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Updated: May 16, 2025
Finally, on taking leave, the good Squire put in his son's hands, as a manual, one of his favourite old volumes, the life of the Chevalier Bayard, by Godefroy; on a blank page of which he had written an extract from the Morte d'Arthur, containing the eulogy of Sir Ector over the body of Sir Launcelot of the Lake, which the Squire considers as comprising the excellencies of a true soldier.
"This is a republication of a dull, profligate Haywoodian production, in which all the males are rogues, and all the females whores, without a glimpse of plot, fable, or sentiment." In its uncompromising literalness the critic's verdict ranks with the learned Ascham's opinion of the "Morte D'Arthur," except that it has not been superseded.
We must look at the tales which, as we are constantly being told by trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers, were the fashionable reading of the feudal classes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the tales best known to us in the colourless respectability of the collection made in the reign of Edward IV. by Sir Thomas Malory, and called by him the "Morte d'Arthur" of the ladies and knights of Arthur's court; of the quest of the Grail by spotless knights who were bastards and fathers of bastards; of the intrigues of Tristram of Lyoness and Queen Yseult; of Launcelot and Guenevere; the tales which Francesca and Paolo read together.
It was from a form of it embodied in the French prose "Lancelot" that Sir Thomas Malory drew the chapters of his "Morte d'Arthur" which are here reprinted, and which, more than the earlier versions, are the source from which the legend has passed into modern English poetry.
The "Morte d'Arthur" itself, which about this time fell into our hands, was not so dear as the "Odyssey," though for a boy to read Sir Thomas Malory is to ride at adventure in enchanted forests, to enter haunted chapels where a light shines from the Graal, to find by lonely mountain meres the magic boat of Sir Galahad.
Assuredly the finding herself a princess, and sharing the captivity of a queen, had not proved so like a chapter of the Morte d'Arthur as it had seemed to Cicely at Buxton.
Tennyson began to use these legends in his Morte d'Arthur ; but the epic idea probably occurred to him later, in 1856, when he began "Geraint and Enid," and he added the stories of "Vivien," "Elaine," "Guinevere," and other heroes and heroines at intervals, until "Balin," the last of the Idylls, appeared in 1885. Later these works were gathered together and arranged with an attempt at unity.
Maitland opened Mallory's "Morte d'Arthur," and read aloud: "Then Sir Galahad came unto a mountain, where he found an old chapel, and found there nobody, for all was desolate, and there he kneeled before the altar and besought of God wholesome counsel." "I suppose it was just that," said Haddingly. Dalton put his head into the tent. "I thought I'd find you here," he said.
The very centre of his thoughts was here: here he had found the first beginnings of his faith and love. How often he had walked alone upon those ramparts with his New Testament and the Morte d'Arthur, striving, in the fervour of romantic sentiment, to combine the standards of knightly chivalry with the austere counsels of the gospel.
In 1485, when Morte d'Arthur was first printed, people indeed found it a book "pleasant to read in," and we find it so still. It is written in English not unlike the English of to-day, and although it has a quaint, old-world sound, we can readily understand it.
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