‘The Death of Arthur was the
Favourite Volume’
MALORY INTO TENNYSON
. . . the windows of the castle commanded an extensive view of the country: and Lancelot, having observed at some distance on the plain a procession accompanying a lady in a veil, in whom he recognised a likeness to the fair Guenevere, suddenly fell down in a swoon, an accident very usual with amorous knights, but always productive of wonder and curiosity in the bystanders.
George Ellis’s summary of Chrétien’s Le Chevalier de la Charette1
The first three chapters looked in turn at literary antiquarianism, at the uses Scott made of medieval literary remains, and at various revivals of verse romance. The fourth and fifth chapters, on Pugin’s ‘Christian Architecture’, and on the applications of medieval ideals to the social problems of the 1840s, show that the mock Gothick of the eighteenth century had given way, with Scott, to a less fantastic and more historical Medieval Revival, dwelling less on what the Enlightenment called ‘the marvellous’ and more on ‘facts and manners’, and finally on values.
The values attributed to reason and imagination changed in the course of the eighteenth century: to see reason as needing supplementation is an infallible sign of Romanticism. A clear if trivial example of this is the change in the way writers portray the habit of seeing ‘pictures in the fire’ on the domestic hearth. This is treated by Pope as innocent in childhood but silly in an adult, whereas Coleridge in his ‘Frost at Midnight’ and Dickens in many places present it as a privileged access to supra-rational vision.
Reason and imagination have a classic debate towards the end of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V.i.1–8, 14–17):
HIPPOLYTA: ’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.
THESEUS: More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
. . . And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
To the cool Athenian reason of the strategist, the young lovers’ reports of their night’s transfigurations are not credible; his betrothed replies that they may nevertheless be true. Immediately after this exchange, the grown-up couple react very differently to the play of Pyramus and Thisbe, offered by Bottom and the ‘rude mechanicals’ of Athens, Warwickshire. Hippolyta, who had found truth in the lovers’ dreams, dismisses the craftsmen’s comically inept love-tragedy as ‘the silliest stuff that ever I heard’. But her man thinks it reasonable to lend his imagination to amend the imperfections of a well-meaning effort: ‘THESEUS: The best in this kind are but shadows [actors], and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them’ (V.i.211–13). A hint from a playwright to his patrons.
‘Things unknown’ is a category which in the Enlightenment included the ‘facts and manners’ of medieval life. The enlightened were confident that these were among the things not worth knowing, a point of view still occasionally encountered. Educated but unimaginative folk were to remain serenely incurious about the Middle Ages for some decades after antiquarians began to publish medieval things in the 1760s. But early in the next century, Walter Scott’s ‘histories’ in verse and prose gave ‘A local habitation and a name’ to inhabitants of the medieval vacuum. Unknown things bodied forth by Scott were reimagined by others, and the values attributed to them went well beyond aesthetic values. The exotic medievalism which had formed ‘matter of entertainment’ for the leisure of some of King George III’s subjects, and the metrical romances which it had amused George Ellis to excerpt and summarise in 1805, were taken by a more serious generation and converted into various forms of ‘applied medievalism’. In the reign of Victoria, medievalism was pressed into social service. The games and dreams of one generation took more concrete forms in the next. Some modern art had begun to imitate medieval life, and modern life began to imitate aspects of this medievalising art.
Within a year of its publication in 1819, five versions of Ivanhoe were put on the London stage and Ballantynes were printing a third edition.2 Guests at an Ivanhoe Ball in Brussels in 1823 had to dress either as persons from Scott’s romance or in twelfth-century costume. The climax of the Coronation dinner in London in 1820 was a ceremony in use from the fourteenth century: a King’s Challenger rode into the hall, threw down his gauntlet thrice, and asked aloud who dared dispute the right to the throne of ‘King George, the Fourth of that name’.3 On his visit to Edinburgh in 1822, George IV wore a version of what became known as Highland Dress, which had been forbidden to Highlanders after 1745. Beau Brummel’s ‘fat friend’ liked dressing up, and, as his Brighton Pavilion suggests, his tastes were various and garish. In 1839 Archibald Montgomery, thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, staged a large-scale tournament, where the flower of society competed, armed and on horseback, before the eyes of Britain, for the hand of a ‘Queen of Beauty’. To the delight of the London press, and of those who had not been invited, the Eglinton Tournament was ruined by rain (though it was successfully held two days later). A spectator noted that the Marquess of Londonderry ‘clad in complete steel, with casque and nodding plume on his head . . . hoisted an umbrella’. Despite this celebrated fiasco, the dressing-up aspect of chivalry could be put to serious purposes by those who wished to defend gentle status or to claim it. A notable example of this is Landseer’s painting, reproduced on the front cover of this book, of Victoria and Albert appearing at a fancy dress ball dressed as Queen Philippa and King Edward III.4 As Britain prospered, crenellations were constructed, disused armour was polished and displayed, and family coats of arms were carved on walls and installed in stained-glass windows. The walls and windows of many large houses and some churches testify that this armorial movement ran until the First World War ended the Austrian and Russian empires, and heraldry became more of a hobby. The bow and arrow which had conquered at Agincourt, and won prizes for Robin Hood, became a pastime for ladies as well as gentlemen at country-house parties. In the 1960s, a bow-shot from Marble Arch and the Tyburn Convent, in London W1, the untended lawns of the Royal Toxophilite Society were still to be found.
We have seen how, in the 1830s and 1840s, Pugin, Newman, Carlyle, Ruskin, Disraeli and others drew religious, ethical, social and political lessons from Scott’s ‘histories’ of the Middle Ages and applied them to a number of national issues: the harshness of the factory system, and of a liberal economics which seemed to justify this inhumanity; the end of the Anglican monopoly on the entrée to a public career; the Catholic origins of English Christianity, and what to make of them; the future roles of Crown, Lords and Commons, housed anew in buildings which proclaimed that the reformed government of England had a ‘Gothic constitution’. Such a historical view of the English polity did not come readily to a philosophical rationalist like Jeremy Bentham, or to a political realist such as Lord Palmerston, who violently opposed a Gothic design for a new Foreign Office. In such quarters an Enlightenment tone persisted, as in Ellis’s amused summaries of medieval romances, or in Thomas Love Peacock’s satirical romance set in sixth-century Wales, The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), now best remembered for ‘The War-Song of Dinas Vawr’, a parody of the Dark-Age battle-poem delighted in by antiquarians:
The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter . . .
We brought away from battle,
And much their land bemoan’d them,
Two thousand head of cattle,
And the head of him that owned them:
Ednyfed, king of Dyfed,
His head was borne before us:
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,
And his overthrow our chorus.5
What are the chief material evidences for Victorian medievalism? A quantity surveyor instructed to report on its visible remains would first note the profusion of neo-Gothic buildings of various sizes, shapes and colours; then, perhaps, the high incidence of medieval subjects in painting and in the decoration of public and private places, from over-ambitious murals in the Houses of Parliament, and the amateur frescoing by the Pre-Raphaelites of the ceiling at the Oxford Union, to the wardrobe chest painted by Edward Burne-Jones as a wedding present to William Morris, and the more satisfying furniture and decoration of Morris’s Red House, to stained-glass windows showing sportsmen in knightly attitudes, and to many illustrated books. In the world of books, our surveyor would find that The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Ivanhoe and their progeny had helped change the cultural climate in the decade of the Regency, preparing the ground for Pugin’s impact on practice and theory in architecture and design in the reign of William IV. The advent of a major medievalist revival in poetry dates from the early 1830s, and its subjects came overwhelmingly from Arthurian romance. The adventures of knights and ladies, whether picturesque, gallant, moral, tragic or spiritual, provided Victorian romancers in verse with a range of medieval subjects. Favourite among these were the relationships of single knights with ladies, nearly always single ladies. The major exception to this rule proves crucial, however: the love of Guenevere and Lancelot du Lac. In Malory’s version of the Arthurian story, it is the public ‘outing’ to Arthur of the mutual love of his queen and his best knight that leads to the break-up of the fellowship of the Round Table. Most of these Arthurian subjects were drawn from a book which, when Ivanhoe appeared in 1819, had been out of print for 185 years.
Sir Thomas Malory completed his Morte Darthur in 1469 or 1470. It was first printed by William Caxton in 1485. The English throne was seized in that year by Henry of Richmond, of a family Welsh in origin, the Tudors. Henry VII called his eldest son Arthur, and had the Winchester Round Table painted in Tudor colours. No fewer than five printed editions of Malory appeared during the reigns of Henry Tudor’s second son, Henry VIII, and his children, the fifth and last appearing in 1577. The popularity of the Morte throughout the century following its composition is shown by allusions in Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare, and by the denunciations of educationalists. Roger Ascham, whose book Toxophilus had won him a pension from Henry VIII, was tutor in Greek to Queens Mary and Elizabeth. He wrote in The Scholemaster, published posthumously in 1570:
In our forefathers tyme, whan Papistrie, as in a standyng poole, covered and overflowed all England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, savyng certaine bookes of Chevalrie, as they sayd, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in Monasteries, by idle Monkes, or wanton Chanons: as one for example, Morte Arthure: the whole pleasure of which booke standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye: In which book those be counted the noblest Knightes, that do kill most men without any quarell, and commit fowlest adulteries by sutlest shiftes . . .6
This prosecuting counsel’s reduction of chivalry to manslaughter and adultery is shrewd enough to suggest that Ascham knew this Morte Arthure well. Malory’s book says more than once that it was composed in prison. But Ascham is less interested in the composers of immoral romances than in those ‘idle Monkes’ who, ‘as some say’, copied them: Nashe’s ‘abbey-lubbers’. Hundreds of religious houses had indeed stood in the England of Ascham’s birth in 1515, but printers were then taking over from the professional lay scribes who copied romances.
The sole surviving manuscript of Malory’s work is dated c. 1471–83. It was discovered in 1934 in the Fellows’ Library at Winchester College, founded in 1378 by the Bishop of Winchester (motto: ‘Manners Makyth Man’). The Fellows’ Library at Winchester College is the right place for the manuscript to have been found, since Camelot, seat of the legendary Arthur, King of Britain before the Saxon conquest, was often identified with the historical Winchester, seat of the historical Alfred of Wessex and capital of England before the Norman conquest. Malory refers to ‘Camelot, otherwyse callyd Wynchester’. The Round Table, the top of which hangs in the hall of Winchester Castle, is thought to have been made in the reign of King Edward I, the conqueror of Wales, the ‘ruthless king’ of ‘The Bard’, or possibly that of Edward II, hammered by the Scots at Bannockburn, or that of Edward III, the victor of Crécy and Poitiers, and the founder of the Order of the Garter.
In 1577 Nathaniel Baxter, formerly tutor in Greek to Sir Philip Sidney, wrote a Dedicatory Epistle to his own translation of Calvin’s sermons on the book of the prophet Jonah. Baxter is less donnish than Ascham. He attacks: ‘vile and blasphemous, or at least . . . prophane and frivolous bookes, such as are that infamous legend of King Arthur . . . with the horrible actes of those whoremasters, Launcelot du Lake, Tristram de Liones, Gareth of Orkney, Merlin, the Lady of the Lake, with the vile and stinking story of the Sangreall, of King Peleus, etc.’7 Sidney, Baxter’s pupil, learned to read Greek. Like Ascham, he too seems also to have read the vile, blasphemous, profane, frivolous, infamous, horrible, whoremasterly, vile and stinking book of Sir Thomas Malory, which had the advantage of being written in a clear and vigorous English. The chivalrous Sidney will have warmed to Malory’s accounts of knightly deeds and his appeals to English honour: he tells us, in his Defence of vernacular literature, that his heart had been stirred by the old ballad of Percy and Douglas, ‘more than with a trumpet’. His addition, that it would have sounded better ‘clothed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar’, may have been prompted by a memory of Baxter’s tutorials.
The chronology of editions of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur offers a profile of its popularity, and editors’ prefaces suggest how knights of romance were seen. In 1634, during the Caroline calm before the Civil War, William Stansby published his edition of the Morte, the sixth. A Preface recommends Malory to readers capable of appreciating the style and manner of antiquity: ‘the reader may see the best forme and manner of writing and speech that was in use at those times’; further, the Morte ‘may passe for a famous piece of antiquity, revived almost from the gulf of oblivion’. In 1748 William Oldys wrote apologetically in Biographia Britannica that Malory’s work ‘seems to have been kept in print for the entertainment of the lighter and more unsolid readers’. In 1765 a reader neither light nor unsolid wrote in the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare that ‘Nations, like individuals, have their infancy . . . The study of those who then aspired to plebeian learning was laid out upon adventures, giants, dragons, and enchantments. The Death of Arthur was the favourite volume.’ By ‘plebeian learning’ Dr Johnson meant popular literature in the vernacular (from verna, ‘a slave born in the house’). The boy Samuel had devoured the books in his father’s shop and grew to make many major contributions to plebeian literature and learning, though he was also a distinguished poet in Latin. Early in the next century it was rumoured that Walter Scott was about to edit the Morte Darthur. But Malory was not restored to print until 1816.8 In that year Stansby’s edition of 1634 received two separate reprints, inexpensive and in modernised spelling. Wordsworth, Keats and Tennyson owned copies of the 1816 editions of the Morte.
Declining the Poet Laureateship in 1813, Walter Scott had mentioned the name of Robert Southey. In 1817 Southey’s elaborate and scholarly edition of the Morte appeared. The Laureate flatters the discerning reader, observing that ‘the fashion for such works has passed away; and now for the full enjoyment of them a certain aptitude is required, as it is for poetry and music: where that aptitude exists, perhaps no works of imagination produce so much delight.’ In 1824 Walter Scott wrote in his ‘Essay on Romance’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that ‘Sir Thomas Malory, indeed, compiled from various French authorities, his celebrated Morte d’Arthur, indisputably the best Prose Romance the language can boast.’ Malory’s prose romance (compiled from English verse romances as well as from French prose authorities) soon eclipsed metrical romance in general, and Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in particular, as the chief source of a renewed literary medievalism. Of higher literary and narrative quality than most of the English verse romances which had preceded it, and very much easier to read, The Death of Arthur again became ‘the favourite volume’ among aspirants to ‘plebeian learning’. The high status accorded to it by Walter Scott was, interestingly, not challenged on moral grounds by Victorian schoolmasters. Idylls from the betrayed king’s story were dedicated by the Poet Laureate to the Queen.
In 1822 the young Sir Kenelm Digby illustrated his The Broad Stone of Honour, variously subtitled ‘Rules for the Gentlemen of England’ and ‘The True Sense and Practice of Chivalrie’, with many exemplary quotations from Malory, all tending to the doctrine of ‘noblesse oblige’. Digby’s magnificently idiosyncratic, innocent and influential work raised Malory’s tone for generations. His ‘philosophic history of chivalry’ opens:
‘Where do you wish that we should sit down and read this tale of ancient chivalry?’ said one of our company, as we walked on a Spring morning through the delicious groves that clothe those mountains of Dauphiny which surround the old castle of the family of Bayard. We proposed to turn aside along the banks of the stream, and there sit down in peace. We were all familiar with Plato, and this spot reminded me forcibly of that charming episode where Phaedrus and Socrates . . .9
Digby’s work is ‘a moral history of the heroic age of Christendom’. The atmosphere of The Broad Stone of Honour is suggested by its locale: ‘a fortress like that rock upon the Rhine which appears to represent, as it were, Knightly perfection, being lofty and free from the infection of a base world’. The ‘rock upon the Rhine’ is called Ehrenbreitstein.10 The elevation of style and sentiment suggest that Digby had read not only Plato’s dialogues but also Sidney’s Arcadia. The Plato with whom Sir Kenelm and his friends were all familiar was not the Plato of Ascham and Baxter, though each might have accepted the ideal of the ‘Philosopher Kings’ put forward in Plato’s Republic. For all his studied grace, Digby was perfectly in earnest in his Christian idealism, and his work was warmly received by its intended audience, the gentlemen of England. Perhaps for this reason, it is now rarely read. This is not the case with the works which stand at the head of the Arthurian tradition of the nineteenth century, Malory’s Morte Darthur itself, and two poems by Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and ‘Morte d’Arthur’.
Alfred Tennyson was not a Victorian poet, not at first. Yet as it turned out, he was Victoria’s Laureate for half his life, and dedicated the first volume of The Idylls of the King to her late husband. In 1869 he published the twelfth and last book of The Idylls, entitled ‘The Passing of Arthur’. In an epilogue ‘To the Queen’, Tennyson reminds her, with some awkwardness, of the Idylls’ original dedication:
But thou, my Queen,
Not for itself, but through thy living love
For one to whom I made it o’er his grave
Sacred, accept this old imperfect tale,
New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul,
Ideal manhood closed in real man,
Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost,
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak,
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still . . .11
Thus did Alfred Tennyson close the ideal manhood of King Arthur in a real man, Prince Albert, now dead. Algernon Swinburne called the poem the ‘Morte d’Albert, or Idylls of the Prince Consort’. Father Hopkins wrote to Canon Dixon in 1879 that Tennyson ‘shd. have called them Charades from the Middle Ages (dedicated by permission to H.R.H. etc.)’.12 But the Idylls also close a real man whom Tennyson remembered, one who had died very young, not in 1864 but in 1833: his friend Hallam.
Readers who, like the present writer, first encountered Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ in a school anthology of the 1950s may like him have received Arthur’s dying speech as representing the Victorian age at its most funereal. It begins, if that is not too lively a word:
And slowly answered Arthur from the barge:
‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new
And God fulfils himself in many ways . . .’13
It comes as a surprise to find that these heavy lines had been composed by a man of twenty-three, shortly after the unexpected death of an Arthur who was his dearest friend. Arthur Hallam had died of a brain haemorrhage while visiting Vienna in September 1833, aged twenty-one. In the next two months Tennyson wrote remarkable poems on early death, old age and survival: ‘Morte d’Arthur’, ‘Ulysses’, ‘Tiresias’ and ‘Tithonus’. This was also the year in which he began his major work, In Memoriam A.H.H., published in 1850. After her husband’s death, the Queen changed ‘Tears of the widower’ to ‘Tears of the widow’ in her copy of In Memoriam, and ‘his’ to ‘her’.14
In the year of Byron’s death in Greece, 1824, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott were writing, as was William Blake. But Keats had died in Rome in 1821, and Shelley had drowned in the Mediterranean in 1822. In a received view of English literary history, these early deaths in exile broke the rainbow of Romantic poetry. Yet seven years later Alfred Tennyson composed ‘The Lady of Shalott’, a poem whose familiarity from school anthologies may have prevented its worth from being recognised. It is in the nature of things that Poets Laureate should write better before their appointment than after it, though John Dryden may be an exception to this rule. In Tennyson’s case, many of his best poems were composed not only before Wordsworth’s death in 1850 but even before Victoria acceded to the throne in 1837. He is not simply a Victorian poet. The Arthurian poems in Tennyson’s Poems of 1832 and of 1842 provided Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other artists with some of their first subjects, and Victorians often approached Malory through Tennysonian arches.
‘The Lady of Shalott’ was begun in 1831 and finished in May 1832, before the death of Hallam. Tennyson, who was a voracious reader, seems to have been interested in Arthurian legend before he read Malory, for he later testified that the story of his verse romance was ‘taken from an Italian novelette, [La] Donna di Scalotta. The Lady of Shalott is evidently the Elaine of the Morte d’Arthur, but I do not think that I had ever heard of the latter when I wrote the former.’15 Much of the real success as well as the initial charm of this piece comes from its opening: ‘On either side the river lie / Long fields of barley and of rye’. A picturesque medieval landscape is simply presented, but the reader comes to see that its decorated and pageant-like quality stands in special relation with the tapestry the Lady weaves in her bower, showing what her glass shows her of life outside: a reflection of a reflection, as in Plato’s fable of the Cave. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is usually first met with in school, but it is not an immature work.
And moving through a mirror clear
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
Winding down to Camelot: . . .
Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,
An abbot on an ambling pad,
Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad,
Or long-haired page in crimson clad,
Goes by to towered Camelot . . .
Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;
‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said
The Lady of Shalott.
Part III brings into the picture not a shadow but a man:
A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,
He rode between the barley-sheaves;
The sun came dazzling through the leaves,
And flamed upon the brazen greaves
Of bold Sir Lancelot.
The shock which this sight delivers, comparable to the effect on Lancelot of the distant sight of Guenevere in Ellis’s amused summary at the head of this chapter, is well conveyed:
The helmet and the helmet-feather
Burned like one burning flame together . . .
She left the web, she left the loom,
She took three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.
In a short song or ballad, Romantic poets could, when on top form, sustain an effect hardly distinguishable from that of their late medieval models. Examples of this are Scott’s ‘Proud Maisie’, Byron’s ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving’, and Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. This timeless illusion could not be sustained in the longer verse romances essayed by all the Romantic poets, such as Coleridge’s Christabel and ‘Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ and Keats’s ‘Eve of St Agnes’. Even the best of these poems has difficulty in blending modern viewpoints and ‘Gothic’ elements into supposedly medieval stories.
It was therefore a remarkable achievement for a twenty-two-year-old to write a poem which for 171 lines adjusts means to ends as perfectly as Keats had managed in the forty-eight lines of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Compared with Keats, Tennyson is more pictorial, less sensuous, and has a less explicit preoccupation with the relation of art, and the artist’s life, to the life around them. It may be thanks to Keats that in ‘The Lady of Shalott’ Tennyson uses genre to much better effect than he had in previous poems of any length.
Following on from the revived romances of Coleridge, Scott and Keats, Tennyson distils a purely artistic idea of the world of Arthurian romance, deploying without strain an echoing stanza form, the rhyme-scheme of which runs aaaa4b3ccc4b3. He then succeeds in making this elaborated landscape organic to the working out of the poem’s meaning. This youthful performance entirely lacks the ‘authentic’ costume detail which encrusts medievalist description in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Ivanhoe and the medieval historical novel down to Stevenson’s The Black Arrow. To lay on detail with a trowel was the vice of historical novelists, from Scott to Bulwer Lytton and Harrison Ainsworth, from Flaubert’s Salammbô to Marguerite Yourcenar.
In Tennyson’s poem such detail is decorative, not obtrusively ‘authentic’: this is a world of legend and romance, not of history – a difference with consequences for the future. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is as vividly coloured as a landscape in a Book of Hours – part of its attraction for anthologists – but bewitchingness of representation becomes part of the poem’s theme. A deeper virtue lies in the poem’s use of psychological symbolism. Here Tennyson shows artistic tact of a high order, for ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is a finer poem than ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, if less ambitious. In considering such a judgement, members of the jury should ask themselves whether they are more affected by understatement (‘She saw the helmet and the plume’) or by overstatement (‘His heart made purple riot’). Edinburgh critics accused Tennyson of ‘Cockney’ vices of style, less violently than they had accused Keats of such vices. Tennyson had read Homer in the original.
Tennyson’s other notable Arthurian poem from this early period, his ‘Morte d’Arthur’, was finished in 1834, though not published until 1842. In the 1842 Poems it is grouped among ‘English Idylls’ and appears framed by ‘The Epic’, a poem set in the present, which opens ‘At Francis Allen’s on the Christmas-eve’. In it Tennyson, thinly disguised as the poet Everard Hall, says that he had burnt ‘His epic, his King Arthur, some twelve books’, written at college. Encouraged by his friends, Hall now reads aloud to them the eleventh book of this epic, the ‘Morte d’Arthur’, the manuscript of which, we are told, Francis Allen had retrieved from the fireplace when they were at college together. The parson sleeps through the recital, but the narrator later has a significant ‘Christmas’ dream. The note of apology in the introduction to ‘The Epic’ struck Leigh Hunt as insincere. Tennyson, he wrote, ‘gives us to understand that he should have burnt his poem but for the “request of friends”.’ ‘Request of friends’, a formula to excuse the vanity of publishing, was an ancient pretext for backing into the limelight. Alexander Pope has a desperate poetaster who ‘Rymes e’re he wakes, and prints before Term ends, / Oblig’d by hunger and Request of friends.’16
Much in ‘The Epic’ is conventional authorial modesty, a convention to which Tennyson kept throughout his life, calling The Idylls of the King an ‘old imperfect tale’. What is conventional can be sincere, however, and in this case ‘request of friends’ was no fiction. Friends, from Hallam onwards, repeatedly requested Tennyson to publish what he had written, often in vain, and Tennyson’s publishers had to twist his arm to get him to do so. Other details in ‘The Epic’ correspond to actuality, notably the twelve-book Arthurian epic, although at college Tennyson had only dreamed of what he represents Everard Hall as having written and burnt. Tennyson later incorporated the full text of ‘Morte d’Arthur’ into the twelfth and last of The Idylls of the King, ‘The Passing of Arthur’. The poet’s concern about how his ‘Morte’ might be received was justified, for ‘his matter was new’.17 John Sterling, a member of the Cambridge ‘Apostles’ (a Socratic circle to which both Hallam and Tennyson also belonged), criticised the ‘Morte’ in print as ‘inferior’. Sterling thought any modern treatment of the legend of Excalibur ‘a mere ingenious exercise in fancy’. Tennyson was highly sensitive to criticism, especially from a fellow Apostle. Sterling’s review discouraged him from continuing his epic for many years. The ‘Morte d’Arthur’ purports to be a fragment plucked from the burning of a completed epic, but in the event was a trial instalment of an epic that Tennyson contemplated but deferred.
John Milton’s notebook, held like Tennyson’s at Trinity College, Cambridge, shows that he too had thought of taking the Arthurian story as the subject of his epic. He later decided against the subject as fantastic and historically unreliable. In Tennyson’s ‘The Epic’, his spokesman, Hall, is conscious that the story of Arthur is largely legend and from a remote period. ‘Why take the style of those heroic times?’ Hall asks himself: ‘For nature brings not back the Mastodon, / Nor we those times; and why should any man / Remodel models?’ This, Hall says, is why he had burnt his epic: ‘Those twelve books of mine / Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing worth.’ Yet the heavy frame of ‘The Epic’ serves its purpose well; the country-house Christmas Eve fireside setting disliked by Leigh Hunt now seems right. Prologue and Epilogue are there for the same reasons as Scott’s in The Lay of the Last Minstrel: to introduce unfamiliar material, to provide a sense of temporal recession, to tune the expectations and mood of the audience, and to point a moral. Scott habitually furnished editorial paratexts for his imaginative narratives, a Scottish Enlightenment dissociation of head and heart, found also in James Hogg and Thomas Carlyle. The visitor, fictional narrator, or editor who tells a strange tale set in the past is a device as old as fiction itself. In the Odyssey XI, the disguised Odysseus tells the court of King Alcinous of his visit to Hades. The answer to Hall’s rhetorical question about remodelling models is provided in the Epilogue, when the narrator, asleep on Christmas Eve, dreams of ‘a bark that, blowing forward, bore / King Arthur, like a modern gentleman / Of stateliest port’. A remodelled Arthur is offered as a model to modern gentlemen, just as, towards the end of the Wars of the Roses, Sir Thomas Malory’s Arthur had been the model of chivalry for his intended audience. Malory makes despairing asides on the inconstancy and factiousness of English knights in his day. Caxton, a businessman of letters, recommended Malory’s work as a guide to gentle conduct. The preface to Stansby’s 1643 edition likewise commends Malory’s work as a book of knightly conduct lent charm by antiquity.
What constitutes superior conduct in a man has interested audiences from before the ‘gentillesse’ of Chaucer through to Tennyson’s ‘modern gentleman’, and since. As early as 1833, Tennyson made a note: ‘The Round Table: liberal institutions’.18 The passage from the 1816 edition of Malory on which he based his ‘Morte’ is reproduced in Ricks’s edition of The Poems of Tennyson. This allows a comparison of a medievalising poem with its source-text, a comparison like that offered earlier between Scott’s characters and their Chaucerian originals. A brief extract is chosen to illustrate the differences between (i) a scholarly edition of the manuscript text in modernised spelling, (ii) the 1816 modernisation of Caxton which was Tennyson’s source, and (iii) Tennyson’s adaptation.
The passage comes at the point when the dying Arthur has repeated his order to Sir Bedivere to throw Excalibur into the lake, which Bedivere had secretly decided to disobey on the first two occasions. This is how the passage stands in Helen Cooper’s edition of Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript:19
‘What sawest thou there?’ said the King.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I saw nothing but waters wap and waves wan.’
‘Ah, traitor unto me and untrue,’ said King Arthur, ‘now hast thou betrayed me twice! Who would ween that thou that hast been to me so lief and dear, and also named so noble a knight, that thou would betray me for the riches of the sword?’
The second text is from the 1816 edition, which modernises Caxton:
‘What saw ye there,’ said the King. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘I saw nothing but the water wap and waves wan.’ ‘Ah, traitor, untrue,’ said King Arthur, ‘now hast thou betrayed me two times, who would have wend [weened] that thou hast been unto me so self [for lief] and dear, and thou art named a noble Knight, and wouldest betray me for the rich sword.’
Then spoke King Arthur, breathing heavily:
‘What is it thou hast seen? or what hast heard?’
And answer made the bold Sir Bedivere:
‘I heard the water lapping on the crag,
And the long ripple washing in the reeds.’
To whom replied King Arthur, much in wrath:
‘Ah, miserable and unkind, untrue,
Unknightly, traitor-hearted! Woe is me!
Authority forgets a dying king . . .’
Comparison shows Malory’s prose as rapid, and Tennyson’s verse as slow. Malory wrote directly, for reading aloud; Tennyson for the recitation of a poet ‘mouthing out his hollow oes and aes’. The speech of his King Arthur is consciously poetic and noble. Malory’s eye is for action, Tennyson’s for description and effect; his ear is an echo-chamber for Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare and Milton. Malory is laconic, Tennyson’s poetic strain has a dying fall. The stylistic qualities of the two passages are of opposite kinds. Tennyson’s variation upon a theme from Malory has an effect comparable to that of the ‘art’ settings of English folksongs by composers from Vaughan Williams to Benjamin Britten: long-drawn out and lacking the simplicity of the original; finely modulated, but nostalgic. Helen Cooper points out that the hand which in Malory clutched Excalibur ‘shook it thrice and brandished’, whereas in Tennyson the arm is ‘clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful’: priestly, feminine, ethereal.20
I hope that readers of the nine lines from Tennyson given above will prefer the first five of them. Malory’s king sounds angry whereas Tennyson’s makes a speech ‘much in wrath’. Better by far is Bedivere’s ‘“I heard the water lapping on the crag, / And the long ripple washing in the reeds.”’ This both makes more sense and sounds better than ‘I saw nothing but the water wap and the waves wan’ (1816). Tennyson here can stand comparison with what Malory may actually have written: ‘I saw nothing but waters wap and waves wan’. Bedivere’s evasive answer is glossed by Helen Cooper to mean ‘I saw nothing but the waters lap and the waves darken.’ Tennyson elaborates a beautiful pattern, but does it very well, achieving something different from Bedivere’s enigmatic words yet almost as desolate.21
The same reader can at different times yield to the spell of each of these works. Malory’s seven-hundred-page romance is an extraordinary achievement, both historically and artistically: the best prose romance, as Scott told the readers of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but also the first major work of prose in an English which is all but modern. (Previous English medieval romances had been in verse.) By taking ‘Morte d’Arthur’ as his title, Tennyson acknowledges that his poem derives from Malory. The king’s death is indeed the climax of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and Tennyson gives it epic treatment. It is a great subject, but Tennyson deserves credit for having selected it and selected well from it. Much of the power of Tennyson’s ‘Morte’ comes from its parent legend, and the impersonal skill with which Malory shaped and retold the legend, or legends, in the 1460s. Yet there was nothing inevitable in Tennyson’s choice of Malory, nor his choice of Arthur’s end, nor about the success of his ‘Morte’. Even as an amplification of an episode, it remains extraordinarily evocative.
Tennyson submerges himself in his source while remaking it entirely, as in ‘The Lady of Shalott’. The difference is not only in the change of form from prose to verse and to a symbolic mode. Both poems also add much in the way of decorative and atmospheric detail. Further, ‘The Lady of Shalott’ adds many key narrative features to the bare bones of the source, most significantly the web and the mirror. Tennyson’s ‘Morte’, on the other hand, leaves out stark physical moments such as that immediately preceding the action, when Sir Bedivere and his brother Sir Lucan de Butler attempt to move the wounded Arthur: ‘and in the lifting Sir Lucan fell in a swoon, that part of his guts fell out of his body, and therewith the noble knight’s heart brast. And when the King awoke, he beheld Sir Lucan, how he lay foaming at the mouth, and part of his guts lay at his feet.’
If Tennyson leaves things out of Malory’s plain report of actions, he elaborates what remains. In Malory, Bedivere on his third and final visit to the mere ‘threw the sword as far into the water as he might’. Tennyson builds a Miltonic simile:
The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirled in an arch,
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
By night, with noises of the northern sea,
So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur . . .22
The burden of Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ remains the myth of the dying king’s possible return: a myth of special moment to a poet suddenly bereft of so close and admired a friend. This is why Tennyson borrows details of Arthur’s dying face from the prophecy of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, 52–3. What sticks in the mind of the reader of the ‘Morte’, however, as much as the story itself and what it portends, is its desolate landscape of loss, which is Tennyson’s. Here are some of the lines which create this quality:
So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea . . .
A broken chancel with a broken cross
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,
Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walked,
Larger than human on the frozen hills.
Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere,
‘Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?’
Long stood Sir Bedivere
Revolving many memories, till the hull
Looked one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.
Plotted on a chronological graph of the Medieval Revival, the two early poems of Tennyson are substantial steps into the world of legend. These romances, though they derive from medieval texts, lack the historical grounding and antiquarian colouring which had made Scott’s medievalist fictions more credible than the sensationalistic fantasy of earlier Gothic fiction. In his ‘Eve of St Agnes’ and ‘Belle Dame’, Keats had produced a first synthesis of Coleridge’s magical experiments and Scott’s historical minstrelsy. Tennyson began where Keats left off, writing medium-length poems of such artistic tact that the authenticity of their medievalism, or the credibility of their Gothicism, are not questions which arise even for the most historically minded reader. Tennyson’s poems are beautiful, are wholly grounded in Arthurian legend, and are set in landscapes almost entirely created by himself.
Poetry showed the way. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ were written in 1833, before the fire at Westminster, before Pugin had designed a church, and before the lay pulpiteers of the 1840s had begun to clear their throats and to call upon medieval precedents. The poetry of the Medieval Revival was henceforward very often to operate in Malory’s world as reimagined by Tennyson, the world of Arthurian legend and symbol. After Scott, imaginative historical writing went in two directions, following the change in his own fiction after Ivanhoe. The historical novel which stemmed from Waverley and Scott’s Scottish novels was typically set in a post-medieval time. The romances which followed in the mode of Ivanhoe, whether medieval or not, are not really historical, but adventure stories and romantic stories loosely situated in ‘history’. Victorian historiography sought confirmation for its narratives in political and constitutional documents. It made strong assumptions, but was interested in facts, not ideas, and later became more analytic than narrative. The rise of professional history cramped the style of the writers of medievalist fiction in prose or verse. They increasingly moved away from texts into the world of legend or of adventure, though this glamour was implicit in their originals. It was Tennyson who led them onto this enchanted ground.