The English Novel - George Saintsbury (read novel full .TXT) 📗

said that on the whole they are artistically managed. You feel, not merely that the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains, but that the reason why he did not is that he did not know how.

Sir Thomas Malory, himself most unknown perhaps of all great writers, did know how; and a cynical person might echo the I nunc of the Roman satirist, and dwell on the futility of doing great things, in reference to the fact that it used to be fashionable, and is still not uncommon, to call Malory a "mere compiler." Indeed from the direction which modern study so often takes, of putting inquiry into origins above everything, and neglecting the consideration of the work as work, this practice is not likely soon to cease. But no mistake about the mysterious Englishman (the place-names with which the designation is connected are all pure English) is possible to any one who has read his book, and who knows what prose fiction is. The Noble Histories of King Arthur, La Morte d'Arthur, The Story of the most Noble and Worthy King Arthur, The Most Ancient and Famous History of the Renowned Prince Arthur, The Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur --call it by whichever name anybody likes of those which various printers and reprinters have given it--is one of the great books of the world. If they can give us any single "French book"--the reference to which is a commonplace of the subject--from which it was taken, let them; they have not yet. If they point out (as they can) French and English books from which parts of it were taken, similar things may be done with Dante and Chaucer, with Shakespeare and Milton, and very probably could have been done with Homer. It is what the artist does with his materials, not where he gets them, that is the question. And Malory has done, with his materials, a very great thing indeed. He is working no doubt to a certain extent blindly; working much better than he knows, and sometimes as he would not work if he knew better; though whether he would work as well if he knew better is quite a different point. Sometimes he may not take the best available version of a story; but we must ask ourselves whether he knew it. Sometimes he may put in what we do not want: but we must ask ourselves whether there was not a reason for doing so, to him if not to us. What is certain is that he, and he only in any language, makes of this vast assemblage of stories one story, and one book. He does it (much more than half unconsciously no doubt) by following the lines of, as I suppose, Walter Map, and fusing the different motives, holding to this method even in parts of the legend with which, so far as one knows, Map cannot have meddled. Before him this legend consisted of half a dozen great divisions--a word which may be used of malice prepense. These were the story of Merlin, that of Arthur's own origin, and that of the previous history of the Graal for introduction; the story of Arthur's winning the throne, of the Round Table, and of the marriage with Guinevere, also endless branchings of special knights' adventures, and of the wars with the Saxons and the Romans, and the episode of the False Guinevere--with whom for a time Arthur lives as with his queen--for middle; and the story of the Graal-quest, the love of Lancelot for the Queen, and the rebellion of Mordred with its fatal consequences, for close. Exactly how much of this Malory personally had before him we cannot of course say: but of any working up of the whole that would have spared him trouble, and robbed him of credit, we do not know. In fact the favourite term "compiler" gives up the only dangerous point. Now in what way did Malory compile ? In the way in which the ordinary compiler proceeds he most emphatically does not. He cuts down the preliminaries mercilessly: but they can be perfectly well spared. He misses almost all the wars with the Saxons, which are the most tedious parts of the originals. He adopts, most happily, the early, not the late, placing of those with the Romans. He drops the false Guinevere altogether, which is imperative, that the true one may have no right to plead the incident--though he does not represent Arthur as "blameless." He gives the roman d'aventures side of the Round Table stories, from the great Tristram and Palomides romances through the Beaumains episode downwards, because they are interesting in themselves and lead up to the Graal quest. He gives that Quest as plentifully because it leads up to the "dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all." How he gives the Lancelot and Guinevere tragedy we shall see presently. And the catastrophe of the actual "departing" he gives perfectly; with the magnificent final scenes which he has converted, sometimes in almost Shakespearean fashion, by the slightest verbal touches from mediocre verse to splendid prose. A very remarkable compiler! It is a pity that they did not take him and cut him up in little stars for a light to all his brethren in compiling thereafter.

For he has what no compiler as such can have--because the moment he has it he ceases to be a compiler, and becomes an artist--the sense of
grasp , the power to put his finger, and to keep it, on the central pulse and nerve of the story. That he did this deliberately is so unlikely as to be practically impossible: that he did it is certain. The Arthurian Legend is the greatest of mediæval creations as a subject--a "fable"--just as the Divina Commedia is the greatest of mediæval "imitations" and works of art. And as such it is inevitable that it should carry with it the sense of the greatest medieval differences , Chivalry and Romance. The strong point of these differences is the way in which they combine the three great motives, as Dante isolates them, of Valour, Love, and Religion. The ancients never realised this combination at all; the moderns have merely struggled after it, or blasphemed it in fox-and-grapes fashion: the mediævals had it--in theory at any rate. The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrate Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot and Guinevere with the minor instances, Love. All these have their [Greek: amarthia]--their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw. The knight wastes his valour in idle bickerings; he forgets law in his love; and though there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live up to the ideal that he does not actually forswear. To throw the presentation--the mimesis --of all this into perfectly worthy form would probably have been too much for any single genius of that curious time (when genius was so widely spread and so little concentrated) except Dante himself, whose hand found other work to do. To colour and shape the various fragments of the mosaic was the work of scores. To put them together, if not in absolutely perfect yet in more than sufficient shape, was, so far as we know, the luck of Malory only: though some one (Map or another) had done a mighty day's work long before in creating the figure and the adventures of Lancelot and imagining the later quest of the Graal with the figure of Galahad--that "improved Percivale," as the seedsmen say.

But besides this power of shaping (or even of merely combining) scattered elements into a story, Malory has another-- the other of the first importance to the novelist proper--in his attraction to character, if not exactly in his making up of it. It has been said above that the defect of the pure romances--especially those of continental origin--is the absence of this. What the Greeks called [Greek: dihanoia]--"sentiment," "thought," "cast of thought," as it has been variously rendered--is even more absent from them than plot or character itself: and of its almost necessary connection with this latter they often seem to have no idea. Very rare is such a touch as that of Sir Amadas being unable at the feast to get rid of the memory of the unburied corpse, kept by enemies from the kindly earth that would hide it, and the rites that would help it to peace: still rarer that in Guy of Warwick when the hero, at the height of his fame and in the full enjoyment of his desires, looks from the tower and is struck by the selfishness and earthliness of his career. The first notion is not "improved" in the original at all, and the second very badly; but in most of the others such things do not even exist. Now the greater Legend is full of situations which encourage such thoughts, and even of expressed thoughts that only need craftsmanship to turn them into the cornerstones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty words long, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid that determine the relations of Tristram and Iseult; the unconscious incest of Arthur and Margause with its Greek-tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity of Palomides, and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant allegory) his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all these are matters in point. But of course the main nursery of such things is the Lancelot-and-Guinevere story itself. Nobody has yet made Guinevere a person--nobody but Shakespeare could have done so perhaps, though Shakespeare's Guinevere would probably have been the greatest woman in all art. But Malory has not been the least successful with her: and of Lancelot he has made, if only in study, one of the great characters of that fictitious world which is so much truer than the real. And let no one say that we are reading Tennyson or any one else into Malory. There are yet persons, at least at the time this was written not quite Methusalahs, who read the Morte d'Arthur before the Idylls appeared and who have never allowed even the Idylls to overlay their original idea of the most perfect and most gentle of knights.

It is probable indeed that Malory invented little or nothing in the various situations, by which the character of Lancelot, and the history of his fatal love, are evolved. We know in most cases that this is so. It is possible, too, that at first (probably because the possibilities had not dawned on him, as it has been admitted they never did very consciously) he has not made the most of the introduction of lover and lady. But when the interest becomes concentrated, as in the various passages of Guinevere's wrath with her lover and their consequences, or in the final series of catastrophes, he is fully equal to the occasion. We know --this time to his credit--how he has improved, in the act of borrowing them, the earlier verse-pictures of the final parting of the lovers, and there are many other episodes and juxtapositions of which as much may be said. That except as to Lancelot's remorse (which after all is the great point) there is not much actual talk about motive and sentiment is nothing; or nothing but the condition of the time. The important point is that, as the electricians say, "the house is wired" for the actual installation of character-novelling. There is here the complete scenario, and a good deal more, for a novel as long as
Clarissa and much more interesting, capable of being worked out in the manner, not merely of Richardson himself, but of Mr. Meredith or Mr. Hardy. It is a