The English Novel, George Saintsbury [romance book recommendations .txt] 📗

least bolder villain of the two. But the fisherman Grim, who is chosen as his murderer, discovers that the child has, at night, a nimbus of flame round his head; renounces his crime and escapes by sea with the child and his own family to Grimsby. Havelok, growing up undistinguished from his foster-brethren, takes service as a scullion with the English usurper. This usurper is seeking how to rid himself of the princess without violence, but in some way that will make her succession to the crown impossible, and Havelok having shown prowess in sports is selected as the maiden's husband. She, too, discovers his royalty at night by the same token; and the pair regain their respective inheritances and take vengeance on their respective traitors, in a lively and adventurous fashion. There are all the elements of a good story in this: and they are by no means wasted or spoilt in the actual handling. It is not a mere sequence of incident; from the mixture of generosity and canniness in the fisherman who ascertains that he is to have traitor's wages before he finally decides to rescue Havelok, to the not unnatural repugnance of Goldborough at her forced wedding with a scullion, the points where character comes in are not neglected, though of course the author does not avail himself of them either in Shakespearean or in Richardsonian fashion. They are
there , ready for development by any person who may take it into his head to develop them.

So too is it in the less powerful and rather more cut and dried King Horn . Here the opening is not so very different; the hero's father is murdered by pirate invaders, and he himself set adrift in a boat. But in this the princess (daughter of course of the king who shelters him) herself falls in love with Horn, and there is even a scene of considerable comic capabilities in which she confides this affection by mistake to one of his companions (fortunately a faithful one) instead of to himself. But Horn has a faithless friend also; and rivals, and adventures, and journeys; and returns just in the nick of time, and recognitions by rings, and everything that can properly be desired occur. In these--even more perhaps than in Havelok's more masculine and less sentimental fortunes--there are openings not entirely neglected by the romancer (though, as has been said, he does not seem to have been one of the strongest of his kind) for digression, expatiation, embroidery. Transpose these two stories (as the slow kind years will teach novelists inevitably to do) into slightly different keys, introduce variations and episodes and codas , and you have the possibilities of a whole library of fiction, as big and as varied as any that has ever established itself for subscribers, and bigger than any that has ever offered itself as one collection to buyers.

The love-stories of these two tales are what it is the fashion--exceedingly complimentary to the age referred to if not to the age of the fashion itself--to call "mid-Victorian" in their complete "propriety." Indeed, it is a Puritan lie, though it seems to possess the vivaciousness of its class, that the romances are distinguished by "bold bawdry." They are on the contrary rather singularly pure, and contrast, in that respect, remarkably with the more popular folk-tale. But fiction, no more than drama, could do without the [Greek: amarthia]--the human and not unpardonable frailty. This appears in, and complicates, the famous story of Tristram , which, though its present English form is probably younger than Havelok and Horn , is likely to have existed earlier: indeed must have done so if Thomas of Erceldoune wrote on the subject. Few can require to be told that beautiful and tragical history of "inauspicious stars" which hardly any man, of the many who have handled it in prose and verse, has been able to spoil. Our Middle English form is not consummate, and is in some places crude in manner and in sentiment. But it is notable that the exaggerated and inartistic repulsiveness of Mark, resorted to by later writers as a rather rudimentary means of exciting compassion for the lovers, is not to be found here; in fact, one of the most poetical touches in the piece is one of sympathy for the luckless husband, when he sees the face of his faithless queen slumbering by her lover's side with the sun on it. "And Mark rewed therefore." The story, especially in its completion with the "Iseult of Brittany" part and the death of Tristram, gives scope for every possible faculty and craftsmanship of the most analytic as of the most picturesque novelist of modern times. There is nothing in the least like it in ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would do it justice in modern times we should have to take the best notes of Charles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and Mr. Meredith, leaving out all their faults, and combine. It is not surprising that, in the very infancy of the art, nobody in German or French, any more than in English (though the German here is, as it happens, the best), should have done it full justice; but it is a wonder that a story of such capacities should have been sketched, and even worked out in considerable detail, so early.

Of the far greater story of which Tristram is a mere episode and hardly even that--a chantry or out-lying chapel of the great cathedral--the Arthurian Legend, the earlier English versions, or rather the earlier versions in English, are, as has been said, not only fragmentary but disappointing. There is nothing in the least strange in this, even though (as the present writer, who can speak with indifferent knowledge, still firmly holds) the conception of the story itself in its greatest and unifying stage is probably if not certainly English. The original sources of the story of Arthur are no doubt Celtic; they give themselves out as being so, and there is absolutely no critical reason for disbelieving them. But in these earlier forms--the authority of the most learned Celticists who have any literary gift and any appreciation of evidence is decisive on this point--not only are the most characteristic unifying features--the Graal story and the love of Lancelot and Guinevere--completely wanting, but the great stroke of genius--the connection of these two and the subordination of all minor legends as to the dim national hero, Arthur, with those about him--is more conspicuously wanting still. Whether it was the Englishman Walter Map, the Norman Robert de Borron, or the Frenchman Chrestien de Troyes, to whom this flash of illumination came, has never been proved--will pretty certainly now never be proved. M. Gaston Paris failed to do it; and it is exceedingly unlikely that, where he failed, any one else will succeed, unless the thrice and thirty times sifted libraries of Europe yield some quite unexpected windfall. In the works commonly attributed to Chrestien, all of which are well known to the present writer, there is no sign of his having been able to conceive this, though he is a delightful romancer. Robert is a mere shadow; and his attributed works,
as his works, are shadows too, though they are interesting enough in themselves. Walter not only has the greatest amount of traditional attribution, but is the undoubted author of De Nugis Curialium . And the author of De Nugis Curialium , different as it is from the Arthurian story, could have finally divined the latter.

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time. And the most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are rarely handled at all in such early vernacular versions of it as we have, whether in verse or prose. Naturally enough, perhaps, it was the fabulous historic connection with British history, and the story of the great British enchanter Merlin, that attracted most attention. The
Arthour and Merlin which is in the Auchinleck MS.; the prose Merlin , published by the Early English Text Society; the alliterative Thornton
Morte d'Arthur , and others, are wont to busy themselves about the antecedents of the real story--about the uninteresting wars of the King himself with Saxons, and Romans, and giants, and rival kings, rather than with the great chivalric triple cord of Round Table, Graal, and Guinevere's fault. The pure Graal poems, Joseph of Arimathea , the work of the abominable Lonelich or Lovelich, etc., deal mainly with another branch of previous questions--things bearable as introductions, fillings-up, and so forth, but rather jejune in themselves. The Scots
Lancelot is later than Malory himself, and of very little interest. Layamon's account, the oldest that we have, adds little (though what little it does add is not unimportant) to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace; and tells what it has to tell with nearly as little skill in narrative as in poetry. Only the metrical Morte --from which, it would appear, Malory actually transprosed some of his most effective passages in the manner in which genius transproses or transverses--has, for that reason, for its dealings with the catastrophe, and for the further opportunity of comparison with Tennyson, interest of the higher kind. But before we come to Malory himself it is desirable to turn to the branches--the chapels, as we have called them, to the cathedral--which he also, in some cases at least, utilised in the magnum opus of English prose romance.

These outliers were rather more fortunate, probably for no more recondite reason than that the French originals (from which they were in almost every instance certainly taken) were finished in themselves. Of the special Gawain cycle or sub-cycle we have two romances in pure metrical form, and more than two in alliterative, which are above the average in interest. Ywain and Gawain , one of the former, is derived directly or indirectly from the Chevalier au Lyon of Chrestien de Troyes; and both present some remarkable affinities with the unknown original of the "Sir Beaumains" episode of Malory, and, through it, with Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette . The other, Lybius Disconus (Le Beau Déconnu) is also concerned with that courteous nephew of Arthur who, in later versions of the main story, is somewhat sacrificed to Lancelot. For a " real romance," as it calls itself (though it is fair to say that in the original the word means "royal"), of the simpler kind but extremely well told, there are not many better metrical specimens than
Ywain and Gawain , but it has less character-interest, actual or possible, than those which have been commented on. The hero, King Urien's son, accepts an adventure in which another knight of the Table, Sir Colgrevance, has fared ill, after it has been told in a conversation at court which is joined in first by the Queen and afterwards by the King. Sir Kay here shows his usual cross-grainedness; and Guinevere "with milde mood" requests to know "What the devil is thee within?" The adventure is of a class well known in romance. You ride to a certain fountain, pour water from it on a stone, and then, after divers marvels, have to do battle with a redoubtable knight. Colgrevance has fared badly; Kay is as usual quite sure that he would fare better; but Ywain actually undertakes the task. He has a tough battle with the knight who answers the challenge, but wounds him mortally; and when the knight flies to his neighbouring castle, is so hard on his heels