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"And so anon was the coronation made," Malory goes on to tell us, "and there was Arthur sworn unto his lords and to the commons for to be a true king, to stand with true justice from henceforth the days of his life." For the rest of all the wonderful stories of King Arthur and his knights you must go to Morte d'Arthur itself.
Yet the original literature of mediæval chivalry is known only to a few scholars: Tennyson's Idylls outsell the Mabinogion and Malory.
"The moral child without the craft to rule, Else had he not lost me." Indeed the romance of Malory makes Arthur deserve "the pretty popular name such manhood earns" by his conduct as regards Guinevere when she is accused by her enemies in the later chapters. Yet Malory does not finally condone the sin which baffles Lancelot's quest of the Holy Grail.
But the gentlemen persuaded Caxton until at last he undertook to "imprint a book of the noble histories of the said King Arthur and of certaine of his knights, after a copy unto me delivered, which copy Sir Thomas Malory tooke out of certaine bookes in the Frenche, and reduced it into English."
The "Idylls of the King," clothed in Tennyson's poetic garments, would have won her interest instead he advised her to read Malory, and read him she obediently did, until her brain ached with the clash of swords, and her eyes were wearied with the glitter of the dragons' scales or the silver mail of the knights who fought to the death for the damsels they served.
The literary form of the "Morte d'Arthur" admits of description rather than of criticism. A noble and forcible simplicity of expression pervades the old Norman French in which the romances of chivalry were first written, which is well reflected in the English of Sir Thomas Malory. Of plot there is none.
We learn from the text that "this book was finished in the ninth year of the reign of King Edward the Fourth, by Sir Thomas Malory, Knight." That would be in the year 1469. Malory is said to have been a Welshman. The origin of the Arthurian romance was probably Welsh. Its first literary form was in Geoffrey of Monmouth's prose, in 1147.
That Tennyson modernises and moralises too much, I willingly admit; what I deny is that he introduces gentleness, courtesy, and conscience where his sources have none. Indeed this is not a matter of critical opinion, but of verifiable fact. Any one can read Malory and judge for himself. But the world in which the Idylls move could not be real.
Beautiful the scene surely is, although wanting in one supreme touch, which a more Catholic-minded poet would have given to it. Guinevere's sin, according to Tennyson, is merely her sin against her husband; according to Malory it is her sin against God, and this is the very essence of the true Guinevere's repentance.
The record adds that "he was the servant of Jesu both by day and night." Beyond that we know little except what may be inferred from the splendid work itself. Malory groups the legends about the central idea of the search for the Holy Grail.
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