William Lewis Jones

“ Hence Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin chronicle in its first printed forms comes to be one of the most eagerly studied books of the time. And it is, perhaps, not fanciful to find in the new interest aroused in the annals and legends of early Britain the influence of the reigning Tudor dynasty. On what other grounds are we to account, for example, for Spenser going out of his way to remind Elizabeth that she can boast of a genuine British ancestry, and that among her forebears is no less a person than the great King Arthur himself? ”

“ Arthur becomes, in his Brut, the flower of chivalry, and his entire narrative is decorated in a way that would appeal to the imagination of all knightly Anglo-Normans. Nor is he without thought of the courtly ladies who took so lively an interest in tales of chivalry. Like Chrétien de Troyes and other romancers, he is at some pains to elaborate his descriptions of scenes of love. He takes delight in dwelling upon the accoutrements of warriors, and upon their individual exploits in the field. ”

“ What is of more importance is the fact that before any “matter of Britain” is heard of as a great romantic theme, a writer appeared who, by means of an orderly narrative embodied in an apparently sober chronicle, aroused an interest in Arthur’s life and deeds such as no mere romance could ever have succeeded in doing. He was Geoffrey of Monmouth, and it is in his History that we get our first full-length portrait of Arthur as a great, and actual, “king of Britain.” ”

“ Geoffrey of Monmouth is, [3] indeed, even more precise and circumstantial than the professed retailers of legend, for he actually gives the reasons why Arthur settled his court at Caerlleon, or the City of Legions—a “passing pleasant place.” [4] That, of course, is only Geoffrey’s way, and illustrates the genius for invention which makes his so-called History a work unique of its kind. The “matter of Britain” is, much more than the “matter of France,” or even the heterogeneous “matter of Rome the great,” the despair of the historian. ”

“ The paramount chief of early Britain, whose prowess and conquests form the prime epic theme of Geoffrey and of Layamon, appears as the king of no known realm, numbering among his retainers heroic figures drawn from the uttermost limits of the mythical world. Exalted, as a world conqueror, to a level with Alexander and Charlemagne, he becomes, like them, largely lost to sight among the crowd of fabulous characters called up around him by the professional romancers. The Arthur of the romances [96] is no more than a primus inter pares. ”

“ Geoffrey can claim, beyond any question, to be the literary father of King Arthur himself as a romantic hero. But the Arthurian legend, as it emerged from mediæval romance and as we know it in its modern presentment by the poets, contains so much more than the story of Arthur that the French romantic scribes who brought Tristan and Lancelot and Perceval into Arthur’s court must be regarded as the first artistic fashioners of a purely poetic “matter of Britain.” ”

“ Why should the great English “Christian king” remain unhonoured in his own land? It was, therefore, with the patriotic object of blazoning the fame of the greatest of English heroes that Caxton undertook the publication of Malory’s book. Now, the historical Arthur, so far as we know him, is not English at all, but a “British” hero, who fought against the Saxons, and whose prowess is one of the jealously treasured memories of the Celtic peoples, and particularly of the Welsh. ”

“ And yet nothing is more “notoriously known” than that authentic historical records of the [2] career of this “most renowned Christian king” are distressingly scanty and indeterminate. An old Welsh bard, who sings of the graves of departed British warriors, and has no difficulty in locating most of them, [1] tells us that “unknown is the grave of Arthur.” [2] Would that this were indeed the sum of our ignorance! To-day, as of old, Arthur remains but a shadowy apparition, clothed in the mists of legend and stalking athwart the path of history to distract and mystify the sober chronicler. ”

“ It is possible, however, that those who have been searching for it have attached too much importance to the “British” book, and that, even were it to be discovered, its contents would only serve to show how deftly Geoffrey manipulated his material, and how artfully he succeeded in making his story of Arthur just what his Norman patrons, and the new romantic taste of the time, required. No intelligent reader of Geoffrey’s History can, at any rate, escape the conclusion that the work, especially in its treatment of both the Brutus legend and the career of Arthur, was written with a motive. ”

“ It is no empty compliment that Geoffrey pays Robert when he hails him as “one nurtured in the liberal arts by philosophy, and called unto the command of our armies by his own inborn prowess of knighthood,” and “whom in these our days Britain haileth with heart-felt affection as though she had been vouchsafed another Henry.” [71] Robert’s enlightened [66] patronage of men of letters is sufficiently attested by the fact that William of Malmesbury, the most distinguished historian of his day, dedicated to him his History of the Kings of England. ”

“ There is, however, just enough in these old Welsh poems and prose stories to indicate that a legend of Arthur existed in Wales from a very early period—certainly from a period long before the appearance of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History in the twelfth century. The traditions embodied in this literature are indeed vague and disconnected enough, for they are drawn from an age when the art of romantic “exploitation” had not yet been learnt; but they bear the unmistakable marks of a legendary growth indigenous to Wales itself. ”

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

“ The Historia is much more of a romance than a sober chronicle, and it is quite conceivable that, in an age of literary experiment, its author enjoyed the use to which he was thus putting the time-honoured form of the chronicle. [71] It is not, of course, suggested that Geoffrey invented all, or even the greater part, of his matter; nor need it be believed that the reference to “the British book” is altogether a ruse. Like other chroniclers, he borrows largely from his predecessors; what he has taken from Nennius and Bede, for example, can be clearly traced in his text. ”

“ When we come to examine the remaining chronicle literature of the pre-Norman period, we find no mention of Arthur’s name, and nothing but the briefest allusion to the campaigns in which he is supposed to have fought. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the dedicatory epistle prefacing his British [28] History, expresses his surprise that Bede, in his “elegant treatise,” has nothing to say about Arthur. If Arthur was indeed widely known as a Christian champion, it is somewhat strange that an ecclesiastical writer of the first half of the eighth century should have passed over his deeds in silence. ”

“ Before, however, he and Melwas engage in battle, the monks of the abbey, accompanied by Gildas, intervene; peace is made, and the queen is restored to her lawful husband.
Of the many chroniclers who, either in prose or in verse, repeat and embellish Geoffrey’s Arthurian narrative, by far the most interesting, and the most important in their influence upon the literary development of Arthurian story, are Wace and Layamon. Both are poets, and their metrical Bruts mark, as it were, the transitional stage between the Arthur of history and traditional legend and the Arthur of pure romance. ”

“ If he be indeed its author, he is entitled to as high a pedestal in the Arthurian House of Fame as either Geoffrey or Chrétien. The difficulty of accepting his authorship of the work is not so much that he was a very active public man, as that the one book of which he is the indubitable author, the De Nugis Curialium,—a sort of commonplace book in which contemporary history finds a place side by side with fairy tales, and much other odd lore,—does not afford the slightest trace of interest in Arthurian story. ”

“ Although by no means the best, the Chevalier de la Charrette is perhaps the most interesting of Chrétien’s extant works, for the reason that we obtain in it our first literary introduction to the story of Lancelot of the Lake. It treats, indeed, of only an episode in that famous knight’s career, but that episode reveals him to us as the lover of Arthur’s queen, and so marks an important stage in the evolution of Arthurian romance. In Chrétien’s poem, Guinevere is abducted by Meleaguant, [98] the son of the king of a land whence no man returns. ”

“ Caxton, however, finds it a matter of reproach that so little had been done in his own country to perpetuate and honour the memory of one who “ought most to be remembered amongst us Englishmen tofore all other Christian kings.” Thanks mainly to Caxton’s own enterprise, and to the poets who have drawn their inspiration from Malory’s book, there is no longer any cause to accuse Englishmen of indifference to Arthur’s name and fame. No literary matter is more familiar to them than “what resounds in fable or romance of Uther’s son.” ”

“ Knightly heroes, of whom little, or nothing, had been heard before, enter the Arthurian circle, and perform feats which interest us far more than anything done by the king. In early Welsh tradition, and in Geoffrey’s chronicle, Kay and Bedivere and, later, Gawain, alone figure as warriors whose deeds are at all worth mentioning by the side of Arthur’s. In the romances, Kay and Bedivere play quite subordinate parts, while Gawain becomes much more prominent, only, however, to find his high station challenged, and frequently usurped, by newcomers such as Tristram and Perceval and Lancelot. ”

“ Early in the next century Layamon wrote his English Brut, embodying, with many interesting additions and embellishments of his own, the main features of Geoffrey’s and Wace’s narrative. Then follow a long line of English chroniclers, in both prose and verse, from Robert of Gloucester down to Grafton and Holinshed, who pass on Geoffrey’s fables as authentic history. In the Elizabethan age, in spite of attempts made to discredit him by critics and antiquaries, like Polydore Vergil and Camden, [86] Geoffrey continues to be drawn upon by the poets. ”

“ Modred, retreating rapidly into Cornwall, is at last brought to bay on the river Camel, and is slain in a battle in which “well-nigh all the captains that were in command on both sides rushed into the press with their companies and fell.” And “even the renowned King Arthur himself was wounded deadly, and was borne thence unto the island of Avalon for the healing of his wounds, where he gave up the crown of Britain unto his kinsman Constantine, son of Cador, duke of Cornwall, in the year of the incarnation of our Lord five hundred and forty-two.” ”

“ Caxton’s way with the sceptics is ingenuous and short, but it is curious to note how his preface to the Morte Darthur succeeds, in its own quaint and crude fashion, in suggesting what are still the main problems of constructive Arthurian criticism. It will not do, he says in effect, to dismiss summarily all Arthurian traditions as so many old wives’ tales. They are too widespread and persistent not to have some basis of solid fact underlying them: besides, the people who believe them, love them, and write of them, cannot all be credulous fools. ”

“ Tennyson’s King Arthur is certainly modern enough in sentiment and speech, but the position which he holds in the ‘Idylls’ is, in many ways, in harmony with that which he occupies in history and romantic legend. ”

“ It is otherwise unaccountable that he should warn orthodox and reputable chroniclers, like William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, not to pry into the romantic enclosure which was his own particular preserve. In his epilogue, Geoffrey tells these two eminent historians that they may go on writing about “the kings of the Saxons,” if they choose, but he “bids them be silent as to the kings of the Britons, since they have not that book in the British speech which Walter, archdeacon of Oxford, brought over from Brittany.” ”

“ Here, at any rate, we have presented to us, in Tennyson’s words, “Soul at war with Sense”; and it is clear enough that the gradual manipulation of the Grail stories marks a deliberate effort by ecclesiastical writers to neutralise the influence of the dangerous ideals of chivalry upon Arthurian romance. Celibacy had to be shown to be compatible with true knighthood; there was no reason why a knight-errant should make love, and, all too often, illicit love, the sole motive of his quest for adventure. ”

“ I, for my part, will smite off the head of my nephew and my betrayer, after which death will be a delight unto me.’ Thus spake he, and hewing a way for himself with his sword through the press, dragged Modred by the helmet into the midst of his own men and cut through his mailed neck as through a straw. ”

“ Malory, at any rate, had some such purpose, for Caxton assures us that the Morte Darthur was “written for our doctrine, and for to beware that we fall not to vice nor sin, but to exercise and follow virtue.” “In Malory’s compilation, and in later mediæval romance, the fate of Arthur means the fate of the chivalrous ideal, whose irreconcilable elements were incorporated in him. In the romantic historians the fate of Arthur is the fate of the Christian Britons in conflict with heathenism from without and treason from within. ”

“ Brutus, the son of Æneas, stands to Britain in the same relation as Æneas himself stands to Rome, with the exception—and that was, of course, to the advantage of Britain—that Brutus could be claimed as the eponymous hero of this island. [73] Thus—as poets like Wace and Layamon, and certain Welsh chroniclers, who use the name, were quick to see—here was a Brut, which, though written in prose, had as good a right to its epic title as the Æneid. There is, even, some evidence that [68] Geoffrey may, at one time, have cherished the ambition of emulating Virgil himself by telling his story in verse ”

“ FOOTNOTES:
[1] ‘The Songs of the Graves,’ in the twelfth century Black Book of Carmarthen. “A grave there is for March (or Mark) ,”—so the lines run,—“a grave for Gwythur, a grave for Gwgawn of the Ruddy Sword; a mystery is the grave of Arthur”: or, as Sir John Rhys translates, “not wise the thought—a grave for Arthur.”
[2] William of Malmesbury (Gesta Reg. Angl., Bk. III.) , referring to the discovery in Wales of the grave of Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, speaks of the grave of Arthur himself as being unknown—hence, he says, ancient songs (antiquitas næniarum) prophesy his return. ”

“ Among the many trials to which Olwen’s father submits Kulhwch is that of “getting Arthur and his companions to hunt the Twrch Trwyth.” “He,” says Yspaddaden, “is a mighty man, and he will not come for thee, neither wilt thou be able to compel him.” Kulhwch knew better, for he had already secured Arthur’s promise to help him to the utmost of his own and his companions’ resources. The hunting of the Boar (the porcus Troit) is one of the main features of the story; and, except perhaps Meleager’s adventure to the quarry of the Calydonian boar, there is no such swine-hunt in primitive literature. ”

“ The review given in this chapter of the earliest Arthurian records,—all of which are in Latin,—as distinguished from Celtic song or fable, points clearly to the gradual growth, around the personality of a real British warrior of the sixth century, of a legend which by the twelfth century had assumed a form that arrested, though it might baffle, the leading historians of the day. Now, it so happened that the twelfth century was the seed-time of mediæval romance in Europe, and how effectively the legend of Arthur was thenceforth exploited for [36] romantic purposes will be seen later on. ”

“ The Arthurian kingdom had no geography,—it was a “no man’s land,” which defied all cartography, and the bounds of which could be extended by each romantic writer at his will. It is true that British tradition, and the bards and chroniclers who had sought to give it literary form, associated Arthur’s name with well-known localities in Great Britain; but, even there, the “champion of Britain” had no settled capital or court. London, the chief city of the Norman kings, claimed him as her own ”

“ With Merlin he is in the very heart of the land of enchantment, and the spell of romance inevitably falls upon him. It is to Merlin’s magic arts that the birth is due of “the most renowned Arthur, who was not only famous in after years, but was well worthy of all the fame he did achieve by his surpassing prowess.” Then follows, in three books, [70] the narrative which first revealed to an astonished world that Britain once had a hero whose deeds challenged comparison with those of Alexander and Charlemagne. ”