Le Morte Darthur

By T. ELIOT S.

Tins is the text of Le Mork Darthttr*, printed after Caxton, with no prefaces, introductions or notes, and a _very beautiful rubricated piece of book-making indeed. It is for those who appreciate Malory and can afford to possess his book in as grand 'a form as anyone could wish ; and those who enjoy Malory ought to be willing to pay him this honour if they can afford it. I mean no disrespect to this wholly admirable edition in suggesting that we need three more editions to follow it : (1) a cheap edition of the text ; (2) a scholarly edition with a full commentary by some person as learned as Miss Jane Harrison or Miss Jessie Weston ; and (3) a-children's edition. Such an edition was in my hands when I was a child of eleven or twelve. It was then, and perhaps has always been, my favourite book., :.I._have not conic across this, or any similar children"s edition, since.

What we are, as a matter of fact; familiar with is a kind

of children's edition ; -but it Is children's edition edited according to the wrong principles:' I should like to have an edition of the text made readable-fOr'ehildren, and somewhat abbreviated ; that with which Si Edward Strachey of Sutton Court provided us is an edition meant to be safe for children. The most accessible and convenient text for every- body was actually prepared.. to : this end. Sir Edward announces : " I do not believe that when we have excluded what is offensive to modern manners there will be found anything practically injuri- ous to the morals of English boys, for whom I have chiefly under- taken this work."

We observe the con fusion of morals and manners. " Lord Tennyson,(' says Sir Edward, " has shown us how we may deal best with this matter." Sir Edward believed in the com- pulsory sterilization of literature. It is not irrelevant to call attention to the degraded moral conceptions of an age in which an editor of Malory could write : " The morality of Morte Darthur 'is low in one essential thing; and this alike in what it says and in what it omits : and Lord Tennyson shows us how it should be raised. The ideal of marriage, in its relation and its contrast with all other forms of love and chastity, is brought out in every form, rising at last to tragic gran- deur, in the Idylls of the King. It is not in celibacy, 'though spiritual and holy as that of Galahad and Percivale, but in marriage, as the highest and purest realization of the ideal of human conditions and relations, that we are to rise above the temptations of a love like that of Launeelot or even of Elaine ; and Malory's book does not set this ideal of life before us with any power or clearness."

This, one may remark, is the result of the policy of Henry VIII. Sir Edward might as well have observed that the morality of St. Paul is low in this one essential thing. He does mention St. Paul in this very introduction. And what does he say of St. Paul ? " In modern times," he says, " St. Paul has been held to be the model of a gentlenmfi." There is nothing more that one can say.

When one compares the present text with that of Sir Edward Strachey, it is perhaps the more trifling alterations of Sir Edward, just because they are trifling, that are the more irritating. One might mention, however, that his bowdlerizing makes the episode of the knight whom Sir Gareth beheads on two different evenings in the hall of Dame Lioness, com- pletely unintelligible. But there are places where his tam- pering is still more fatal. Let us take the birth of Mordred. The Strachey text reads : " And thither came to him Lot's wife of Orkney . . . and she was a passing fair lady, wherefore the king cast great love unto her, and so was Mordred born, and she was his sister, on the mother side Igraine . . . But all this time King Arthur knew not that king Lot's wife was his sister."

The true text reads :

" And thyder came to him king Lot's wife of Orkney . . . for she was a passyng fayr lady, wherfore the kyng cast grate love unto her, and desyred to lye by her ; so they were agreed, and he begate upon her Mordred : and she was his sister on the moders syde Igrayne," &c.

It is a very slight alteration. But the incest of Arthur is the foundation of the plot of the whole book, which is almost meaningless without it. Whether it should be Minimized in

*Le Morte Darthur. Reduced in to Englisahe by Sir Thomas Malory. (Blackwell : The Shakespeare Head Press. ..2 Vole. £9 9s. the set in half leather ; £9 15s. the set in fnll leather.) an edition for boys is a question for dispute ; but I feel sure that Sir Edward Strachey regarded it as an " impurity," instead of as springing from a profound, tribal, Soplacelean morality. It is indeed to Sophocles and his sources that I should compare Malory. He is a kind of crude northern Homer, a good chronicler, organizer and designer, a fine prose writer, just lacking the poet's, power over the word.

The morality of the Morte Darthur, as I have suggested, is of that primitive kind which belongs to the nature of things as our shallow modern manners do not. This primitive morality was refined by Christianity ; but the passing of Christianity has left only the refinement without the morality, as one can already see in the preface of Sir Edward Strachey ; and it ends in a " sense of, justice," a humanitarianism, which is finally immoral. T.Xo, a'simplei: and truer view of life than ours the moral lawis. a very real thing, as real and inexorable as natural law-jndeed, apart of natural law : the early peoples did not foolishly.req*e, as we do, that morality itself should be moral. - Certain _ acts were sins, and had deadly consequences ; andTthese consequences must follow whether the acts were committed in ignorance or not. They demanded purgation.

It is, perhaps, most perfectly in Sophocles, but legibly also in Malory, that the pattern of responsibility and fatality is woven. Arthur himSelf is the offspring Of sin; though legitimated ; but it is his unwitting sin that is the clue to the whole story. It is his incest-born bastard who shall destroy him; and like Laius, still more like Herod, the paragon king attempts by a most-unchristian slaughter of the innocents born on May day to defeat fate. Arthur throughout is a man under doom, at first admonished by the prophetic voice of Merlin, his Tiresias, himself cursed, not by blindness, but by the blind infatuation which ruins him. Arthur remains without legitimate issue, an unhappy Man, dedicated, and under the doom giving his : wannest love and highest esteem to the known lover of his wife. And they all remain, like the House of Atreus, and the House of Laius, great people. And like Oedipus at Colonus, the doomed and persecuted of Heaven is reserved for great honour from Heaven ; Oedipus and Arthur leave the world not like ordinary men. In life it is not Arthur who triumphs in the lists and in adventures ; he is always partly the observer, the stranger ; but it is he, rather than Launcelot or the saint begotten by a sleight, who dominates the scene.

• One of the reasons why the Morte Darthur is a permanent source of refresluderit; is the-degree to which the primitive ritual " stories are and are not integrated into the nar- rative. The inconsequence of many episodes is important, a consistent inconsequence. It is less, certainly, than appears on first reading. Balin and Balan, those pure folk-lore pre- Christian personages, are connected through the sword of Balin, through the Dolorous Stroke, with Galahad and the Sangreal. And the personalities of the Round Table are excellently well balanced : the simple good—Sir Gareth and Sir Pelleas, Sir Tor and other minor figures ; the mixed good and evil, like Sir Gawaine, who are human not on the heroic scale ; and the gradation from Sir Bors to Sir Percival (whose sister has significance) to Sir Galahad—whom I mentioned as a saint, but who is more properly angelic : certainly not simply human, but the offspring of a virgin sacrifice.

I do not wish to suggest that everything in the Merle Darthur is right and inevitable. There are plenty of loose ends. The book is anything but self-explanatory, and there was much of which Sir Thomas Malory was ignorant. I pray that during my lifetime someone may bring out an edition, as bulky as Frazer's Pausanias, which shall give the natural history of the Questing Beast, and the etymology of the names of all the knights and kings. I accept Sir La Cote Male Taile, but what about Sir Marhaus, and Sir Suppinabiles, and King Bagdemagus, and Sir Meliagrance, Sir Lamorak and Sir Persant of Inde

The Old and New Testaments, and Homer and Aeschylair and Sophocles and Malory, are books which deserve good printing and binding. This book is accordingly well worth nine guineas, and the extra six shillings to have it in fiig leather,