42. E. K. Chambers, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Some Collected Studies
Of the six essays in this volume the only two which are here printed for the first time fall outside the scope of Medium Aevum; of the remaining four all except one are concerned with medieval literature. The short paper entitled Some Points in the Grail Legend is, perhaps, the most controversial. Sir Edmund Chambers criticizes the theories of Nutt, Miss Weston, Loomis, and Brown, and advances one of his own. His criticisms are generally simple and cogent pleas of ‘not proven’. He ‘rejects Miss Weston in toto’ on the very rational ground that there is after all no evidence (except the suspect claims of modern occultists) for the cult of Attis in Britain, and that the ritual parallels are imperfect. All this seems to be a legitimate use of Occam's razor.
It is not, however, very easy to see how those who have followed the argument can be expected, a moment later, to welcome Sir Edmund's own suggestion that the Grail story dramatizes the ritual of succession in certain forms of early kingship. The ‘Shilluk tribe of the White Nile’ and the Persians in Herodotus, who are cited as examples, seem to labour under the same disadvantage as the cult of Attis. The author would no doubt claim that the succession-ritual, in varying forms, is widely diffused: but the same may be said for the rituals of fertility.
The next essay – that on Sir Thomas Malory – is partly appreciative, partly biographical, and partly controversial. The appreciative passages are as admirable as readers of Sir Edmund Chambers will have learned to expect – masterpieces of what we must unhappily begin to call the older tradition, the tradition so wide that it includes both Raleigh and Mackail. The author is not afraid of evocative quotation, nor even of retelling Malory's story at some length. I am aware that many dislike this kind of thing: for my own part, I anticipate with very little pleasure the day when it will be finally silenced by the steady tramp of the thesis-mongers.
On the controversial side I find this essay a little ambiguous. The name of Professor Vinaver appears only once, and then in a footnote which ominously glosses the statement that Malory's treatment of his sources is an intricate subject and that the available evidence ‘has not always been wisely used’. It is not clear whether we are referred to Professor Vinaver for an account of the evidence, or for one more example of its unwise use.
If I understand both scholars aright, Sir Edmund Chambers’ disagreement with Professor Vinaver is not very great. Both are agreed that Malory's treatment of the Grail story is unsatisfactory and even irrelevant. Sir Edmund maintains that the true catastrophe of Malory's story has nothing to do with the clash between Corbenic and Camelot; Professor Vinaver says the same thing in almost the same words.
They differ, however, in their explanation of Malory's failure. For Professor Vinaver, Malory is, perhaps, misunderstanding, or at least following half-heartedly, a work of Cistercian mysticism; for Sir Edmund, Malory has simply stumbled on an inferior version as his source, which lacks the ‘mystery’ of Chrétien, the ‘melancholy’ of Perlesvaus, and the ‘humanity’ of Wolfram. In strict logic the two views are not incompatible: but we shall probably neither err nor offend if we suspect in the English writer a profound lack of sympathy with Professor Vinaver's (or M. Gilson's) implied estimate of the ‘French book’ at this point. Sir Edmund is a little impatient with the whole thing; his heart, he frankly admits, ‘goes down the hill with Gawain’. In other words, he really feels as Professor Vinaver supposes Malory to have felt.
Did Malory really feel so? It is possible for our reading of an author to become what we may call ‘source-ridden’, so that we no longer see his book as it is in itself, but only as it contrasts with its sources. This is clearly an injustice to the author, for we are preserving in their original form elements which he has transmuted, and even elements which he rejected. It is as though we ate all the raw ingredients of a pudding along with the pudding itself: such an eating is emphatically not the pudding's proof. If we wish to know how far Malory's Grail is a success, we must sooner or later read it as if we knew nothing about its sources. When it is thus read, I think we shall find that while there are structural weaknesses and confusions of plot, there are no confusions of sentiment and no ‘false issue’. Let any man sit down and read, in this spirit, the last four chapters of Book XIII, and he will see that Malory fully understands the condemnation and the contrition of Launcelot. His heart has not the slightest tendency to go downhill with Gawain: and Professor Vinaver could have found in Malory a wish to spare Launcelot only because he turned to Malory with a memory, too full and too recent, of other versions where Launcelot was even more severely treated. Malory has no doubt at all that Launcelot is to be condemned – by the highest standards and in the long run: that Corbenic is above Camelot – in the long run. But this is quite compatible with his praise of Camelot (that is, of love and of Guenevere) in other passages.
I cannot share Sir Edmund Chambers’ suspicion that Malory does not ‘see his way clearly through the queer spiritual tangle’ of courtly love. Malory is simply in agreement with Andreas Capellanus’ double doctrine: that, on the one hand, nullum in mundo bonum vel curialitas exercetur nisi ex amoris fonte derivetur, while, one the other hand, love is a mortal sin. He is in agreement with Chaucer's praise of love in the earlier books of Troilus, and equally with Chaucer's rejection of love at the end of Troilus. The apparent inconsistency results from the fact that the medieval writers are using a triple scale of values where their modern critics are using only a double one.
Professor Vinaver sees a simple dichotomy of worldly and spiritual (of Corbenic and Camelot) and assumes that Malory must be simply for the one and against the other: the only problem being to find out which. Sir Edmund Chambers has a dichotomy of good and bad (both in the ‘human’ sense), and, wishing Malory to play out a purely secular tragedy between these in the Shakespearian or modern way, regards the intrusion of any third term as a confusion of the issue. But Malory has a three-storeyed mind – a scale of bad–good–best (Mark–Launcelot–Galahad) which, if read backwards, becomes of course good–bad–worst. It will be seen that the middle term may appear sometimes as ‘good’ and sometimes as ‘bad’, without any inconsistency. He is thus perfectly serious about the nobility of Launcelot and of courtly love – the ‘old love’ so much more faithful and patient than ‘love nowadays’: and he is equally serious about the yet higher law which cuts across the courtly world in the Grail books. Launcelot rises so high on the natural plane that he must face the alternative of rising yet higher to the supernatural, or of falling. He fails to meet the higher claim: he ‘falls to his love again’, ‘forgets the promise and the perfection’; is discovered, forced into blood feud with his best friend, and drags down the whole structure of Britain with him.
It is quite true, as Sir Edmund Chambers says, that the catastrophe is brought about by ‘the familiar conflict between human love and human loyalty’; but this does not mean that the Grail episode is irrelevant. It is an essential part of the tragedy of Launcelot (perhaps the first truly tragic hero in our literature) that he should have been given the chance of escaping from this human level on which the tragedy is foredoomed, and should have failed to take it. To remove from the story the account of his last efforts at escape and of his relapse (XVIII i–ii) would be a tasteless over-simplification. To be sure, Malory is a simple man in the sense that he is not analytical. But the sentiments which he presents, without analysis, are in themselves complex and delicate; as we may see from the beautiful episode of Sir Urre, which Sir Edmund quotes.
The third item in the book is a reprint of the introduction to the Sidgwick and Jackson Early English Lyrics of 1907. Those who remember, as the present writer remembers, making their first acquaintance with the subject by means of this essay, must always regard it with a sort of piety that almost precludes criticism. From such an abundance of happy quotation, unobtrusive argument, and critical sensibility it would be idle, perhaps impertinent, to select particular passages for praise: but I cannot leave it without reflecting how much nonsense about the Renaissance might have remained unuttered if everyone had noticed the statement that the Provençal chanson d'amour ‘may be said to have fixed the type of literary romantic sentiment from the Canzoniere of Petrarch to The Angel in the House’. This seems – if we omit the possibly ambiguous word ‘romantic’ – to be one of those rare propositions in literary history which are entirely true, and yet important.