Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Riikka Talonpoika and the PG OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team
THE ENGLISH NOVEL
BY
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THEUNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
LONDON: J.M. DENT & SONS LTD.BEDFORD STREET, STRAND 1913NEW YORK: E.P. BUTTON & CO.
PREFACE
It is somewhat curious that there is, so far as I know, no completehandling in English of the subject of this volume, popular and importantthough that subject has been. Dunlop's _History of Fiction_, anexcellent book, dealt with a much wider matter, and perforce ceased itsdealing just at the beginning of the most abundant and brilliantdevelopment of the English division. Sir Walter Raleigh's _EnglishNovel_, a book of the highest value for acute criticism and grace ofstyle, stops short at Miss Austen, and only glances, by a sort ofanticipation, at Scott. The late Mr. Sidney Lanier's _English Novel andthe Principle of its Development_ is really nothing but a laudatorystudy of "George Eliot," with glances at other writers, includingviolent denunciations of the great eighteenth-century men. There arenumerous monographs on parts of the subject: but nothing else that Iknow even attempting the whole. I should, of course, have liked to dealwith so large a matter in a larger space: but one may and should"cultivate the garden" even if it is not a garden of many acres inextent. I need only add that I have endeavoured, not so much to give"reviews" of individual books and authors, as to indicate what Mr.Lanier took for the second part of his title, but did not, I think,handle very satisfactorily in his text.
I may perhaps add, without impropriety, that the composition of thisbook has not been hurried, and that I have taken all the pains I could,by revision and addition as it proceeded, to make it a complete surveyof the Novel, as it has come from the hands of all the more importantnovelists, not now alive, up to the end of the nineteenth century.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY.
_Christmas_, 1912.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE II. FROM LYLY TO SWIFT III. THE FOUR WHEELS OF THE NOVEL WAIN IV. THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL V. SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN VI. THE SUCCESSORS--TO THACKERAY VII. THE MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL VIII. THE FICTION OF YESTERDAY--CONCLUSION
INDEX
THE ENGLISH NOVEL
CHAPTER I
THE FOUNDATION IN ROMANCE
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts ofliterary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at anyrate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two greatclassical languages, of what we call by that name. It might be anaccident, though a rather improbable one, that we have no Greek prosefiction till a time long subsequent to the Christian era, and nothing inLatin at all except the fragments of Petronius and the romance ofApuleius. But it can be no accident, and it is a very momentous fact,that, from the foundation of Greek criticism, "Imitation," that is tosay "Fiction" (for it is neither more nor less), was regarded as notmerely the inseparable but the constituent property of poetry, eventhough those who held this were doubtful whether poetry must necessarilybe in verse. It is another fact of the greatest importance that theancients who, in other forms than deliberate prose fiction, try to "tella story," do not seem to know very well how to do it.
The _Odyssey_ is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is theoriginal romance of the West; but the _Iliad_, though a magnificentpoem, is not much of a story. Herodotus can tell one, if anybody can,and Plato (or Socrates) evidently could have done so if it had lain inhis way: while the _Anabasis_, though hardly the _Cyropaedia_, showsglimmerings in Xenophon. But otherwise we must come down to Lucian andthe East before we find the faculty. So, too, in Latin before the twolate writers named above, Ovid is about the only person who is a realstory-teller. Virgil makes very little of his _story_ in verse: and itis shocking to think how Livy throws away his chances in prose. No:putting the Petronian fragments aside, Lucian and Apuleius are the onlytwo novelists in the classical languages before about 400 A.D.: andputting aside their odd coincidence of subject, it has to be rememberedthat Lucian was a Syrian Greek and Apuleius an African Latin. Theconquered world was to conquer not only its conqueror, but itsconqueror's teacher, in this youngest accomplishment of literary art.
It was probably in all cases, if not certainly, mixed blood thatproduced the curious development generally called Greek Romance. It isno part of our business to survey, in any detail, the not very numerousbut distinctly interesting compositions which range in point ofauthorship from Longus and Heliodorus, probably at the meeting of thefourth and fifth centuries, to Eustathius in the twelfth. At one timeindeed, when we may return to them a little, we shall find themexercising direct and powerful influence on modern European fiction, andso both directly and indirectly on English: but that is a time a goodway removed from the actual beginning of our journey. Still, _Apolloniusof Tyre_, which is probably the oldest piece of English prose fictionthat we have, is beyond all doubt derived ultimately from a Greekoriginal of this very class: and the class itself is an immense advance,in the novel direction, upon anything that we have before. It is on theone hand essentially a "romance of adventure," and on the otheressentially a "love-story"--in senses to which we find little inclassical literature to correspond in the one case and still less in theother. Instead of being, like _Lucius_ and the _Golden Ass_, a tissue ofstories essentially unconnected and little more than framed by the maintale, it is, though it may have a few episodes, an example of at leastromantic unity throughout, with definite hero and definite heroine, theprominence and importance of the latter being specially noteworthy. Itis in fact the first division of literature in which the heroine assumesthe position of a protagonist. If it falls short in character, so doeven later romances to a great extent: if dialogue is not veryaccomplished, that also was hardly to be thoroughly developed till thenovel proper came into being. In the other two great divisions, incidentand description, it is abundantly furnished. And, above all, the twogreat Romantic motives, Adventure and Love, are quite maturely presentin it.
To pass to the deluge, and beyond it, and to come to close quarters withour proper division, the origin of Romance itself is a very debatablesubject, or rather it is a subject which the wiser mind will hardly careto debate much. The opinion of the present writer--the result, at least,of many years' reading and thought--is that it is a result of themarriage of the older East and the newer (non-classical) West throughthe agency of the spread of Christianity and the growth and diffusion ofthe "Saint's Life." The beginnings of Hagiology itself are veryuncertain: but what is certain is that they are very early: and that asthe amalgamation or leavening of the Roman world with barbarian materialproceeded, the spread of Christianity proceeded likewise. The _Vision ofSt. Paul_--one of the earliest examples and the starter it would seem,if not of the whole class of sacred Romances, at any rate of the largesubsection devoted to Things after Death--has been put as early as"before 400 A.D." It would probably be difficult to date such legends asthose of St. Margaret and St. Catherine _too_ early, having regard totheir intrinsic indications: and the vast cycle of Our Lady, thoughprobably later, must have begun long before the modern languages wereready for it, while that of the Cross should be earlier still. And letit be remembered that these Saints' Lives, which are still infinitelygood reading, are not in the least confined to homiletic necessities.The jejuneness and woodenness from which the modern religious story toooften suffers are in no way chargeable upon all, or even many, of them.They have the widest range of incident--natural as well as supernatural:their touches of nature are indeed extended far beyond mere incident.Purely comic episodes are by no means wanting: and these, like thepara
llel passages in the dramatising of these very legends, were sure tolead to isolation of them, and to a secular continuation.
But, once more, we must contract the sweep, and quicken the pace to dealnot with possible origins, but with actual results--not with Ancient orTransition literature, but with the literature of English in thedepartment first of fiction generally and then, with a third and lastnarrowing, to the main subject of English fiction in prose.
The very small surviving amount, and the almost completely second-handcharacter, of Anglo-Saxon literature have combined to frustrate whatmight have been expected from another characteristic of it--the unusualequality of its verse and prose departments. We have only one--notquite entire but substantive--prose tale in Anglo-Saxon, the version ofthe famous story of _Apollonius of Tyre_, which was to be afterwardsdeclined by Chaucer, but attempted by his friend and contemporary Gower,and to be enshrined in the most certain of the Shakespearean"doubtfuls," _Pericles_. It most honestly gives itself out as atranslation (no doubt from the Latin though there was an early Greekoriginal) and it deals briefly with the subject. But as an example ofnarrative style it is very far indeed from being contemptible: and inpassages such as Apollonius' escape from shipwreck, and his wooing ofthe daughter of Arcestrates, there is something which is different fromstyle, and with which style is not always found in company--that facultyof telling a story which has been already referred to. Nor does thisfail in the narrative portions of the prose Saints' Lives and Homilies,especially Aelfric's, which we possess; in fact it is in these lastdistinctly remarkable--as where Aelfric tells the tale of the monk whospied on St. Cuthbert's seaside devotions. The same faculty isobservable in Latin work, not least in Bede's still more famous tellingof the Caedmon story, and of the vision of the other world.
But these faculties have better chance of exhibiting themselves in theverse division of our Anglo-Saxon wreckage. _Beowulf_ itself consists ofone first-rate story and one second-rate but not despicable tale,hitched together more or less anyhow. The second, with good points, is,for us, negligible: the first is a "yarn" of the primest character. Onemay look back to the _Odyssey_ itself without finding anything so good,except the adventures of the Golden Ass which had all the story-work oftwo mightiest literatures behind them. As literature on the other hand,_Beowulf_ may be overpraised: it has been so frequently. But letanybody with the slightest faculty of "conveyance" tell the first partof the story to a tolerably receptive audience, and he will not doubt(unless he is fool enough to set the effect down to his own gifts andgraces) about its excellence as such. There is character--not much, butenough to make it more than a _mere_ story of adventure--and adventureenough for anything; there is by no means ineffectual speech--evendialogue--of a kind: and there is some effective and picturesquedescription. The same faculties reappear in such mere fragments as thatof _Waldhere_ and the "Finnsburgh" fight: but they are shown much morefully in the Saints' Lives--best of all in the _Andreas_, no doubt, butremarkably also (especially considering the slender amount of"happenings") in the _Guthlac_ and the _Juliana_. In fact the veryfragments of Anglo-Saxon poetry, by a sort of approximation which theyshow to dramatic narrative and which with a few exceptions is far lesspresent in the classics, foretell much more clearly and certainly thanin the case of some other foretellings which have been detected in them,the future achievements of English literature in the department offiction. _The Ruin_ (the finest thing perhaps in all Anglo-Saxon) is asort of background study for something that might have been much betterthan _The Last Days of Pompeii_: and _The Complaint of Deor_, in itsallusion to the adventures of the smith Weland and others, makes onesorry that some one more like the historian of a later and decadentthough agreeable Wayland the Smith, had not told us the tale that is nowleft untold. A crowd of fantastic imaginings or additions, to supply themain substance, and a certain common-sense grasp of actual conditionsand circumstances to set them upon, and contrast them with--these arethe great requirements of Fiction in life and character. You must mixprose and poetry to get a good romance or even novel. The consciences ofthe ancients revolted from this mixture of kinds; but there was no suchrevolt in the earlier moderns, and least of all in our own mediaevalforefathers.
So few people are really acquainted with the whole range of Romance(even in English), or with any large part of it, that one may withoutundue presumption set down in part, if not in whole, to ignorance, adoctrine and position which we must now attack. This is that romance andnovel are widely separated from each other; and that the historian ofthe novel is really straying out of his ground if he meddles withRomance. These are they who would make our proper subject begin withMarivaux and Richardson, or at earliest with Madame de La Fayette, whoexclude Bunyan altogether, and sometimes go so far as to question theright of entry to Defoe. But the counter-arguments are numerous: and anyone of them would almost suffice by itself. In the first place the ideaof the novel arising so late is unnatural and unhistorical: theseMelchisedecs without father or mother are not known in literature. Inthe second a pedantic insistence on the exclusive definition of thenovel involves one practical inconvenience which no one, even amongthose who believe in it, has yet dared to face. You must carry your wallof partition along the road as well as across it: and write separatehistories of Novel and Romance for the last two centuries. The presentwriter can only say that, though he has dared some tough adventures inliterary history, he would altogether decline this. Without the help ofthe ants that succoured Psyche against Venus that heap would indeed beill to sort.
But there is a third argument, less practical in appearance but bolderand deeper, which is really decisive of the matter, though few seem tohave seen it or at least taken it up. The separation of romance andnovel--of the story of incident and the story of character andmotive--is a mistake logically and psychologically. It is a very oldmistake, and it has deceived some of the elect: but a mistake it is. Itmade even Dr. Johnson think Fielding shallower than Richardson; and ithas made people very different from Dr. Johnson think that Count Tolstoiis a greater analyst and master of a more developed humanity thanFielding. As a matter of fact, when you have excogitated two or morehuman beings out of your own head and have set them to work in thenarrative (not the dramatic) way, you have made the novel _in posse_, ifnot _in esse_, from its apparently simplest development, such as_Daphnis and Chloe_, to its apparently most complex, such as the_Kreutzer Sonata_ or the triumphs of Mr. Meredith. You have started the"Imitation"--the "fiction"--and _tout est la_. The ancients could dothis in the dramatic way admirably, though on few patterns; in thepoetical way as admirably, but again not on many. The Middle Ages lostthe dramatic way almost entirely, but they actually improved thepoetical on its narrative side, and the result was Romance. In everyromance there is the germ of a novel and more; there is at least thesuggestion and possibility of romance in every novel that deserves thename. In the Tristram story and the Lancelot cycle there are most of thethings that the romancer of incident and the novelist of character andmotive can want or can use, till the end of the world; and Malory (that"mere compiler" as some pleasantly call him) has put the possibilitiesof the latter and greater creation so that no one who has eyes can missthem. Nor _in the beginning_ does it much or at all matter whether thevehicle was prose or verse. In fact they mostly wrote in verse becauseprose was not ready.
In the minor romances and tales (taking English versions only) from_Havelok_ to _Beryn_ there is a whole universe of situation, scenario,opportunity for "business." That they have the dress and thescene-backing of one particular period can matter to no one who has eyesfor anything beyond dress and scene-backing. And when we are told thatthey are apt to run too much into grooves and families, it is sufficientto answer that it really does not lie in the mouth of an age whichproduces grime-novels, problem-novels, and so forth, as if they had beenstruck off on a hectograph, possessing the not very exalted gift ofvarying names and places--to reproach any other age on this score. Butwe have only limited room here for generalities and still le
ss forcontroversy; let us turn to our proper work and survey the actualturn-out in fiction--mostly as a result of mere fashion, verse, butpartly prose--which the Middle Ages has left us as a contribution tothis department of English literature.
It has been said that few people know the treasures of English romance,yet there is little excuse for ignorance of them. It is some centurysince Ellis's extremely amusing, if sometimes rather prosaic, book putmuch of the matter before those who will not read originals; to befollowed in the same path by Dunlop later, and much later still by theinvaluable and delightful _Catalogue of_ [British Museum] _Romances_ byMr. Ward. It is nearly as long since the collections of Ritson andWeber, soon supplemented by others, and enlarged for the last fortyyears by the publications of the Early English Text Society, put theseoriginals themselves within the reach of everybody who is not so lazyor so timid as to be disgusted or daunted by a very few actuallyobsolete words and a rather large proportion of obsolete spellings,which will yield to even the minimum of intelligent attention. Only avery small number (not perhaps including a single one of importance)remain unprinted, though no doubt a few are out of print or difficult toobtain. The quality and variety of the stories told in them are bothvery considerable, even without making allowance for what has beencalled the stock character of mediaeval composition. That almost all aredirectly imitated from the French is probable enough, that most are iscertain: but this matters, for our purpose, nothing at all. That theimitation was not haphazard or indiscriminate is obvious. Thus, thoughwe have some, we have not very many representatives of the class whichwas the most numerous of all in France--the _chansons de geste_ orstories of French legendary history, national or family. Except as faras the Saracens are concerned, they would naturally have less interestfor English hearers. The _Matiere de Rome_, again--the legends ofantiquity--though represented, is not very abundant outside of theuniversally popular Tale of Troy; and the almost equally popularAlexander legend does not occupy a very large part of them. What isperhaps more remarkable is that until Malory exercised his genius upon"the French book," the more poetical parts of the "matter of Britain"itself do not seem to have been very much written about in English. Thepreliminary stuff about Merlin and Vortigern exists in severalhandlings; the foreign campaigns of Arthur seem always (perhaps fromnational vanity) to have been popular. The "off"-branches of Tristramand Percivale, and not a few of the still more episodic romances ofadventures concerning Gawain, Iwain, and other knights, receiveattention. The execrable Lonelich or Lovelich, who preceded Malory alittle, had of course predecessors in handling the other parts of theGraal story. But the crown and flower of the whole--the inspirationwhich connected the Round Table and the Graal and the love of Lancelotand Guinevere--though, so far as the present writer's reading andopinion are of any weight, the recent attempts to deprive theEnglishman, Walter Map, of the honour of conceiving it are of noforce--seems to have waited till the fifteenth century--that is to saythe last part of three hundred years--before Englishmen took it up. Mostpopular of all perhaps, on the principle that in novels the flock "likesthe savour of fresh grass," seem to have been the pure _romansd'aventures_--quite unconnected or nearly so with each other or with anyof the larger cycles. Those adventures of particular heroes havesometimes a sort of Arthurian link, but they really have no more to dowith the main Arthurian story than if Arthur were not.
For the present purpose, however, filiation, origin, and such-likethings are of much less importance than the actual stories that getthemselves told to satisfy that demand which in due time is to producethe supply of the novel. Of these the two oldest, as regards the actualforms in which we have them, are capital examples of the more and lessoriginal handling of "common-form" stories or motives. They were notthen, be it remembered, quite such common-form as now--the rightful heirkept out of his rights, the usurper of them, the princess gracious orscornful or both by turns, the quest, the adventure, the revolutions anddiscoveries and fights, the wedding bells and the poetical justice onthe villain. Let it be remembered, too, if anybody is scornful of theseas _vieux jeu_, that they have never been really improved upon except bythe very obvious and unoriginal method common in clever-silly days, ofsimply reversing some of them, of "turning platitudes topsy-turvy," asnot the least gifted, or most old-fashioned, of novelists, Tourguenief,has it. Perhaps the oldest of all, _Havelok the Dane_--a story the ageof which from evidence both internal and external, is so great thatpeople have not quite gratuitously imagined a still older Danish or evenAnglo-Saxon original for the French romance from which our existing oneis undoubtedly taken--is one of the most spirited of all. Both hero andheroine--Havelok, who should be King of Denmark and Goldborough, whoshould be Queen of England--are ousted by their treacherousguardian-viceroys as infants; and Havelok is doomed to drowning by histutor, the greater or at least bolder villain of the two. But thefisherman Grim, who is chosen as his murderer, discovers that the childhas, at night, a _nimbus_ of flame round his head; renounces his crimeand escapes by sea with the child and his own family to Grimsby.Havelok, growing up undistinguished from his foster-brethren, takesservice as a scullion with the English usurper. This usurper is seekinghow to rid himself of the princess without violence, but in some waythat will make her succession to the crown impossible, and Havelokhaving shown prowess in sports is selected as the maiden's husband. She,too, discovers his royalty at night by the same token; and the pairregain their respective inheritances and take vengeance on theirrespective traitors, in a lively and adventurous fashion. There are allthe elements of a good story in this: and they are by no means wasted orspoilt in the actual handling. It is not a mere sequence of incident;from the mixture of generosity and canniness in the fisherman whoascertains that he is to have traitor's wages before he finally decidesto rescue Havelok, to the not unnatural repugnance of Goldborough ather forced wedding with a scullion, the points where character comes inare not neglected, though of course the author does not avail himself ofthem either in Shakespearean or in Richardsonian fashion. They are_there_, ready for development by any person who may take it into hishead to develop them.
So too is it in the less powerful and rather more cut and dried _KingHorn_. Here the opening is not so very different; the hero's father ismurdered by pirate invaders, and he himself set adrift in a boat. But inthis the princess (daughter of course of the king who shelters him)herself falls in love with Horn, and there is even a scene ofconsiderable comic capabilities in which she confides this affection bymistake to one of his companions (fortunately a faithful one) instead ofto himself. But Horn has a faithless friend also; and rivals, andadventures, and journeys; and returns just in the nick of time, andrecognitions by rings, and everything that can properly be desiredoccur. In these--even more perhaps than in Havelok's more masculine andless sentimental fortunes--there are openings not entirely neglected bythe romancer (though, as has been said, he does not seem to have beenone of the strongest of his kind) for digression, expatiation,embroidery. Transpose these two stories (as the slow kind years willteach novelists inevitably to do) into slightly different keys,introduce variations and episodes and _codas_, and you have thepossibilities of a whole library of fiction, as big and as varied as anythat has ever established itself for subscribers, and bigger than anythat has ever offered itself as one collection to buyers.
The love-stories of these two tales are what it is the fashion--exceedinglycomplimentary to the age referred to if not to the age of the fashionitself--to call "mid-Victorian" in their complete "propriety."Indeed, it is a Puritan lie, though it seems to possess the vivaciousnessof its class, that the romances are distinguished by "bold bawdry."They are on the contrary rather singularly pure, and contrast, inthat respect, remarkably with the more popular folk-tale. But fiction,no more than drama, could do without the [Greek: amarthia]--thehuman and not unpardonable frailty. This appears in, and complicates,the famous story of _Tristram_, which, though its present English formis probably younger than _Havelok_ and _Horn_, is likely to have existede
arlier: indeed must have done so if Thomas of Erceldoune wrote on thesubject. Few can require to be told that beautiful and tragical historyof "inauspicious stars" which hardly any man, of the many who havehandled it in prose and verse, has been able to spoil. Our MiddleEnglish form is not consummate, and is in some places crude in mannerand in sentiment. But it is notable that the exaggerated and inartisticrepulsiveness of Mark, resorted to by later writers as a ratherrudimentary means of exciting compassion for the lovers, is not to befound here; in fact, one of the most poetical touches in the piece isone of sympathy for the luckless husband, when he sees the face of hisfaithless queen slumbering by her lover's side with the sun on it. "AndMark rewed therefore." The story, especially in its completion with the"Iseult of Brittany" part and the death of Tristram, gives scope forevery possible faculty and craftsmanship of the most analytic as of themost picturesque novelist of modern times. There is nothing in the leastlike it in ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would doit justice in modern times we should have to take the best notes ofCharles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and Mr. Meredith, leaving out alltheir faults, and combine. It is not surprising that, in the veryinfancy of the art, nobody in German or French, any more than in English(though the German here is, as it happens, the best), should have doneit full justice; but it is a wonder that a story of such capacitiesshould have been sketched, and even worked out in considerable detail,so early.
Of the far greater story of which _Tristram_ is a mere episode andhardly even that--a chantry or out-lying chapel of the greatcathedral--the Arthurian Legend, the earlier English versions, or ratherthe earlier versions in English, are, as has been said, not onlyfragmentary but disappointing. There is nothing in the least strange inthis, even though (as the present writer, who can speak with indifferentknowledge, still firmly holds) the conception of the story itself in itsgreatest and unifying stage is probably if not certainly English. Theoriginal sources of the story of Arthur are no doubt Celtic; they givethemselves out as being so, and there is absolutely no critical reasonfor disbelieving them. But in these earlier forms--the authority of themost learned Celticists who have any literary gift and any appreciationof evidence is decisive on this point--not only are the mostcharacteristic unifying features--the Graal story and the love ofLancelot and Guinevere--completely wanting, but _the_ great stroke ofgenius--the connection of these two and the subordination of all minorlegends as to the dim national hero, Arthur, with those about him--ismore conspicuously wanting still. Whether it was the Englishman WalterMap, the Norman Robert de Borron, or the Frenchman Chrestien de Troyes,to whom this flash of illumination came, has never been proved--willpretty certainly now never be proved. M. Gaston Paris failed to do it;and it is exceedingly unlikely that, where he failed, any one else willsucceed, unless the thrice and thirty times sifted libraries of Europeyield some quite unexpected windfall. In the works commonly attributedto Chrestien, all of which are well known to the present writer, thereis no sign of his having been able to conceive this, though he is adelightful romancer. Robert is a mere shadow; and his attributed works,_as_ his works, are shadows too, though they are interesting enough inthemselves. Walter not only has the greatest amount of traditionalattribution, but is the undoubted author of _De Nugis Curialium_. Andthe author of _De Nugis Curialium_, different as it is from theArthurian story, _could_ have finally divined the latter.
But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions,wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English,a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for along time. And the most interesting parts of the Arthurian story arerarely handled at all in such early vernacular versions of it as wehave, whether in verse or prose. Naturally enough, perhaps, it was thefabulous historic connection with British history, and the story of thegreat British enchanter Merlin, that attracted most attention. The_Arthour and Merlin_ which is in the Auchinleck MS.; the prose _Merlin_,published by the Early English Text Society; the alliterative Thornton_Morte d'Arthur_, and others, are wont to busy themselves about theantecedents of the real story--about the uninteresting wars of the Kinghimself with Saxons, and Romans, and giants, and rival kings, ratherthan with the great chivalric triple cord of Round Table, Graal, andGuinevere's fault. The pure Graal poems, _Joseph of Arimathea_, the workof the abominable Lonelich or Lovelich, etc., deal mainly with anotherbranch of previous questions--things bearable as introductions,fillings-up, and so forth, but rather jejune in themselves. The Scots_Lancelot_ is later than Malory himself, and of very little interest.Layamon's account, the oldest that we have, adds little (though whatlittle it does add is not unimportant) to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace;and tells what it has to tell with nearly as little skill in narrativeas in poetry. Only the metrical _Morte_--from which, it would appear,Malory actually transprosed some of his most effective passages in themanner in which genius transproses or transverses--has, for that reason,for its dealings with the catastrophe, and for the further opportunityof comparison with Tennyson, interest of the higher kind. But before wecome to Malory himself it is desirable to turn to the branches--thechapels, as we have called them, to the cathedral--which he also, insome cases at least, utilised in the _magnum opus_ of English proseromance.
These outliers were rather more fortunate, probably for no morerecondite reason than that the French originals (from which they were inalmost every instance certainly taken) were finished in themselves. Ofthe special Gawain cycle or sub-cycle we have two romances in puremetrical form, and more than two in alliterative, which are above theaverage in interest. _Ywain and Gawain_, one of the former, is deriveddirectly or indirectly from the _Chevalier au Lyon_ of Chrestien deTroyes; and both present some remarkable affinities with the unknownoriginal of the "Sir Beaumains" episode of Malory, and, through it, withTennyson's _Gareth and Lynette_. The other, _Lybius Disconus (Le BeauDeconnu)_ is also concerned with that courteous nephew of Arthur who, inlater versions of the main story, is somewhat sacrificed to Lancelot.For a "_real_ romance," as it calls itself (though it is fair to saythat in the original the word means "royal"), of the simpler kind butextremely well told, there are not many better metrical specimens than_Ywain and Gawain_, but it has less character-interest, actual orpossible, than those which have been commented on. The hero, KingUrien's son, accepts an adventure in which another knight of the Table,Sir Colgrevance, has fared ill, after it has been told in a conversationat court which is joined in first by the Queen and afterwards by theKing. Sir Kay here shows his usual cross-grainedness; and Guinevere"with milde mood" requests to know "What the devil is thee within?" Theadventure is of a class well known in romance. You ride to a certainfountain, pour water from it on a stone, and then, after divers marvels,have to do battle with a redoubtable knight. Colgrevance has faredbadly; Kay is as usual quite sure that he would fare better; but Ywainactually undertakes the task. He has a tough battle with the knight whoanswers the challenge, but wounds him mortally; and when the knightflies to his neighbouring castle, is so hard on his heels that theportcullis actually drops on his horse's haunches just behind thesaddle, and cuts the beast in two. Ywain is thus left between theportcullis and the (by this time shut) door--a position all the moreawkward that the knight himself expires immediately after he has reachedshelter. The situation is saved, however, by the guardian damsel ofromance, Lunet (the Linet or Lynette of the Beaumains-Gareth story), whoemerges from a postern between gate and portcullis and conveys theintruder safe to her own chamber. Here a magic bed makes him invisible:though the whole castle, including the very room, is ransacked by thedead knight's people and would-be revengers, at the bidding of hiswidow.
This widow, however, is rather an Ephesian matron. The sagacious Lunet,whose confidante she is, suggests to her that, unless she enlists somedoughty knight as her champion, the king will confiscate her fief; andthat there is no champion like a husband. A very little more finesseeffects the marriage, even though the lady is made aware of the identityof her new lover and her ow
n husband's slayer. (It is of coursenecessary to remember that the death of a combatant in fairly challengedand fought single contest was not reckoned as any fault to hisantagonist.) Ywain actually shows his prowess against the King: and hasan opportunity of showing Kay once more that it is one thing to blameother people for failing, and another to succeed yourself. And afterthis the newly married pair live together happily for a time. But it wasreckoned a fault in a knight to take too prolonged a honeymoon: andYwain, after what the French call _adieux dechirants_, obtains leave forthe usual "twelvemonth and a day," at the expiration of which, on St.John's Eve, he is without fail to return, the engagement being sealed bythe gift from his lady of a special ring. He forgets his promise ofcourse: and at the stated time a damsel appears, sternly demands thering, and announces her lady's decision to have nothing further to dowith him. There is in such cases only one thing for any true knight,from Sir Lancelot to Sir Amadis, to do: and that is to go mad, divesthimself of his garments, and take to the greenwood. This Ywain dulydoes, supporting himself at first on the raw flesh of game which hekills with a bow and arrows wrested from a chance-comer; and then onless savage but still simple food supplied by a benevolent hermit. As helies asleep under a tree, a lady rides by with attendants, and one ofthese (another of the wise damsels of romance) recognises him as SirYwain. The lady has at the time sore need of a champion against ahostile earl, and she also fortunately possesses a box of ointmentinfallible against madness, which Morgane la Faye has given her. Withthis the damsel is sent back to anoint Ywain. He comes to his senses, isarmed and clothed, undertakes the lady's defence, and discomfits theearl: but is as miserable as ever. Resisting the lady's offer of herselfand all her possessions, he rides off once more "with heavy heart anddreary cheer."
Soon he hears a hideous noise and, riding in its direction, finds that adragon has attacked a lion. He succours the holier beast, kills thedragon, and though he has unavoidably wounded the lion in the _melee_ isthenceforth attended by him not merely as a food-provider, but as thedoughtiest of squires and comrades in fight. To aggravate his sorrow hecomes to the fountain and thorn-tree of the original adventure, andhears some one complaining in the chapel hard by. They exchangequestions. "A man," he said, "some time I was" (which must be one of theearliest occurrences in English of a striking phrase), and the prisonerturns out to be Lunet. She has been accused of treason by the usualsteward (it is _very_ hard for a steward of romance to be good) and twobrothers--of treason to her lady, and is to be burnt, unless she canfind a knight who will fight the three. Ywain agrees to defend her: butbefore he can carry out his promise he has, on the same morning, to meeta terrible giant who is molesting his hosts at a castle where he isguested. Both adventures, however, are achieved on the same day, withvery notable aid from the lion: and Ywain undertakes a fresh one, beingrecruited by the necessary damsel-messenger, against two half-fiendbrother knights. They stipulate that the lion is to be forciblyprevented from interfering, and he is locked up in a room; but, hearingthe noise of battle, he scratches up the earth under the door, freeshimself, and once more succours his master at the nick of time. Eventhis does not expiate Ywain's fault: and yet another task falls tohim--the championship of the rights of the younger of a pair of sisters,the elder of whom has secured no less a representative than Gawainhimself. The pair, unknowing and unknown, fight all day long beforeArthur's court with no advantage on either side: and when the lightfails an interchange of courtesies leads to recognition and thesettlement of the dispute. Now the tale is nearly full. Ywain rides yetagain to the magic fountain and performs the rite; there is no one tomeet him; the castle rocks and the inmates quake. But the crafty Lunetpersuades her mistress to swear that if the Knight of the Lion, who hasfallen at variance with his lady, will come to the rescue, she will doall she can to reconcile the pair. Which not ill-prepared "curtain" dulyfalls: leaving us comfortably assured that Ywain and his Lady and Lunetand the Lion (one wishes that these two could have made a match of it,and he must surely have been a bewitched knight) lived happily
"Until that death had driven them down."
This, it has been said, is a specimen of the pure romance; with littleexcept incident in it, and a touch or two of manners. It does not, asthe others noticed above do, lend itself much to character-drawing. Butit is spiritedly told; though rougher, it is much more vigorous than theFrench original; and the mere expletives and stock phrases, which arethe curse of these romances, do not obtrude themselves too much. In thisrespect, and some others, it is the superior of the one coupled abovewith it, _Lybius Disconus_, which is closer, except in names, to theBeaumains story. Still, this also is not a bad specimen of the sameclass. The hero of it is a son, not a brother, of Gawain, comes namelessor nicknamed, but as "Beaufils," not "Beaumains," to Arthur's court, andis knighted at once, not made to go through the "kitchen-knave" stage.Accordingly, the damsel Elene (not Lunet), to whom he is assigned aschampion in the adventure of the Lady of Sinadowne, objects only to hisnovelty of knighthood and is converted by his first victory. The courseof the adventures is, however, different from that which some peopleknow from Malory, and many from Tennyson. One of them is farcical: theFair Unknown rescues a damsel at her utmost need from two giants, a redand a black, one of whom is roasting a wild boar and uses the animal asa weapon, with the spit in it, for the combat. Moreover, he falls avictim to the wiles of a sorceress-chatelaine whom he has alsosuccoured: and it is only after the year and day that Elene goads him onto his proper quest. But this also is no bad story.
The limits of this volume admit of not much farther "argument" (thoughthe writer would very gladly give it) of these minor romances ofadventure, Arthurian and other. Ellis's easily accessible book suppliesabstracts of the main Arthurian story before Malory; of the two mostfamous, though by no means best, of all the non-Arthurian romances, _Guyof Warwick_ and _Bevis of Hampton_ (the former of which was handled andrehandled from age to age, moralised, curtailed, lengthened, and hashedup in every form); of the brilliant and vigorous _RichardCoeur-de-Lion_; of the less racy Charlemagne romances in English; of the_Seven Wise Masters_, brought from the East and naturalised all overEurope; of the delightful love story of _Florice and Blancheflour_; ofthat powerful and pathetic legend of the _Proud King_ (Robert ofSicily), which Longfellow and Mr. William Morris both modernised, eachin his way; of those other legends, _Sir Isumbras_ and _Amis andAmillion_, which are so beautiful to those who can appreciate themediaeval mind, and to the beauty of which others seem insensible; of_Sir Triamond_ and _Sir Eglamour_ (examples of the romance at itsweakest); of the exceedingly spirited and interesting _Ipomydon_, and ofsome others, including the best of Scotch romances, _Sir Eger, SirGrame, and Sir Graysteel_. But Ellis could not know others, and he leftalone yet others that he might have known--the exquisite _Sir Launfal_of Thomas Chester at the beginning of the fifteenth century, where anunworthy presentment of Guinevere is compensated by the gracious imageof Launfal's fairy love; the lively adventures of _William of Palerne_,who had a werewolf for his friend and an emperor's daughter for hislove, eloping with her in white bear-skins, the unusual meat of whichwas being cooked in her father's kitchen; _Sir Orfeo_--Orpheus andEurydice, with a happy ending; _Emare_, one of the tales of innocent butpersecuted heroines of which Chaucer's Constance is the best known;_Florence of Rome_; the rather famous _Squire of Low Degree; SirAmadas_, not a very good handling of a fine motive, charity to a corpse;many others.
Nor does he seem to have known one of the finest of all--thealliterative romance of _Gawain and the Green Knight_ which, since Dr.Morris published it some forty years ago for the Early English TextSociety, has made its way through text-books into more general knowledgethan most of its fellows enjoy. In this the hero is tempted repeatedly,elaborately, and with great knowledge of nature and no small command ofart on the teller's part, by the wife of his host and destinedantagonist. He resists in the main, but succumbs in the point ofaccepting a magic preservative as a gift: and is discovered and lecturedaccordingly. I
t is curious that this, which is far above the usual mereadventure-story and is novel of a high kind as well as romance, has noknown French original; and is strongly English in many characteristicsbesides its verse-form.
On the whole, however, one need have no difficulty in admitting that themajority of these romances _do_ somewhat content themselves withincident, incident only, and incident not merely of a naif but of astock kind, for their staple. There are striking situations, even strikingphrases, here and there; there is plenty of variety in scene, and more thanis sometimes thought in detail; but the motive-and-character-interest israrely utilised as it might be, and very generally is not even suggested.There is seldom any real plot or "fable"--only a chain of events: andthough no one but a very dull person will object to the supernaturalelement, or to the exaggerated feats of professedly natural prowess andendurance, it cannot be said that on the whole they are artisticallymanaged. You feel, not merely that the picture would have been better ifthe painter had taken more pains, but that the reason why he did notis that he did not know how.
Sir Thomas Malory, himself most unknown perhaps of all great writers,did know how; and a cynical person might echo the _I nunc_ of the Romansatirist, and dwell on the futility of doing great things, in referenceto the fact that it used to be fashionable, and is still not uncommon,to call Malory a "mere compiler." Indeed from the direction which modernstudy so often takes, of putting inquiry into origins above everything,and neglecting the consideration of the work as work, this practice isnot likely soon to cease. But no mistake about the mysteriousEnglishman (the place-names with which the designation is connected areall pure English) is possible to any one who has read his book, and whoknows what prose fiction is. _The Noble Histories of King Arthur, LaMorte d'Arthur, The Story of the most Noble and Worthy King Arthur, TheMost Ancient and Famous History of the Renowned Prince Arthur, TheBirth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur_--call it by whichever name anybodylikes of those which various printers and reprinters have given it--isone of the great books of the world. If they can give us any single"French book"--the reference to which is a commonplace of thesubject--from which it was taken, let them; they have not yet. If theypoint out (as they can) French and English books from which parts of itwere taken, similar things may be done with Dante and Chaucer, withShakespeare and Milton, and very probably could have been done withHomer. It is what the artist does with his materials, not where he getsthem, that is the question. And Malory has done, with _his_ materials, avery great thing indeed. He is working no doubt to a certain extentblindly; working much better than he knows, and sometimes as he wouldnot work if he knew better; though whether he would work as well if heknew better is quite a different point. Sometimes he may not take thebest available version of a story; but we must ask ourselves whether heknew it. Sometimes he may put in what we do not want: but we must askourselves whether there was not a reason for doing so, to him if not tous. What is certain is that he, and he only in any language, makes ofthis vast assemblage of stories one story, and one book. He does it(much more than half unconsciously no doubt) by following the lines of,as I suppose, Walter Map, and fusing the different motives, holding tothis method even in parts of the legend with which, so far as one knows,Map cannot have meddled. Before him this legend consisted of half adozen great divisions--a word which may be used of malice prepense.These were the story of Merlin, that of Arthur's own origin, and that ofthe previous history of the Graal for introduction; the story ofArthur's winning the throne, of the Round Table, and of the marriagewith Guinevere, also endless branchings of special knights' adventures,and of the wars with the Saxons and the Romans, and the episode of theFalse Guinevere--with whom for a time Arthur lives as with hisqueen--for middle; and the story of the Graal-quest, the love ofLancelot for the Queen, and the rebellion of Mordred with its fatalconsequences, for close. Exactly how much of this Malory personally hadbefore him we cannot of course say: but of any working up of the wholethat would have spared him trouble, and robbed him of credit, we do notknow. In fact the favourite term "compiler" gives up the only dangerouspoint. Now in what way did Malory _compile_? In the way in which theordinary compiler proceeds he most emphatically does not. He cuts downthe preliminaries mercilessly: but they can be perfectly well spared. Hemisses almost all the wars with the Saxons, which are the most tediousparts of the originals. He adopts, most happily, the early, not thelate, placing of those with the Romans. He drops the false Guineverealtogether, which is imperative, that the true one may have no right toplead the incident--though he does not represent Arthur as "blameless."He gives the _roman d'aventures_ side of the Round Table stories, fromthe great Tristram and Palomides romances through the Beaumains episodedownwards, because they are interesting in themselves and lead up tothe Graal quest. He gives that Quest as plentifully because it leads upto the "dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all." Howhe gives the Lancelot and Guinevere tragedy we shall see presently. Andthe catastrophe of the actual "departing" he gives perfectly; with themagnificent final scenes which he has converted, sometimes in almostShakespearean fashion, by the slightest verbal touches from mediocreverse to splendid prose. A very remarkable compiler! It is a pity thatthey did not take him and cut him up in little stars for a light to allhis brethren in compiling thereafter.
For he has what no compiler as such can have--because the moment he hasit he ceases to be a compiler, and becomes an artist--the sense of_grasp_, the power to put his finger, and to keep it, on the centralpulse and nerve of the story. That he did this deliberately is sounlikely as to be practically impossible: that he did it is certain. TheArthurian Legend is the greatest of mediaeval creations as a subject--a"fable"--just as the _Divina Commedia_ is the greatest of mediaeval"imitations" and works of art. And as such it is inevitable that itshould carry with it the sense of the greatest medieval _differences_,Chivalry and Romance. The strong point of these differences is the wayin which they combine the three great motives, as Dante isolates them,of Valour, Love, and Religion. The ancients never realised thiscombination at all; the moderns have merely struggled after it, orblasphemed it in fox-and-grapes fashion: the mediaevals _had_ it--intheory at any rate. The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrateValour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot andGuinevere with the minor instances, Love. All these have their [Greek:amarthia]--their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw. The knightwastes his valour in idle bickerings; he forgets law in his love; andthough there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live upto the ideal that he does not actually forswear. To throw thepresentation--the _mimesis_--of all this into perfectly worthy formwould probably have been too much for any single genius of that curioustime (when genius was so widely spread and so little concentrated)except Dante himself, whose hand found other work to do. To colour andshape the various fragments of the mosaic was the work of scores. To putthem together, if not in absolutely perfect yet in more than sufficientshape, was, so far as we know, the luck of Malory only: though some one(Map or another) had done a mighty day's work long before in creatingthe figure and the adventures of Lancelot and imagining the later questof the Graal with the figure of Galahad--that "improved Percivale," asthe seedsmen say.
But besides this power of shaping (or even of merely combining)scattered elements into a story, Malory has another--_the_ other of thefirst importance to the novelist proper--in his attraction to character,if not exactly in his making up of it. It has been said above that thedefect of the pure romances--especially those of continental origin--isthe absence of this. What the Greeks called [Greek: dihanoia]--"sentiment,""thought," "cast of thought," as it has been variously rendered--is evenmore absent from them than plot or character itself: and of its almostnecessary connection with this latter they often seem to have no idea.Very rare is such a touch as that of Sir Amadas being unable at the feastto get rid of the memory of the unburied corpse, kept by enemies from thekindly earth that would hide it, and the rites that would help it to peace:still rarer that
in _Guy of Warwick_ when the hero, at the height ofhis fame and in the full enjoyment of his desires, looks from the tower andis struck by the selfishness and earthliness of his career. The firstnotion is not "improved" in the original at all, and the second very badly;but in most of the others such things do not even exist. Now the greaterLegend is full of situations which encourage such thoughts, and even ofexpressed thoughts that only need craftsmanship to turn them into thecornerstones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty wordslong, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid that determine therelations of Tristram and Iseult; the unconscious incest of Arthur andMargause with its Greek-tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity ofPalomides, and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant allegory)his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all these are matters inpoint. But of course the main nursery of such things is theLancelot-and-Guinevere story itself. Nobody has yet made Guinevere aperson--nobody but Shakespeare could have done so perhaps, thoughShakespeare's Guinevere would probably have been the greatest woman inall art. But Malory has not been the least successful with her: and ofLancelot he has made, if only in study, one of the great characters ofthat fictitious world which is so much truer than the real. And let noone say that we are reading Tennyson or any one else into Malory. Thereare yet persons, at least at the time this was written not quiteMethusalahs, who read the _Morte d'Arthur_ before the _Idylls_ appearedand who have never allowed even the _Idylls_ to overlay their originalidea of the most perfect and most gentle of knights.
It is probable indeed that Malory invented little or nothing in thevarious situations, by which the character of Lancelot, and the historyof his fatal love, are evolved. We know in most cases that this is so.It is possible, too, that at first (probably because the possibilitieshad not dawned on him, as it has been admitted they never did veryconsciously) he has not made the most of the introduction of lover andlady. But when the interest becomes concentrated, as in the variouspassages of Guinevere's wrath with her lover and their consequences, orin the final series of catastrophes, he is fully equal to the occasion.We _know_--this time to his credit--how he has improved, in the act ofborrowing them, the earlier verse-pictures of the final parting of thelovers, and there are many other episodes and juxtapositions of which asmuch may be said. That except as to Lancelot's remorse (which after allis the great point) there is not much actual talk about motive andsentiment is nothing; or nothing but the condition of the time. Theimportant point is that, as the electricians say, "the house is wired"for the actual installation of character-novelling. There is here thecomplete scenario, and a good deal more, for a novel as long as_Clarissa_ and much more interesting, capable of being worked out in themanner, not merely of Richardson himself, but of Mr. Meredith or Mr.Hardy. It _is_ a great romance, if not the greatest of romances: it hasa great novel, if not the greatest of novels, written in sympathetic inkbetween the lines, and with more than a little of the writing sometimesemerging to view.
Little in the restricted space here available can be, though much mightbe in a larger, said about the remaining attempts in English fictionbefore the middle of the sixteenth century. The later romances, down tothose of Lord Berners, show the character of the older with a certainaddition of the "conjuror's supernatural" of the _Amadis_ school. Butthe short verse-tales, especially those of the Robin Hood cycle, andsome of the purely comic kind, introduce an important variation ofinterest: and even some of the longer, such as that _Tale of Beryn_,which used to be included in Chaucer's works, vary the chivalrous modelin a useful way. Still more important is the influence of the short_prose_ tale:--first Latin, as in the _Gesta Romanorum_ (which of coursehad older and positively mediaeval forerunners), then Italian and French.The prose saved the writer from verbiage and stock phrase; the shortnessfrom the tendency to "watering out" which is the curse of the long verseor prose romance. Moreover, to get point and appeal, it was especiallynecessary to _throw up_ the subject--incident, emotion, or whatever itwas--to bring it out; not merely to meander and palaver about it. Butlanguage and literature were both too much in a state of transition toadmit of anything capital being done at this time. It was the great goodfortune of England, corresponding to that experienced with Chaucer inpoetry three quarters of a century earlier, that Malory came to give thesum and substance of what mediaeval fiction could do in prose. For more,the times and the men had to come.