Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.

The compilation of the Morte d’Arthur was finished in 1469, but of the compiler little is known save the name. He is generally believed to be the Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell in Warwickshire who died in 1471. No manuscript of the work is known, and, though Caxton certainly revised it, exactly to what extent has never been settled. The prologue to this book is, perhaps, the best and most interesting piece of writing the printer ever composed, and still remains one of the best criticisms of Malory’s romance. Of the popularity of the book we have striking evidence. Of Caxton’s edition two copies are known, of which one is imperfect. The second edition, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1498, is known from one copy only, which is imperfect, while the third edition, also printed by de Worde is, again, only known from one imperfect copy. It may well be, considering these facts, that there were other intervening editions which have entirely disappeared. 16 While Caxton was busily at work making and printing his translations, he did not neglect other classes of books which were in demand. His position near the abbey would turn his attention to service-books, and, of these, he printed a large number. One of the first books he issued was a Sarum Ordinale, and this he advertised by means of a little handbill fixed up in prominent places. Of Books of Hours he issued at least four editions. Besides these, he printed the Psalter, Directorium Sacerdotum and some special services to add to the breviary. The larger service-books he does not seem to have attempted. These were always of a highly ornamental character and his own types and material, intended simply for ordinary work, were not equal to the task. In 1487, when there was a demand for an edition of the Sarum Missal, he gave a commission for the printing to a Paris printer, Guillaume Maynial, but added to it his own device. 17 The Royal Book and The Book of Good Manners were the next two of Caxton’s translations to be printed. The first is a translation of La Somme des Vices et des Vertus, the latter of Le livre des bonnes meurs by Jacques Legrand. The Book of Good Manners, issued in 1487, was a popular book and was reprinted at least four times before the close of the century. 18 The Fayttes of Arms, the next of Caxton’s translations to be printed, was issued in 1489. It was undertaken at the express desire of Henry VII, who himself lent the manuscript, now in the British Museum, from which the translation was made. The authorship is generally ascribed to Christine de Pisan. 19 About this time, two very popular romances were issued, The History of the Four Sons of Aymon and The History of Blanchardyn and Eglantine. The first, of which manuscripts are common, was printed in French as early as 1480, at Lyons, and it was, no doubt, from this edition that Caxton prepared his translation. The second was translated at the request of Margaret, duchess of Somerset, from a manuscript of the French version which she had purchased from Caxton himself many years previously. In this translation, Caxton had adhered to his original far more nearly than is usual in his translations, rendering word for word in the closest manner.

Like The Golden Legend, the Morte d’Arthur, the publication of which holds a chief place in Caxton’s work, looks back to the Middle Ages. Based on translation, a mosaic of adaptations, it is, nevertheless, a single literary creation such as no work of Caxton’s own can claim to be, and it has exercised a far stronger and longer literary influence. 8 If, as is possible, Malory was the knight of Newbold Revell, he had been a retainer of the last Beauchamp earl of Warwick, he had seen the splendours of the last efforts of feudalism and had served in that famous siege of Rouen which so deeply impressed contemporary imagination. Apparently, he was a loyalist during the Civil Wars and suffered from Yorkist revenge; his burial in the Grey Friars may, possibly, suggest that he even died a prisoner in Newgate. In any case, he must have died before the printing of his immortal book, which comes to us, therefore, edited by Caxton, to whom, possibly, are due most of the lacunae, bits of weak grammar and confusions in names. Nevertheless, the style seals the Morte d’Arthur as Malory’s, not Caxton’s. It is as individual as is the author’s mode of dealing with the material he gathered from his wide field. This material Malory several times says he found in a French book— the French book—but critics have discovered a variety of sources. It is in the course of the story that the multiplicity of sources is at times discernible—in the failure of certain portions to preserve a connecting thread, in the interruption of the story of Tristram, in the curious doubling of names, or the confusion of generations; the style reveals no trace of inharmonious originals. The skilful blending of many ancient tales, verse and prose, French and English, savage and saintly, into a connected, if but loosely connected, whole is wrought in a manner which leaves the Morte, while representative of some of the nobler traits of Malory’s century, in other respects typical neither of that nor any particular epoch, and this is an element in its immortality. 9 If such an ascetic purity and rapt devotion as glows in the Grail story was practised among the mystics, such a fantastic chivalry portrayed by Froissart, such a loyalty evinced by a Bedford or a Fortescue, yet the Morte assumes the recognition of a loftier standard of justice, purity and unselfishness than its own century knew. These disinterested heroes, who give away all they win with the magnanimity of an Audley at Poictiers, these tireless champions of the helpless, these eternal lovers and their idealised love, are of no era, any more than the forests in which they for ever travel. And, if the constant tournaments and battles, and the castles which seem to be the only places to live in, suggest a medieval world, the total absence of reference to its basic agricultural life and insistent commerce detaches us from it again, while the occasional mention of cities endows them with a splendour and remoteness only to be paralleled in the ancient empire or in the pictures of Turner. 10 Medieval stories were, naturally, negligent of causes in a world where the unaccountable so constantly happened in real life, and a similar suddenness of adventure may be found in tales much older than this. Malory, however, on the threshold of an age which would require dramatic motive or, at least, probability, saved his book from the fate of the older, unreasoned fiction by investing it with an atmosphere, impossible to analyse, which withdraws his figures to the region of mirage. This indescribable conviction of magic places Malory’s characters outside the sphere of criticism, since, given the atmosphere, they are consistent with themselves and their circumstances. Nothing is challenged, analysed or emphasised; curiosity as to causation is kept in abeyance; retribution is worked out, but, apparently, unconsciously. Like children’s are the sudden quarrels and hatreds and as sudden reconciliations. The motive forces are the elemental passions of love and bravery, jealousy and revenge, never greed, or lust, or cruelty. Courage and the thirst for adventure are taken for granted, like the passion for the chase, and, against a brilliant and moving throng jof the brave and fair, a few conceptions are made to stand forth as exceptional—a Lancelot, a Tristram, or a Mark. Perhaps most skilful of all is the restraint exercised in the portrayal of Arthur. As with Shakespeare’s Caesar and Homer’s Helen, we realise Arthur by his effect upon his paladins; of himself we are not allowed to form a definite image, though we may surmise justice to be his most distinct attribute. Neither a hero of hard knocks nor an effective practical monarch, he is not to be assigned to any known type, but remains the elusive centre of the magical panorama.

Ballads

THE subject of this chapter needs careful definition. Sundry shorter poems, lyrics, of whatever purpose, hymns, “flytins,” political satires, mawkish stories in verse, sensational journalism of Elizabethan days and even the translation of Solomon’s Song, have gone by the name of ballad. The popular ballad, however, now in question, is a narrative poem without any known author or any marks of individual authorship such as sentiment and reflection, meant, in the first instance, for singing, and connected, as its name implies, with the communal dance, but submitted to a process of oral tradition among people free from literary influences and fairly homogeneous. Conditions favourable to the making of such poetry ceased to be general after the XV century; and, while it was both composed and preserved in isolated rural communities long after that date, the instinct which producted it and the habit which handed it down by word of mouth were, alike, a heritage of the past. Seen in critical and historical perspective, balladry takes its distinguishing marks mainly from this process of oral tradition. Owing to this process, the ballad has lost its dramatic or mimetic and choral character and become distinctly epic; it has, in many cases, even forfeited its refrain, once indispensable; but it has kept its impersonal note, lacks, last as first, all trace of deliberate composition and appeals to the modern reader with a charm of simplicity quite its own. The sources of tradition have, apparently, at last run dry. Sir George Douglas notes that the Scottish border shepherds, at their annual dinners, no longer sing their old or their own ballads; what are known as “songs of the day,” mainly of music-hall origin, now rule without any rivals from the past.

In the XIV century, “rimes of Robin Hood and Randolph, earl of Chester,” are mentioned in Piers the Plowman as known to the common men of that day. Robin Hood ballads are preserved; the Randolph cycle is lost. But the outlaw literature must have been popular long before that. The story of Fulk Fitz-Warine, preserved in French prose and paraphrased by Leland in fragments from “an old English boke yn ryme,” gives its hero traits and experiences not unlike those of Robin Hood. The forged chronicle of Croyland says that “ballads” about Hereward were still sung, in the chronicler’s day, by the common people and by women at the dance. The deeds of Waltheof at York, told by Malmesbury, are plainly taken “from a ballad”—so Freeman declares; but from what sort of ballad? Waltheof, it is true, was sung “in the warlike songs of the tongues of both his parents”; one of these songs, however, the Danish one, is preserved, and has no trace of balladry about it, but all the art and artifice of the professional scald. Ballads of the outlaw, indeed, would be of a popular and traditional type, as the Robin Hood cycle shows; but political songs, which also had their vogue, were doubtless, made by the minstrel, who, also, retouched and sang again the rude verses which warrior or outlaw had improvised, taking them out of their choral conditions, smoothing, adding, connecting, and making them fit for chant and recitation de longue haleine, precisely as the jongleurs of early France, according to Gaston Paris, remade the improvisations of an age that knew no minstrel class at all into the chansons degeste and into the epic itself. Such remade poems could again be broken into ballads, popular enough, sung and transmitted by very humble folk. For a late example, the Scottish ballad Gude Wallace has its evident source in the Wallace of Blind Harry; but “the portions of Blind Harry’s poem,” says Child, “out of which these ballads were made, were, perhaps, themselves composed from older ballads, and the restitution of the lyrical form may have given us something not altogether unlike what was sung in the fifteenth, or even the fourteenth century.” Nevertheless most of the “ballads” cited by the chroniclers seem to have been political songs, more or less popular—not what could be called, in strict use of the term, a traditional ballad. 5 In one case, we are on sure negative ground. Henry of Huntingdon has a flery piece of description in which he reproduces the story of a battle; as with similar passages, a “ballad” is his source; but here, luckily, that source is known. He is translating a poem, inserted in the Old English Chronicle, on the battle of Brunanburh; and whoever will read this poem, whether in the original or in Tennyson’s spirited rendering, can see at how great a distance it stands from any ballad of the traditional kind. Minstrels, moreover, as actual authors of the ballads recorded at a later day, are utterly out of the question. Barring a few wretched specimens labelled by Child with the minstrel’s name, and inserted in the collection because they still may retain some traditional note, that “rogue by act of parliament” to whom Percy ascribed the making of practically all English and Scottish ballads is responsible for none of them. It has been pointed out by Kittredge as “capable of practically formal proof that for the last two or three centuries the English and Scottish ballads have not, as a general thing, been sung or transmitted by professional minstrels or their representatives. There is no reason whatever for believing that the state of things between 1300 and 1600 was different, in this regard, from that between 1600 and 1900.…” Still stronger proof lies in the fact that we have the poetry which the minstrels did make; and it is far removed from balladry. “The two categories are distinct.” When, finally, one studies the structure and the elements of the ballad itself as a poetic form, a form demonstrably connected with choral dramatic conditions in its origin but modified by a long epic process in the course of oral and quite popular tradition, one is compelled to dismiss absolutely the theory of minstrel authorship, and to regard ballads as both made and transmitted by the people. This phrase is often misunderstood and challenged, but in vain. All poetry, good and bad, is found by the last analysis to be made in the same way; and there is no romantic mystery or “miracle” about the ballad. What differentiates it from other forms of poetry is the conditions under which it is made and the agency by which it is handed down. We may reasonably infer for early times such a making and such a transmission; but the older product is lost, and we are restricted for our study to the actual and undisputed material at our command. 6 All English and Scottish ballads agree in the fact of tradition,—tradition, in the main, oral and communal; and there result from this fact two capital exceptions to the ordinary rules of literary investigation. It is well nigh useless to hunt for the “original document of a given ballad, or to compare the several varying versions, and so establish, by whatever means, an authenitic text. It is also useless to lean with any confidence upon chronology. Some of the ballads gathered, within a century or so, from oral tradition of Scotland, are distinctly older in form than many of the ballads of the Percy manuscript, written down in the seventeenth century, and are closer to the traditional ballad type than many pieces of even earlier date of record than the famous folio. This renunciation of authentic original texts, and of chronology in the ordinary sense, is generally conceded. A few critics, however, are still of opinion that ballads are, after all, nothing but anonymous poems,and that to trace a ballad to its author is not, necessarily, an impossible task.

We have a number of ballads which tell different adventures in the life of Robin Hood; and we have an actual epic poem, formed upon these ballads or their very close counterparts, which embodies the adventures in a coherent whole. Between the style of the Gest of Robyn Hode, however, and the style of the best Robin Hood ballads, there is almost no difference at all; and these, for all their age of record, may well represent the end of the epic process in balladry. In metrical form, they hold to the quatrain made up of alternating verses of four and three measures, which is not very far from the old couplet with its two alternating verses of the refrain. The change in structure is mainly concerned with loss of choral elements, especially of incremental repetition. The well known opening of Robin Hood and the Monk shows both the change in form and the new smoothness of narrative.

Then the story begins with a dialogue between Little John and Robin, passes into the third personal narrative and so tells its tale with a good plot, fair coherence of motive, character and event, exciting incident of fight, imprisonment, disguise, escape and the proper pious conclusion, not unlike the prayer that Chaucer puts into the mouth of the nun’s priest when his tale is told. There are ninety stanzas preserved in this ballad, and it has suffered losses by mutilation of the fifteenth century manuscript. Old as it is by record, however, it seems far more finished, familiar, modern, than a ballad recovered centuries later from oral tradition in Scotland, short, intense, abrupt, with communal song for every other line of it from beginning to end, a single dominant situation, a dramatic and choral setting. Just enough epic detail has been added here to supply in tradition what was lost by transfer from actual choral rendering; and, even as it is, the taking by the hand, the turning round, seem little more than the stage directions of a play.

Ballads of the funeral, echoes of the old coronach, vocero, whatever the form of communal grief, are scantily preserved in English; Bonnie James Campbell and The Bonny Earl of Murray may serve as types; but the noblest outcome of popular lament, however crossed and disguised by elements of other verse it may seem in its present shape, is Sir Patrick Spens, which should be read in the shorter version printed by Percy in the Reliques, and should not be teased into history. The incremental repetition and climax of its concluding stanzas are beyond praise. Less affecting is the “good night”—unless we let Johnny Armstrong, beloved of Goldsmith, pass as strict representative of this type. Lord Maxwell’s Last Good Night, it is known, suggested to Byron the phrase and the mood of Childe Harold’s song. To be a ballad, however, these “good nights” must tell the hero’s story, not simply echo his emotion. 24 Superstition, the other world, ghost-lore, find limited scope in English balladry. Two ballads of the sea, Bonnie Annie and Brown Robyn’s Confession, make sailors cast lots to find the “fey folk” in the ship, and so to sacrifice the victim. Commerce with the other world occurs in Thomas Rymer, derived from a romance, and in Tam Lin, said by Henderson to be largely the work of Burns. Clerk Colvill suffers from his alliance with a mermaid. The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, a mournful little ballad from Shetland, tells of him who is “a man upo’s the lan’,” but a seal, “a silkie in the sea.” Other transformation ballads are Kemp Owyne, Allison Gross and The Laily Worm. In Sweet William’s Ghost, however, a great favourite of old, and in the best of all “supernatural” ballads, The Wife of Usher’s Well, dignified, pathetic, reticent, English balladry competes in kind, though by no means in amount, with the riches of Scandinavian tradition. 25 Epic material of every sort was run into the ballad mould. King Orfeo finds Eurydice in Shetland; the ballad is of very old structural type. Sacred legends like that of Sir Hugh, and secular legends such as Hind Horn, occur; while Sir Cawline and King Estmere are matter of romance. Possibly, the romances of Europe sprang in their own turn from ballads; and Sir Lionel, in the Percy folio, with its ancient type of structure, may even reproduce the kind of ballads which formed a basis for Sir Cawline itself. Minstrels, of course, could take a good romance and make it over into indifferent ballads; three of these are so described by Child— The Boy and the Mantle, King Arthur and King Cornwall and The Marriage of Sir Gawaine. With the cynical Crow and Pie we reach the verge of indecency, also under minstrel patronage, though it is redeemed for balladry by a faint waft of tradition. This piece, along with The Baffled Knight and The Broomfield Hill, is close to the rout from which Tom D’Urfey selected his Pills to Purge Melancholy. Thoroughly debased is The Keach in the Creel; but The Jolly Beggar, especially in the “old lady’” manuscript, is half-redeemed by the dash and swing of the lines. Old ladies, as one knows from a famous anecdote of Scott, formerly liked this sort of thing, without losing castle, and saw no difference between it and the harmless fun of Get Up and Bar the Door, or the old story, which Hardy seems to record as still a favourite in Dorsetshire, of Queen Eleanor’s Confession.

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