116 The Efficacy Of Prayer

116 The Efficacy Of Prayer

116 THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER

Some years ago I got up one morning intending to have my hair cut in preparation for a visit to London, and the first letter I opened made it clear I need not go to London. So I decided to put the haircut off too. But then there began the most unaccountable little nagging in my mind, almost like a voice saying, "Get it cut all the same. Go and get it cut." In the end I could stand it no longer. I went. Now my barber at that time was a fellow Christian and a man of many troubles whom my brother and I had sometimes been able to help. The moment I opened his shop door he said, "Oh, I was praying you might come today." And in fact if I had come a day or so later I should have been of no use to him.

It awed me; it awes me still. But of course one cannot rigorously prove a causal connection between the barber's prayers and my visit. It might be telepathy. It might be accident.

I have stood by the bedside of a woman whose thighbone was eaten through with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the disease in many other bones as well. It took three people to move her in bed. The doctors predicted a few months of life; the nurses (who often know better), a few weeks. A good man laid his hands on her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, through rough woodland) and the man who took the last X-ray photos was saying, "These bones are as solid as rock. It's miraculous!'

But once again there is no rigorous proof. Medicine, as all true doctors admit, is not an exact science. We need not invoke the supernatural to explain the falsification of its prophecies. You need not, unless you - choose, believe in a causal connection between the prayers and the recovery.

The question then arises, "What sort of evidence would prove the efficacy of prayer?" The thing we pray for may happen, but how can you ever know it was not going to happen anyway? Even if the thing were indisputably miraculous it would not follow that the miracle - had occurred because of your prayers. The answer surely is that a compulsive empirical proof such as we have in the sciences can never be attained. Some things are proved by the unbroken uniformity of our experiences. The law of gravitation is established by the fact that, in our experience, all bodies without exception obey it. Now even if all the things that people prayed for happened, which they do not, this would not prove what Christians mean by the efficacy of prayer. For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them. Invariable "success" in prayer would not prove the Christian doctrine at all. It would prove something much more like magic - a power in certain human beings to control, or compel, the course of nature.

There are, no doubt, passages in the New Testament which may seem at first sight to promise an invariable granting of our prayers. But that cannot be what they really mean. For in the very heart of the story we meet a glaring instance to the contrary. In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not. After that the idea that prayer is recommended to us as a sort of infallible gimmick may be dismissed.

Other things are proved not simply by experience but by those artificially contrived experiences which we call experiments. Could this be done about prayer? I will pass over the objection that no Christian could take part in such a project, because he has been forbidden it: "You must not try experiments on God, your Master."

Forbidden or not, is the thing even possible? I have seen it suggested that a team of people the more the better - should agree to pray as hard as they knew how, over a period of six weeks, for all the patients in Hospital A and none of those in Hospital B. Then you would tot up the results and see if A had more cures and fewer deaths. And I suppose you would repeat the experiment at various times and places so as to eliminate the influence of irrelevant factors.

The trouble is that I do not see how any real prayer could go on under such conditions. "Words without thoughts never to heaven go," says the King in Hamlet. Simply to say prayers is not to pray; otherwise a team of properly trained parrots would serve as well as men for our experiment. You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery. But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another. You are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens. The real purpose and the nominal purpose of your prayers are at variance. In other words, whatever your tongue and teeth and knees may do, you are not praying. The experiment demands an impossibility.

Empirical proof and disproof are, then, unobtainable. But this conclusion will seem less depressing if we remember that prayer is request and compare it with other specimens of the same thing.

We make requests of our fellow creatures as well as of God: we ask for the salt, we ask for a raise in pay, we ask a friend to feed the cat while we are on our holidays, we ask a woman to marry us. Sometimes we get what we ask for and sometimes not. But when we do, it is not nearly so easy as one might suppose to prove with scientific certainty a causal connection between the asking and the getting. Your neighbour may be a humane person who would not have let your cat starve even if you had forgotten to make any arrangement. Your employer is never so likely to grant your request for a raise as when he is aware that you could get better money from a rival firm and is quite possibly intending to secure you by a raise in any case. As for the lady who consents to marry you - are you sure she had not decided to do so already? Your proposal, you know, might have been the result, not the cause, of her decision. A certain important conversation might never have taken place unless she had intended that it should.

Thus in some measure the same doubt that hangs about the causal efficacy of our prayers to God hangs also about our prayers to man. Whatever we get we might have been going to get anyway. But only, as I say, in some measure. Our friend, boss, and wife may tell us that they acted because we asked; and we may know them so well as to feel sure, first that they are saying what they believe to be true, and secondly that they understand their own motives well enough to be right.

But notice that when this happens our assurance has not been gained by the methods of science. We do not try the control experiment of refusing the raise or breaking off the engagement and then making our request again under fresh conditions. Our assurance is quite different in kind from scientific knowledge. It is born out of our personal relation to the other parties; not from knowing things about them but from knowing them.

Our assurance-if we reach an assurance - that God always hears and sometimes grants our prayers, and that apparent grantings are not merely fortuitous, can only come in the same sort of way. There can be no question of tabulating successes and failures and trying to decide whether the successes are too numerous to be accounted for by chance. Those who best know a man best know whether, when he did what they asked, he did it because they asked. I think those who best know God will best know whether He sent me to the barber's shop because the barber prayed.

For up till now we have been tackling the whole question in the wrong way and on the wrong level. The very question "Does prayer work?" puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. "Work": as if it were magic, or a machine - something that functions automatically. Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (our selves) and the utterly concrete Person. Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. In it God shows Himself to us. That He answers prayers is a corollary - not necessarily the most important one - from that revelation. What He does is learned from what He is.

Petitionary prayer is, nonetheless, both allowed and commanded to us: "Give us our daily bread." And no doubt it raises a theoretical problem. Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men? For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it. But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate. He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers; or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries. Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to co-operate in the execution of His will. "God," said Pascal, "instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures the dignity of causality." But not only prayer; whenever we act at all He lends us that dignity. It is not really stranger, nor less strange, that my prayers should affect the course of events than that my other actions should do so. They have not advised or changed God's mind - that is, His overall purpose. But that purpose will be realized in different ways according to the actions, including the prayers, of His creatures.

For He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye. He allows us to neglect what He would have us do, or to fail. Perhaps we do not fully realize the problem, so to call it, of enabling finite free wills to coexist with Omnipotence. It seems to involve at every moment almost a sort of divine abdication. We are not mere recipients or spectators. We are either privileged to share in the game or compelled to collaborate in the work, "to wield our little tridents." Is this amazing process simply Creation going on before our eyes? This is how (no light matter) God makes something indeed, makes gods-out of nothing.

So at least it seems to me. But what I have offered can be, at the very best, only a mental model or symbol. All that we say on such subjects must be merely analogical and parabolic. The reality is doubtless not comprehensible by our faculties. But we can at any rate try to expel bad analogies and bad parables. Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate.

It would be even worse to think of those who get what they pray for as a sort of court favorites, people who have influence with the throne. The refused prayer of Christ in Gethsemane is answer enough to that. And I dare not leave out the hard saying which I once heard from an experienced Christian: "I have seen many striking answers to prayer and more than one that I thought miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning: before conversion, or soon after it. As the Christian life proceeds, they tend to be rarer. The refusals, too, are not only more frequent; they become more unmistakable, more emphatic."

Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best? Well, He who served Him best of all said, near His tortured death, "Why hast thou forsaken me?" When God becomes man, that Man, of all others, is least comforted by God, at His greatest need. There is a mystery here which, even if I had the power, I might not have the courage to explore. Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.

118 THE EMPTY UNIVERSE

(Note: This essay was first published as a Preface to D.E. Harding's The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe (London, 1952).

This book is, I believe, the first attempt to reverse a movement of thought which has been going on since the beginning of philosophy.

The process whereby man has come to know the universe is from one point of view extremely complicated; from another it is alarmingly simple. We can observe a single one-way progression. At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account: classified as our sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not rest there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves. The masters of the method soon announce that we were just as mistaken (and mistaken in much the same way) when we attributed "souls", or "selves" or "minds" to human organisms as when we attributed Dryads to the trees. Animism, apparently, begins at home. We, who have personified all other things, turn out to be ourselves mere personifications. Man is indeed akin to the gods: that is, he is no less phantasmal than they. Just as the Dryad is a “ghost", an abbreviated symbol for all the facts we know about the tree foolishly mistaken for a mysterious entity over and above the facts, so the man's “mind" or “consciousness" is an abbreviated symbol for certain verifiable facts about his behaviour: a symbol mistaken for a thing. And just as we have been broken of our bad habit of personifying trees, so we must now be broken of our bad habit of personifying men: a reform already effected in the political field. There never was a Subjective account into which we could transfer the items which the Object had lost. There is no “consciousness" to contain, as images or private experiences, all the lost gods, colours, and concepts. Consciousness is "not the sort of noun that can be used that way".

For we are given to understand that our mistake was a linguistic one. All our previous theologies, metaphysics, and psychologies were a by-product of our bad grammar. Max Müller's formula (Mythology is a disease of language) (Note: Friedrich Max Müller, The Science of Language (1864), Second Series, Lecture viii on "Metaphor") thus returns with a wider scope than he ever dreamed of. We were not even imagining these things, we were only talking confusedly. All the questions which humanity has hitherto asked with deepest concern for the answer turn out to be unanswerable; not because the answers are hidden from us like "goddes privitee", (Note: Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales , The Miller's Prologue, line 3164) but because they are nonsense questions like "How far is it from London Bridge to Christmas Day?" What we thought we were loving when we loved a woman or a friend was not even a phantom like the phantom sail which starving sailors think they see on the horizon. It was something more like a pun or a sophisma per figuram dictionis (Note: "Sophism disguised as language.") It is as though a man, deceived by the linguistic similarity between “myself" and “my spectacles", should start looking round for his “self" to put in his pocket before he left his bedroom in the morning: he might want it during the course of the day. If we lament the discovery that our friends have no "selves" in the old sense, we shall be behaving like a man who shed bitter tears at being unable to find his “self" anywhere on the dressing-table or even underneath it.

And thus we arrive at a result uncommonly like zero. While we were reducing the world to almost nothing we deceived ourselves with the fancy that all its lost qualities were being kept safe (if in a somewhat humbled condition) as "things in our own mind". Apparently we had no mind of the sort required. The Subject is as empty as the Object. Almost nobody has been making linguistic mistakes about almost nothing. By and large, this is the only thing that has ever happened.

Now the trouble about this conclusion is not simply that it is unwelcome to our emotions. It is not unwelcome to them at all times or in all people. This philosophy, like every other, has its pleasures. And it will, I fancy, prove very congenial to government. The old "liberty-talk" was very much mixed up with the idea that, as inside the ruler, so inside the subject, there was a whole world, to him the centre of all worlds, capacious of endless suffering and delight. But now, of course, he has no “inside", except the sort you can find by cutting him open. If I had to burn a man alive, I think I should find this doctrine comfortable. The real difficulty for most of us is more like a physical difficulty: we find it impossible to keep our minds, even for ten seconds at a stretch, twisted into the shape that this philosophy demands. And, to do him justice, Hume (who is its great ancestor) warned us not to try. He recommended backgammon instead; and freely admitted that when, after a suitable dose, we returned to our theory, we should find it "cold and strained and ridiculous". (Note: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1, Part iv, section vii) And obviously, if we really must accept nihilism, that is how we shall have to live: just as, if we have diabetes, we must take insulin. But one would rather not have diabetes and do without the insulin. If there should, after all, turn out to be any alternative to a philosophy that can be supported only by repeated (and presumably increasing) doses of backgammon, I suppose that most people would be glad to hear of it.

There is indeed (or so I am told) one way of living under this philosophy without the backgammon, but it is not one a man would like to try. I have heard that there are states of insanity in which such a nihilistic doctrine becomes really credible: that is, as Dr I.A. Richards would say, "belief feelings" are attached to it. (Note: I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), chapter XXXV) The patient has the experience of being nobody in a world of nobodies and nothings. Those who return from this condition describe it as highly disagreeable.

Now there is of course nothing new in the attempt to arrest the process that has led us from the living universe where man meets the gods to the final void where almost-nobody discovers his mistakes about almost-nothing. Every step in that process has been contested. Many rearguard actions have been fought: some are being fought at the moment. But it has only been a question of arresting, not of reversing, the movement. That is what makes Mr Harding's book so important. If it "works", then we shall have seen the beginning of a reversal: not a stand here, or a stand there, but a kind of thought which attempts to reopen the whole question. And we feel sure in advance that only thought of this type can help. The fatal slip which has led us to nihilism must have occurred at the very beginning.

There is of course no question of returning to Animism as Animism was before the "rot" began. No one supposes that the beliefs of pre-philosophic humanity, just as they stood before they were criticized, can or should be restored. The question is whether the first thinkers in modifying (and rightly modifying) them under the criticism, did not make some rash and unnecessary concession. It was certainly not their intention to commit us to the absurd consequences that have actually followed. This sort of error is of course very common in debate or even in our solitary thought. We start with a view which contains a good deal of truth, though in a confused or exaggerated form. Objections are then suggested and we withdraw it. But hours later we discover that we have emptied the baby out with the bath water and that the original view must have contained certain truths for lack of which we are now entangled in absurdities. So here. In emptying out the dryads and the gods (which, admittedly, "would not do" just as they stood) we appear to have thrown out the whole universe, ourselves included. We must go back and begin over again: this time with a better chance of success, for of course we can now use all particular truths and all improvements of method which our argument may have thrown up as by-products in its otherwise ruinous course.

It would be affectation to pretend that I know whether Mr Harding's attempt, in its present form, will work. Very possibly not. One hardly expects the first, or the twenty-first, rocket to the Moon to make a good landing. But it is a beginning. If it should turn out to have been even the remote ancestor of some system which will give us again a credible universe inhabited by credible agents and observers, this will still have been a very important book indeed.

It has also given me that bracing and satisfying experience which, in certain books of theory, seems to be partially independent of our final agreement or disagreement. It is an experience most easily disengaged by remembering what has happened to us whenever we turned from the inferior exponents of a system, even a system we reject, to its great doctors. I have had it on turning from common "Existentialists" to M. Sartre himself, from Calvinists to the Institutio, from "Transcendentalists" to Emerson, from books about "Renaissance Platonism" to Ficino. One may still disagree (I disagree heartily with all the authors I have just named) but one now sees for the first time why anyone ever did agree. One has breathed a new air, become free of a new country. It may be a country you cannot live in, but you now know why the natives love it. You will henceforward see all systems a little differently because you have been inside that one. From this point of view philosophies have some of the same qualities as works of art. I am not referring at all to the literary art with which they may or may not be expressed. It is the ipseitas , the peculiar unity of effect produced by a special balancing and patterning of thoughts and classes of thoughts: a delight very like that which would be given by Hesse's Glasperlenspiel (in the book of that name) if it could really exist. (Note: Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) has been translated into English as The Glass Bead Game by R. and C. Winston (London, 1970).) I owe a new experience of that kind to Mr Harding.

THE ENGLISH PROSE MORTE

I begin by considering certain paradoxes which have been thrown up by the remarkable discoveries made in the last fifty years about Malory and the book (or books) which he translated, with modifications, from the French and which Caxton printed in 1485. They are five in number.

1. The work has long passed for a mirror of honour and virtue; the author appears to have been little better than a criminal.

II. The work strikes every reader as a rich feast of marvels, a tale 'of faerie damsels met in forest wide'; but a comparison of it with its sources seems to show Malory almost everywhere labouring to eliminate the marvellous and introduce the humdrum.

III. The work seems to many of us the typical specimen (because it is the first specimen we met) of Interwoven or Polyphonic narrative. But once again, comparison with the sources shows everything proceeding as if Malory detested this technique and did his best to pluck the threads apart.

IV. Its handling of the Grail story sounds deeply religious, and we have the sense that it is somehow profoundly connected with the final tragedy. But a case can be made out for the view that Malory evaded the religious significance and ignored or severed the connexion.

V. Malory seemed to Saintsbury (and doubtless to many) the man who alone 'makes of this vast assemblage of stories one story and one book'. The evidence of the Winchester MS. convinces Professor Vinaver that he really wrote several works which were never intended to form a whole.

If all these Paradoxes stand, they build up into a single grand Paradox. It is not of course paradoxical that a man's work should be other than he intended. What is paradoxical is that a man's work should succeed by its failure to realize every single intention he had when he made it. For it is as a mirror of honour, as a feast of marvels, as a Polyphonic narrative, as a romance of chivalry haunted by the higher mystery of the Grail, and as (in some sort) a unity, that the Morte Darthur has pleased. And not only pleased, but so far outstripped its rivals that it alone of all medieval prose romances has survived as a living book into our own century. In Malory's case, apparently, nothing succeeds like failure.

The reader should be warned at once that I am not attempting a reductio ad absurdum. I am not sure whether all the Paradoxes, in their sharpest form, will stand; but neither am I sure that all of them will completely fall. It therefore may be true that something like this paradoxical 'success by failure' has actually happened. If it has, then I want to draw a conclusion from it. But that will come later; in the meantime I will proceed to examine the five Paradoxes one by one.

1. The apparent discrepancy between the man and the work has seemed to some so formidable that they seek refuge in the possibility that the wicked Malory of the records is not our author but another man of the same name. But this is rather a desperate expedient. By all sound methodological principles a Malory whose Christian name was Thomas, who was a knight, who lived at the right time, and who was sometimes (like our Malory) in prison, must be assumed to be the author until any evidence to the contrary turns up. A far more respectable alternative is Professor Vinaver's view that the discrepancy is an illusion because the book (or books) are not in fact noble; the common belief in their 'morality' is based mainly on Caxton's preface. (Note: The Works of Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver (Oxford 1947), p. xxi. [In references to Malory in this volume W denotes this edition and C that of Caxton. Numbers refer to Book and chapter of C and to page, or page and line, of W. - Ed.)) Yet I cannot quite accept this. It must of course be admitted that there are in the text untransmuted lumps of barbarism, like Arthur's massacre of the children (C 1.27). And even when we discount these, no one can claim (or should demand) that the general tone conforms to the standards either of the New Testament or of modern, peacetime respectability. But I find in it, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, an unforced reverence not only for courage (that of course) but for mercy, humility, graciousness, and good faith. The best way to see it is to compare Malory's heroes, the characters he obviously admired, with those of Homer, Virgil, Renaissance drama, or even our earlier novelists. I cannot conceive that even the best of them - even Hector, Pallas, Othello, or Tom Jones - could ever have been made to understand why Lancelot wept like a beaten child after he had healed Sir Urry (C xix. 12). A character from Corneille might understand the scene when Gawain, unhorsed, bids Marhaus to dismount, 'or else I will slay thy horse', and Marhaus, instantly obeying, replies, 'Grammercy, of your gentleness ye teach me courtesy' (C iv. i 8); I doubt if he could equally have understood Lancelot's unresponsive endurance of Gawain's challenges (C xx. 20). I cannot deny either 'morality' (it is not a word I love) or something better to the imagination that shows us Lancelot refusing to take Gareth's victory from him at the tournament (C vii. 28), or Pelleas laying his sword across the throats of Gawain and Ettard (C iv. 22), or all Lancelot's contrition in Book XV, or the last message of Galahad, now almost a blessed spirit, to his father (C xvii. 22), or the final lament of Ector (C xxi. 13). In such passages, and indeed almost everywhere, we meet something which I chiefly hesitate to call 'morality' because it is so little like a code of rules. It is rather the civilization of the heart (by no means of the head), a fineness and sensitivity, a voluntary rejection of all the uglier and more vulgar impulses. We can describe it only in words derived from its own age, words which will now perhaps be mocked, such as courtesy, gentleness, chivalry. It makes the Morte a 'noble' as well as a 'joyous' history. I at any rate will never blacken the book to make it match the man.

But was the man so black? At first sight it would seem hard to deny, for he was convicted of cattle-lifting, poaching, extortion, sacrilegious robbery, attempted murder, and rape.

The record suggests to Professor Vinaver a man who at the age of forty 'from being a peaceable and presumably well-to-do citizen ... became a law-breaker'. (Note: Op. cit. p. xvi) And if we apply certain habitual conceptions of our own to Malory's record, this result seems inevitable. But are these conceptions possibly too local and modern? 'Citizen', 'law-breaker', and (why has that come in?) 'well-to-do'. I suspect that a man of Malory's class and time would not much have relished the titles 'peaceable' or 'citizen'; and the real question about his actions probably was for him, and should be for us, not whether they broke the law but whether they were cowardly, discourteous, treacherous, and (in a word) unknightly. It is not clear that they need have been. Our record of them comes from lawyers. In that age evidence was not scientifically sifted and accusers laid it on thick. In every county civil war exploited, and was exploited by, local feuds. Legal proceedings, whether civil or criminal, were often primarily moves in family quarrels. We need not assume that he did all the things he was accused of. But even if he did, he need not have been, by all standards, a villain. Cattle-lifting was a gentlemanly crime. If he killed other men's deer, so did the Douglas at Otterburn. A knightly ambush and encounter could be attempted murder. Rape need mean no more than abduction; from the legal point of view Lancelot committed rape when he saved Guinevere from the fire. If Malory, loving Joan Smyth par amours, and knowing her cuckoldy knave of a husband to be little better than a King Mark, carried her off behind him at 'a great wallop' and perhaps thus saved her from a broken head and two black eyes at home, he may have done what a good knight and a true lover ('of a sinful man') should. That he often fell below the highest standards of chivalry, we may well believe; we need not believe that he fell flagrantly below them. He might, on the evidence, have been as good a knight as Tristram; for what should we think of Tristram himself if our knowledge of him were derived only from King Mark's solicitors?

Of course this picture is conjectural; but it is equally conjecture to represent him, on the strength of the records, as the sort of man who in our days becomes a 'criminal'. We don't know what he was really like, and I suppose we never shall.

II. This Paradox, like the next two, of course involves the assumption that differences between Malory's text and the extant MSS. of his originals are due to Malory. I think this is very probably so. I agree with Professor Vinaver that it is monstrous to set out by assuming that Malory had no spark of originality and therefore to trace everything in which he differs from those MSS. to a hypothetical, lost, intermediary. But probability is not certainty. We cannot be absolutely sure that any given passage, peculiar to Malory, or even any given omission, was his own. Everything I say about Paradoxes II, III, and IV must be understood with this caveat.

There are fewer marvels in Malory than in the corresponding French romances. There are, to be sure, at least two places where he introduces a marvel which they lack. But one of these seems to me (Note: Vinaver (op. cit. p. 1569 n. on 1027, 3O-32) prefers a different explanation) to be almost certainly the (not unhappy) result of a graphic error. In C xvii. 19 the sword 'arose great and marvellous and was full of great heat that many men fell for dread'. In the French it was a wind (ung vent) that so arose. I suppose that either Malory or the scribe of the French MS. he was using, having the sword in his head from the preceding passage, wrote it here, intending to write wind. The other is in C iv. 6, where a sudden, presumably miraculous light of torches in Malory replaces the French text's ordinary arrival of torches carried by ladies. But this, or both these, amount to nothing against the opposite instances. No one disputes that Malory's text naturalizes, negatively, by the omission of wonders, and positively, by introducing practical, mundane details. When Arthur defeats Damas he makes proper legal arrangements for the righting of the wrongs Damas has done: 'I will that ye give unto your brother all the whole manor with the appurtenance, under this form, that Sir Ontzlake hold the manor of you, and yearly to give you a palfrey' (C IV. 12). Similarly (in C vii. 35) the defeated knights swear homage and fealty to Gareth 'to hold of him for evermore'. King Anguysh sending Marhaus to Cornwall, assures him that his expenses will be amply covered (C viii. 4). When Tristram bleeds over the lady's bed in C viii. 14, we are told the extent of damage almost as if Malory had made up the laundry list - 'both the over-sheet and the nether-sheet and the pillows and the head-sheet'. Mordred explains at length, and very sensibly, why young knights are at a disadvantage on horseback (C ix. 4). Lancelot's habit of talking in his sleep is noted (C xi. 8). Best of all, we are told exactly how much it had cost the Queen (£20,000) to send out knights in search of him (C xii. 9).

The Paradox here is not very strong, for it turns on the contrast between Malory's supposed intentions and the known effect of his work. For, clearly, even if we know what he did, we can only guess what he intended. It is possible to imagine a burly, commonsensible man who was always trying to turn the faerie world of the romances into something much more earthy and realistic. Accepting that picture, we may smile at the 'success by failure', the happy frustration of his vain labour which has made his book for centuries the chief delight of all who love 'the fairy way of writing'. But a quite different picture is equally possible. If you write fairy-tales and receive letters from your child readers, you will find that children are always asking the sort of questions that Malory is always answering. A simple and serious delight in marvellous narrative most emphatically does not involve any indifference to mundane details. The more seriously you take the story the more you want to tie everything up and to know how people got from one place to another, and what they had to eat, and how all outstanding issues were settled. Neglect of these points, whether in writer or reader, means that the whole thing is merely conventional or playful. Multiplication of marvels goes with the same attitude. Those who love them, as alone they can be loved, for their suggestiveness, their quality, will not increase their number. Two enchanters, two ghosts, two ferlies are always half as impressive as one. Every supposedly naturalistic change that Malory made in the story might proceed from a far fuller belief and a more profound delight in it than the French authors had ever known. He would not be the less English for that.

Once more, I ask no one to choose between these two pictures. Either, as it seems to me, will fit the facts. We shall never know which is true.

III. The excellent remarks of Professor Vinaver on what I have called Interwoven or Polyphonic narrative (Note: Op. cit. Pp. xlviii-liii) will have made it clear to all readers that this is a real technique, not, as an earlier generation supposed, a mere muddle or an accidental by-product of conflation. It is a technique not peculiar to medieval prose romance. We find it fully developed over long stretches of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The rudiments of it are there in parts of Beowulf. The epic poets of Italy took it over from the romance, and Spenser took it over from them. Sidney re-wrote the Arcadia to make it more polyphonic. Milton seems to have toyed with the idea of using it for a great epic; he certainly acknowledged that to depart from Aristotelian unity In a narrative might be an enriching of art. (Note: Reason of Church Government, Pref. Bk. II.) Quite clearly the method continued to be used for centuries, not in blind obedience to tradition but because it gave pleasure. Dante selected this feature of chivalrous romance for special praise: Arturi regis ambages pulcerrime. (Note: De Vulgari Eloquentia, I. x. 2) Tasso confesses that all knights and ladies prefer it; everyone reads Ariosto, and no one reads Trissino. (Note: Discorsi Poetici, II) He even records how his father discovered by sad experience that 'unity of action gave little pleasure'. (Note: Apologia in difesa alla Ger.Lib.) The vogue of the Polyphonic in fact lasted longer than that of the modern novelistic technique has yet done. It would be interesting to analyse, and perhaps not difficult to account for, the pleasure it gave. But that would be too long a digression. What matters for the moment is that it did please and can please still. To the present day no one enjoys Malory's book who does not enjoy its ambages, its interweaving.

For it is certainly interwoven. Arthur has a war against five kings. To repair his losses he must make new knights. His selection sends Bagdemagus, malcontent, from the court, and the story of his wanderings crosses the latter end of Merlin's story. Arthur meanwhile has got involved in the affairs of Damas and Ontzlake, which in their turn involve both him and Accolon in the machinations of Morgan, which lead to the banishment of her son Uwain, which leads to his joint errantry with Gawain, which brings them both (now in company with Marhaus) to those three damsels at the river-head who fork the story into three (C iv. 4-19)... and so on. Those who dislike this sort of thing will not much like Malory.

Yet it may be, as Professor Vinaver concludes, (Note: Op. cit. p. lii) that Malory 'strongly disliked' it himself. Certainly the evidence that he constantly simplified is irresistible. Whether he wanted to simplify still further and get rid of the Polyphonic altogether, or whether he wanted to go just as far as he has gone and liked the degree of Polyphony which survives under his treatment, we do not know. If he wanted to get rid of it altogether, he has undoubtedly failed. To anyone who comes to his work fresh from modern literature its Polyphonic character will be at first one of the most noticeable things about it. And the work will be liked, where it is liked, not despite of this peculiarity but (in part) because of it.

IV. This Paradox involves us in two subjects: Malory's treatment of the holy quest, and the connexion, if any, between it and other matters in his text.

Professor Vinaver's view on the first subject depends on the interpretation of a great many different passages. I shall refer to them both by the Book and Chapter of Caxton's edition and by the page and line of the Professor's (which I indicate by the letter W). They fall into four classes.

i. A passage (Note: At least I think this must be the passage Vinaver has in mind on p. 1524.) held to indicate Malory's 'confidence in the unfailing merits of Arthurian chivalry' (W i 524). This is C xvi. 3 (W 946.18) where a Hermit in the French text condemns the Round Table for luxure and orgueil; but in Malory, for 'sin and wickedness'. I cannot myself see that the substitution of the general for the particular makes the condemnation less severe.

2. Passages where Malory substitutes the worldly for the religious. Thus in C xvi. 3 (W 945.10) the dying Uwain in the French asks that prayer be made for his soul; in Malory he asks to be remembered to Arthur and the court, 'and for old brotherhood, think on me'. (This phrase itself might imply a request for prayers, but I would not press that.) Again, in C xvi. 6 (W 955.9) Bors, surprisingly, and without authority from the French, says that he who achieves the Grail will win 'much earthly worship'. Both these, and especially the latter, are strong evidence for Professor Vinaver's view: if it is felt that they are sufficient to colour the whole narrative, then that view will be unassailable. Two other passages which might be quoted here seem to me, on the other hand, to rank as 'worldly' only if we adopt standards of worldliness which are almost intolerably severe. In C xiii. 19 (W 896.11) Malory allows the contrite Lancelot to be 'somewhat comforted' when day breaks and he hears the birds sing. In the French (which is finely imagined) the morning and the birds directly produce the conviction of God's anger, which in Malory comes home to Lancelot only when he realizes that he has lost his horse and his armour. This is certainly very practical, homely, English, and (in a word) Malorian; but it does not for me empty the scene of all religious significance. Again in C xvii. 13 (W 1011.31-1012.1) Malory's Lancelot (not his French equivalent) after a month of fasting on board ship with no one but a dead lady for company, 'was somewhat weary of the ship' and went ashore 'to play him'. (Middle English play in such a context is of course a very mild word; we should have said 'to stretch his legs' or 'to relax'.) Now I think a man might have done that and yet be a very good sort of penitent on the whole. Both passages, indeed, are for me specimens of that Malorian realism which brings the story to life; they make Lancelot, not a stained-glass figure, but a real man, though a contrite one. It is proper, however, to point out that the difference between Professor Vinaver and myself may be simply the same difference there was between the French originals and Malory, the difference between the hard lines and rigid schematization of Latin thought, and the softening, compromising temper of us islanders. (For some say our best Christians are all Pelagians, and our best atheists all Puritans, at heart.) 3. The third class is, for me, the hardest to feel sure about. In C xiii. 14 (W 886.18) the qualification for success in the holy quest is, In the French, chevaillierie celestiale; in the English, 'virtuous living'. In C xiii. i6 (W 891.32) it is again, for Malory, 'knightly deeds and virtuous living'; for the French author it is service to the Creator, defence of Holy Church, and the offering to Christ of the treasure (one's soul) which has been entrusted to one. In C xvi. 6 (W 956.2) Bors is praised in the French for his 'religious', in Malory for his 'stable', life. In C xvi. 13 (W 968.11) Lionel is condemned by the French author because n'a an soi nule vertu de Nostre Seignor qui en estant le tiegne; by Malory, because 'he is a murderer and doth contrary to the order of knighthood'. These are I think the strongest specimens. That in C xv. 5 (W 931.25) seems to me weak. It is true that the motive which Malory gives Lancelot for joining in a certain fray is, as Professor Vinaver claims, incongruous with the Quest; but then Malory is fully aware of this and In the very next chapter (C xv. 6; W 933.32-934.4) makes his recluse tell Lancelot that such 'bobaunce and pride of the world' must be abandoned. The insertion of both these passages by Malory would seem to emphasize the very point which, it is claimed, he was ignoring. We might perhaps add C xvi. 17 (W 974.15-17) where the edifying mutual forgiveness of Bors and his brother is also peculiar to Malory.

But the earlier passages remain, and I will not for a moment dispute that they all indicate an important change made by Malory and affecting his version throughout. The question is how we are to define it. At first sight I am tempted to say that where the originals used specifically religious, Malory uses ethical, concepts: virtuous for celestial, knightly and virtuous for the offering of the heart to Christ, stable for religious. This certainly means that the choice before Malory's knights is not that between 'religion' in the technical sense and active life in the world. They are to go on being knights (C xiii. 20; W 899.1-5); just as the soldiers who came to the Baptist were told to go on being soldiers. (Note: Luke iii. 14) Malory in fact holds the same view as Langland and Gower and many other English medieval moralists. No man need leave the Order to which he has been called, but every man must begin really to fulfil the functions for which that Order exists. The recall is not from knighthood to the cloister, but from knighthood as it has come to be (full of 'sin and wickedness') to knighthood as it was intended to be, grounded in 'patience and humililty' (C xvi. 3; W 945-7). Admittedly, then, the story is ethical, as against mystical. But we must not say 'ethical, as against religious', for the ethical claim and the attempted ethical response, when prompted by a vision, purged by confession and penance, supported and corrected at every turn by voices, miracles, and spiritual counsels, is precisely the religious as it most commonly appears In secular vocations. And stability (perseverance to the end, or consistency) is of course essential.

4. Finally, we have those passages which exalt the supremacy of Lancelot over all other knights. There may be some difference of opinion as to which we should include in this class. I certainly would not include C xvii. 22 (W 1035. 11-12) where Galahad, almost at the threshold of Heaven, sends to his father a message bidding him 'remember of this unstable world'. The words are full of knightly courtesy, filial duty, and Christian charity, but of course they are a warning and (by delicatest implication) a reproof. It is Galahad whom they exalt. Nor do I find much 'rehabilitation' of Lancelot in Malory's insertion at the end of C xvii. 23 (W 1036.19-1037.7). Lancelot does not relate the adventures of the Grail simpliciter, but those 'that he had seen'. Bors had seen, and Bors told, what Lancelot had not seen. One would expect the surviving knights each to contribute to the report which Arthur naturally demanded. And the passage repeats Galahad's message, with its grave implication. Another doubtful place is C xvi. i (W 941. 20-22). Here Gawain says that 'If one thing were not' (surely beyond all doubt the 'one thing' is his adultery?) Lancelot would be matchless. But as things are, far from rising (for purposes of this Quest) to the level of Galahad, Perceval, and Bors, Lancelot 'is as we be', is just like the rest of us, nous autres, Ectors and Gawains - 'but if he take the more pain on him'. (Note: I don't believe this means 'even though he takes'. Rather 'unless he were to take'; i.e. he is (and will remain) like us unless he should take more pains than he's taking at present.) cannot imagine a better way of making us feel how Lancelot has sunk than thus to let us hear lesser men exclaiming that at last he's no better than they.

The passages on which the Vinaverian view must finally rest are those where Malory deliberately inserts the praise of Lancelot. A damsel in C xiii. 5 (W 863.30), a hermit in C xv. 4 (W 930.14), and a second hermit in C xvi. 5 (W 948.27-8) all remind us that Lancelot was the best knight, for a sinful man, that ever lived. The reservation is of course important; but in spite of it, I am prepared to admit that all these passages may be meant to blunt for us the edge of the abasement which Lancelot undergoes in the French text. But it also seems to me equally possible that they were intended to have - and for me they have - a very different effect. It is a question of what may be called the logic of the Imagination. If one wanted to exhibit in a novel the theme that intellectual achievements were no passport to heaven, one would not choose for one's protagonist some mediocrity who has 'got a good second'. Only a fool would labour to show the failure, on the highest level, of pretensions which were doubtfully adequate even on their own. Obviously one would build one's protagonist up to the stature of a Porson, a Sherrington, or a Mahaffy. If you want to show that one sort of achievement is inferior to, even incommensurable with, another, then of course the more splendid (in its own kind) your specimen is, the more impressive its failure (in another kind) will be. Every word said in praise of Lancelot as a good knight 'of a sinful man' - as the bravest, most courteous, most faithful in his love, but not seriously hitherto attempting that perfection of chastity and all other virtues which the Christian law demands of the knight, in his own fashion, no less than of the contemplative - serves all the more to drive home the moral of the whole story, makes it all the clearer that with the Quest we have entered a region where even what is best and greatest by the common standards of the world 'falls into abatement and low price'.

But, as before, I end in uncertainty. I am sure that Malory's handling has not on me the effect, and therefore need not have been meant to have the effect, which Professor Vinaver supposes. I know it has the opposite effect on me. I cannot rule out the possibility that it was intended to have this opposite effect. I do not claim to know that it was.

So much for his treatment of the Quest. As regards its relation to other parts of his work, I feel a little more confident. It appears to me to be unmistakably linked with the Morte. Before the Quest begins, before Galahad is begotten, when the Grail first appears before Lancelot in the house of Pelles, Malory inserts the prophecy that 'when this rich thing goeth about, the Round Table shall be broken for a season'. (C xi. 2; W 793.32-36). I do not know what to make of 'for a season', and how right (as often) Caxton was to omit it! But it is Malory who has introduced, even if Caxton perfected, the note of doom: the dreadful hint that the best is fatal to the good. Then in the Quest itself (C xiii. 20; W 897.27-28) Lancelot promises 'by the faith of his body' never to come in Guinevere's 'fellowship' again if he can avoid it. Then, when the Quest is over, almost immediately, Lancelot 'forgat the promise and the perfection that he made in the Quest'. This is in the French; but as if this were not enough Malory must add that this was the inadequately repented 'bosom-sin' which had led him to fail in that attempt (C xviii. 1; W 1045.12-16). Notice too that in thus forgetting his promise Lancelot is verifying the diagnosis ('not stable, but ... likely to turn again') made upon him by the hermit in C xvi 5. - a passage, so far as we know, of Malory's own making. The connexion here, if unintended, is singularly fortunate. But Malory still feels he has not done enough. Returning to C xvi ii. 1, we find a dialogue between Lancelot and Guinevere inserted (W 1045.30-1048.I4) in which he almost begs the terrible woman to release him, pleading, 'I was but late in the quest,' confessing that 'privy thoughts to return to your love' were the lime-twigs he could not escape, trying to make her understand that such experiences 'may not be lightly forgotten'. Then later (C xix. 10-12) we have what is perhaps the greatest of all passages peculiar to Malory, the healing of Sir Urry. Here Lancelot is proved by infallible signs to be in one sense (he knows too well in what and how limited a sense) the best knight of the world. Hence, while all praise him to the skies, he can only weep like a beaten child. As he failed on the Quest, so (for the same reason) he is failing now. In him, its highest specimen, the whole Round Table is failing; on it and him, as the result of his illicit love, the prophecies begin to be fulfilled. They are, no doubt, worked out through a tangle of human motives, the spite of Agravain and Mordred, the assumption of the blood-feud by Gawain. Of course. The fulfilment of the prophecies about Oedipus came about through seemingly free agents obeying human motives. That is how prophecies are fulfilled in good stones; no one ever suggested that the motivation somehow abolishes the connexion between the prediction and the event. And when all is nearly over and the doom worked out, Lancelot again recalls to us the source of the whole tragedy: 'For in the quest of the Sangreal I had forsaken the vanities of the world had not your love been' (C xxi. 9; W 1253.14-15).

And still, though I cannot see how any reader fails to see the connexion, I cannot be certain whether Malory himself saw it or not.

V. Finally, did Malory write one book or eight? Close study of the Winchester MS. has convinced Professor Vinaver that he wrote eight; instead of the Morte Darthur we have the 'Works' of Malory, and inconsistencies between them no longer matter - indeed, no longer exist, for independent worlds of invention cannot be inconsistent with one another. This view has been seriously criticized by Mr. D. S. Brewer. (Note: 'Form in the Morte Darthur.' Medium Aevum xxi (1952), pp. 14-24. The argument is restated in Mr. Brewer's essay in J.A.W. Bennet, ed. Essays on Malory. - Ed.]) He points out that the eight 'works' are full of backward and forward references, their order not alterable, and 'bridge' passages often supplied. I think I should be on Mr. Brewer's side in this question, if I were not bogged down in a preliminary doubt as to what precisely the question is.

I believe I know fairly well what we mean if we say, 'Pickwick is one work, but Pickwick and Great Expectations are two works'. We mean that within Pickwick, as within Great Expectations, there are characters that continue or recur, and that there are causal connexions, and the later parts presuppose the earlier; whereas there are no common characters and no causal connexions shared by both. But ask me the same questions about Barchester Towers and The Last Chronicle; already a shade of ambiguity has crept in. Now go a step further. What of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained? Here there are characters common to both, and the later poem presupposes and recalls events in the earlier. Satan's temptation of Christ presupposes his rebellion against God and his expulsion from Heaven. And if Satan, and the whole Story, were as purely Milton's invention as Archdeacon Grantly is Trollope's, the two poems would stand in the same not very easily defined relation as the two novels. Actually, however, Satan's career with all its causal and chronological structure already exists in the Fathers and in popular belief, before Milton sets pen to paper, and continues to exist whether he wants us to treat Regained as a sequel or as a wholly separate poem. Presupposals of events in Paradise Lost, and backward references, are bound to occur. It may be impossible to say whether a given instance of them illustrates the unity of the two poems or whether it merely exhibits at one point the external, pre-existing, non-Miltonic unity of the matter he worked on. Hence we may generalize: wherever there is a matter (historical or legendary) previous and external to the author's activity, the question, 'One work or many?' loses a good deal of its meaning. And of course Malory's matter was of this kind.

On top of this a special difficulty arises from the fact that Malory was a medieval author. if it were possible to question him directly, in what form should we put our question? It would be no use asking him how many books he thought he had written; he would think we meant the material volumes or 'quairs'. If we asked him, 'How many tales?' he might enumerate more than eight. Such expressions as 'Thus endeth the tale of...' (C ii. 19; W 92.22), or 'the adventure of' (C iii. 8; W 108.28) or 'the quest of' (C iii. II; W 113. 34) occur within the Vinaverian units. If we talked to him about 'artistic unity', he would not understand. We might finally, in desperation, try to find out whether he was at all worried at the appearance in one passage of some knight whose death had been recorded in an earlier passage. He would, I feel certain, simply refer us to 'the French book' as his authority. For the difficulty between Malory and us would not be merely linguistic. We should by the very form of our questions be presupposing concepts his mind was not furnished with. Did any Middle English author conceive clearly that he was writing fiction, a single work of fiction, which should obey the laws of its own inner unity but need not cohere with anything else in the world? I cannot believe it. They are all, even Chaucer, handing on, embellishing, expanding, or abridging a matter received from some source. They feel free to illuminate it at any number of points with their own vivid imagination, and even to correct what seems to them improbable, improper, or unedifying. But whatever their own degree of actual belief or of scepticism (were they clearly aware of either? did they for the most part even raise such questions?) they all proceed as if they were more or less historians; unscholarly, decorating, and emotional historians to be sure, like Livy or Plutarch, but (by and large) historians still. I do not for a moment believe that Malory had any intention either of writing a single 'work' or of writing many 'works' as we should understand the expressions. He was telling us about Arthur and the knights. Of course his matter was one - the same king, the same court. Of course his matter was many - they had had many adventures.

The choice we try to force upon Malory is really a choice for us. It is our imagination, not his, that makes the work one or eight or fifty. We can read it either way. We can read it now one way, now another. We partly make what we read.

As will be seen, the examination of all five Paradoxes produces in me varying degrees of doubt (weakest as regards the Third, strongest as regards the Second and Fifth) about Professor Vinaver's idea of Malory's intentions; but it produces no confidence in any alternative theory. The net result is that Malory eludes me. Perhaps, then, I shall be able to find him in his style, for they say that a man's style is himself. Unfortunately, Malory turns out to have not a style, but styles. The inverted and alliterative language of the Roman War has little likeness to the limpid, unobtrusive prose in which we follow the adventures of knights errant. And we know why. The one is from the Alliterative Morte, the other renders, and copies as closely as English can, the style of the French prose romances. In both, Malory writes such a style as he has most lately read. And we cannot say that this subjection to the model is a prentice weakness which he outgrew in his maturity. At the very end, as soon as the Stanzaic Morte comes before him, the tell-tale features, the tags, inversions, and alliterations, creep into his prose: 'while we thus in holes us hide' - 'that was wary and wise' - 'droop and dare' - 'shred them down as sheep in a fold' (C xx. 19; W 1211-12). And when he leaves his originals altogether to reflect upon the story (C xviii. 25; W 1119-20), we have a style different from all these. There are more (ultimately) Latin derivatives close together (constrain, divers, negligence, stability, and rasure), and doublets like 'bring forth fruit and flourish', 'springeth and flourisheth', 'arase and deface', 'deface and lay apart'. This is quite unlike the prose used in his own (or what we take to be his own) additions to the narrative parts, especially those dialogues which he inserts more freely as he nears the end. These are no doubt admirable; but who, on purely internal evidence, could have picked them out (as almost anyone could pick out the alliterative passage about the dream in C v. 4)? They may be better than the surrounding prose which reproduces the French, but they are all of a piece with it. Malory's greatest original passages arise when he is most completely absorbed in the story and realizes the characters so fully that they begin to talk for him of their own accord; but they talk a language he has largely learned from his sources. The very ease with which he wanders away from this style into that of some inferior source or into a language of his own (which he may have thought 'higher') suggests that he hardly knows what he is doing. Thus, while in one sense it would be monstrous to say that he 'has no style' (he has written prose as musical, as forthright, as poignant, as was ever heard in England) it would be true in another. He has no style of his own, no characteristic manner. (if you were searching all literature for a man who might be described as 'the opposite of Pater', Malory would be a strong candidate.) In a style or styles so varied, everywhere so indebted to others, and perhaps most original precisely where it is most indebted, one cannot hopefully seek l'homme même. Here also Malory vanishes into a mist.

And this result neither surprises nor disappoints me. I have called this essay 'The English prose Morte', because I think we may deceive ourselves by such expressions as 'Malory's Morte Darthur' or 'The Works of Sir Thomas Malory'. They sound so dangerously like 'Browning's Sordello' or 'The Works of Jane Austen'. But there is no real parallel. Our familiar concept of 'author-and-his-book' is foiled by the composite works of the Middle Ages. Even in Troilus and Criseyde, where the whole is much shorter and the last worker's additions are much larger and known more certainly, we are foiled. We can sort out the Boccaccian and the Chaucerian passages. But not the Boccaccian and the Chaucerian element. For of course the surviving Boccaccio is modified by the interpolated Chaucer, and the Chaucer modified (this is less often stressed) by the Boccaccio. In the end we cannot really say that either author, nor even in what proportion each author, is responsible for the total effect. The prose Morte is very much more complicated. Whatever Malory's intentions - if he had any intentions - may have been, it is agreed on all hands that he has changed the tale very little. From the nature of the case he could not have changed it much. It is too vast, too filled with its own strong life, to be much affected by alterations so comparatively short and sporadic as his. This does not mean that his contribution is of negligible value. Like so many medieval authors (like, for example, the poet of Cleanness and Patience), at point after point he adds vividness, throws some figure Into bolder relief, cuts away an excrescence, or sweetens some motive that he rightly found odious. (Note: e.g. at C viii. 9 (W 385.6-8) where he turns Tristram from a cad into an ordinary amorous young man) The process may be described as 'touching up'. But there is no question of a great artist giving to a pupil's work those strokes of genius 'which make all the difference'. Rather, a deft pupil has added touches here and there to a work which, in its majestic entirety, he could never have conceived; and from which his own skill has been chiefly learned. Though he has in fact improved it, it was (by our standards, not by those of the Middle Ages) rather cheek of him to try. But even if he had done harm, he would not have done much harm.

If some people find it distressing to have a work which cannot be assigned to any single author, let me remind them that in another art we are familiar with this sort of thing. I am thinking of a great cathedral, where Saxon, Norman, Gothic, Renaissance, and Georgian elements all coexist, and all grow together into something strange and admirable which none of its successive builders intended or foresaw. Under Malory's work lies that of the French prose romancers; under theirs, that of Chrétien, Wace, and other poets; under that, Geoffrey, and perhaps the Breton lais; deepest of all, who knows what fragments of Celtic myth or actual British history? Malory is only the last of many restorers, improvers, demolitionists; if you will, of misunderstanders. Meanwhile, the great cathedral of words stands solidly before us and imposes on us a meaning which is largely independent of their varying and perhaps incompatible purposes. Who, if any, first saw or intended the tragic and ironic parallel between Mordred's begetting and Galahad's? Or the necessity that the Grail should bring not peace but a sword? Or the three-storied effect inevitably produced by the intermediate position of the good knights between the villains like Mark and the perfect knights like Percivale? Or the deep suggestiveness of Arthur's relation to that dark family (Morgan, Morgause, and the rest) from whom he emerges, who lie in wait for him, and who mysteriously return in his last hour to take him away?

I said just now that Malory was only the last of the makers of the Morte. I should have said, last but one (or even last but two). It follows from the view I am trying to put that Caxton's text is not most usefully regarded as a corruption. He touched up Malory as Malory touched up his predecessors and by the same right. The greatest service that he did the old fabric was one of demolition. Most unluckily (and probably, as Professor Vinaver thinks, early in his career) Malory had come across the Alliterative Morte. It is not a first-class poem, not comparable in epic quality to the battle scenes of Layamon, and it treats the dullest and most incredible part of the whole Arthurian legend. It is far easier to suspend one's disbelief in enchantments than in vast contradictions of known history scrawled across a whole continent; and a narrative of unbroken military successes, dull even when true, is insufferable when feigned. It is defeat, or (as in the Iliad) discords within one of the armies, that we need for epic. Malory swallowed this poem almost whole, except that by separating it from the Morte he deprived it of the tragic close and the moral judgement (Note: Alliterative Morte 3393-3402, ed. E. Brock (E.E.T.s. 1865)) which had saved it from total paltriness. He also surrendered his style without resistance to the influence of the alliterative metre, which, degenerate even in the original, becomes in prose a noisy rumble. Caxton wisely abridged the whole dreary business, and removed (he might well have used the knife more boldly) some of the traces of the metre. Thus where Winchester's (and no doubt Malory's) text read

Now fecche me, seyde sir Pryamus, my vyall that hangys by the gurdyll of my haynxman, for hit is full of the floure of the four good watyrs that passis from Paradyse, the mykill fruyte in fallys that at one day fede shall us all.

Caxton gives

And Priamus took from his page a vial full of the four waters that came out of Paradise.

Notice that Caxton has made it much more Malorian, more like the best and most typical parts of Malory, than Malory himself had done. This is 'forcing a man to be free', making him himself (C v. 10; W 234.11-14). Again in C v. 8 (W 219.16-17) we owe to Caxton 'the ground trembled and dindled' instead of 'all the vale dyndled'. The division into chapters, if sometimes unskilfully done, has made the book everywhere more readable. The rubrics he prefixed to the chapters have become as much part of its beauty as the losses of the Ancient Mariner's. Sometimes, as in 'how anceote to his old love again', they direct us unerringly to the pith of what follows (C xviii. 1); again and again they are evocative In the highest degree.

I am not of course suggesting that Caxton's share in the final effect is remotely comparable to Malory's; only that he too, in his degree, has helped a little, and that it is no misfortune if his text has counted for so much In the English imagination. That is why I have usually quoted not only from Caxton but even from Caxton edited by Pollard; the household book. I enjoy my cathedral as it has stood the test of time and demand no restoration. I have no more wish to discard Caxton for Malory than to discard Malory for the French romances.

It would distress me if anyone took this to imply the slightest depreciation of Professor Vinaver's great edition. It is an indispensable work of which English scholarship may well be proud, and my own debts to it will be obvious. Indeed the view I have taken allows me to give Professor Vinaver a place higher, in my opinion, than scholarship of itself could claim. I hesitated a while ago whether to call Malory last but one, or last but two, of the many who worked at the prose Morte. For has not Professor Vinaver some right to be numbered among them? He has not, naturally, allowed himself the liberties of a Malory or even of a Caxton. His chisel has touched no stone of the building. But he has made a new approach, and one which many modern pilgrims will find more congenial. His book smacks of our own century as Caxton's smacked of his. The division into eight romances, and above all the title, The Works of Malory, whether right or wrong (or neither), makes it far more digestible by contemporary critical conceptions than the old Morte. The Works, the Complete Works - that is what our libraries are used to. Already Malory fits more comfortably on the shelf beside the 'works' of everyone else. And the mere look of the pages - the paragraphing and the inverted commas - acclimatizes the book still further. Beyond question, Professor Vinaver has shown the cathedral from a new angle; placed the modern pilgrim where he will enjoy it best. And now that his edition is deservedly reaching the stage of cheap reprints, it may in its turn become the household book; until perhaps alter Achilles, some second Vinaver (a little cold to the first one as he is a little cold to Caxton) recalls his generation to the long forgotten book of 1485 or even to the French, and someone like myself puts in a plea for what will then be the old, the traditional, 'Works of Malory'. And all these preferences will be legitimate and none of them 'right' or 'wrong'. The cathedral of words is so large that everyone can find In it the work of his favourite period; and here, as you could not do in a real cathedral, you can always strip that favourite work of later accretions without pulling the whole thing down. What you must not do is to call those bits 'the' or 'the real' cathedral. They might have been. The whole might have been designed by one man and finished in one style. But that is not what happened. Though every part of it was made by a man, the whole has rather grown than been made. Such things have a kind of existence that is almost midway between the works or art and those of nature.

E. VINAVER ON ART AND NATURE:

A LETTER TO C. S. LEWIS

My dear Lewis,

Of all the contributors to this volume I am the most fortunate. You have shown me your essay and asked me to write a reply to it or, to quote your own words, 'a development from it'. The privilege is a perilous one, and at first I hesitated to take up the friendly challenge; but the prospect of a dialogue with you on the vital issues you have raised is irresistible.

Everything you say is enlightening and much of it is revealing. I have lived with Malory for many years and I think I know how he impresses me; but I would rather leave the reader with your impressions firmly fixed in his mind, for I consider them an acquisition for us all and not a matter for discussion. What might usefully be discussed is not what you feel about Malory, but the way in which you account for your feelings - your interpretation of your reaction to the book.

I find this interpretation debatable, and there you probably agree. You sum it up by saying: 'the net result is that Malory eludes me.' I confess that up to that point, as I went on reading your essay, the familiar but invariably fresh magic of your language and thought lulled me into a delightful state of acquiescence. But when I came to these words I had to pause. Surely, I reflected, if there is one critic whom Malory does not elude it is C. S. Lewis; hence, if the 'net result' of his argument is to make him deny so obvious a fact there must be something wrong with his argument. I did not, and I could not, ask myself why Malory 'eluded' you, because he quite clearly had not done so. The only question in my mind was why you thought he had eluded you. What was it that gave you the feeling that you were faced with something strange and 'paradoxical': not even with one paradox, but with as many as five? There is no simple and uniform answer to this question. But as I was looking for a possible answer a passage from A Winter's Tale came to my mind - the lines spoken by Polixenes in Act IV:

You see, sweet maid, we marry

A gentle scion to the wildest stock,

And make conceive a bark of baser kind

By bud of nobler race. This is an art

Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but

The art itself is Nature.

Art itself is nature. It plays, as Spenser said not long before these words were written, 'second Nature's part', and while it is totally different from Nature in the ordinary sense, which includes the artist's personality, his outlook and his intentions, it is part of a natural process which we can occasionally observe and which would be the greatest paradox of all, were it not 'itself Nature'.

The first of the five 'paradoxes' which you list at the outset is the cleavage between the man and the book. 'The work has long passed for a mirror of honour and virtue; the author appears to have been little better than a criminal.' Let us leave aside for the moment all questions of fact. The evidence on which the notion of Malory's 'immorality' rests is very slight indeed. Considering the state of justice in fifteenth-century England, even a conviction would not have been sufficient to prove that he was guilty of any of the charges brought against him; and there was in fact no conviction, or at least we have no record of one. Your own assessment of Malory's probable misdeeds is as fair a hypothesis as any that can reasonably be advanced in the present state of our knowledge. But even if he were as 'immoral' a character as some of his other biographers want him to be, what difference would this make to our understanding of his work? What except the romantic myth of the work being an expression of the 'whole man' makes you think that there would be anything abnormal about a cleavage between the man and the book? I should have thought that it would be more contrary to the natural course of things if there were no such cleavage, for in that case the two 'natures' would be identical, whereas in fact they hardly ever are: no reader of your Personal Heresy in Criticism will ever take their identity for granted. Proust in his Méthode de Sainte-Beuve contrasts them as two distinct entities, totally unlike one another:

Cette méthode, qui consiste à ne pas séparer l'homme et l'oeuvre [...] méconnaît ce qu'une fréquentation un peu profonde avec nousmêmes nous apprend: qu'un livre est le produit d'un autre moi que celui que nous manifestions dans nos habitudes [...] Ce moi profond qui a attendu pendant qu'on était avec les autres, on sent bien qu'il est le seul réel, celui pour lequel seul les artistes finissent par vivre, comme un dieu qu'ils quittent de moins en moins [...] Le moi de l'écrivain ne se montre que dans ses livres.

Proust is here speaking of authors about whose behaviour and character we can discover everything there is to be known; and his contention is that the more we concentrate on their moi extérieur, the less likely we are to understand their creative self, their moi profond. On this showing it seems singularly fortunate that our knowledge of Malory the man is not only limited but apparently inconsistent with the nature of his work: we are not even tempted to explain one through the other. It is, as you put it, 'a desperate expedient' to question Malory's identity simply because we cannot square the known facts of his life with the meaning and the message of his book; desperate to the extent of being perverse. Malory's biography has its uses: it is entertaining in itself, and it is an interesting sidelight on the social history of his time. But to feel 'disconcerted' about it as, for instance, E. K. Chambers did, is to misuse the results of biographical research, which are no more - and no less - puzzling in this case than such results normally are.

Your second and fourth 'paradoxes' are more difficult to dispose of, if indeed they can be disposed of at all. The problem they raise is a fundamental one. You find a curious contrast between Malory's efforts 'to eliminate the marvellous and introduce the humdrum' and the result of these efforts (Paradox II), and you suggest that there is an equally curious contrast between what seems to be a 'deeply religious' handling of the Grail story and a constant tendency to evade the religious issue (Paradox IV). What you say is not only true, but illuminating and very important. In Malory the feeling of the marvellous is not lessened, but intensified in spite of his 'practical realism'; and again, in his version of the Quest of the Holy Grail, much as he tries to cut down the religious exposition and even substitute the worldly for the divine, he produces a work which makes a more deeply religious impression on one's mind than the strictly orthodox original upon which it is based. How does this come about? I think you have supplied the answer. The work is not 'what any single individual either intended or foresaw'. 'Though every part of it was made by a man, the whole has rather grown than been made. Such things have a kind of existence that is almost midway between the works of art and those of nature.' I hope these words will long be remembered by all those who read Malory and induce others to read him. Perhaps you will allow me to illustrate them by a brief quotation:

Lorde, I thanke The, for now I se that that hath be my desire many a day. Now, my Blessed Lorde, I wold nat lyve in this wrecched wonde no lenger, if hit myght please The, Lorde.

This is Galahad's last prayer, and perhaps one of the most profoundly religious moments ever recorded in any version of the Grail story. If you look at the corresponding place in Pauphilet's edition of the Queste del Saint Graal (Note: p 278. I have quoted both passages in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1959) published since I wrote this letter (p. 548)) you will find that every single word used by Malory is there, but that about three-quarters of the French text is missing in Malory. Among the omissions there are some important phrases and sentences which by the strict standards of the author of the French Queste the occasion required. And yet when you read the two passages together you realize that one has a power and a greatness totally absent from the other. Is this not, in miniature, the process you are thinking of? But why contrast in this instance 'art' and 'nature'? Why not say with Polixenes that this is 'an art that Nature makes'? The discrepancy between the intention and the result occurs daily in every branch of art, not because nature 'takes over' from the artist, but because the artist's genius takes control of the situation and modifies what we call his intention - his conscious self, his 'design'. It is again art 'playing second nature's part', acting much in the same way as nature is supposed to act, but within the artist's mind. Malory the man was certainly not a believer in the supernatural: the simple method of collation shows how consistently he cut it down in adapting his French books. And he was certainly not interested in the complexities of the Grail doctrine, as the same method amply demonstrates. But when we say this we describe the mind - or what happened in the mind - of Sir Thomas Malory when he was thinking about the supernatural and the Grail: we do not describe the process of his work, which is something very different and much more difficult to understand. The greater the author and the theme, the more room there is for this inner logic of the work, which alone, in the last analysis, determines the 'result'. It is the logic of the supernatural and the logic of the Grail theme that make the work into 'something which none of its successive builders intended or foresaw', but that logic only becomes active in the artist's hands; when it defeats his intentions and his beliefs the triumph is his: it is the triumph of his art over his conscious self, and each time it occurs he may well experience a 'more profound delight' in the result than the French authors had ever known.

Perhaps for the sake of clarity I ought to put it another way. If I understand your reasoning correctly, it is something like this: there was an excess of the supernatural in Malory's French originals; because he was out of sympathy with the supernatural he reduced the overall amount of it, and because 'two enchanters, two ghosts, two ferlies are always half as impressive as one' the reduction added to the impressiveness of the marvellous. But does this mean that anybody applying the same equation (2 = 1/2) to the same material might achieve the same result? Surely not. And if you agree, that is to say, if you think as I do that the equation taken by itself is inoperative, would you not say that it became operative in Malory because of something that happened in Malory and did not happen elsewhere - something that for want of a better word we call his art? The equation is, of course, a paradox, and a splendid one, but not the process which makes the equation work. The essence of it is the coexistence of two 'natures', the conscious and the creative, one 'mending' the other - clearly something rare, but no more paradoxical or accidental than any art 'which adds to Nature'. This is not a criticism, but a development of your argument. Alone among critics you have perceived the significance of Malory's treatment of the supernatural and the religious, and the interpretation I suggest is simply a means of describing this treatment in more explicit terms while 'walking stumblingly' after you.

The two remaining sections - III and V - are no less illuminating and thought-provoking. You formulate your paradox V' as follows:

Malory seemed to Saintsbury (and doubtless to many) the man who alone 'makes of this vast assemblage of stones one story and one book'. The evidence of the Winchester MS. convinces Professor Vinaver that he really wrote several works which were never intended to form a whole.

A thorny problem, and one which has engaged the attention of a considerable number of critics ever since I published my edition of the Works. But it seems to me that you have found the answer - if you can bear another paradox -by saying that you are 'bogged down in a preliminary doubt as to what precisely the question is'. Malory would have been 'bogged down in very much the same doubt. It would be no use asking him, if he came back to life, 'how many books he thought he had written; he would think we meant the material volumes or "quairs"... If we talked to him about "artistic unity" he would not understand.' And you put the entire problem in a nutshell when you say: 'We should by the very form of our questions be presupposing concepts his mind was not furnished with.' But there are two issues we might consider: (a) how did Malory intend his romances to be presented to his readers? and (b) do these romances in fact make one romance? From the editor' s point of view the first question is the only one that matters; the critic, on the other hand, is - or should be - interested primarily, if not exclusively, in the second, i.e. In the result, not in the intention. And either question can be answered without prejudice to the other.

What Malory intended could have been gathered long ago from his own words had they not been partly distorted in the process of transmission and partly misunderstood or ignored. The Pierpont Morgan copy of Caxton's edition is the only existing record of what Malory wrote in his last colophon. In the other extant copy - the John Rylands - the last pages are missing. They have been replaced by Whittaker's facsimiles, which Sommer reproduced in his reprint, and everybody has since looked upon Sommer's text as a convenient and entirely reliable substitute for Caxton's. Unfortunately it is not at all reliable and the fault is not Sommer's, but Whittaker's. The Pierpont Morgan copy reads as follows:

Here is the ende of the hoole book of kyng arthur and of his noble knyghtes of the rounde table that whan they were hole togyders there was euer an hondred and forty And here is the ende of the deth of arthur

The word hoole is the last word on the last page but one of the text; it is perfectly legible, but if one is a little careless, and especially if one is thinking of the next word (the first on the following page) book - one can easily misread hoole as booke. This is precisely what Whittaker did. In Sommer we find, as a result, here is the ende of the booke book, which all later editors took for a dittography and reduced to here is the end of the book. Next came the critics who, looking at the passage, decided, quite naturally, that from Malory's point of view the 'book of King Arthur', &c., was the same as the 'Death of Arthur': that the words after the first the ende of were a description of the work of which the words after the second the ende of supplied the title. Hence, they concluded, Malory did give his romances one general title, and Caxton did not betray the author's intentions by saying in his own colophon: 'Thus endeth thys noble and Ioyous book entytled le morte Darthur.' There was clearly no harm in 'anglo-normanizing' the death of . Who can say, then, that Malory did not intend to write one book or that Le Morte Darthur is not its legitimate title?

I am not suggesting that without Whittaker's error critics would not have accepted Caxton's title and all that it involves, or even that the belief in Malory's 'unifying' design, shared by so many and denied by so few, rests to any appreciable extent on Malory's colophon; but I do think that now that we have at last got the correct reading of this colophon we ought to take some notice of it. Its implication seems to me crystal-clear. On the one hand there is 'the whole book', the entire collection, or series, of romances about King Arthur and his knights; and on the other, there is the Death of Arthur , the last work in the series, which presumably stands in the same relation to the whole as does each one of the romances - or 'works' - that occur earlier on. If we add to this the fact that, as the Winchester MS. shows, each romance has a separate title given to it in its colophon, that five out of the eight colophons end with the word Amen - the medieval equivalent of THE END - that four of these plus one other give the author's name (the equivalent of the signature with which not so long ago authors used to conclude their books), can there be much argument as to what Malory intended 'the whole book' to be? I am deliberately refraining for the moment from any discussion of its internal 'unity' or lack of 'unity': I am concerned purely and simply with what the text was meant to be; in other words I am arguing as an editor, not as a critic. And as an editor I feel that Malory has given us as clear an indication as any medieval author has ever done as to how his text should be presented to his readers. The only hesitation one might have concerns the words the whole book of King Arthur and of his noble knights that when they were wholly together there was ever a hundred and forty. is this a title or a description of the series? My own feeling is - but I may be wrong - that both the qualifying adjective 'whole' and the subordinate clause after 'knights' tip the balance against the 'title' theory, and this is why I did not think I would be justified in replacing Le Morte Darthur (which, incidentally, nobody used as a title after Caxton until Haslewood revived it in 1816) by another title. I called my edition The Works of Sir Thomas Malory , which is clearly not a 'title'. You say, quite rightly, 'I do not for a moment believe that Malory had any intention either of writing a single "work" or of writing many "works" as we should understand the expression.' Of course not. But what author ever starts off with the idea of writing 'many works'? Can you honestly say that you ever did? And yet, if at some not distant date there appears a series of volumes entitled The Works of C. S. Lewis will you regard it as something contrary to your intentions as a writer?

I now come to the other and perhaps more important aspect of the problem: the 'critical' as distinct from the 'editorial'. I agree entirely with your concluding remarks: 'It is our imagination, not his (Malory's), that makes the work one or eight or fifty. We can read it either way. We can read it now one way, now another. We partly make what we read.' We partly make what we read describes a general phenomenon; what matters to us at the moment is the particular phenomenon: We can read it now one way, now another. We certainly can, but why? My explanation would be that the kind of 'unity' that people occasionally look for, and find, in Malory's romances is not the essential or the 'binding' kind. it is a kind without which any one of his romances could very well exist and be appreciated to the full. Remove from Malory's text all the occasional references to what is going to happen in a later work or to what has happened already in an earlier one, and nothing of importance will be lost. You are right in saying that some of these references are 'singularly fortunate', and it does not matter at this point in the argument whether they are of Malory's own making or whether they come straight from his sources: we are discussing the effect of the work, not its genesis. But by and large I can see only two 'areas' In which these references occur in a way that is at all significant: between the Tale of King Arthur and the Quest of the Holy Grail and between the Quest and the romance that comes immediately after it, The Book of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere . The examples you quote are from the latter area; other critics have made a good deal of those which occur in the former. I cannot help feeling that too much has been read into some of these examples. Does the sentence 'and ever Sir Launcelote wepte, as he had bene a chylde that had bene beatyn' in The Healing of Sir Urry really mean that 'as he failed in the Quest, so (for the same reason) he is failing now'? Lancelot has healed Sir Urry after everyone else has failed in the attempt. He and all the 'kings and knights' kneel down and give 'thankynges and lovynge unto God and unto Hys Blyssed Modir'. And tears - not, I think, of sorrow or contrition, but of joy and gratitude, flow down Lancelot's face. What can be more natural? And why think of the Quest at this point, and of Lancelot's failure in it, when there is not the slightest indication in the text that any such thoughts crossed his mind? I mention this example simply because so much has been made of it by the champions of 'unity' (E. K. Chambers was, I think, the first to suggest the interpretation which you have adopted). But there are, of course, others which cannot be dismissed, and which I have no intention of querying. Lancelot certainly refers to the Quest in speaking to Guinevere (W 1046.3-14), and Malory in describing the effects of the Dolorous Stroke clearly refers to the Grail theme (W 85.27-9). There are other reminders and anticipations of the same kind. But how much do they really mean to Malory's readers? Not to compilers of concordances, nor to Ph.D. candidates who laboriously dig them out and exhibit them as precious finds, but to people who read Malory as he was meant to be read, that is to say for pleasure, as a 'noble and joyous book'? I am sure you have guessed already the thought behind this question, but let me make it clearer still. In a work such as the Arthurian Cycle of romances commonly known as the 'Vulgate' - the great cycle containing the Estoire del Graal, the Merlin, the Lancelot proper, the Queste del Saint Graal and the Mort Artu references and cross-links of this kind not only occur more frequently, but have an entirely different function: without them the work would not make sense; it could be neither understood nor enjoyed (this, incidentally, is the reason why critics who have not taken the trouble to follow them up find the Vulgate unreadable). Hence there is, I think, some justification for calling such a composition 'one work'; none of it could be appreciated by a reader who did not carry the whole of it in his head. I have often wondered whether the changes in the form of the European novel are not determined, in the last analysis, by the variations in the quantity of things that one can carry in one's head: our modern novel does seem to correspond to our present capacity, while the thirteenth-century cyclic novel leaves us far behind, just as it left Malory and his readers far behind. Of course, it is always pleasant to be reminded in passing of something one remembers; but it is also pleasant to know that it does not really matter whether one remembers it or not, and this is what to my mind makes Malory's echoes from one work to another 'singularly fortunate'. It would be disastrous if we made the entire edifice of his romances rest upon them: Le Morte Darthur would immediately collapse. If we don't want this to happen we must not let our imagination 'make the work one'; but on the other hand, it would be a pity if we lost altogether the feeling which you describe so well in your Preface to extracts from Spenser in Major British Writers, the feeling that 'adventures of this sort are going on all round us, that in this vast forest (we are nearly always in a forest) this is the sort of thing that goes on all the time, that it was going on before we arrived and will continue after we have left'.

Here, then, the achievement, the final result is not in any way contrary to the intention: we read Malory more or less as he thought one ought to read him, and enjoy the arrangement and the somewhat capricious sequence of romances as he intended it to be enjoyed. The difficulty upon which so much thought and effort have been expended in recent years does not arise (and this is indeed a paradox) until we 'presuppose concepts Malory's mind was not furnished with, either at the reflective or at the creative level.

There is much the same relationship between intention and achievement in his narrative technique (Paradox III). You agree that he made a valiant effort to 'straighten out' the unbelievably complex pattern of interwoven narratives which he found in his French books. If he had not done this very few people in post-medieval England would have bothered to read him, just as in post-medieval France very few people have bothered to read in the original the great Arthurian Cycle of the thirteenth century. Of course, he did not carry the process of straightening-out to the end; and of course it is true that such 'interweavings' as he left in the text often add to our enjoyment of it. But it is entirely a question of degree: he carried his modifications far enough to make the work 'pleasant to read in' by modern standards. Here again the reader's reaction is conditioned partly by the author's efforts and partly by what he allowed to survive from the earlier state of his stories. With all its component elements and techniques the work has grown, as you say, 'into something strange and admirable', something which none of its successive builders can claim to have foreseen exactly as it is. This great cathedral 'stands solidly before us' and imposes upon us a structure of its own. Nothing else survives. Many writers had worked on the French Arthurian prose romances between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries; there had been adaptations of it in Spain and in Germany. All this is now dead and buried, and Malory alone stands as a rock defying all changes of taste and style and morals; not as a grand paradox of nature, but as a lasting work of art. Is it not, then, right that we should be thinking of the work in terms of what he did when he called it back to life? To create does not necessarily mean to invent or even to build; it may mean to leave out or to undo what others have done; it may even be something less tangible, which somehow transforms what had no existence into something that has. And our task as interpreters is really much more modest than people think. We can neither define nor explain. But we can point in the direction where we feel the path of genius lies and hope that in this way we may bring ourselves and others a little closer to its understanding. This is what you have done. Hence my gratitude.

Yours,

EUGENE VINAVER.