Sir Thomas Malory: January 1922 (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Sir Thomas January 1922

Sir thomas malory came late to his high theme. The hey-day of Arthurian romance was over by the middle of the thirteenth century. Then began the period of scribes and interpolators, with their sequels and enfances. The outlines of the old stories were blurred, their movement slowed down under the accumulation of subsidiary adveni tures, conventional and interminable. They had always been long winded enough; the evenings in a mediaeval castle, when the day's fighting was over, were long. The alliterative revival of the fourteenth century gave some fresh impulse, but it passed. Then the Romance of the Rose brought in the new mode of sentimental allegory, and Chaucer followed with his quicker and more vivid way of telling tales. Moreover, the best of the romances were still in French, and cultivated England was ceasing to talk French. They became old fashioned, and at the most contributed to balladry. It is the popular literature - ballads, carols, miracle-plays - which counts most in theih/ fifteenth century; except for Malory himself, who has nothing to do' with all these. And so when Malory began to turn over the faded manuscripts in the window-seat of some country manor, and to shape them into his strong new prose, he was almost as deliberate an archaist as the writer of The Faerie Queene or the writer of The Defence of Guenevere. It was not all loss. Detached from the tradition, he had to pour some new wine into the old bottles, to bring his antiquarian findings into some kind of vital relation to the thought and conditions of his own day. I shall come back to that.

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