Even after these embarrassments, neither Arthur nor Merlin was quite forgotten, especially on the stage, and by the end of the eighteenth century scholars like Thomas Warton and Joseph Ritson and anthologists like Thomas Percy, Thomas Evans, and George Ellis had transmitted the materials of the tradition to a reviving interest: three reprints of Malory appeared in 1816-17. But the English Romantics saw little value in a medieval tradition that was not based in personal moral authenticity: an interesting effort to rewrite Malory in verse like Reginald Heber’s Morte D’Arthur (ca. 1810) was uncompleted, while Wordsworth in The Bridal of Triermain (1813) and Scott in The Lady of the Lake (1810) made Arthurian characters, especially Merlin, the enemies of morality. But Arthur did have some positive role in the period. Cornish, Welsh, and Scottish writers found him and Merlin useful to validate a separate identity, and some little-remembered English texts offered Arthurian adventure in the far north—including the Arctic and the Northwest Passage. John Dee had drawn this idea from Arthur’s Norman-Viking adventures in Geoffrey of Monmouth to justify Elizabethan claims, and the Arctic Arthur thrived in Richard Hole’s Arthur, or the Northern Enchantment (1789), John Thelwall’s The Fairy of the Lake (1801), Charles Milman’s Samor, Lord of the Bright City (1818), and, grandest and most Northwest Passage-connected of all, Bulwer Lytton’s stanzaic epic King Arthur (1848).
Interesting as these activities are, it was Tennyson who brought Arthur back to vigorous life. His scholarship and his feeling for the death of Arthur Hal-lam led to the “Morte Darthur” in 1833, and he long planned the discontinuous epic that started with four poems in 1859, to be completed as the 12 Idylls of the King in 1885, ending with the still Hallam-connected “The Passing of Arthur.” As he began the great work, Tennyson drew on the Vulgate for “Merlin and Vivien” and the Welsh Mabinogion romances for what would be “The Marriage of Geraint” and “Geraint and Enid” (originally one long idyll), but his major source was Malory, selecting episodes to explore aspirations and, mostly, failures. Arthur is a moral monarch with no real enemies except human weakness: most of his supporters are derailed by temptation, whether sexual (as with Merlin, Pelleas, and Tristram), mystical (as with Galahad), or simply the attractions of indiscipline (as with Gawain, Pelleas, Balin, and Balan). But for male weakness in general, the ultimate blame is sheeted home to women like Vivien, Ettare, and Isolt, and the central errant figure of Guinevere, whose infidelity is made, in Arthur’s own and almost completely unforgiving voice, the main cause for tragedy.
Tennyson reestablished the Arthurian theme in terms of a masculinist, moralist, and royalist myth that had failed in the face of modern fallibility and sensuality, but the poem’s text and imagery richly creates the sensual world that it sees as the bane of all goodness. Many conservative writers in Britain and the United States reworked these themes, usually clumsily, especially in verse plays around 1900: poets such as T. S. Eliot and David Jones were to see both Tennyson and Arthur as old-world and used the myth only in referential ways, but, through working in the modernist fragmentary mode, their treatment was also potent. The strongest anti-Tennysonian voice was Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889). In Yankee, Arthur is at first a cruel fool, and Twain’s illustrator, Dan Beard (1850-1941), depicted the mean-minded Merlin as Tennyson himself. But Twain also projected his satire of medieval and modern England into a critique of the United States. The final battle is a Civil War version of Camlan, as the Yankee, rich in both technology and self-confidence, slaughters the whole chivalry of England and Arthur is finally seen not as a feudal bully, but as a valid human spirit, a royal individual.
World History
