Talk at a Country House: Down to Tower'd Camelot

THE squire was from home for a day or two, on business. When he came back, he asked the ladies, “ What have you been doing while I was away ? ” They answered, “We took Mr. Foster to Camelot, to convince him that it was Cadbury in Somersetshire, and not Winchester, which he declared Caxton to have said it to be.”

Squire. Caxton was a wise as well as a good man, and his knowledge was great; but even he did not know everything. In the Introduction to the Globe Edition of Morte Darthur you will find the reasons for holding that King Arthur’s Camelot — probably from Camelus, the Celtic god of war — was the Cadbury Castle you saw yesterday. But perhaps you are already convinced that you had seen the true Camelot, and that Arthur really held his court there ?

Foster. Certainly. I felt like Mopsa, who loved a ballad in print, because then she knew it to be true.

Squire. I should like to hear your account of the expedition. I know you keep a journal.

Foster (fetches a notebook, and reads from it). “ We got to Sparkford at about one o’clock on a day of terrible midsummer heat; from there we drove to South Cadbury, about two miles off. The drive was across a plain ; in fact, the end of the great valley which runs up from the sea, roughly speaking, bounded by the Mendip range on one side, and the Polden hills, parallel to Mendip, on the other, and the beginning of the downs which join on to the system of Salisbury Plain, shutting in the valley at right angles to Mendip and the Polden hills. In this great trench are islands: near the sea, such ones as Brent Knoll; further up, Glastonbury Tor ; and furthest from the sea, and just under the downs, lies Camelot. As we drove, we could see, looking towards our right, the downs bounding the horizon with their characteristic slopes, the flat tops and steep sloping sides and general plainness of surface which give to downs an individuality among hills. Along their ridges were to be seen scars on their sides showing old encampments. Close under these downs stands Camelot, a long, regularly sloped hill, quite isolated, its top at a distance looking nearly horizontal, while the two ends present a slope of about the same angle; the side towards us was thickly wooded, and so no ramparts were to be seen. At South Cadbury, a pretty village, with its little church and pollard poplar-trees round it, we began our walk. A narrow lane, with steep banks, leading out of the highroad, and called Castle Lane, began to go up the hill. After a short distance we reached a gate: here the lane widened, and seemed to go straight up the hill in a broad ditch. A short way up, roads branched to right and left; on the one to the left was a gamekeeper’s cottage. These branching roads were, in fact, the first ditches at the top of the first slope of earthwork. Before telling of our ascent of the fort, I will describe the general lines on which the defenses are made, as this will simplify the account I am going to give of the details. Imagine to yourself a plain out of which rises a hill, two hundred feet high, of regular shape on the northern side; a slight slope up from the plain suddenly turns into a steep rampart of about fifty feet, so steep that we, like Camden, found it easier to run down it than walk. Gaining the top of this first rampart, you find yourself on a narrow edge, sloping steeply down to a ditch, a slope of perhaps ten feet; from the bottom of this ditch rises the second rampart, of about the same height as the first, which again ends in an edge sloping down to a second ditch, from which rises the third rampart, like the second, but not so high as the first and second, though as steep; this, too, has its ditch, and from it rises the fourth and last rampart. The top of this one is embanked about ten feet above the nearly flat top of the hill. This is a space of some twenty acres, and at the eastern end enters the roadway leading up from the bottom to where I have said we first began to climb, the roadway cutting through ditches and ramparts. This entrance was, no doubt, protected by the iron gates which still live in tradition. So the road enters the oval top of the hill at the eastern end. Opposite, at the western end, another road just like this one comes up from the bottom ; a little to the north of this western gate the ground rises in a knoll, called Arthur’s Castle, and is the highest part of the hill, being five hundred feet above the sea. It has steep sides, which seem partly the result of art, and partly natural.

“ One could not help being struck by the simple earth walls and their primitive strength, and feeling how different must have been the people who lived here in rude strength from the gorgeous images of the Camelot of Malory. How entirely the life here must have differed from the mediæval surroundings from which he drew his color ! And we could not help wondering who were the people who began to make a fortress out of the hill, and what were the names of those who had brought these earth mounds and ditches to such perfection of strength. Strange that the genius that planned and the energy that executed should have left only the work accomplished, and no record of those by whose might it was framed ! Strange that a people so great, who could carve the everlasting hills into citadels, and whose mounds and ditches have survived ‘ the drums and tramplings of three conquests,’1 should have left no name even in the histories of nations now dead!

“ ‘ But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids ? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana ; he is almost lost that built it.’¹

“ The greater part of the hill is wooded. This, unfortunately, hides the ramparts and ditches, except at close quarters, but then they are seen clearly. We made our way up through the eastern entrance, walked across the oval top, and went out at the western gate down the hill to the bottom, where we found a wall below the last rampart shutting in the hill from the fields round. We then walked round the northern slope inside this wall, in search of the Wishing Well. After going a little way, the squire’s daughter saw a cow ” —

Squire (interrupting). And you all ran for your lives, I suppose ?

Foster. No, we did not. The young lady only availed herself, as her father would have done, of the opportunity for the exercise of the higher criticism, as you will see if you let me go on, — “ saw a cow on the top of the first rampart above us (here not very high), and thought this might indicate water. We went to the place only to find a muddy pool, and were thinking of going on farther, when the other lady of the party, her sister-in-law, noticed, a little to the right of the pool, a few steps above it, a small inclosure some twenty feet square, made by a low, dry wall; going into this, she found the well. The second rampart slopes up at the back of the little inclosure, making one of its walls; in its side, on the ground, is the Wishing Well. A block of stone, about four feet long, has been hollowed out into a circular arch, the inside of which is cut into a scallop shell ; this block might be the top part or roof of a semicircular niche, though here it rests on no pillars, but on the ground, so the opening is only some two feet high and three long; the surface of the water was about a foot below the ground, in a little basin built, apparently, of brick, on the same plan as the scalloped roof, — that is, in front straight, the back a half - round. The water was of crystal clearness and of icy coldness. Although the shape of the stone was evidently not very old, possibly of the time of Queen Anne, as it is sometimes called Queen Anne’s Well, still, here it seemed a living thing of the past. The soft gurgle of the spring, as it ran away in some hidden channel, heard only when one bent close to the water, made one feel it was thus that this spring ran when those ramparts over our heads, now slumbering in peaceful decay, had resounded to the busy life of a capital city of the old British kingdom, or had echoed to the battle cry of a mightier race, the torrent of whose conquest this citadel had stayed, but not arrested. Not only did the well put us in touch with ‘ the clouded forms of long past history,’ but we also thought of those whom poets have made much clearer.

For, at Camelot, Arthur and his knights still ride at the full moon and water their horses at this well. The hill of ramparts and ditches rose in the imagination to something much more than a stockaded camp of a savage tribe, and, like Leland before us, we felt that we were at the local habitation of those airy nothings, those fancies of poets’ brains, King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, whose deeds had played as important a part as had Troy the ancient, and influenced the modern world as greatly. Whether it was from such thoughts as these or not I cannot say, but the water of the Wishing Well seemed a draught inspiring beyond all other water. But we had other things to see yet, and above all to prove if the hill were hollow; for the legends of the country assert that a noise made at King Arthur’s Well is heard at the Wishing Well; so the ladies stayed at the latter, while I started in search of King Arthur’s Well, the other spring on the hill. This I found at no great distance, close to the cottage, and on the left side of the eastern road up the hill. This was a stone with a round hole in it about two feet across, the well below being a circular place about four feet deep, full of filthy and all but stagnant water, and quite powerless to excite the imagination. At the appointed time I made much noise by hitting boards and sticks on the mouth of the well; but on going back to the Wishing Well found that my noises had not been heard. Considering that we had drunk deep of the clear spring, I was relieved to think it did not communicate with the poisonous waters of King Arthur’s Well. We now set out to see more of the southern side, and, walking along past the cottage, found ourselves on the top of the first rampart. On the southeastern slope the walls of earth stand out in bald grandeur, for there are no trees, and here we could appreciate the enormous strength of the ramparts rising tier above tier over our heads. I have seen other camps of this kind, but never anything like this ; the steepness of the sides and the regularity of the slopes make it a striking spectacle. As we got farther round on the south side, trees began again, though more scattered ; and as we climbed up gradually, startling countless rabbits, and at one place a badger, the views became of great beauty, till, reaching the top of the southern side, near the west gate, we looked down on the village of Sutton Montis. Nothing could have been more lovely. A little brook with willows skirted the fortress, after leaving the downs opposite whence it rose ; across this brook lay a vast orchard, the orderly rows of its great trees clearly seen from our height; beyond this came the ‘ pleasant villages and farms adjoined,’ — one especially glowing roof of almost crimson tiles took the eye; beyond this, again, the church, and then the vast sweep of view towards Dorsetshire. From here we went through the western gate of the top of the camp, and descended the hill by the road at that end, leaving Camelot by the west, having come there by the east. We then went a pleasant way across the grounds, orchards and fields, till a path near the river took us back into Sparkford, where the interval till our train was due was filled by many cups of tea in a pleasant old inn. The train took us home in a golden evening, and we were left with visions of romance and of the monumental handiwork of a vanished people, all seen through a halo of midsummer sunlight.” ²

Squire. Very good geography, physical, military, and archæological; not without a touch, too, of purple patch, and some of a very fine purple.

Foster. If it had been full moon or the eve of St. John, I think I should have begged the ladies to stay with me, or to leave me there, that I, too, might hear and see Arthur and his knights come riding down King Arthur’s Lane, as, according to local tradition, they have never left off doing since the days of Leland, whose account I have just been reading, who tells us of the silver horseshoe that one of them had cast in such a ride.

Squire. I have often fancied that if I had the poet’s gift of looking into and seeing the imaginary past, while the senses of the present are laid asleep, the vision would come to me on the grassy mound called Arthur’s Castle, at the top of the hill of Camelot. Even now that vision rises before me with successive magic scenes, “ apart from place, withholding time,” but always in that golden prime of Arthur and his knights. I seem to see the town of Camelot, while within the hall is the Round Table, its seats filling with knights come to the feast of Pentecost, though Arthur will not take his place till be hears from Sir Kay, the Seneschal, that an adventure is at hand, since some unknown lady or knight can be seen riding down the road. Scene after scene rises before me of things done, and words spoken, and quests undertaken, in that hall; and not least that when the Holy Grail, covered with white samite, passed through, offering every knight for once to partake of that mysterious food, and awaking in him the resolve to achieve that quest. And then,

“ I see no longer, I myself am there,” among the crowd of ladies and knights who gathered to see the barge which came floating down the river with the dead but beautiful Elaine, the Lady of Shalot, and hear Sir Launcelot tell her sad tale. The river may be seen by the bodily eye, and in the light of summer day ; and so may Glastonbury and Avalon, no longer, indeed, an island on the one hand, and the site at least of the nunnery of Almesbury on the other. But now the vision rises before me of the twofold story of Malory and Tennyson, of that parting, solemn to awfulness, of Arthur and Guenever, when he rode out through the mist, without looking back, to the battle which he knew was to be his last; of the battle, and of the coming of that barge with the weeping ladies who bore away the dying king to Avalon. Then, again, those last laments of Launcelot over Arthur and Guenever, and of Ector over Launcelot himself. These actions are very real to me ; and yet, as I speak, I know, like Prospero, that they are melting into air, into thin air.

Foster. My sympathies are all with you, squire, but yet forgive me if I ask, as I heard your little grandson ask the other day when you were telling him a story, “ Is it true ? Tell me something real.” And I should be glad to think that the fabric of your vision is not altogether baseless.

Squire. Yes, and no. And first, yes. Camelot itself, call it castle, or fortress, or camp, as you will, stands there with its smaller outlying forts in the forefront of my answer. It stands in the very place where you would draw the line at which the onward progress of the English towards the southwest was stopped for one hundred years after they had won the battle of Deorham in 577, and taken the cities of Sarum and Bath. Is it not clear, so far as reasonable inference can supply the lack of direct historical record, that it was this Camelot which stayed their advance, — a fortress formed and held by Freedom’s hands ? And if Arthur was a king of Britain or of the British during part of that hundred years, it is not unreasonable to believe that it was at Camelot that he held his camp, if not his court.

Foster. But was there an Arthur at all ? Milton, with all his admiration for Arthur and his knights as heroes of romance, did not believe in his historical existence ; so you will hardly expect me to satisfy my doubts by the historical arguments by which Caxton tells us that many noble and divers gentlemen satisfied his doubts, nor even by the evidence which they called in of Gawain’s skull, Cradock’s mantle, and Launcelot’s sword.

Squire. Though, you took his word for it that Camelot was Winchester. But I can give you better authority than that of Caxton, or Milton, or any one else. Here (opening a drawer, and taking out a letter) is the last letter which I received from my old friend Edward Freeman. He writes: —

“ Guest taught me to believe in Arthur, and there is a notice of him which, if not history, is at best very early legend, in the Life of Gildas. It proves a good bit, anyhow. Then R舒seemed to disbelieve in him, and now be seems to have taken to him again. I tell R舒 that I live much too near to Avalon, which is Glastonbury, to give him up altogether, and that I can’t part with him to them of Strathclyde.”

But it is a very slight and dim existence at best. You just now compared the story of Arthur to that of Agamemnon ; and I might add that Camelot is to Malory’s Morte Darthur what Dr. Sehliemann’s Troy is to the Iliad.

Foster. Your answer to my question was to be “ no ” as well as “yes.”

Squire. But I cannot say “ no,” after all. Those knights and ladies do live to me, as I trust that they will live to many an English-speaking boy and girl yet unborn. But I will answer your question in the best Dryasdust fashion that I can. I do not attempt to follow up the old legends to those pre-Christian and even prehistoric sources of which some learned writers believe that they can get occasional glimpses. I am content to believe that in the ages in which war was more to men than peace, and imagination more than cool reason, the legends somehow grew up. The British bards termed the actual losses of their countrymen glorious gain and triumphs of poetry; and when they were driven back into Cornwall and Wales and Scotland, they found everywhere new Camelots and Round Tables at Tintagel, Caerleon, and Carlisle, and across the sea in Brittany. Mr. Symonds tells us that in the Middle Ages the legends of Arthur were greater favorites with the educated classes in Italy than the earlier ones of Charlemagne, which were left to the common people. And it is a curious fact that Gervase of Tilbury, writing early in the thirteenth century, gives a story of the discovery in the woods of Mount Etna, in Sicily, of King Arthur, there biding his time in solemn seclusion, which exactly corresponds with the like story which has been told of the Somersetshire Camelot by a peasant girl to a lady now living. The minstrel, or troubadour, wandered far; and he carried everywhere with him not only the name, but the local habitation of his hero.

Foster. Were not the Chivalry romances chiefly French?

Squire. If you except the greatest of all, that of Sir Thomas Malory, perhaps they were. He says there were in Welsh many, and in French many; and he also makes use of old English romances. But the Curate found in Don Quixote’s library a pretty good number of Spanish romances. And you must remember that French was the language of the English Norman lords and ladies, and that England was first of the lands of chivalry, whatever was its chief language.

Foster. I think Southey says, in the preface either to his Amadis or Palmerin, that the Spanish and Portuguese romances bear evidence, in their references to England, that this was so.

Squire. I like to see significance in the fact, pointed out by Frederick Maurice, that the man whom the Germans, the French, the Italians, and the Spaniards honored as ritter, chevalier, cavaliere, caballero, the rider of the war horse, was to the English the knight, the knecht, the servant of all men.

Foster. Is not Amadis of Gaul the most perfect embodiment of the ideal of knighthood ? He is as pure as Perceval or even Galahad, without their monklike asceticism ; and as true and ardent a lover as Launcelot, without his guilty “ honor rooted in dishonor,” as Tennyson calls it.

Squire. The loves of Amadis and Oriana are, indeed, charming. There is nothing in Malory like that description of them in Southey’s translation : —

“ Oriana was about ten years old, the fairest creature that ever was seen; therefore she was called the one ‘ without a peer.’ The Child of the Sea (that is, Amadis) was now twelve years old, but in stature and size he seemed fifteen, and he served the queen; but now that Oriana was there, the queen gave her the Child of the Sea, that he should serve her, and Oriana said that ‘ it pleased her ; ’ and that word which she said the Child kept in his heart, so that he never lost it from his memory, and in all his life he was never weary of serving her, and his heart was surrendered to her; and this love lasted as long as they lasted, for as well as he loved her did she also love him. But the Child of the Sea, who knew nothing of her love, thought himself presumptuous to have placed his thoughts on her, and dared not speak to her; and she, who loved him in her heart, was careful not to speak more with him than with another ; but their eyes delighted to reveal to the heart what was the thing on earth that they loved best, and now the time came that he thought he could take arms if he were knighted ; and this he greatly desired, thinking that he would do such things that, if he lived, his mistress should esteem him.”

I often feel the force of the arguments of the worthy Ascham against the tales of chivalry, and wish that Malory had made Amadis, and not Launcelot, his principal hero. But then I recur to what Caxton had written long before, as if in anticipation of the charge, and how Tennyson has brought out, in full life and proportion as well as with the lineaments of the noblest poetry, this contrast between good and evil, and triumph of good over evil, which Caxton eulogizes in Malory’s story.

Foster. Milton, too, while he expresses a pious and thankful wonder that his youthful footsteps should have been directed in the paths of chastity by the tales of chivalry, among which Malory’s Morte Darthur no doubt found a chief place, seems to recognize that the moral effect on his young mind had been good, and not evil.

Squire. The growth and progress of moral life are as marked and worthy of notice in our tales of chivalry as in any other form of our civilization. And it was our happy lot that, just at the right time, a William Caxton was ready to print and publish the great national epic which he had found and encouraged a Sir Thomas Malory to write. Like the Iliad, it is partly of that lofty and serious kind in which the imagination can believe and find enjoyment. A little later, the old tales of chivalry could only have supplied the material for a moral allegory like that of the Faerie Queene, or a genial burlesque like that of Don Quixote, or a hard, cynical, political satire like that of Hudibras.

Foster. You have said nothing of Tennyson’s revival, may I say, of the old faith in the old poems. It is true, they are idyls, little pictures, and you call Sir Thomas Malory’s romance an epic. Do you hold to that eulogistic designation of Malory’s Morte Darthur, in face of the half-patronizing, half-contemptuous language in which the Caxtons of the present day have described the very book on which they have just lavished all the learning, labor, and cost of many years, — a work which very few will care for or appreciate at its proper value, though many may enjoy the popular fruits of it all ?

Squire. So it is, and must be. I have the sincerest respect for a learning, industry, and generous self-devotion to the cause of letters such as I can make little pretension to. But while I know enough of these things to appreciate what these scholars have done for us, I see no proofs that I ought to submit myself to their authority on a question on which it contradicts my own literary judgment. Look at this book of Malory’s Morte Darthur as it actually is, and not as the critics say it ought to have been, if he had properly followed his sources. You will find on every page the marks of a work of true though early and somewhat rude art; and then, if you will look again with your own eyes, and not with those of the critics, you will see that his art is all his own, and not to be found in the older legends which he has used as materials. I do not know whether Malory had acquaintance with any of what have been called the masterpieces of antiquity, nor whether he was conscious at all that he was himself creating one of such masterpieces. But his work itself lies before us. He has taken the legends of an old national hero and fashioned them into a work of art, with the main characteristic features of the epic, or the drama, of all ages and countries. It is what Carlyle would have called the perennial battle between God and the devil, — the contest between man’s free will and his circumstances ; the Nemesis which attends his way during that contest, and his triumph by help of a higher power than his own. ▵ιòς δϵτλϵιϵτο βουλη Arthur is born into a world of anarchy, for which the lawlessness of his father is more or less responsible ; Merlin watches over him, and, by help of his counsels, Arthur, on reaching manhood, is able to establish and consolidate his kingdom, and even to extend it over that of the Emperor of Rome ; and the Round Table at which he sat as the centre and head of his knights was the sign and token of this world under kingship. But there was a canker at the root of all this glory. After many years of prosperity and of great deeds, both good and evil, the coming of the Holy Grail brought a test which could not be escaped; the fellowship of the Round Table was broken up, and Mordred, the child of the guilty loves of Arthur and Morgan le Fay long years before, became the instrument of divine judgment and retribution. Thus the personages of the story, through whose action its several threads are woven or unwound, are as artistically varied and distinguished as are the events. Both these points of the story and the characters are discussed at some length in the Introduction to the Globe Edition of Morte Darthur, to which I may refer you, if you care for more. Only for the humor of it, do read me the account of the Bishop of Canterbury’s excommunication of Mordred. You will find a mark at the page.

Foster. 舠 And then came the Bishop of Canterbury, the which was a noble clerk and an holy man, and thus he said to Sir Mordred : Sir, what will ye do, will ye first displease God, and sithen shame yourself and all knighthood ? Is not King Arthur your Uncle, no further but your mother’s brother, and are not ye his son, therefore how may ye wed your father’s wife ? Sir, saith the noble clerk, leave this opinion, or else I shall curse you with book, and bell, and candle. Do thy worst, said Sir Mordred, wit thou well I shall defy thee. Sir, said the Bishop, and wit you well I shall not fear me to do that me ought to do. Also where ye noise where my lord Arthur is slain, and that is not so, and therefore ye will make a foul work in this land. Peace, thou false priest, said Sir Mordred, for and thou chafe me any more, I shall strike off thy head. So the Bishop departed, and did the curse in the most orgulous wise that might be done. And then Sir Mordred sought the Bishop of Canterbury for to have slain him. Then the Bishop fled, and took part of his goods with him, and went nigh unto Glastonbury, and there he was as priest hermit in a chapel, and lived in poverty and in holy prayers : for well he understood that mischievous war was at hand.”

Squire. That touch of the bishop escaping into a humble and quiet hermitage, but prudently taking some of his goods with him, after he had done the cursing in the most orgulous manner, always strikes me as very happy. Sir Thomas Malory was a humorist; and his pathos is greater than his humor. Let us hear those last words of Sir Launcelot and Sir Ector. One can never be weary of them.

Foster (reads). “Truly, said Sir Launcelot, I trust I do not displease God, for He knoweth mine intent, for my sorrow was not, nor is not, for any rejoicing of sin, but my sorrow may never have end. For when I remember of her beauty and of her noblesse, that was both with her King and with her; so when I saw his corpse and her corpse so lie together, truly mine heart would not serve to sustain my careful body. Also when I remember me how, by my default, mine orgule, and my pride, that they were both laid full low, that were peerless that ever was living of Christian people, wit you well, said Sir Launcelot, this remembered, of their kindness and mine unkindness, sank so to my heart, that I might not sustain myself.”

And again : —

“ Ah, Launcelot, he said, thou were the head of all Christian knights; and now I dare say, said Sir Ector, thou Sir Launcelot, there thou best, that thou were never matched of earthly knight’s hand ; and thou were the courtiest knight that ever bare shield ; and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse, and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were kindest man that ever strake with sword ; and thou were the goodliest person ever came among press of knights ; and thou was the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies ; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.”

Squire. Here again I would refer you to the Globe Introduction for proof that in these and other instances the passages are either Malory’s own, or have been converted by him into poetry out of mere prosaic materials. In his twenty-first, or last book, in which I think his art is at its highest, he frequently alters or changes the incidents from those in the French books which he is always quoting ; and in each case it seems to me that the variation has been made for the sake of artistic effect.

Foster. You call Morte Darthur a poem, then, and Malory a poet ?

Squire. He has the poet’s eye to see into the life of things, and the poet’s power to endow what he sees with outward form and color, but he wanted that essential qualification of the proper poet which Wordsworth calls the accomplishment of verse.

Foster. Did not Carlyle say that poetry would be better if it were written in prose instead of in verse, and that it might be hoped that the poetry of the future would be so written ?

Squire. I suppose we are all more ready to justify than to confess our mental deficiencies ; and though Carlyle had much poetic insight, he had not the poet’s proper faculty of expression.

Foster. How would you define this poetical mode of expression ? It is something more or other than the skillful art of making lines of ten syllables with or without rhymes at the end.

Squire. One characteristic — I had almost said the characteristic — of verse, in the highest meaning of the word, is its reticence. It was said of the great linguist, Cardinal Mezzofanti, that he could keep silence in forty languages ; and the poet is a man who can and does keep silence in the midst of his wealth of rushing thoughts and words ; and it is in this accomplishment of verse that he finds that the limitations of verse make this silence both proper and profitable. His words must be few while and because every one of them must be a creation, a cosmos, in itself, pregnant with life and meaning. Tennyson evidently saw and understood this in the formation of his style, — in part cultivated his poet’s art which makes his style, in the highest sense of the word, and in which it has been well said to be the man himself. Mr. Knowles tells us³ that he said “Wordsworth would have been much finer if he had written much less ; ” and he told Browning in my presence that “ if he had got rid of two thirds, the remaining third would be much finer.” After saying that, and when Browning had left us, he enlarged on the imperative necessity of restraint in art. “ It is necessary to respect the limits,” he said. “An artist is one who recognizes bounds to his work as a necessity, and does not overflow illimitably to all extent about a matter. I soon found that if I meant to make any mark at all it must be by shortness, for all the men before me had been so diffuse, and all the big things had been done. To get the workmanship as nearly perfect as possible is the best chance for going down the stream of time. A small vessel on fine lines is likely to float further than a great raft.”

Foster. And so you contrast these small vessels, the Idylls, with Malory’s great raft of Le Morte Darthur ?

Squire. Yes. And if you like to shift the metaphor from the ship to the river, you may quote Denham and say : —

Each generation has its own authorities and teachers. I quote Tennyson now; fifty years ago I thought Coleridge’s distinctions of poetry and romance, prose and verse, the best possible ; and indeed I think you will still find them worth reading.

Foster. I know them well, though I did not read them fifty years ago. Judged by Coleridge’s standard, is not Malory’s book a romance rather than a poem ?

Squire. Perhaps it is. I am not at all willing, even for Malory’s sake, to break down the distinction between prose and verse which I think so real and so important. I will content myself with saying that it is a work of art, real though rude ; and for this I have the voice of the world of letters, gentle and simple, on my side, the few and minute critics notwithstanding. Whatever side lights their learning may have supplied to Spenser, Milton, and Tennyson, there can be no reasonable doubt that the Arthur and his knights whom they knew are the king and knights of Malory. The popular voice of approval has never been silent since Caxton printed his first edition ; and during the present century it has been raised, with an ever-increasing volume, to what Tennyson may be said to have given a not inappropriate expression when he said, “ There is no grander subject in the world than King Arthur.”

Foster. The bibliography of the book is curious and interesting, especially as to Upcott’s very ingenious interpolations to supply the missing pages of the Althorp copy. It seems odd that the truth had remained undiscovered for fifty years till you told the story in the Introduction to the Globe Edition.

Squire. When I came to look into the history of the text for myself, I was astonished at the inaccuracy and slovenliness of the professional critics, and their habit of putting second-hand guesses in the place of verified facts. But I venture to say that you may depend on the bibliography of the Globe Introduction and the Prolegomena of Dr. Somer. The work of Dr. Somer is, indeed, a wonderful monument of German learning, industry, and contentment with the reward of the approval and admiration of the few scholars competent to judge of its merits.

Foster. I am afraid that you cannot include the authorities of the British Museum among those who justly appreciate the worth of Malory’s book, when they allowed the one perfect copy of the original edition to go to America.

Squire. From what I have heard, I guess that they outwitted themselves by the overdone caution — not uncommon with buyers at auctions — of trying to make their purchase without giving their bidding agent a free hand. I was very sorry when I first heard that the precious volume which, when it lay in the Osterly Park library, had been seen by very few but myself, was gone to Brooklyn instead of to Bloomsbury. But I could no longer grudge the loss when I remembered that the treasure had only gone to our brothers — may I say our sister ? — across the Atlantic, with whom, as its possessor, Mrs. Abby E. Pope, tells me, it is prized more than it was among ourselves. I could only wish that it may be as safe from risks of fire and other damage as it would have been in the British Museum, and that the present possessor of the Althorp copy will obtain — as would no doubt be allowed — a photograph facsimile of the missing pages, to be substituted for the very inaccurate though beautifully written transcript by Whittaker. But here comes tea. Queen Guenever and her ladies never poured out that at the Round Table, nor invited Arthur and his knights to “ five o’clocker.”

Edward Strachey.