Читать книгу The Pageant of English Literature - Sir Edward Parrott - Страница 21
ОглавлениеTHE ARTHURIAN LEGEND.
“That gray King whose name, a ghost, Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak, And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still.”—Tennyson.
The most splendid figure of all romance now appears—Arthur, flower of kings, mirror of princes, ideal knight of all the world, whose glory, in the words of Tennyson, was—
“To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honour his own word as if his God's,
To lead sweet life in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her, by years of noble deeds.”
“From the great deep to the great deep he goes,” a figure of magic and mystery, dimly described on the horizon of history, but sufficiently embodied to catch the eye and kindle the imagination of men. Bard and minstrel claim him as their own; they weave magical garments for him to wear, and create worlds for him to conquer. All the splendour of kingly virtue, all the panoply of knightly achievement, all the wisdom and worth of sages, all the devotion of saints, everything that is great, good, noble, lofty, and triumphant in man “a little lower than the angels,” cleaves to him. He grows in glory and glamour through three long centuries, and inspires the legendary lore of many nations.
Then comes one, “in the ninth year of the reygne of Kyng Edward the Fourth,” who goes a-gleaning in this wide field, and gathers the sheaves of stories into an imperishable book which fixes for all time the radiant image of this “first and chief of Christian men.” Centuries later, English writers will turn to this book as to a treasure house, and again poetic fancy will light up the figures of the king and his knights and invest them with a symbolism that teaches eternal truths to our own and succeeding ages.
Let us inquire how Arthur first appeared in literature. Some eleven years after the Norman Conquest a Welsh boy named Geoffrey was born in the little town of Monmouth. He was educated for the Church, and as a young man became chaplain to William, Count of Normandy. Subsequently he was appointed Bishop of St. Asaph, and about the year 1147 completed in Latin a “History of the Kings of Britain” who ruled the land “before the incarnation of Christ.” It was by means of this book that King Arthur was first introduced to the world.
Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle do not mention him, but Nennius, a Welshman who wrote a history some sixty-five years after the death of Bede, tells us that Arthur was the war-leader of the Britons in their struggles with the English, and that he led them in twelve great battles, in the last of which nine hundred and sixty men fell before his single onset. This is all the real evidence we have that Arthur was an actual warrior and not a figment of the imagination.
Old Welsh books that have come down to us contain many stories of the king, and some of these Geoffrey must have heard and stored up in his memory during his boyhood at Monmouth. It is probable that when residing in Normandy he heard new stories of Arthur from the lips of the Bretons, who were of the same Celtic stock as the Welsh, and had long provided a refuge for their harried kinsmen on the other side of the Channel.
Geoffrey tells us in his History that he obtained his information not from legend or hearsay, but from a book in the Breton tongue which Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, brought out of Brittany. It is this book which he purports to translate into Latin. Such a book may have existed, but it has never been discovered, and we shall do no injustice to the memory of Geoffrey if we assume that in telling the story of Arthur he drew largely on his own imagination.
Geoffrey was a born romancer, and he knew that nothing appealed so strongly to lords and ladies throughout Christendom as tales of knightly prowess and faithful love. So he turned novelist, and exercised all his skill in inventing a great heroic figure which should be to the British what Odysseus was to the Greeks and Charlemagne to the Franks. The serious historians of the time, such as William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, talked openly of Geoffrey's “fabrications,” but most men held the view which Caxton expressed more than three centuries later, that to doubt the existence of Arthur was almost atheism.
The first six books of Geoffrey's History are devoted to the story of Arthur's predecessors. At the close of the sixth book Merlin, the Enchanter, appears on the scene and begins his weird and fantastic prophecies, one of which foretells the coming of a British chief “who should obtain the Empire of Rome.” Then he relates the mysterious birth of Arthur, and the death of his father Uther Pendragon, after which the kingly boy of due right succeeds to the throne and at once begins his wondrous career of conquest.
Saxons, Scots, and Picts are vanquished, the whole island is subdued, and Arthur weds Guinevere, a noble lady of surpassing beauty. Then Ireland and Iceland are added to his kingdom, the rulers of the Orkneys and of Gothland are forced to do him homage, and a brilliant assemblage of knights gathers around him. His ambitions grow apace and he now desires to subdue the whole of Europe. Norway, Daria, and Gaul cannot resist him, and he establishes Bedivere, his butler, and Kay, his seneschal, upon tributary thrones. Then he returns to Britain, and at Caerleon-upon-Usk, in his “kingly palaces” which rival those of Rome itself, keeps high court.
Geoffrey says:—
“At that time was Britain exalted unto so high a pitch of dignity as that it did surpass all other kingdoms in plenty of riches, in luxury of adornment, and in the courteous wit of them that dwelt therein. Whatsoever knight in the land was of renown for his prowess did wear his clothes and his arms all of one same colour. And the dames, no less witty, would apparel them in like manner of a single colour, nor would they deign to have the love of any save he had thrice approved him in the wars. Wherefore at that time did dames wax chaste and knights the nobler for their love.”
Magic surrounds the king even in this early recital of his fame. He destroys monsters, kills a Spanish giant at St. Michael's Mount, and lays low another who wraps himself in a cloak made of the skins of the kings whom he has slain. Then he meets the Romans in battle, does prodigies of valour, and marches on Rome itself. In his absence Modred, who is acting as his viceroy in Britain, sets the crown upon his own head and persuades Guinevere, Arthur's queen, to become his wife. When Arthur hears the news, he assembles his British warriors and leads them home. Modred meets him in force but is driven back, and Guinevere flies for safety to a convent. At the river Camel in the west country a final and terrible battle is fought. Modred is slain, and King Arthur himself is wounded unto death, and is borne thence unto the island of Avalon for the healing of his wounds.
Such in brief outline was the story which Geoffrey told as serious history. Readers of Sir Thomas Malory's “Morte d'Arthur” and of Tennyson's beautiful “Idylls of the King” will notice that Geoffrey gives us the bald story from which the fully developed legend sprang. The Round Table was as yet unknown; Lancelot, Galahad, Tristram, and Iseult had not appeared, and the Quest of the Holy Grail still lay in the imagination of the later romancers. But the elements were all there; the vivid and florid fancy of Geoffrey's successors seized upon and expanded every incident of his story; new characters and new motives were invented, and by degrees the greatest romance of all the world assumed its present form.
Geoffrey's book had an enormous popularity, for it exactly suited the taste of the age. In court and hall knights and ladies listened with rapt attention to the new and entrancing story, and eagerly awaited fresh versions and fuller details. No book before the age of printing had such a vogue. So well were the stories known that it became the mark of a clown to confess ignorance of them.
Geoffrey of Monmouth set out to write history but achieved romance. He takes his place in our pageant not as a contributor to the progress of our native literature, but as the collector and inventor of legends from which English writers were afterwards to draw plot and inspiration. Some sixty years later his materials passed, as we shall see, into English poetry; and when English literature had come into its own, great writers such as Chaucer, Spenser, Drayton, and Wordsworth were fain to acknowledge their obligation to him in words of gratitude and admiration.
