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Edition d'Elite

HISTORICAL TALES

The Romance of Reality

by

CHARLES MORRIS

Author of "Half-Hours with the Best American Authors," "Tales
from the Dramatists," etc.

In Fifteen Volumes

VOLUME XIII

King Arthur

1


J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON


Copyright, 1891, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.

Copyright, 1904, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.

Copyright, 1908, by J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.

       *       *       *       *       *


[Illustration: FURNESS ABBEY.]




                          CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.


                                 BOOK I.

                        HOW ARTHUR WON THE THRONE.

      CHAPTER.                                                      PAGE.

        I.--THE MAGIC SWORD                                           19

       II.--ARTHUR'S WARS AND THE MYSTERY OF HIS BIRTH                28

      III.--THE LADY OF THE LAKE                                      39

       IV.--GUENEVER AND THE ROUND TABLE                              46


                                 BOOK II.

                           THE DEEDS OF BALIN.

        I.--HOW BALIN WON AND USED THE ENCHANTED SWORD                55

       II.--HOW ARTHUR TRIUMPHED OVER THE KINGS                       65

      III.--HOW BALIN GAVE THE DOLOROUS STROKE                        72

       IV.--THE FATE OF BALIN AND BALAN                               81

        V.--MERLIN'S FOLLY AND FATE                                   89


                                 BOOK III.

                       THE TREASON OF MORGAN LE FAY.

        I.--THE ADVENTURE OF THE ENCHANTED SHIP                       94

       II.--THE COMBAT OF ARTHUR AND ACCOLAN                         102

      III.--HOW MORGAN CHEATED THE KING                              110

       IV.--THE COUNTRY OF STRANGE ADVENTURES                        120


                                 BOOK IV.

                            LANCELOT DU LAKE.

        I.--HOW TROUBLE CAME TO LIONEL AND HECTOR                    137

       II.--THE CONTEST OF THE FOUR QUEENS                           143

      III.--HOW LANCELOT AND TURQUINE FOUGHT                         153

       IV.--THE CHAPEL AND PERILOUS                                  164

        V.--THE ADVENTURE OF THE FALCON                              174


                                 BOOK V.

                      THE ADVENTURES OF BEAUMAINS.

        I.--THE KNIGHTING OF KAY'S KITCHEN BOY                       179

       II.--THE BLACK, THE GREEN, AND THE RED KNIGHTS                187

      III.--THE RED KNIGHT OF THE RED LAWNS                          201

       IV.--HOW BEAUMAINS WON HIS BRIDE                              212


                                 BOOK VI.

                 TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE AND THE FAIR ISOLDE.

        I.--HOW TRISTRAM WAS KNIGHTED                                238

       II.--LA BELLA ISOLDE                                          249

      III.--THE WAGER OF BATTLE                                      258

       IV.--THE DRAUGHT OF LOVE                                      267

        V.--THE PERILS OF TRUE LOVE                                  275

       VI.--THE MADNESS OF SIR TRISTRAM                              289


                                 BOOK VII.

                       HOW TRISTRAM CAME TO CAMELOT.

        I.--TRISTRAM AND DINADAN                                     304

       II.--ON THE ROAD TO THE TOURNAMENT                            312

      III.--AT THE CASTLE OF MAIDENS                                 322

       IV.--THE QUEST OF THE TEN KNIGHTS                             335

        V.--THE KNIGHT WITH THE COVERED SHIELD                       345




                           LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

                            KING ARTHUR. VOL. I.


                                                                    PAGE

      FURNESS ABBEY                                  _Frontispiece_.

      STATUE OF KING ARTHUR AT INNSBRUCK                              24

      KING ARTHUR'S FAIR LOVE                                         48

      KING ARTHUR'S TOMB                                              70

      MERLIN AND NIMUE                                                89

      THE GREAT FOREST                                                94

      NIMUE                                                          105

      THE LOVE OF PELLEAS AND NIMUE                                  134

      DREAM OF SIR LANCELOT                                          139

      OLD ARCHES OF THE ABBEY WALL                                   149

      KING ARTHUR'S ROUND TABLE, WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL                179

      BEAUMAINS, DAMSEL, AND DWARF                                   213

      THE JOYOUS WEDDING                                             235

      SIR TRISTRAM HARPING TO ISOLDE                                 250

      A CASTLE OF CORNWALL                                           258

      TRISTRAM AND THE FAIR ISOLDE                                   273

      THE CLIFFS ABOVE THE SEA                                       288

      TINTAGIL KING ARTHUR'S CASTLE                                  302

      TRISTRAM THEREUPON DEPARTED TO HIS PAVILION                    325

      ADMISSION OF SIR TRISTRAM TO THE KING OF THE
      ROUND TABLE                                                    359

       *       *       *       *       *




INTRODUCTORY.


Geoffrey of Monmouth, the famous chronicler of legendary British
history, tells us,--in reference to the time when the Celtic kings of
Britain were struggling against the Saxon invaders,--that "there
appeared a star of wonderful magnitude and brightness, darting its rays,
at the end of which was a globe of fire in the form of a dragon, out of
whose mouth issued two rays; one of which seemed to stretch itself
beyond the extent of Gaul, the other towards the Irish Sea, and ended in
two lesser rays." He proceeds to say, that Merlin, the magician, being
called on to explain this portent, declared that the dragon represented
Uther, the brother of King Ambrose, who was destined himself soon to
become king; that the ray extending towards Gaul indicated a great son,
who should conquer the Gallic Kingdoms; and that the ray with two lesser
rays indicated a daughter, whose son and grandson should successively
reign over Britain. Uther, in consequence, when he came to the throne,
had two gold dragons made, one of which he placed in the cathedral of
Winchester, which it brightly illuminated; the other he kept, and from
it gained the name of _Pendragon_. The powerful ray represented his
great son Arthur, destined to become the flower of chivalry, and the
favorite hero of mediaeval romance.

This is history as Geoffrey of Monmouth understood it, but hardly so in
the modern sense, and Arthur remains as mystical a figure as Achilles,
despite the efforts of various writers to bring him within the circle of
actual kings. After the Romans left Britain, two centuries passed of
whose history hardly a coherent shred remains. This was the age of
Arthur, one of the last champions of Celtic Britain against the
inflowing tide of Anglo-Saxon invasion. That there was an actual Arthur
there is some, but no very positive, reason to believe. After all the
evidence has been offered, we still seem to have but a shadowy hero
before us, "a king of shreds and patches," whose history is so pieced
out with conjecture that it is next to impossible to separate its facts
from its fancies.

The Arthur of the legends, of the Welsh and Breton ballads, of the later
_Chansons de Geste_, of Malory and Tennyson, has quite stepped out of
the historic page and become a hero without time or place in any real
world, a king of the imagination, the loftiest figure in that great
outgrowth of chivalric romance which formed the favorite fictitious
literature of Europe during three or four of the mediaeval centuries.
Charlemagne, the leading character in the earlier romances of chivalry,
was, in the twelfth century, replaced by Arthur, a milder and more
Christian-like hero, whose adventures, with those of his Knights of the
Round Table, delighted the tenants of court and castle in that
marvel-loving and uncritical age. That the stories told of him are all
fiction cannot be declared. Many of them may have been founded on fact.
But, like the stones of a prehistoric wall, their facts are so densely
enveloped by the ivy of fiction that it is impossible to delve them out.

The ballads and romances in which the King Arthur of mediaeval story
figures as the hero, would scarcely prove pleasant and profitable
reading to us now, however greatly they delighted our ancestors. They
are marked by a coarseness and crudity which would be but little to our
taste. Nor have we anything of modern growth to replace them. Milton
entertained a purpose of making King Arthur the hero of an epic poem,
but fortunately yielded it for the nobler task of "Paradise Lost."
Spenser gives this hero a minor place in his "Fairie Queen." Dryden
projected a King Arthur epic, but failed to write it. Recently Bulwer
has given us a cumbersome "King Arthur," which nobody reads; and
Tennyson has handled the subject brilliantly in his "Idyls of the King,"
splendid successes as poems, yet too infiltrated with the spirit of
modernism to be acceptable as a reproduction of the Arthur of romance.
For a true rehabilitation of this hero of the age of chivalry we must go
to the "Morte Darthur" of Sir Thomas Malory, a writer of the fifteenth
century, who lived when men still wore armor, and so near to the actual
age of chivalry as to be in full sympathy with the spirit of its
fiction, and its pervading love of adventure and belief in the magical.

Malory did a work of high value in editing the confused mass of earlier
fiction, lopping off its excrescences and redundancies, reducing its
coarseness of speech, and producing from its many stories and episodes
a coherent and continuous narrative, in which the adventures of the
Round Table Knights are deftly interwoven with the record of the birth,
life, and death of the king, round whom as the central figure all these
knightly champions revolve. Malory seems to have used as the basis of
his work perhaps one, perhaps several, old French prose romances, and
possibly also material derived from Welsh and English ballads. Such
material in his day was doubtless abundant. Geoffrey had drawn much of
his legendary history from the ancient Welsh ballads. The mass of
romantic fiction which he called history became highly popular, first in
Brittany, and then in France, the Trouveres making Arthur, Lancelot,
Tristram, Percival, and others of the knightly circle the heroes of
involved romances, in which a multitude of new incidents were invented.
The Minnesingers of Germany took up the same fruitful theme, producing a
"Parzivale," a "Tristan and Isolt," and other heroic romances. From all
this mass of material, Malory wrought his "Morte Darthur," as Homer
wrought his "Iliad" from the preceding warlike ballads, and the unknown
compiler of the "Nibelungenlied" wrought his poem from similar ancient
sources.

Malory was not solely an editor. He was in a large sense a creator. It
was coarse and crude material with which he had to deal, but in his
hands its rude prose gained a degree of poetic fervor. The legends which
he preserves he has in many cases transmuted from base into precious
coin. There is repulsive matter in the old romances, which he freely
cuts out. To their somewhat wooden heroes he gives life and character,
so that in Lancelot, Gawaine, Dinadan, Kay, and others we have to deal
with distinct personalities, not with the non-individualized
hard-hitters of the romances. And to the whole story he gives an epic
completeness which it lacked before. In the early days of Arthur's reign
Merlin warns him that fate has already woven its net about him and that
the sins of himself and his queen will in the end bring his reign to a
violent termination, and break up that grand fellowship of the Round
Table which has made Britain and its king illustrious. This epic
character of Malory's work is pointed out in the article "Geoffrey of
Monmouth" in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," whose writer says that the
Arthurian legends "were converted into a magnificent prose poem by Sir
Thomas Malory in 1461. Malory's _Morte Darthur_ is as truly _the_ epic
of the English mind as the _Iliad_ is the epic of the Greek mind."

Yet the "Morte Darthur," if epic in plan and treatment, is by no means
free from the defects of primitive literature. It was written before the
age of criticism, and confusion reigns supreme in many of its pages,--a
confusion which a very little critical supervision might have removed.
As an instance, we find that Galahad, two years after his birth, is made
a knight, being then fifteen years old. In like manner the "seat
perilous" at the Round Table is magically reserved for Galahad, the
author evidently forgetting that he had already given it to Percivale.
King Mark's murder of his brother Baldwin is revenged by Baldwin's
grandson, thirty or forty years afterward, though there is nothing to
show that the characters had grown a year older in the interval. Here a
knight finds one antagonist quite sufficient for one man; there he does
not hesitate to attack fifty at once; here a slight wound disables him;
there a dozen deep wounds are fully healed by a night's rest. Many
similar instances might be given, but these will suffice. The
discrepancies here indicated were perhaps due to the employment of
diverse legends, without care to bring them into accordance, but they
lay the work open to adverse criticism.

This lack of critical accuracy may have been a necessary accompaniment
of the credulous frame of mind that could render such a work possible.
It needed an artlessness of mental make-up, a full capacity for
acceptance of the marvellous, a simple-minded faith in chivalry and its
doings, which could scarcely exist in common with the critical
temperament. In truth, the flavor of an age of credulity and simplicity
of thought everywhere permeates this quaint old work, than which nothing
more artless, simple, and unique exists in literature, and nothing with
a higher value as a presentation of the taste in fiction of our mediaeval
predecessors.

Yet the "Morte Darthur" is not easy or attractive reading, to other than
special students of literature. Aside from its confusion of events and
arrangement, it tells the story of chivalry with a monotonous lack of
inflection that is apt to grow wearisome, and in a largely obsolete
style and dialect with whose difficulties readers in general may not
care to grapple. Its pages present an endless succession of single
combats with spear and sword, whose details are repeated with wearisome
iteration. Knights fight furiously for hours together, till they are
carved with deep wounds, and the ground crimsoned with gore. Sometimes
they are so inconsiderate as to die, sometimes so weak as to seek a
leech, but as often they mount and ride away in philosophical disregard
of their wounds, and come up fresh for as fierce a fight the next day.

As for a background of scenery and architecture, it scarcely exists.
Deep interest in man and woman seems to have shut out all scenic
accessories from the mind of the good old knight. It is always but a
step from the castle to the forest, into which the knights-errant
plunge, and where most of their adventures take place; and the favorite
resting-and jousting-place is by the side of forest springs--or wells,
as in the text. We have mention abundant of fair castles, fair valleys,
fair meadows, and the like, the adjective "fair" going far to serve all
needs of description. But in his human characters, with their loves and
hates, jousts and battles, bewitchments and bewilderments, the author
takes deep interest, and follows the episodical stories which are woven
into the plot with a somewhat too satisfying fulness. In evidence of the
dramatic character of many of these episodes we need but refer to the
"Idyls of the King," whose various romantic and tragic narratives are
all derived from this quaint "old master" of fictitious literature.

With all its faults of style and method, the "Morte Darthur" is a very
live book. It never stops to moralize or philosophize, but keeps
strictly to its business of tale-telling, bringing up before the reader
a group of real men and women, not a series of lay-figures on a
background of romance, as in his originals.

Kay with his satirical tongue, Dinadan with his love of fun, Tristram
loving and noble, Lancelot bold and chivalrous, Gawaine treacherous and
implacable, Arthur kingly but adventurous, Mark cowardly and
base-hearted, Guenever jealous but queenly, Isolde tender and faithful,
and a host of other clearly individualized knights and ladies move in
rapid succession through the pages of the romance, giving it, with its
manners of a remote age, a vital interest that appeals to modern tastes.

In attempting to adapt this old masterpiece to the readers of our own
day, we have no purpose to seek to paraphrase or improve on Malory. To
remove the antique flavor would be to destroy the spirit of the work. We
shall leave it as we find it, other than to reduce its obsolete
phraseology and crudities of style to modern English, abridge the
narrative where it is wearisomely extended, omit repetitions and
uninteresting incidents, reduce its confusion of arrangement, attempt a
more artistic division into books and chapters, and by other arts of
editorial revision seek to make it easier reading, while preserving as
fully as possible those unique characteristics which have long made it
delightful to lovers of old literature.

The task here undertaken is no light one, nor is success in it assured.
Malory has an individuality of his own which gives a peculiar charm to
his work, and to retain this in a modernized version is the purpose with
which we set out and which we hope to accomplish. The world of to-day
is full of fiction, endless transcripts of modern life served up in a
great variety of palatable forms. Our castle-living forefathers were not
so abundantly favored. They had no books,--and could not have read them
if they had,--but the wandering minstrel took with them the place of the
modern volume, bearing from castle to court, and court to castle, his
budget of romances of magic and chivalry, and delighting the
hard-h