takesLancelot forty lines to convince his lady that when bars are in your waythere is nothing like pulling them out of it. So in the actualpulling-out there is the idlest exaggeration and surplusage; the firstbar splits one of Lancelot's fingers to the sinews and cuts off the topjoint of the next. The actual embraces are prettily and gracefully told(though again with otiose observations about silence), and the whole,from the knight's coming to the window to his leaving it, takes 150lines. Now hear the prose of the so-called "Vulgate _Lancelot_."

  "And he came to the window: and the Queen, who waited for him, slept not, but came thither. And the one threw to the other their arms, and they felt each other as much as they could reach. "Lady," said Lancelot, "if I could enter yonder, would it please you?" "Enter," said she, "fair sweet friend? How could this happen?" "Lady," said he, "if it please you, it could happen lightly." "Certainly," said she, "I should wish it willingly above everything." "Then, in God's name," said he, "that shall well happen. For the iron will never hold." "Wait, then," said she, "till I have gone to bed." Then he drew the irons from their sockets so softly that no noise was made and no bar broke."

  In this simple prose, sensuous and passionate for all its simplicity, istold the rest of the story. There are eighteen lines of it altogether inDr. Sommer's reprint, but as these are long quarto lines, let usmultiply them by some three to get the equivalent of the "skippingoctosyllables." There will remain fifty to a hundred and fifty, with, inthe prose, some extra matter not in the verse. But the acme of thecontrast is reached in these words of the prose, which answer to someforty lines of the poet's watering-out. "Great was the joy that theymade each other that night, for long had each suffered for the other.And when the day came, they parted." Beat that who can!

  Many years ago, and not a few before M. Gaston Paris had published hisviews, I read these two forms of the story in the valuable jointedition, verse and prose, of M. Jonckbloet, which some ruffian (mayHeaven _not_ assoil him!) has since stolen or hidden from me. And I saidthen to myself, "There is no doubt which of these is the original."Thirty years later, with an unbroken critical experience of imaginativework in prose and verse during the interval, I read them again in Dr.Forster's edition of the verse and Dr. Sommer's of the prose, and said,"There is less doubt than ever." That the prose should have beenprettified and platitudinised, decorated and diluted into the verse is apossibility which we know to be not only possible but likely, from athousand more unfortunate examples. That the contrary process shouldhave taken place is practically unexampled and, especially at that time,largely unthinkable. At any rate, whosoever did it had a much greatergenius than Chrestien's.

  This is no place to argue out the whole question, but a singleparticular may be dealt with. The curiously silly passage about the barsabove given is a characteristic example of unlucky and superfluousamplification of the perfectly natural question and answer of the prose,"May I come to you?" "Yes, but how?" an example to be paralleled bythousands of others at the time and by many more later. Taken the otherway it would be a miracle. Prose abridgers of poetry did not go to worklike that in the twelfth-thirteenth century--nor, even in the case ofCharles Lamb, have they often done so since.

  It is, however, very disagreeable to have to speak disrespectfully of awriter so agreeable in himself and so really important in our story asChrestien. His own gifts and performances are, as it seems to me, clearenough. He took from this or that source--his selection of the _Erec_and _Percivale_ matters, if not also that of _Yvain_, suggests othersbesides the, by that time as I think, concentrated Arthurian story--andfrom the Arthuriad itself the substance of the _Chevalier a laCharette_. He varied and dressed them up with pleasant etceteras, andin especial, sometimes, though not always, embroidered the alreadyintroduced love-motive with courtly fantasies and with a great deal ofdetail. I should not be at all disposed to object if somebody says thathe, before any one else, set the type of the regular verse _Romand'aventures_. It seems likely, again, from the pieces referred to above,that he may have had originals more definitely connected with Celticsources, if not actually Celtic themselves, than those which have givenus the mighty architectonic of the "Vulgate" _Arthur_. In his own wayand place he is a great and an attractive figure--not least in thehistory of the novel. But I can see nothing in him that makes me thinkhim likely, and much that makes me think him utterly unlikely, to be theauthor of what I conceive to be the greatest, the most epoch-making, andalmost the originating conception of the novel-romance itself. Who itwas that did conceive this great thing I do not positively know. Allexternal evidence points to Walter Map; no internal evidence, that Ihave seen, seems to me really to point away from him. But if any onelikes let us leave him a mere Eidolon, an earlier "Great Unknown." Ourbusiness is, once more, with what he, whoever he was, did.

  [Sidenote: The constitution of the Arthuriad.]

  The multiplicity of things done, whether by "him" or "them," isastonishing; and it is quite possible, indeed likely, that they were notall done by the same person. Mediaeval continuators (as has been seen inthe case of Chrestien) worked after and into the work of each other in arather uncanny fashion; and the present writer frankly confesses that heno more knows where Godfrey de Lagny took up the _Charette_, or thevarious other sequelists the _Percevale_, from Chrestien than he wouldhave known, without confession, the books of the _Odyssey_ done by Mr.Broome and Mr. Fenton from those done by Mr. Pope. The _grand-oeuvre_is the combination of Lancelot as (1) lover of the Queen; (2) descendantof the Graalwards; (3) author, in consequence of his sin, of thegeneral failure of the Round Table Graal-Quest; (4) father of its onesuccessful but half-unearthly Seeker; (5) bringer-about (in more waysthan one[28]) of the intestine dissension which facilitates the invasionof Mordred and the foreigners and so the Passing of Arthur, of his ownrejection by the repentant Queen, and of his death. As regards minordetails of plot and incident there have to be added the bringing in ofthe pre-Round Table part of the story by Lancelot's descent from KingBan and his connections with King Bors, both Arthur's old allies, andboth, as we may call them, "Graal-heirs"; the further connection withthe Merlin legend by Lancelot's fostering under the Lady of theLake;[29] the exaltation, inspiring, and, as it were, unification ofthe scattered knight-adventures through Lancelot's constant presence aspartaker, rescuer, and avenger;[30] the human interest given to theGraal-Quest (the earlier histories being strikingly lacking in this) byhis failure, and a good many more. But above all there are the generalcharacters of the knight and the Queen to make flesh and blood of thewhole.

  Not merely the exact author or authors, but even the exact source orsources of this complicated, fateful, and exquisite imagination are,once more, not known. Years ago it was laid down finally by the mostcompetent of possible authorities (the late Sir John Rhys) that "thelove of Lancelot and Guinevere is unknown to Welsh literature."Originals for the "greatest knight" have been sought by guesswork, byidle play on words and names, if not also by positive forgery, in thatBreton literature which does not exist. There do exist versions of thestory in which Lancelot plays no very prominent part, and there is evenone singular version--certainly late and probably devised by a propermoral man afraid of scandal--which makes Lancelot outlive the Queen,quite comfortably continuing his adventurous career (this is perhaps the"furthest" of the Unthinkable in literature), and (not, it may be owned,quite inconsistently) hints that the connection was merely Platonicthroughout. These things are explicable, but better negligible. For myown part I have always thought that the loves of Tristram and Iseult(which, as has been said, were originally un-Arthurian) suggested themain idea to the author of it, being taken together with Guinevere'sfalseness with Mordred in the old quasi-chronicle, and perhaps the storyof the abduction by Melvas (Meleagraunce), which seems to be possibly agenuine Welsh legend. The
re are in the Tristram-Iseult-Mark trio quitesufficient suggestions of Lancelot-Guinevere-Arthur; while the farhigher plane on which the novice-novelist sets his lovers, and even thevery interesting subsequent exaltation of Tristram and Iseult themselvesto familiarity and to some extent equality with the other pair, hasnothing critically difficult in it.

  But this idea, great and promising as it was, required furtherfertilisation, and got it from another. The Graal story is (once more,according to authority of the greatest competence, and likely ifanything to be biassed the other way) pretty certainly not Welsh inorigin, and there is no reason to think that it originally had anythingto do with Arthur. Even after it obeyed the strange "suck" of legendstowards this centre whirlpool, or Loadstone Rock, of romance, it yieldednothing intimately connected with the Arthurian Legend itself at first,and such connection as succeeded seems pretty certainly[31] to be thatof which Percevale is the hero, and an outlier, not an integral part.But either the same genius (as one would fain hope) as that whichdevised the profane romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, or another,further grafted or inarched the sacred romance of the Graal and itsQuest with the already combined love-and-chivalry story. Lancelot, thegreatest of knights, and of the true blood of the Graal-guardians, oughtto accomplish the mysteries; but he cannot through sin, and that sin isthis very love for Guinevere. The Quest, in which (despite warning andindeed previous experience) he takes part, not merely gives occasion foradventures, half-mystical, half-chivalrous, which far exceed ininterest the earlier ones, but directly leads to the dispersion andweakening of the Round Table. And so the whole draws together to an endidentical in part with that of the Chronicle story, but quite infinitelyimproved upon it.

  [Sidenote: Its approximation to the novel proper.]

  Now not only is there in this the creation of the novel _in posse_, ofthe romance _in esse_, but it is brought about in a curiously noteworthyfashion. A hundred years and more later the greatest known writer of theMiddle Ages, and one of the three or four greatest of the world, definedthe subjects of poetry as Love, War, and Religion, or in words which wemay not unfairly translate by these. The earlier master recognised(practically for the first time) that the romance--that allotropic form(as the chemists might say) of poetry--must deal with the same. Now inthese forms of the Arthurian legend, which are certainly anterior to thelatter part of the twelfth century, there is a great deal of war and agood deal of religion, but these motives are mostly separated from eachother, the earlier forms of the Arthur story having nothing to do withthe Graal, and the earlier forms of the Graal story--so far as we cansee--nothing, or extremely little, to do with Arthur. Nor had Love, inany proper and passionate sense of the word, anything to do with either.Women and marriage and breaches of marriage appear indeed; but theearlier Graal stories are dominated by the most asceticvirginity-worship, and the earlier Arthur-stories show absolutelynothing of the passion which is the subject of the magnificent overtureof Mr. Swinburne's _Tristram_. Even this story of Tristram himself,afterwards fired and coloured by passion, seems at first to have shownnothing but the mixture of animalism, cruelty, and magic which ischaracteristic of the Celts.[32] Our magician of a very differentgramarye, were he Walter or Chrestien or some third--Norman, Champenois,Breton,[33] or Englishman (Welshman or Irishman he pretty certainly was_not_)--had therefore before him, if not exactly dry bones, yet thehalf-vivified material of a chronicle of events on the one hand and amystical dream-sermon on the other. He, or a French or English Pallasfor him, had to "think of another thing."

  And so he called in Love to reinforce War and Religion and to do itsproper office of uniting, inspiring, and producing Humanity. Heeffected, by the union of the three motives, the transformation of amere dull record of confused fighting into a brilliant pageant ofknightly adventure. He made the long-winded homilies and genealogies ofthe earlier Graal-legend at once take colour from the amorous andwar-like adventures, raise these to a higher and more spiritual plane,and provide the due punishment for the sins of his erring characters.The whole story--at least all of it that he chose to touch and all thathe chose to add--became alive. The bones were clothed with flesh andblood, the "wastable country verament" (as the dullest of the Graalchroniclers says in a phrase that applies capitally to his own work)blossomed with flower and fruit. Wars of Arthur with unwilling subjectsor Saxons and Romans; treachery of his wife and nephew and his owndeath; miracle-history of the Holy Vessel and pedigree of itscustodians; Round Table; these and many other things had lain as merescraps and orts, united by no real plot, yielding no real characters,satisfying no real interest that could not have been equally satisfiedby an actual chronicle or an actual religious-mystical discourse. Andthen the whole was suddenly knit into a seamless and shimmering web ofromance, from the fancy of Uther for Igerne to the "departing of themall" in Lyonnesse and at Amesbury and at Joyous Gard. A romanceundoubtedly, but also incidentally providing the first real novel-heroand the first real novel-heroine in the persons of the lovers who, as inthe passage above translated, sometimes "made great joy of each otherfor that they had long caused each other much sorrow," and finallyexpiated in sorrow what was unlawful in their joy.

  Let us pass to these persons themselves.

  [Sidenote: Especially in the characters and relations of Lancelot andGuinevere.]

  The first point to note about Lancelot is the singular fashion in whichhe escapes one of the dangers of the hero. Aristotle had never said thata hero must be faultless; indeed, he had definitely said exactly thecontrary, of at least the tragic hero. But one of the worst of the manymisunderstandings of his dicta brought the wrong notion about, andVirgil--that exquisite craftsman in verse and phrase, but otherwise,perhaps, not great poet and very dangerous pattern--had confirmed thisnotion by his deplorable figurehead. It is also fair to confess that allexcept morbid tastes do like to see the hero win. But if he is to be ahero of Rymer, not merely

  Like Paris handsome[34] and like Hector brave,

  but as pious as Aeneas; "a rich fellow enough," with blood hopelesslyblue and morals spotlessly copy-bookish--in other words, a Sir CharlesGrandison--he will duly meet with the detestation and "conspuing" of theelect. Almost the only just one of the numerous and generally sillycharges latterly brought against Tennyson's Arthurian handling is thathis conception of the blameless king does a little smack of this falseidea, does something grow to it. It is one of the chief points in whichhe departed, not merely from the older stories (which he probably didnot know), but from Malory's astonishing redaction of them (which hecertainly did).

  [Sidenote: Lancelot.]

  But Lancelot escapes this worst of fates in the _Idylls_ themselves, andmuch more does he escape it in the originals. In the first place, thoughhe invariably (or always till the Graal Quest) "wins through," heconstantly does not do so without intermediate hairbreadth escapes, andeven not a few adventures which are at first not escapes at all. Andjust as his perpetual bafflement in the Quest salts and seasons histriumphs in the saddle, so does the ruling passion of his sin save, fromanything approaching mawkishness,[35] his innumerable and yetinoffensive virtues; his chastity, save in this instance, which chastityitself, by a further stroke of art, is saved from _niaiserie_ by theplotted adventures with Elaine; his courtesy, his mercifulness, hiswonderfully early notion of a gentleman (_v. inf._), his invariabledisregard of self, and yet his equally invariable naturalness. PiousAeneas had not the least objection to bringing about the death of Dido,as he might have known he was doing (unless he was as great a fool as heis a prig); and he is probably never more disgusting or Pecksniffianthan when he looks back on the flames of Dido's pyre and is reallyafraid that something unpleasant must have happened, though he can'tthink what the matter can be. But _he_, one feels sure, would never havelifted up his hand against a woman, unless she had richly deserved it onthe strictest patriotic scores, as in the case of Helen, when his mammafortunately interfered. On the other hand, Lancelot was "of the Asra whodie when they love" and love till they die--nay, wh
o would die if theydid not love. But it is certain (for there is a very nice miniature ofit reproduced from the MS. in M. Paulin Paris's abstract) that, for amoment, he drew his sword on Elaine to punish the deceit which made himunwittingly false to Guinevere. It is very shocking, no doubt, butexceedingly natural; and of course he did not kill or even (likePhilaster) wound her, though nobody interfered to prevent him. Many ofthe incidents which bring out his character are well known to moderns bypoem and picture, though others, as well worth knowing, are not. But thehuman contrasts of success and failure, of merit and sin, have never, Ithink, been quite brought out, and to bring them out completely herewould take too much room. We may perhaps leave this other--quiteother--"_First_ Gentleman in Europe" with the remark that Chrestien deTroyes gives only one side of him, and therefore does not give him atall. The Lancelot of board and bower, of travel and tournament, he doesvery fairly. But of the Lancelot of the woods and the hermitage, of thedream at the foot of the cross, of the mystic voyage and the justfailing (if failing) effort of Carbonek, he gives, because he knows,nothing.

  [Sidenote: Guinevere.]

  Completed as he was, no matter for the moment by whom, he is thus thefirst hero of romance and nearly the greatest; but his lady is worthy ofhim, and she is almost more original as an individual. It is true thatshe is not the first heroine, as he is, if not altogether, almost thefirst hero. Helen was that, though very imperfectly revealed andgingerly handled. Calypso (hardly Circe) _might_ have been. Medea isperhaps nearer still, especially in Apollonius. But the Greek romancerswere the first who had really busied themselves with the heroine: theytook her up seriously and gave her a considerable position. But they didnot succeed in giving her much character. The naughty _not_-heroine ofAchilles Tatius, though she has less than none in Mr. Pope's supposedinnuendo sense, alone has an approach to some in the other. As for theaccomplished Guinevere's probable contemporary, the Ismene or Hysmine ofEustathius Macrembolites (_v. sup._ p. 18), she is a sort ofGreek-mediaeval Henrietta Temple, with Mr. Meredith and Mr. Disraeli byturns holding the pen, though with neither of them supplying the brains.But Guinevere is a very different person; or rather, she _is_ a person,and the first. To appreciate her she must be compared with herself inearlier presentations, and then considered fully as she appears in theVulgate--for Malory, though he has given much, has not given the wholeof her, and Tennyson has painted only the last panel of the polyptychwholly, and has rather over-coloured that.[36]

  In what we may call the earliest representations of her, she has hardlyany colour at all. She is a noble Roman lady, and very beautiful. For atime she is apparently very happy with her husband, and he with her; andif she seems to make not the slightest scruple about "taking up with"her nephew, co-regent and fellow rebel, why, noble Roman ladies thoughtnothing of divorce and not much of adultery. The only old Welsh story(the famous Melvas one so often referred to) that we have about her inmuch detail merely establishes the fact, pleasantly formulated by M.Paulin Paris, that she was "tres sujette a etre enlevee," but in itself(unless we admit the Peacockian triad of the "Three Fatal Slaps of theIsle of Britain" as evidence) again says nothing about her character.If, as seems probable if not certain, the _Launfal_ legend, with itslibel on her, is of Breton origin, it makes her an ordinary Celticprincess, a spiritual sister of Iseult when she tried to kill Brengwain,and a cross between Potiphar's wife and Catherine of Russia, without anyof the good nature and "gentlemanliness" of the last named. The realGuinevere, the Guinevere of the Vulgate and partly of Malory, is freedfrom the colourlessness and the discreditable end of Geoffrey's queen,transforms the promiscuous and rather _louche_ Melvas incident into animportant episode of her epic or romantic existence, and gives the lie,even in her least creditable or least charming moments, to the _Launfal_libel. As before in Lancelot's case, details of her presentation had insome cases best be either translated in full or omitted, but I cannotrefuse myself the pleasure of attempting, with however clumsy a hand, aportrait of our, as I believe, English Helen, who gave in Frenchlanguage to French, and not only French literature, the pattern of aheroine.

  There is not, I think, any ancient authority for the rather commonplacesuggestion, unwisely adopted by Tennyson, that Guinevere fell in lovewith Lancelot when he was sent as an ambassador to fetch her; thusmerely repeating Iseult and Tristram, and anticipating Suffolk andMargaret. In fact, according to the best evidence, Lancelot could nothave been old enough, if he was even born. On the contrary, nothingcould be better than the presentation of her introduction to Arthur andthe course of the wooing in the Vulgate--the other "blessed original."She first sees Arthur as a foe from the walls of besieged Carmelide, andadmires his valour; she has further occasion to admire it when, as afriend, he rescues her father, showing himself, as what he really was inhis youth, his own best knight. The pair are genuinely in love with eachother, and the betrothal and parting for fresh fight are the mostgracious passages of the _Merlin_ book, except the better version (_v.sup._) of the love of Merlin himself and the afterwards libelledViviane. Anyhow, she was married because she fell in love with him, andthere is no evidence to show that she and Arthur lived otherwise thanhappily together. But, if all tales were true, she had no reason toregard him as a very faithful husband or a blameless man. She may nothave known (for nobody but Merlin apparently did know) the early andunwitting incest of the King and his half-sister Margause; but theextreme ease with which he adopted her own treacherous foster-sister,the "false Guinevere," and his proceedings with the Saxon enchantressCamilla, were very strong "sets off" to her own conduct. Also she had amost disagreeable[37] sister-in-law in Morgane-la-Fee. These are not inthe least offered as excuses, but merely as "lights." Indeed Guineverenever seems to have hated or disliked her husband, though he often gaveher cause; and if, until the great repentance, she thought more lightlyof "spouse-breach" than Lancelot did, that is not uncharacteristic ofwomen.[38] In fact, she is a very perfect (not of course in the moralsense) gentlewoman. She is at once popular with the knights, and losesthat popularity rather by Lancelot's fault than by her own, whileGawain, who remains faithful to her to the bitter end, or at least tillthe luckless slaughter of his brethren, declares at the beginning thatshe is the fairest and most gracious, and will be the wisest and best ofqueens. She shows something very like humour in the famous and fatefulremark (uttered, it would seem, without the slightest ill or doublemeaning at the time) as to Gawain's estimate of Lancelot.[39] She seemsto have had an agreeable petulance (notice, for instance, the rebuke ofKay at the opening of the _Ywain_ story and elsewhere), which sometimes,as it naturally would, rises to passionate injustice, as Lancelotfrequently discovered. She is, in fact, always passionate in one orother sense of that great and terrible and infinite[40] word, but nevertragedy-queenish or vixenish. She falls in love with Lancelot because hefalls in love with her, and because she cannot help it. False as she isto husband and to lover, to her court and her country,[41] it can hardlybe said that any act of hers, except the love itself and itsirresistible consequences, is faulty. She is not capricious,extravagant, or tyrannical; in her very jealousy she is not cruel orrevengeful (the original Iseult would certainly have had Elaine poisonedor poniarded, for which there was ample opportunity). If she tormentsher lover, that is because she loves him. If she is unjust to him, thatis because she is a woman. Her last speech to Lancelot after thecatastrophe--Tennyson should have, as has been said, paraphrased this ashe paraphrased the passing of her husband, and from the same texts, andwe should then have had another of the greatest things of Englishpoetry--shows a noble nature with the [Greek: hamartia] present, butrepented in a strange and great mixture of classical and Christiantragedy. There is little told in a trustworthy fashion about herpersonal appearance. But if Glastonbury traditions about her bones betrue, she was certainly (again like Helen) "divinely tall." And if thesuggestions of Hawker's "Queen Gwennyvar's Round"[42] in the sea roundTintagel be worked out a little, it will follow that her eyes weredivinely blue.

  [Sideno
te: Some minor points.]

  When such very high praise is given to the position of the (further)accomplished Arthur-story, it is of course not intended to bestow thatpraise on any particular MS. or printed version that exists. It is inthe highest degree improbable that, whether the original magician wasMap, or Chrestien, or anybody else (to repeat a useful formula), wepossess an exact and exclusive copy of the form into which he himself threwthe story. Independently of the fact that no MS., verse or prose, of anythinglike the complete story seems old enough, independently of the enormous andalmost innumerable separable accretions, the so-called Vulgate cycle of"_Graal-Merlin-Arthur-Lancelot-Graal-Quest-Arthur's-Death_" hasconsiderable variants--the most important and remarkable of which by faris the large alteration or sequel of the "Vulgate" _Merlin_ which Malorypreferred. In the "Vulgate" itself, too, there are things which werecertainly written either by the great contriver in nodding moods, or bysomebody else,--in fact no one can hope to understand mediaevalliterature who forgets that no mediaeval writer could ever "let a thingalone": he simply _must_ add or shorten, paraphrase or alter. I ratherdoubt whether the Great Unknown himself meant _both_ the amours ofArthur with Camilla and the complete episode of the false Guinevere tostand side by side. The first is (as such justifications go) asufficient justification of Guinevere by itself; and the conduct ofArthur in the second is such a combination of folly, cruelty, and allsorts of despicable behaviour that it overdoes the thing. So, too,Lancelot's "abscondences," with or without madness, are too many and tooprolonged.[43] The long and totally uninteresting campaign againstClaudas, during the greater part of which Lancelot (who is most of allconcerned) is absent, and in which he takes no part or interest whenpresent, is another great blot. Some of these things, but not all,Malory remedied by omission.

  To sum up, and even repeat a little, in speaking so highly of thisdevelopment--French beyond all doubt as a part of literature, whateverthe nationality, domicile, and temper of the person or persons whobrought it about--I do not desire more to emphasise what I believe to bea great and not too well appreciated truth than to guard against thatexaggeration which dogs and discredits literary criticism. Of course nosingle redaction of the legend in the late twelfth or earliestthirteenth century contains the story, the whole story, and nothing butthe story as I have just outlined it. Of course the words used do notapply fully to Malory's English redaction of three centuries later--workof genius as this appears to me to be. Yet further, I should be fullydisposed to allow that it is only by reading the _posse_ into the_esse_, under the guidance of later developments of the novel itself,that the estimate which I have given can be entirely justified. But thisprocess seems to me to be perfectly legitimate, and to be, in fact, theonly process capable of giving us literary-historical criticism that isworth having. The writer or writers, known or unknown, whose work wehave been discussing, have got the plot, have got the characters, havegot the narrative faculty required for a complete novel-romance. If theydo not quite know what to do with these things it is only because thetime is not yet. But how much they did, and of how much more theyforeshadowed the doing, the extracts following should show better thanany "talk about it."

  [_Lancelot, still under the tutelage of the Lady of the Lake and ignorant of his own parentage, has met his cousins, Lionel and Bors, and has been greatly drawn to them._]

  [Sidenote: Illustrative extracts translated from the "Vulgate." The youth of Lancelot.]

  Now turns herself the Lady back to the Lake, and takes the children with her. And when she had gone[44] a good way, she called Lancelot a little way off the road and said to him very kindly, "King's son,[45] how wast thou so bold as to call Lionel thy cousin? for he _is_ a king's son, and of not a little more worth and gentry than men think." "Lady," said he, who was right ashamed, "so came the word into my mouth by adventure that I never took any heed of it." "Now tell me," said she, "by the faith thou owest me, which thinkest thou to be the greater gentleman, thyself or him?" "Lady," said he, "you have adjured me strongly, for I owe no one such faith as I owe you, my lady and my mother: nor know I how much of a gentleman I am by lineage. But, by the faith I owe you, I would not myself deign to be abashed at that for which I saw him weep.[46] And they have told me that all men have sprung from one man and one woman: nor know I for what reason one has more gentry than another, unless he win it by prowess, even as lands and other honours. But know you for very truth that if greatness of heart made a gentleman I would think yet to be one of the greatest." "Verily, fair son," said the Lady, "it shall appear. And I say to you that you lose nothing of being one of the best gentlemen in the world, if your heart fail you not." "How, Lady!" said he, "say you this truly, _as_ my lady?" And she said, "Yes, without fail." "Lady," said he, "blessed be you of God, that you said it to me so soon [_or_ as soon as you have said it]. For to that will you make me come which I never thought to attain. Nor had I so much desire of anything as of possessing gentry."

  [_The first meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere. The Lady of the Lake has prevailed upon the King to dub Lancelot on St. John's Day (Midsummer, not Christmas). His protectress departing, he is committed to the care of Ywain, and a conversation arises about him. The Queen asks to see him._]

  [Sidenote: The first meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere.]

  Then bid he [the King] Monseigneur[47] Ywain that he should go and look for Lancelot. "And let him be equipped as handsomely as you know is proper: for well know I that he has plenty." Then the King himself told the Queen how the Lady of the Lake had requested that he would not make Lancelot knight save in his own arms and dress. And the Queen marvelled much at this, and thought long till she saw him. So Messire Ywain went to the Childe [_vallet_] and had him clothed and equipped in the best way he could: and when he saw that nothing could be bettered, he led him to Court on his own horse, which was right fair. But he brought him not quietly. For there was so much people about that the whole street was full: and the news was spread through all the town that the fair Childe who came yester eve should be a knight to-morrow, and was now coming to Court in knightly garb. Then sprang to the windows they of the town, both men and women. And when they saw him pass they said that never had they seen so fair a Childe-knight. So he came to the Court and alighted from his horse: and the news of him spread through hall and chamber; and knights and dames and damsels hurried forth. And even the King and the Queen went to the windows. So when the Childe had dismounted, Messire Ywain took him by the hand, and led him by it up to the Hall.

  The King and the Queen came to meet him: and both took him by his two hands and went to seat themselves on a couch: while the Childe seated himself before them on the fresh green grass with which the Hall was spread. And the King gazed on him right willingly: for if he had seemed fair at his first coming, it was nothing to the beauty that he now had. And the King thought he had mightily grown in stature and thews.[48] So the Queen prayed that God might make him a man of worth, "for right plenty of beauty has He given him," and she looked at the Childe very sweetly: and so did he at her as often as he could covertly direct his eyes towards her. Also marvelled he much how such great beauty as he saw appear in her could come: for neither that of his lady, the Lady of the Lake, nor of any woman that he had ever seen, did he prize aught as compared with hers. And no wrong had he if he valued no other lady against the Queen: for she was the Lady of Ladies and the Fountain of Beauty. But if he had known the great worthiness that was in her he would have been still more fain to gaze on her. For none, neither poor nor rich, was her equal.

  So she asked Monseigneur Ywain what was the Childe's name, and he answered that he knew not. "And know you," said she, "whose son he is and of what birth?"
"Lady," said he, "nay, except I know so much as that he is of the land of Gaul. For his speech bewrayeth him."[49] Then the Queen took him by the hand and asked him of whom he came. And when he felt it [the touch] he shuddered as though roused from sleep, and thought of her so hard that he knew not what she said to him. And she perceived that he was much abashed, and so asked him a second time, "Tell me whence you come." So he looked at her very sheepishly and said, with a sigh, that he knew not. And she asked him what was his name; and he answered that he knew not that. So now the Queen saw well that he was abashed and _overthought_.[50] But she dared not think that it was for her: and nevertheless she had some suspicion of it, and so dropped the talk. But that she might not make the disorder of his mind worse, she rose from her seat and, in order that no one might think any evil or perceive what she suspected, said that the Childe seemed to her not very wise, and whether wise or not had been ill brought up. "Lady," said Messire Ywain, "between you and me, we know nothing about him: and perchance he is forbidden[51] to tell his name or who he is." And she said, "It may well be so," but she said it so low that the Childe heard her not.

  [_Here follows (with a very little surplusage removed perhaps) the scene which Dante has made world-famous, but which Malory (I think for reasons) has "cut." I trust it is neither Philistinism nor perversity which makes me think of it a little, though only a little, less highly than some have done. There is (and after all this makes it all the more interesting for us historians) the least little bit of anticipation of_ Marivaudage _about it, and less of the adorable simplicity such as that (a little subsequent to the last extract given) where Lancelot, having forgotten to take leave of the Queen on going to his first adventure, and having returned to do so, kneels to her, receives her hand to raise him from the ground, "and much was his joy to feel it bare in his." But the beauty of what follows is incontestable, and that Guinevere was "exceeding wise in love" is certain._]

  [Sidenote: The scene of the kiss.]

  "Ha!" said she then, "I know who you are--Lancelot of the Lake is your name." And he was silent. "They know it at court," said she, "this sometime. Messire Gawain was the first to bring your name there...." Then she asked him why he had allowed the worst man in the world to lead him by the bridle. "Lady," said he, "as one who had command neither of his heart nor of his body." "Now tell me," said she, "were you at last year's assembly?" "Yes, Lady," said he. "And what arms did you bear?" "Lady, they were all of vermilion." "By my head," said she, "you say true. And why did you do such deeds at the meeting the day before yesterday?" Then he began to sigh very very deeply. And the Queen cut him short as well, knowing how it was with him.

  "Tell me," she said, "plainly, how it is. I will never betray you. But I know that you did it for some lady. Now, tell me, by the faith you owe me, who she is." "Ah, Lady," said he, "I see well that it behoves me to speak. Lady, it is you." "I!" said she. "It was not for me you took the spears that my maiden brought you. For I took care to put myself out of the commission." "Lady," said he, "I did for others what I ought, and for you what I could." "Tell me, then, for whom have you done all the things that you _have_ done?" "Lady," said he, "for you." "How," said she, "do you love me so much?" "So much, Lady, as I love neither myself nor any other." "And since when have you loved me thus?" "Since the hour when I was called knight and yet was not one."[52] "Then, by the faith you owe me, whence came this love that you have set upon me?" Now as the Queen said these words it happened that the Lady of the Puy of Malahault[53] coughed on purpose, and lifted her head, which she had held down. And he understood her now, having oft heard her before: and looked at her and knew her, and felt in his heart such fear and anguish that he could not answer the Queen. Then began he to sigh right deeply, and the tears fell from his eyes so thick, that the garment he wore was wet to the knees. And the more he looked at the Lady of Malahault the more ill at ease was his heart. Now the Queen noticed this and saw that he looked sadly towards the place where her ladies were, and she reasoned with him. "Tell me," she said, "whence comes this love that I am asking you about?" and he tried as hard as he could to speak, and said, "Lady, from the time I have said." "How?" "Lady, you did it, when you made me your friend, if your mouth lied not." "My friend?" she said; "and how?" "I came before you when I had taken leave of my Lord the King all armed except my head and my hands. And then I commended you to God, and said that, wherever I was, I was your knight: and you said that you would have me to be your knight and your friend. And then I said, 'Adieu, Lady,' and you said, 'Adieu, fair sweet friend.' And never has that word left my heart, and it is that word that has made me a good knight and valiant--if I be so: nor ever have I been so ill-bested as not to remember that word. That word comforts me in all my annoys. That word has kept me from all harm, and freed me from all peril, and fills me whenever I hunger. Never have I been so poor but that word has made me rich." "By my faith," said the Queen, "that word was spoken in a good hour, and God be praised when He made me speak it. Still, I did not set it as high as you did: and to many a knight have I said it, when I gave no more thought to the saying. But _your_ thought was no base one, but gentle and debonair; wherefore joy has come to you of it, and it has made you a good knight. Yet, nevertheless, this way is not that of knights who make great matter to many a lady of many a thing which they have little at heart. And your seeming shows me that you love one or other of these ladies better than you love me. For you wept for fear and dared not look straight at them: so that I well see that your thought is not so much of me as you pretend. So, by the faith you owe the thing you love best in the world, tell me which one of the three you love so much?" "Ah! Lady," said he, "for the mercy of God, as God shall keep me, never had one of them my heart in her keeping." "This will not do," said the Queen, "you cannot dissemble. For many another such thing have I seen, and I know that your heart is there as surely as your body is here." And this she said that she might well see how she might put him ill at ease. For she thought surely enough that he meant no love save to her, or ill would it have gone on the day of the Black Arms.[54] And she took a keen delight in seeing and considering his discomfort. But he was in such anguish that he wanted little of swooning, save that fear of the ladies before him kept him back. And the Queen herself perceived it at the sight of his changes of colour, and caught him by the shoulder that he might not fall, and called to Galahault. Then the prince sprang forward and ran to his friend, and saw that he was disturbed thus, and had great pain in his own heart for it, and said, "Ah, Lady! tell me, for God's sake, what has happened." And the Queen told him the conversation. "Ah, Lady!" said Galahault, "mercy, for God's sake, or you may lose me him by such wrath, and it would be too great pity." "Certes," said she, "that is true. But know you why he has done such feats of arms?" "Nay, surely, Lady," said he. "Sir," said she, "if what he tells me is true, it was for me." "Lady," said he, "as God shall keep me, I can believe it. For just as he is more valiant than other men, so is his heart truer than all theirs." "Verily," said she, "you would say well that he is valiant if you knew what deeds he has done since he was made knight," and then she told him all the chivalry of Lancelot ... and how he had done it all for a single word of hers [_Galahault tells her more, and begs mercy for L._]. "He could ask me nothing," sighed she, "that I could fairly refuse him, but he will ask me nothing at all."... "Lady," said Galahault, "certainly he has no power to do so. For one loves nothing that one does not fear." [_And then comes the immortal kiss, asked by the Prince, delayed a m
oment by the Queen's demur as to time and place, brought on by the "Galeotto"-speech._ "Let us three corner close together as if we were talking secrets," _vouchsafed by Guinevere in the words_, "Why should I make me longer prayer for what I wish more than you or he?" _Lancelot still hangs back, but the Queen_ "takes him by the chin and kisses him before Galahault with a kiss long enough" so that the Lady of Malahault knows it.] And then said the Queen, who was a right wise and gracious lady, "Fair sweet friend, so much have you done that I am yours, and right great joy have I thereof. Now see to it that the thing be kept secret, as it should be. For I am one of the ladies of the world who have the fairest fame, and if my praise grew worse through you, then it would be a foul and shameful thing."

  [Sidenote: Some further remarks on the novel character of the story.]

  A little more comment on this cento, and especially on the centralpassage of it, can hardly be, and ought certainly not to be, avoided insuch a work as this, even if, like most summaries, it be something of arepetition. It must surely be obvious to any careful reader that here issomething much more than--unless his reading has been as wide elsewhereas it is careful here--he expected from Romance in the commoner andhalf-contemptuous acceptation of that word. Lancelot he may, though heshould not, still class as a mere _amoureux transi_--a nobler andpluckier Silvius in an earlier _As Yon Like It_, and with a greater thanPhoebe for idol. Malory ought to be enough to set him right there: heneed even not go much beyond Tennyson, who has comprehended Lancelotpretty correctly, if not indeed pretty adequately. But Malory has leftout a great deal of the information which would have enabled hisreaders to comprehend Guinevere; and Tennyson, only presenting her inparts, has allowed those parts, especially the final and only fullpresentation, great as it is, to be too much influenced by his certainlyunfortunate other presentation of Arthur as a blameless king.

  I do not say that the actual creator of the Vulgate Guinevere, whoeverhe was, has wrought her into a novel-character of the first class. Itwould have been not merely a miracle (for miracles often happen), butsomething more, if he had. If you could take Beatrix Esmond at a bettertime, Argemone Lavington raised to a higher power, and the spirit of allthat is best and strongest and least purely paradoxical in Meredith'sheroines, and work these three graces into one woman, adding the passionof Tennyson's own Fatima and the queenliness of Helen herself, it mightbe something like the achieved Guinevere who is still left to thereader's imagination to achieve. But the Unknown has given the hints ofall this; and curiously enough it is only of _English_ novel-heroinesthat I can think in comparison and continuation of her. This book, if itis ever finished, will show, I hope, some knowledge of French ones: Ican remember none possessing any touch of Guineveresque quality. Dante,if his poetic nature had taken a different bent, and Shakespeare, if hehad only chosen, could have been her portrayers singly; no others that Ican think of, and certainly no Frenchman.

  [Sidenote: And the personages.]

  But here Guinevere's creator or expounder has done more for her thanmerely indicate her charm. Her "fear for name and fame" is not exactly"crescent"--it is there from the first, and seems to have nothing eithercowardly or merely selfish in it, but only that really "last infirmityof noble minds," the shame of shame even in doing things shameful orshameless. I have seldom seen justice done to her magnificentfearlessness in all her dangers. Her graciousness as a Queen has beenmore generally admitted, but, once again, the composition and complexityof her fits of jealousy have never, I think, been fully rationalised.Here, once more, we must take into account that difference of age whichis so important. _He_ thinks nothing of it; _she_ never forgets it. Andin almost all the circumstances where this rankling kindles intowrath--whether with no cause at all, as in most cases, or with causemore apparent than real, as in the Elaine business--study of particularswill show how easily they might be wrought out into the great characterscenes of which they already contain the suggestion. _This_ Guineverewould never have "taken up" (to use purposely a vulgar phrase for whatwould have been a vulgar thing) with Mordred,[55] either for himself orfor the kingdom that he was trying to steal. And I am bound to say againthat much as I have read of purely French romance--that is to say,French not merely in language but in certain origin--I know nothing andnobody like her in it.

  That Guinevere, like Charlotte, was "a married lady," that, unlikeCharlotte, she forgot the fact, and that Lancelot, though somewhatWertheresque in some of his features, was not quite so "moral" as thatvery dull young man, are facts which I wish neither to suppress nor todwell upon. We may cry "Agreed" here to the indictment, and all itsconsequences. They are not the question.

  The question is the suggesting of novel-romance elements which forms theaesthetic solace of this ethical sin. It should be seen at once that theGuinevere of the Vulgate, and her fault or fate, provide a character andcareer of no small complexity. It has been already said that torepresent her as after a fashion intercepted by love for Lancelot on herway to Arthur, like Iseult of Ireland or Margaret of Anjou, is, so tospeak, as unhistorical as it is insufficiently artistic. We cannot,indeed, borrow Diderot's speech to Rousseau and say, "C'est le pont auxanes," but it certainly would not have been the way of the Walter whom Ifavour, though I think it might have been the way of the Chrestien thatI know. Guinevere, when she meets her lover, rescuer, and doomsman, isno longer a girl, and Lancelot is almost a boy. It is not, in the commonand cheap misuse of the term, the most "romantic" arrangement, but somenot imperfect in love-lore have held that a woman's love is never sostrong as when she is past girlhood and well approaching age, and thatman's is never stronger than when he is just not a boy. Lancelot himselfhas loved no woman (except his quasi-mother, the Lady of the Lake), andwill love none after he has fulfilled the Dead Shepherd's "saw ofmight." She _has_ loved; dispute this and you not only cancel graciousscenes of the text, but spoil the story; but she has, though probablyshe does not yet know it, ceased to love,[56] and not without somereason. To say no more about Arthur's technical "blamelessness," he has,by the coming of Lancelot, ceased to be altogether heroic. Though nevera mere petulant and ferocious dotard as the _Chansons_ too oftenrepresent Charlemagne, he is very far from being a wise ruler or evenbaron. He makes rash promises and vows, accepts charges on very slightevidence, and seems to have his knights by no means "in hand." So, too,though never a coward or weakling, he seems pretty nearly to have lostthe pluck and prowess which had won Guinevere's love under the walls ofCarmelide, and of which the last display is in the great fight with hissister's lover, Sir Accolon. All this may not excuse Guinevere's conductto the moralist; it certainly makes that conduct artistically probableand legitimate to the critic, as a foundation for novel-character.

  Her lover may look less promising, at least at the moment ofpresentation; and indeed it is true that while "la donna e _im_mobile,"in essentials and possibilities alike, forms of man, though never losingreality and possibility, pass at times out of possible or at least easyrecognition. Anybody who sees in the Lancelot of the foregoing sceneonly a hobbledehoy and milksop who happens to have a big chest, strongarms, and plenty of mere fighting spirit, will never grasp him. Hardlybetter off will be he who takes him--as the story _does_ give somehandles for taking him--to be merely one of the too common examples ofhumanity who sin and repent, repent and sin, with a sort ofAmericanesque notion of spending dollars in this world and laying themup in another. Malory has on the whole done more justice to thepossibilities of the Vulgate Lancelot than he has to Guinevere, andTennyson has here improved on Malory. He has, indeed, very nearly "got"Lancelot, but not quite. To get him wholly would have required Tennysonfor form and Browning for analysis of character; while even this_mistura mirabilis_ would have been improved for the purpose by touchesnot merely of Morris and Swinburne, but of lesser men like Kingsley andeven George Macdonald. To understand Lancelot you must previouslyunderstand, or by some kind of intuition divine, the mystical elementwhich his descent from the Graal
-Wardens confers; the essential orquintessential chivalric quality which his successive creators agreed inimparting to him; the all-conquering gift so strangely tempered by anentire freedom from the boasting and the rudeness of the _chanson_ hero;the actual checks and disasters which his cross stars bring on him; hisutter loyalty in all things save one to the king; and last and mightiestof all, his unquenchable and unchangeable passion for the Queen.

  Hence what they said to him in one of his early adventures, with nogreat ill following, "Fair Knight, thou art unhappy," was always true ina higher sense. He may have been Lord of Joyous Gard, in title and fact;but his own heart was always a Garde Douloureuse--a _corluctificabile_--pillowed on idle triumphs and fearful hopes andpoisoned satisfactions, and bafflements where he would most fain havesucceeded. He has almost had to have the first kiss forced on him; he isrefused the last on grounds of which he himself cannot deny thevalidity. Guinevere is a tragic figure in the truest and deepest senseof the term, and, as we have tried to show, she is amply complex incharacter and temperament. But it is questionable whether Lancelot isnot more tragic and more complex still.

  [Sidenote: Books.]

  It may perhaps without impropriety be repeated that these are not merefancies of the writer, but things reasonably suggested by and solidlybased upon "the French books," when these later are collated and, so tospeak, "checked" by Malory and the romances of adventure branching offfrom them. But Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot by no means exhaust thematerial for advanced and complicated novel-work--in character as wellas incident--provided by the older forms of the Legend. There is Gawain,who has to be put together from the sort of first draft of Lancelotwhich he shows in the earlier versions, and the light-o'-love oppositewhich he becomes in the later, a contrast continued in the Amadis andGalaor figures of the Spanish romances and their descendants. There isthe already glanced at group of Arthur's sisters or half-sisters, leftmere sketches and hints, but most interesting. Not to be tedious, weneed not dwell on Palomides, a very promising Lancelot unloved; onLamoracke, left provokingly obscure, but shadowing a most importantpossibility in the unwritten romance of one of those very sisters; Bors,of whom Tennyson has made something, but not enough, in the later_Idylls_; and others. But it is probably unnecessary to carry thediscussion of this matter further. It has been discussed and illustratedat some length, because it shows how early the elements, not merely ofromance but of the novel in the fullest sense, existed in Frenchliterature.

  [_Here follows the noble passage above referred to between Lancelot and King Bagdemagus after the death of Meleagraunce, whose cousin Lancelot has just slain in single combat for charging him with treason. He has kept his helm on, but doffs it at the King's request._]

  And when the King saw him he ran to kiss him, and began to make such joyof him as none could overgo. But Lancelot said, "Ah, Sir! for God'ssake, make no joy or feast for me. Certainly you should make none, forif you knew the evil I have done you, you would hate me above all men inthe world." "Oh! Lancelot," said he, "tell it me not, for Iunderstand[57] too well what you would say; but I will know[57] nothingof it, because it might be such a thing" as would part them for ever.

  FOOTNOTES:

  [14] The subdivision of the _gestes_ does not matter: they were allconnected closely or loosely--except the Crusading section, and eventhat falls under the Christian _v._ Saracen grouping if not under theCarlovingian. The real "outside" members are few, late, and in almostevery case unimportant.

  [15] There are comic _episodes_ elsewhere; but almost the whole of thispoem turns on the _gabz_ or burlesque boasts of the paladins.--It may bewise here to anticipate an objection which may be taken to these remarkson the _chansons_. I have been asked whether I know M. Bedier's handlingof them; and, by an odd coincidence, within a few hours of the questionI saw an American statement that this excellent scholar's researches"have revised our conceptions" of the matter. No one can exceed me inrespect for perhaps the foremost of recent scholars in Old French. Butmy "conception" of the _chansons_ was formed long before he wrote, notfrom that of any of his predecessors, but from the _chansons_themselves. It is therefore not subject to "revisal" except from my ownre-reading, and such re-reading has only confirmed it.

  [16] It is not of course intended to be preferred to the far more widelyknown tale in which the heroine bears the same name, and which will bementioned below. But if it is less beautiful such beauty as it has isfree from the slightest _morbidezza_.

  [17] And to this introduction our dealings with it here may be confined.The accounts of the siege itself are of much less interest, especiallyin connection with our special subject.

  [18] A sort of companion handbook to the first part of this volume willbe found in the present writer's sketch of twelfth and thirteenthcentury European literature, under the title of _The Flourishing ofRomance and the Rise of Allegory_, in Messrs. Blackwood's _Periods ofEuropean Literature_ (Edinburgh and London, 1897), and another in his_Short History of French Literature_ (Oxford, 7th ed. at press).

  [19] It is scarcely rash to say that Cressid is the first representativeof this dread and delightful entity, and the ancestress of all itsembodiments since in fiction, as Cleopatra seems to have been inhistory. No doubt "it" was of the beginning, but it lacked its _vates_.Helen was different.

  [20] _Faerie Queene_, v. iv. 1-20.

  [21] I hope I may be allowed to emphasise the disclaimer, which I havealready made more than once elsewhere, of the very slightest disrespectto this admirable scholar. The presumption and folly of such disrespectwould be only inferior to its ingratitude, for the indulgence with whichM. Paris consistently treated my own somewhat rash adventures in OldFrench was extraordinary. But as one's word is one's word so one'sopinion is one's opinion.

  [22] Sometimes _de_, but _a_ seems more analogical.

  [23] Chrestien was rather like Chaucer in being apt not to finish. Eventhe _Charette_ owes its completion (in an extent not exactlydeterminable) to a certain Godfrey de Lagny (Laigny, etc.).

  [24] Of course it is easy enough to assign explanations of it, from thevehicle of criminals to the scaffold downwards; but it remains aconvention--very much of the same kind as that which ordains (or used toordain) that a gentleman may not carry a parcel done up in newspaper,though no other form of wrapping really stains his honour.

  [25] Neither he nor Malory gives one of the most gracious parts ofit--the interview between Lancelot and King Bagdemagus, _v. inf._ p. 54.

  [26] Material (chamois skin)? or garment? Not common in O.F., I think,for _camisia_; but Spenser (_Faerie Queene_, II. iii. xxvi.) has (asProf. Gregory Smith reminds me) "a silken _camus_ lilly whight."

  [27] As does Pyramus's--or Bottom's--objection to the wall.

  [28] This part of the matter has received too little attention in modernstudies of the subject: partly because it was clumsily handled by someof the probably innumerable and certainly undiscoverable meddlers withthe Vulgate. The unpopularity of Lancelot and his kin is not due merelyto his invincibility and their not always discreet partisanship. Theolder "Queen's knights" must have naturally felt her devotion to him;his "undependableness"--in consequence not merely of his fits of madnessbut of his chivalrously permissible but very inconvenient habit ofdisguising himself and taking the other side--must have annoyed thewhole Table. Yet these very things, properly managed, help to create andcomplicate the "novel" character. For one of the most commonly and notthe least justly charged faults of the average romance is its deficiencyin combined plot and character-interest--the presence in it, at most, ofa not too well-jointed series of episodes, possibly leading to a deathor a marriage, but of little more than chronicle type. This fault hasbeen exaggerated, but it exists. Now it will be one main purpose of thepages which follow to show that there is, in the completed Arthuriad,something quite different from and far beyond this--something perhapsimperfectly realised by any one writer, and overlaid and disarranged bythe interpolations or misinterpretations of others, but still a "
mind"at work that keeps the "mass" alive, and may, or rather surely will,quicken it yet further and into higher forms hereafter. (Those who knowwill not, I hope, be insulted if I mention for the benefit of those whodo not, that the term "Vulgate" is applied to those forms of the partsof the story which, with slighter or more important variations, arecommon to many MSS. The term itself is most specially applied to the_Lancelot_ which, in consequence of this popularity throughout the laterMiddle Ages, actually got itself printed early in the FrenchRenaissance. The whole has been (or is being) at last most fortunatelyreprinted by Dr. Sommer. See Bibliography.)

  [29] This is another point which, not, I suppose, having been clearlyand completely evolved by the first handler, got messed and muddled bysuccessive copyists and continuators. In what seems to be the oldest,and is certainly the most consistent and satisfactory, story there ispractically nothing evil about Viviane--Nimiane--Nimue, who is alsoindisputably identical with the foster-mother of Lancelot, theoccasional Egeria (always for good) of Arthur himself, and thebenefactress (this is probably a later addition though in the right key)of Sir Pelleas. For anybody who possesses the Power of the Sieve sheremains as Milton saw her, and not as Tennyson mis-saw part of her. Thebewitching of Merlin (who, let it be remembered, was an ambiguous personin several ways, and whose magic, if never exactly black, was sometimesa rather greyish or magpied white) was not an unmixed loss to the world;she seems to have really loved him, and to have faithfully kept her wordby being with him often. He "could not get out" certainly, but are theremany more desirable things in the outside world than lying with yourhead in the lap of the Lady of the Lake while she caresses and talks toyou? "J'en connais des plus malheureux" as the French poet observed ofsome one in less delectable case. The author of the _Suite de Merlin_seems to have been her first maligner. Tennyson, seduced by contrast,followed and exaggerated the worst view. But I am not sure that the most"irreligious" thing (as Coleridge would have said) was not thetransformation of her into a mere married lady (with a chateau inBrittany, and an ordinary knight for her husband) which astounds us inone of the dullest parts of the Vulgate about Lancelot--the wars withClaudas.

  [30] I have always thought that Spenser (whose dealings with Arthurianaare very curious, and have never, I think, been fully studied) took thisfunction of Lancelot to suggest the presentation of his Arthur. ButLancelot has no--at least no continuous--fairy aid; he is not invariablyvictorious, and he is thoroughly human. Spenser's Prince began the"blamelessness" which grew more trying still in Tennyson's King. (In thefew remarks of this kind made here I am not, I need hardly say, "goingback upon" my lifelong estimate of Tennyson as an almost impeccablepoet. But an impeccable poet is not necessarily an impeccable plot- andcharacter-monger either in tale-telling or in drama.)

  [31] Of this we have unusually strong evidence in the shape of MS.interlineations, where the name "Percevale" is actually struck out andthat of "Gala[h]ad" substituted above it.

  [32] I do not say that this is their _only_ character.

  [33] Brittany had much earlier and much more tradition of chivalry thanWales.

  [34] The only fault alleged against Lancelot's person by carpers wasthat he was something "pigeon"--or "guardsman"--chested. But Guinevereshowed her love and her wit, and her "valiancy" (for so at least on thisoccasion we may translate _vaillant_) by retorting that such a chest wasonly big enough--and hardly big enough--for such a heart.

  [35] Some of the later "redactors" of the Vulgate may perhaps haveunduly multiplied his madnesses, and have exaggerated his early shynessa little. But I am not sure of the latter point. It is not only "beasts"that, as in the great Theocritean place, "go timidly because they fearCythera"; and a love charged with such dread consequences was not to belightly embarked upon.

  [36] The early _Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere_, though only external,is perfect. Many touches in the _Idylls_ other than the title-one aresuitable and even subtle; but the convertite in that one is (as they saynow) "unconvincing." The simpler attitude of the rejection of Lancelotin the verse _Morte_ and in Malory is infinitely better. As for Morris'stwo pieces, they could hardly be better in themselves as poems--but theyare scarcely great on the novel side.

  [37] Disagreeable, that is to say, as a sister and sister-in-law. Theremust have been something attractive about her in other relations.

  [38] Compare one of the not so very many real examples of Ibsen'svaunted psychology, the placid indifference to her own past of Gina inthe _Wild Duck_.

  [39] He had said that if he were a woman he would give Lancelot anythinghe asked; and the Queen, following, observes that Gawain had leftnothing for a woman to say.

  [40] _Nos passions ont quelque chose d'infini_, says Bossuet.

  [41] [Greek: helandros, heleptolis]. She had no opportunity of being[Greek: helenaus].

  [42] Hawker's security as to Cornish men and things is, I admit, alittle Bardolphian. But did he not write about the Quest? (This sort ofargument simply swarms in Arthurian controversy; so I may surely use itonce.) Besides there is no doubt about the blueness of the sea inquestion; though Anthony Trollope, in _Malachi's Cove_, has most falselyand incomprehensibly denied it.

  [43] That this is a real sign of decadence and unoriginality, thefurther exaggeration of it in the case of the knights of the _Amadis_cycle proves almost to demonstration.

  [44] After the opening sentence I have dropped the historic present,which, for a continuance, is very irritating in English.

  [45] Lancelot himself has told us earlier (_op. cit._ i. 38) that,though he neither knew nor thought himself to be a king's son, he wascommonly addressed as such.

  [46] Lionel (very young at the time) had wept because some one mentionedthe loss of his inheritance, and Lancelot (young as he too was) hadbidden him not cry for fear of landlessness. "There would be plenty forhim, if he had heart to gain it."

  [47] This technical title is usually if not invariably given to Ywainand Gawain as eldest sons of recognised kings. "Prince" is not used inthis sense by the older Romancers, but only for distinguished knightslike Galahault, who is really a king.

  [48] There is one admirable word here, _enbarnis_, which has so longbeen lost to French that it is not even in Littre. But Dryden's"_burnish_ into man" probably preserves it in English; for this iscertainly not the other "burnish" from _brunir_.

  [49] "Car moult en parole diroit la parole."

  [50] Puzzled by the number of new thoughts and emotions.

  [51] Ywain suggests one of the commonest things in Romance.

  [52] Arthur had, by a set of chances, not actually girded on Lancelot'ssword.

  [53] Whose prisoner Lancelot had been, who had been ready to fall inlove with him, and to whom he had expressly refused to tell his ownlove. Hence his confusion.

  [54] The day when Lancelot, at her request, had turned against the sideof his friend Galahault and brought victory to Arthur's.

  [55] By the way, the Vulgate Mordred is a more subtle conception thanthe early stories gave, or than Malory transfers. He is no mere traitoror felon knight, much less a coward, from the first; but at that firstshows a mixture of good and bad qualities in which the "dram of eale"does its usual office. Here once more is a subject made to the hand of anovelist of the first class.

  [56] Some poet or pundit, whether of East or West, or of what place,from Santiago to Samarcand, I know not, has laid it down, that men canlove many, but without ceasing to love any; that women love only one atonce, but can (to borrow, at fifty years' memory, a phrase of GeorgeLawrence's in _Sans Merci_) "drop their lovers down _oubliettes_" withcomparative ease.

  [57] It is excusable to use two words for the single verb _savoir_ tobring out the meaning. King Bagdemagus does not "know" as a fact thatLancelot has slain his son, though he fears it and feels almost sure ofit.

 

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