40. 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.
I. 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.
I. 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.
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 I.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, peace-time 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. 18); 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’. 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 gallop’ 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 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 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.
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. Tasso confesses that all knights and ladies prefer it; everyone reads Ariosto, and no one reads Trissino. He even records how his father discovered by sad experience that ‘unity of action gave little pleasure’. 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 the company of 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, 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 this 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.
1. A passage held to indicate Malory's ‘confidence in the unfailing merits of Arthurian chivalry’ (W 1524). 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 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 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, chevaillerie celestiale; in the English, ‘virtuous living’. In C XIII. 13 (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 our 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. 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 a knighthood as it was intended to be, grounded in ‘patience and humility’ (C XVI. 3; W 945–47). 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. 1 (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’. I cannot imagine a better way of making us feel how Lancelot has sunk than thus to let us hear lesser men exclaiming that at least 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 948.27–28) 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 us for 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 XVIII. 1, we find a dialogue between Lancelot and Guinevere inserted (W 1045.30–1048.14) 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 stories; 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.
5. 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. 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. 11; 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 original 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 Crisyede, 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. 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 co-exist, 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 La
amon, 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 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 em, 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 glosses of the Ancient Mariner's. Sometimes, as in ‘how Lancelot fell 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 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 of art and those of nature.