Chapter 7 - The Morte Darthur
It was on 23 July 1934 that Mr W. F. Oakeshott made in the library of Winchester College the most startling literary discovery of the century—a manuscript of Malory’s Arthurian romances roughly contemporary with Caxton’s print and independent of it. By so doing he secured something not unlike immortality for his name and also reduced the study of Malory to a state of suspense for thirteen years. During that period nothing could be said about the Morte Darthur without a reservation; no one knew what the Winchester manuscript, when once it was published, might refute or confirm. Professor Vinaver’s three-volume Works of Sir Thomas Malory (the title, as we shall see, is significant) ends this uneasy interim and puts all previous work on this subject out of date. It has been worth waiting for. It is a very great work and a work which hardly any other man in England was qualified to perform.
It is not, of course, to be expected that all Professor Vinaver’s views will finally win the acceptance of scholars. At the very threshold some will dispute the argument on which his chronology of Malory’s literary career is based. All turns on an ‘analogy’ which Professor Vinaver pronounces ‘obvious’ between Arthur’s fight with the giant at St Michael’s Mount and Sir Marhaute’s fight with a giant Taulard. (The passages are Caxton, V, 5 and IV, 25; Vinaver, p. 128 and p. 175.) Yet the analogy will escape some. Even if we allow that Arthur’s giant sat between fir-trees and Taulard under a ‘tre of hooly’, it does not seem to be very strong; but if, as the whole account of Arthur’s combat suggests, the ‘two fyrys’ were not fir-trees at all but fires, it may be thought to amount to very little. But there will be long debate between specialists before this and many like questions are decided. In the meantime, however, not only specialists but a far larger circle of those who have known and loved Caxton’s text from boyhood are anxious to learn how Malory emerges from this new crisis in his fame. How far must we revise our conception of the Morte Darthur and its author? For it is no specialist’s book; it is Milton’s book, Tennyson’s book, Morris’s book, a sacred and central possession of all who speak the English tongue.
The most embarrassing things which Professor Vinaver has to tell us (some of them had got abroad before the present edition) concern Malory himself; the most embarrassing, that is, for those who love the Morte and would wish to respect its author. To others, to those who love to see old altars defaced, Malory’s life offers a rich banquet. Wordsworth’s French daughter was a mere kickshaw in comparison. Malory appears to have been convicted of cattle-lifting, theft, extortion, sacrilegious robbery, attempted murder and rape. At first sight it is a thing not only to shock our sensibilities but to puzzle our intellects, and it is not surprising that some would cut the knot by assuming that this black record belongs not to our Malory but to another man of the same name. Professor Vinaver takes a different line. He tries to reconcile the book with the man by arguing that the book is less noble than has usually been supposed, and even that the idea of its ‘nobility’ is largely derived from Caxton’s preface.
It all depends on what is meant by nobility. The predominant ethical tone of Malory’s work is certainly not the bourgeois, still less the proletarian, morality of our own day. And, on its own showing, it is not the Christian rule of life; all the chief characters end as penitents. It is aristocratic. It does not forbid homicide provided it is done in clean battle. It does not demand chastity, though it highly honours lifelong fidelity to the chosen mistress. Though it admires mercy it allows private war and the vendetta. And it has no respect at all for property or for laws as such. It is distinguished from heroic morality by its insistence on humility. It can be very accurately called nobility if the noble is defined as the opposite of the vulgar. It does not condemn all whom we would now call ‘criminals’; its displeasure is primarily for the cad. It is magnificently summed up in Sir Ector’s final lament, which, so far as we know, is Malory’s own invention: ‘Thou was the mekest man and the jentyllest that ever ete in halle emonge ladyes and thou were the sternest knyght to thy mortal foe that ever put spere in the rest.’ There is the real, and indispensable, contribution of chivalry to ethics.
In this sense, then, there is really no question about the ‘nobility’ of the Morte. But how different such nobility may be from the virtues of the law-abiding citizen will appear if we imagine the life of Sir Tristram as it would be presented to us by King Mark’s solicitors.
It is from the lawyers that we get Malory’s life. In the courts of that age evidence was not very scientifically sifted, and accusers ‘laid it on thick’. Every county was the scene of family feuds exploiting, and exploited by, the larger dynastic struggle. ‘Crimes’ and criminal proceedings alike were often primarily moves in private war. There is no need to suppose that Malory did all the things of which he was convicted: much less that those which he did do were necessarily crimes in his own eyes. Cattle-lifting has always been a gentlemanly vice. The ‘robberies’ and ‘extortions’ may have been acts of private war not only permitted but demanded by honour. ‘Attempted murder’ may have been knightly encounter. Rape need mean no more than abduction. When Launcelot saved Guinevere from the stake and carried her off to Joyous Gard the law would have called it rape. Malory may have had equally good reasons for removing from an orgulous and discourteous husband, a local King Mark, some gentlewoman whom he loved par amors. We may be sure that he did not succeed in living up to the level of his own Launcelot; but there is no reason for assuming him to be at all like a modern ‘criminal’. The records tell us nothing more than we might expect such records to tell of a man on the locally unpopular side who attempted on the whole to live as a good knight should.
When we turn from the man to the book, the first thing Professor Vinaver has to tell us is that it was not in our sense a book at all. Malory really wrote eight separate romances. The apparent unity of the old text, like its division into books and chapters, is the work of Caxton, and criticisms of Malory’s inconsistencies fall to the ground. Hence Professor Vinaver’s title, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. In general the Winchester text does not differ very much from Caxton’s, and neither is textually much purer than the other. Sometimes Winchester clears up difficulties in Caxton. At least once it has that smoothness which textual critics distrust where Caxton has the honest difficilior lectio. At I, 16 (Vinaver, p. 35) Winchester’s ‘And whoso that fledde all they sholde be slayne’ is almost certainly a scribal evasion of the unknown difficulty which produced Caxton’s ‘And who so that fledde but did as they dyd shold be slayne’. Elsewhere a Caxton reading which is not ‘better’ in the textual sense is so much better imaginatively that we wish it to be correct. In I, 35 (Vinaver, p. 638) Caxton prints ‘that they sorceresses wold sette alle the countrey in fyre with ladyes that were enchantresses’, where Winchester for in fyre has merely envyrone.
To this general close similarity between the two texts there is one notable exception. In the Roman War (his ‘Book V’) Caxton quite frankly acts as an editor. He drastically abridges and he radically alters the style. At this point, as has long been known, Malory was following a work very different from his usual French sources; the English alliterative Morte. This alters both his temper and his style. The temper becomes more heroic (you might say, more barbaric) and the prose is filled with alliterative tags and inversions. Even in Caxton these elements had shown through in the description of Arthur’s dream (V, 4), but now that we have both texts in full we see the magnitude of his alteration; and it is almost certainly for the better. Malory had failed to turn his verse original into true prose. This means that while in isolated quotation his phrases often have a pith and race which Caxton’s want, yet the cumulative effect of his verse rhythms and tags becomes intolerable. Caxton found them discordant, just as he found the crude epic vitality of the matter discordant with the general tone of Malory’s stories. He therefore ironed out the style and dispatched the whole affair as shortly as he could. It is indeed the most tasteless fiction in the whole Arthuriad. Caxton’s judgement was sound. The artificial unity which he gave to the whole corpus almost justifies itself when we see him here working to produce unity in a much higher sense. Even his chapter-headings (now no more irrelevant to our delight than the glosses in The Ancient Mariner) we cannot spare. However warmly we welcome the Winchester text there must be no question of expelling Caxton from the tradition.
The Roman War, read in the Winchester text, raises a point about Malory’s prose which is too little mentioned. Critics talk of his style as if he were in secure possession of it throughout. It is not so. As we have just seen, when his source is alliterative verse he reproduces its rhythm and much of its diction. Turn a few pages and you find something quite different—the gentle yet hardy prose for which he is so famed; but it is in fact the nearest English equivalent of the French prose he is following. Turn on to the end, where he is following the stanzaic English Morte, and again you will find inversion and verse rhythms (this time of a different sort) intruding. Turn to his own original excursion into non-narrative prose (Caxton, XVIII, 25; Vinaver, p. 1119) and you will find something different from any of these—a strange lack of progressiveness and an unusual percentage of romance words. This does not mean that Malory is not a fine artist; but his fineness is responsive, not creative. As he has lately read, so he writes. He is at the mercy of his originals.
This is true, in a certain sense, not only of his style but of his work as a whole. Professor Vinaver sees him as a realist because he cuts down the marvellous elements in the stories and adds prosaic details. But it is quite possible that he did so because he was a more serious romantic than his masters. It is the isolated marvel that tells. Multiplication of enchantments is no proof that the writer is himself enchanted; it rather suggests that they are to him mere stage properties. Every superfluous fay carries us farther away from the world of evocative wonder and nearer to that of Baron Munchausen. It is the same with homely details. The more devoutly romantic we are, the more we admit and demand them. It is the child, not the adult, who wants such details in a fairy-tale, because their absence hinders the serious suspension of disbelief which he wishes to make. All Malory’s ‘realistic’ alterations may have been made in a spirit opposite to that which Professor Vinaver supposes. But even if they were not it makes curiously little difference. It would only mean that, wishing to rationalize, he has produced the contrary effect. He laboured in Professor Vinaver’s view to thin the romantic forest and make the labyrinth less mysterious; and, for his pains, the impression made on posterity is that which Milton unerringly recalls of
faery damsels met in forest wide
By knights of Logres or of Lyonesse.
By pruning the marvellous he has strengthened its growth. By homely details he has given his story that air of sober conviction in which it excels all other romantic narratives. If Guinevere had merely sought Launcelot ‘through the world’ (like Ceres) it would seem a pretty fancy; when Sir Ector says ‘Hyt hath coste my lady the quene twenty thousand pounds the sekynge of you’, who can disbelieve?
The effect is certain, Malory’s motives conjectural. If he intended a different effect, then the genius of the story has been too strong for him; nay, if Professor Vinaver is right, has been strengthened by his very efforts to resist it.
There is a similar obscurity about Malory’s attitude to the story of the Sangreal. In the most recent and one of the most vital rehandlings of the legend, in Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars, the Grail has been made central and the final tragedy is seen as the inevitable ruin of a society that had refused its high vocation. And Williams certainly thought he was finding this in Malory’s version. Professor Vinaver, on the contrary, insists that Malory took little interest in the Sangreal; and especially that he saw no connexion between it and the fall of the Round Table. The question will be long debated. The Winchester text certainly brings new support to the professor’s view. In it the Quest and the Morte are separate works, divided by a third work. And yet, if Malory wanted us to forget the quest he has given us little help to do so. Since his ‘works’ all deal with the same characters, impressions made in one must affect us in the next. He has left Galahad the son of Launcelot. He has left, therefore, the divine irony whereby Launcelot’s begetting of that son was at once his sole offence against the courtly code and, on the heavenly plane, his sole raison d’être. He has left that piercing moment when, as Williams says, ‘Joy remembered joylessness’ and the spiritual bids its courteous, implacable farewell to the natural, ‘My fayre lorde, salew me unto my lorde Sir Launcelot, my fadir, and bydde hym remembir of this worlde unstable’.
When the quest is over and we return to the court, the first thing he shows us is Launcelot’s attempt to break off his intrigue with the Queen, and her ruthless recapture of him. His motives were admittedly mixed; partly to avoid the growing scandal in court, but partly because ‘I was but late in the quest of the Sankgreall’—and then, dying away, as such a speech would at such a juncture, into embarrassed repetition, ‘and therefore Madam I was but late in that queste’. On top of this Malory introduces, perhaps even invents, the exquisite episode of Sir Urry, where Launcelot at the very summit of earthly (and hardly earthly) glory ‘wepte as he had bene a chylde that had bene betyn’. Why, unless he remembered a higher glory and ‘pined his loss’? Finally, when all is ended and Launcelot comes to take his last leave of Guinevere, Malory again harks back to the Grail; ‘God deffende but that I shulde forsake the worlde as ye have done. For in the queste of the Sankgreall I had that tyme forsakyn the vanytees of the worlde, had not youre love been’ (Caxton had given lord for love, but Winchester confirms the conjectural emendation which many readers had pencilled long since in the margin).
Once again Malory’s intentions can only be guessed. And to guess them aright would be important if there were in fact any logical or emotional incompatibility between the religious interpretation and the human tragedy of blood feud and conflicting loyalties which, in Professor Vinaver’s view, was all that Malory had in mind. But there is none. The human tragedy becomes all the more impressive if we see it against the background of the Grail, and the failure of the Quest becomes all the more impressive if it is felt thus reverberating through all the human relationships of the Arthurian world. No one wants the Grail to overthrow the Round Table directly, by a fiat of spiritual magic. What we want is to see the Round Table sibi relictur, falling back from the peak that failed to reach heaven and so abandoned to those tendencies within it which must work its destruction. And that is what we are shown. All the touches which Malory has added—especially the love between Gareth and Launcelot—only make it more overwhelming, and of the final contrition it is surely too harsh to say with Professor Vinaver that Launcelot repents not of his sins against God but of having brought all whom he loved to earthly ruin. It is in such a tragic glass that most men, especially Englishmen, first see their sins with clarity.
Perhaps Malory did not mean it. Perhaps here also the genius of the story proved too strong for him. If so, it would be the crowning paradox, for it would have overcome him where he himself was at his strongest. In these last chapters, as Professor Vinaver shows, his originality is at its height and reveals itself in tragic dialogue which has hardly yet been praised as it deserves.
There is no reason to be surprised or dismayed if the pure Malory thus always evades us. We are not reading the work of an independent artist; we are reading what is almost such a ‘traditional book’ as Professor Gilbert Murray believed the Iliad to be. Whatever he does Malory’s personal contribution to the total effect cannot be very great, though it may be very good. We should approach the book not as we approach Liverpool Cathedral, but as we approach Wells Cathedral. At Liverpool we see what a particular artist invented. At Wells we see something on which many generations laboured, which no man foresaw or intended as it now is, and which occupies a position half-way between the works of art and those of nature.
The Morte is like that. Professor Vinaver is the skilled guide; he will point you out here a Middle English crypt, there an Anglo-Norman chapel, a late French bit and bits that are almost pure Malory, and then Malory worked over by Caxton, and then Caxton simply. It is extraordinarily interesting. And fortunately a book, unlike a building, does not reduce us to the alternative of either leaving it alone or ‘restoring’. The new Works of Malory is the restoration; but the cathedral, our old familiar Caxton, is also still there. We should all read the Works; but it would be an impoverishment if we did not return to the Morte. As for Malory, we shall never know him. He is hidden in the work; do not say ‘his’ work. Only once does he address us directly. He asks us to pray for his soul; with that our direct relation to him begins and ends.