that he was famous at the Court. Yet it was this man who is held to have conceived the character of the pure and stainless knight Sir Galahad, assigning to him what is in some respects the chief, or at all events the worthiest, position in the Arthurian list of knights. If Sir Galahad, stainless, chivalrous, alone capable of achieving the Quest of the Grail, were the creation of Walter Map, to him we owe that spiritual and religious element which refines and enriches King Arthur’s history. Map wrote the story of the Grail, a Christianised rendering of Celtic myth, and to him probably we owe the moving and impressive Mort, with those notable outbursts which rank among the treasures of our literature. He, however, had the originals to work upon. The Welsh had taken their legends to Brittany, the troubadours were singing them, and the German and the French chroniclers were at work. And though there is no doubt that Map contributed in a considerable degree to the romances, it must be faithfully recorded that questions have arisen whether he was really capable of doing all that has been attributed to him, and whether, if he had the capacity, he would also have had the inclination. “Spotless spirituality,” such as he is supposed to have infused into the story, is scarcely consistent with the character of the man whose Anacreontics are often lacking in refinement.3
So far, it will be easily conceded, very little has been advanced in the way of proof of the existence of the British prince and hero, of the Cymric “Dux Bellorum,” of the Chief of the Siluri or Dumnonii, the name given to the remnant of the British races driven westward by the Saxons. We can understand Milton questioning who Arthur was, and doubting “whether any such reigned in Britain.” “It had been doubted heretofore, and may be again with good reason,” he wrote, notwithstanding the fascination possessed by—
“What resounds
In fable or romance of Uther’s son
Begirt with British and Armoric knights.”
Geoffrey’s “monument of stupendous delusion” had not deceived him, and Sir Thomas Malory’s laborious compilation, while winning unstinted admiration for its beauty, richness, and delectation, would be as unconvincing historically as were Caxton’s quaintly-argued evidences. All the tributaries which now combined to make the full broad current of Arthurian literature were infected at their sources, numerous and widely separated as those sources were. If Malory depended, as we have the authority of the best scholars for believing, upon the several ancient romances of Merlin, the inventions and adaptations of Walter Map, the mysterious compilations of pseudonymous “Helie de Bouri” and “Luces de Gast,” with other manuscripts—some of which are untraced—of like character, it was obvious that he was only presenting us with an aggregation of the impostures, inventions, fables, and falsities of the centuries preceding. That Malory had a conscientious belief in the romance is extremely probable, though in the absence of all information concerning him—for he is a name, a great name, and little more—we can only infer this from the scrupulous manner in which he has performed his task and from the commendatory form in which it was issued in the year 1485.
Judged purely as literature, and with every allowance made for want of uniformity in level as well as for the tediousness of numberless digressions, Malory’s romance only admits of one opinion; and to him and to Caxton (who, despite the humility of his prologues and epilogues, and his professions of “simpleness and ignorance,” was a scholar and a master of middle-class English) the race is under a perpetual debt.4 The compiler does not seem to be open to the charge levelled against him by Sir Walter Scott, that he “exhausted at hazard, and without much art or combination, from the various French prose folios”; on the contrary it is easy to conceive that he exercised that “painful industry” with which he is credited by the writer of the Preface to the edition of 1634. In addition to this, he stamped his own individuality upon the work, and manifested a singular purity of taste by removing the grosser elements which stained many of the earlier versions, and by preserving all that was best as literature and in keeping with the finest and truest spirit of romance. We know from the scholarly investigations of Dr. Sommer and Sir Edmund Strachey how judicious Malory was in translating from his “French books,” or in making abstracts, or in amending and enlarging. With true insight he chose the material that was of good report and of genuine worth; the dross he cast aside. Malory may have belonged to a Yorkshire family, judging from the fact that Leland recorded that a Malory possessed a lordship in that county, but there is no slight authority for believing that he was a Welshman and a priest—“a servant of Jesu both day and night,” as he himself said. That he was a good and earnest Christian his own work proves beyond all question, for he imparted all the religious ardour to the romance that he could, and accentuated that element when it had already been introduced.
The romance of Arthur was enriched, to use Gibbon’s words, with the various though incoherent ornaments which were familiar to the experience, the learning, or the fancy of the twelfth century. Every nation enhanced and adorned the popular romance, until “at length the light of science and reason was re-kindled, the talisman was broken, the visionary fabric melted into air, and by a natural though unjust reverse of public opinion the severity of the present age became inclined to question the existence of Arthur.” That Arthur’s name should stream like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak is the fault of the mediæval writers who, in taking the British king for their hero, could represent no age but their own, and had no consciousness of anachronism. It came natural to them in speaking of the sixth-century knights to endow them with the attributes of the thirteenth and fourteenth century, and to describe Arthur’s Britain much as they would have described the Britain of a Henry or an Edward. The Arthur of Geoffrey, of Walter Map, and of Malory is as impossible as the Arthur of Wagner, Lytton, Swinburne, and Tennyson. Most of the writers on chivalry have either viewed and treated the Knights of the Round Table as contemporary heroes, or have altogether idealised them. We are forced to the conclusion that Geoffrey and all the other mediæval chroniclers had no real conception of the character of the age of which they wrote; if they discovered real names and real persons they transported them to an imaginary world and invested them with fabulous attributes. They made reality itself unreal, transformed heroes into myths, and buried history beneath romance; they had no power to recognise truth even when it appeared to them.
King Arthur was a traditional and historic chieftain of rude times, the man of an epoch, a hero to be sung and remembered. His life must have been a tumult; his seventy odd battles were the events of his era. Whether he represents a nascent civilisation, or whether, following the Romans, he simply maintained a barbaric splendour in the cities they had made or by means of some enlightened laws they had instituted, is a matter of dispute. But he is the “gray king,” the elemental hero, not the advanced type. It is a remarkable fact that English scholars have until quite recently done so little to popularise Arthurian literature. Malory’s version remained almost inaccessible until Southey issued his edition, and the best work of all was undertaken for us in latter years by Dr. Sommer, a German. Considering the hold on the imagination which the romance possessed, little was done to elucidate the obscurities and to solve the mysteries concerning not only the authors but the heroes themselves and the land to which they belonged. Much has been conjectured, but we feel that we are dealing more with phantoms and fancies than with realities and facts. Yet what an inspiration King Arthur has been! His name has lingered, his memory has been treasured in national ballads. Poets have in all ages hovered round the subject, and some have alighted upon it, only perhaps to leave it again as beyond their scope.
“The mightiest chiefs of British song
Scorned not such legends to prolong.”
Milton, Spenser, Dryden, Warton, Collins, Scott and Gray, together with derided and half-forgotten Blackmore; Lytton, with his ambitious epic, doomed to unmerited neglect; Rossetti, James Russell Lowell, and lastly, Arnold, Morris, Swinburne, and Tennyson—these have lifted the romance into the highest and purest realm of poetry, and have impregnated the story with new meanings and illuminated it with rich interpretation.
All have felt the influence of Arthur’s history, “its dim enchantments, its fury of helpless battle, its almost feminine tenderness of friendship, its fainting passion, its religious ardours, all at length vanishing in defeat and being found no more.” We have seen how the Arthurian