John Walters - The Lost Land of King Arthur

The romance of Arthur was enriched, to use Gibbon’s words, with the various though incoherent ornaments which were familiar to the experience, the learning, or the fancy of the twelfth century. Every nation enhanced and adorned the popular romance, until “at length the light of science and reason was re-kindled, the talisman was broken, the visionary fabric melted into air, and by a natural though unjust reverse of public opinion the severity of the present age became inclined to question the existence of Arthur.” That Arthur’s name should stream like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak is the fault of the mediæval writers who, in taking the British king for their hero, could represent no age but their own, and had no consciousness of anachronism. It came natural to them in speaking of the sixth-century knights to endow them with the attributes of the thirteenth and fourteenth century, and to describe Arthur’s Britain much as they would have described the Britain of a Henry or an Edward. The Arthur of Geoffrey, of Walter Map, and of Malory is as impossible as the Arthur of Wagner, Lytton, Swinburne, and Tennyson. Most of the writers on chivalry have either viewed and treated the Knights of the Round Table as contemporary heroes, or have altogether idealised them. We are forced to the conclusion that Geoffrey and all the other mediæval chroniclers had no real conception of the character of the age of which they wrote; if they discovered real names and real persons they transported them to an imaginary world and invested them with fabulous attributes. They made reality itself unreal, transformed heroes into myths, and buried history beneath romance; they had no power to recognise truth even when it appeared to them.

King Arthur was a traditional and historic chieftain of rude times, the man of an epoch, a hero to be sung and remembered. His life must have been a tumult; his seventy odd battles were the events of his era. Whether he represents a nascent civilisation, or whether, following the Romans, he simply maintained a barbaric splendour in the cities they had made or by means of some enlightened laws they had instituted, is a matter of dispute. But he is the “gray king,” the elemental hero, not the advanced type. It is a remarkable fact that English scholars have until quite recently done so little to popularise Arthurian literature. Malory’s version remained almost inaccessible until Southey issued his edition, and the best work of all was undertaken for us in latter years by Dr. Sommer, a German. Considering the hold on the imagination which the romance possessed, little was done to elucidate the obscurities and to solve the mysteries concerning not only the authors but the heroes themselves and the land to which they belonged. Much has been conjectured, but we feel that we are dealing more with phantoms and fancies than with realities and facts. Yet what an inspiration King Arthur has been! His name has lingered, his memory has been treasured in national ballads. Poets have in all ages hovered round the subject, and some have alighted upon it, only perhaps to leave it again as beyond their scope.

Milton, Spenser, Dryden, Warton, Collins, Scott and Gray, together with derided and half-forgotten Blackmore; Lytton, with his ambitious epic, doomed to unmerited neglect; Rossetti, James Russell Lowell, and lastly, Arnold, Morris, Swinburne, and Tennyson—these have lifted the romance into the highest and purest realm of poetry, and have impregnated the story with new meanings and illuminated it with rich interpretation.

All have felt the influence of Arthur’s history, “its dim enchantments, its fury of helpless battle, its almost feminine tenderness of friendship, its fainting passion, its religious ardours, all at length vanishing in defeat and being found no more.” We have seen how the Arthurian history, real or fabulous, arose from early traditions and grew as each chronicler handled it and combined with it the traditions and the fictions of other races. It lost nothing by its transfusion into new tongues, but was enriched by the imaginations of the adapters and combined with the stories already current in other lands. The hero that Celtic boastfulness had created became the representative hero of at least three peoples in these early times, and the songs of the Trouvères speedily spread his fame over Western Europe. We find Arthur represented as the master of a vast kingdom, and his power extending to Rome itself; and we find him claimed as the natural hero of nearly every race which heard his praise and was kindled to valour by the example of his exploits. Each country seemed bent upon supplying at least one representative of the Table Round, and eagerly competed for the pre-eminence and perfection of the knight of its choice. The kingdom allotted to him was without limit, and as the elder Disraeli would put it, “fancy bent her iris of many-softened hues over a delightful land of fiction.”

Lost though King Arthur’s realm is, the land of the ancient British chieftain must have been real, and it is most possible that we tread the dust which covers it in journeying from Caerleon to Glastonbury, from Glastonbury to Camelford, from Camelford to Tintagel. To these places is our pilgrimage directed.

No matter how far the chroniclers of old departed from fact in the details of their narratives, they grouped the incidents around a central figure, a magnificent ancient hero; and, more than that, they specified the actual locality in which that hero had won his renown. But just as they magnified the hero out of all proportion, so they extended the area of his realm beyond all possibility: hence the difficulties that meet us in the search for truth.

Of the Celts, Ralph Waldo Emerson has perhaps left us, in brief, the best record. He sums up the greatness and the importance of the race by saying that of their beginning there is no memory, and that their end is likely to be still more remote in the future; that they had endurance and productiveness and culture and a sublime creed; that they had a hidden and precarious genius; and that they “made the best popular literature of the Middle Ages in the songs of Merlin and the tender and delicious anthology of Arthur.” This race was not likely to take a narrow view of its possessions, or to assign a small territory to its greatest monarch. Its claim may be preposterous, but that comes of the consciousness of superior strength and of daring imagination. Britain was not large enough for the Celts; they required not a country but a continent. And when their songs were sung, their stories told, and their great Arthur’s name celebrated throughout the west, they boldly affirmed that the west was his, and that he had subdued and ruled the whole civilised world. Arthur’s England became in their eyes the perfect realm, the ideal place; and the survival of this idea may be discovered in the works of the poets, old and new.