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Updated: May 16, 2025
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.
But, a few minutes after, he had to recite alone a passage of Tennyson's Morte d'Arthur, and then he appeared to greater advantage.
In this world of "Flamenca," which is in truth the same world as that of the "Romaunt of the Rose," the "Morte d'Arthur," and of the love poets of early France and Germany, conjugal morality and responsibility simply do not exist. It seems an unreal pleasure-garden, with a shadowy guardian impalpable to us gross moderns called Honour, but where, as it seems, Love only reigns.
But Homer and Virgil had been unlocked for him; and in the school library he found Shakespeare and Chaucer, 'Morte d'Arthur' and 'Don Quixote, fresh and endless material for his drawing, which never stopped.
MALORY'S MORTE D'ARTHUR. The greatest English work of this period, measured by its effect on subsequent literature, is undoubtedly the Morte d'Arthur, a collection of the Arthurian romances told in simple and vivid prose. Of Sir Thomas Malory, the author, Caxton in his introduction says that he was a knight, and completed his work in 1470, fifteen years before Caxton printed it.
'Sir Galahad the Knight of the Siege Perilous who won the Saint Greal. 'What language is that? said Charles. 'What! Don't you know the Morte d'Arthur! I thought every one did! Don't you, Philip! 'I once looked into it. It is very curious, in classical English; but it is a book no one could read through. 'Oh! cried Guy, indignantly; then, 'but you only looked into it.
But the idea of the Christian knighthood setting out to seek the Holy Cup was "marvellous and adventurous," and so well suited to please the mediæval mind that we find this quest introduced into several of the romances of chivalry, and it appears, though in an incomplete form, in the "Morte d'Arthur."
The third movement might have been inspired by Tennyson's version of Arthur's farewell to Guinevere, it is such a rich fabric of grief. The finale seems to me to picture the Morte d'Arthur, beginning with the fury of a storm along the coast, and the battle "on the waste sand by the waste sea."
He is the very knight of courtesy, in chivalry above all other knights save Arthur so strong that "whom he smote he overthrew"; he is brave, noble, scornful, and "falsely true," but he is not the Lancelot of the Morte d'Arthur.
There was a castle by the sea, a "well at the world's end," a pool in a forest; princesses with names out of the "Morte d'Arthur" lost crowns of gold; and blind beggars without a name wandered in the darkness of eternal terror. Death was always the scene-shifter of the play, and destiny the stage-manager.
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