LANCELOT AND GUENEVERE.

335 drawn by the great tragic poets of Athens. When first Arthur thinks of wedding her, he is warned, as we have seen, by the wise Merlin that she will not be a wholesome wife for him; and from the circumstances already noticed it is clear that according to the conceptions of some one or other of the romance-makers her actual faithlessness began before Lancelot had seen the future mother of his child. It may be urged that the sensual fury displayed by Guenevere, when she finds that the very plan which she has laid to keep Lancelot by her side leads to his being again entrapped by Elaine while he sojourns in Arthur's court, is to be charged to the corrupt imagination of a later age; but it must be remembered that the very structure of the story which relates the career of Galahad utterly precludes this notion. Nay, Guenevere is not only a destroyer of many knights, as she might easily be on the hypothesis that though seemingly guilty she was really innocent we have seen that in the case of Meliagrance she combines cruelty with her sensuality. As to Lancelot, who thus commits murder at her bidding, he avoids in this instance the utterance of a direct falsehood, because the partial knowledge of Meliagrance makes it possible for him to employ the tricks of a dishonest pleader.

Thus, then, we have treachery on the one side, and faithlessness on the other; and the taking away of Guenevere from the court of Arthur, who had cherished him as his friend, answers to the taking away of Helen from Menelaos by the man in whom he had placed a perfect trust. In short, the character of Lancelot precisely reflects that of Paris; and the words of Menelaos before the walls of Ilion are echoed in those of Arthur before the gates of Joyous Gard. 6 Fie on thy fair speech; I am now thy mortal foe, for thou hast slain my knights and dishonoured my queen.' But in spite of all his efforts, the Christian sentiment of the romance-maker cannot disguise the nature of the materials which he was handling. If Arthur was

1 See p. 319.

the man so little extreme to mark what is done amiss, as he is here represented, so little disposed to think evil of another without due evidence, the persistence with which he follows up to the death a quarrel with his friend on a charge which, according to some portions of the story as we have it, is unproven, and even after the touching protestations of innocence which mark the restitution of Guenevere to her husband, becomes inexplicable. But if the character of Arthur here drawn is not Christian, it is because the portraits of Achilles and Odysseus in our Iliad and Odyssey are not Achaian.1

Arthur and
Mordred.

We have now reached the ending of the great drama. The victory of the snake Ahi is a victory of the great worm of darkness, which slays the light of day; and thus in the Arthur myths also visions of snakes bring the foreboding of the end. The king dreams that he sits in a chair, fastened to a wheel, beneath which lies a deep black water full of serpents and noisome things, and that suddenly the wheel turns round and he is plunged into the infernal stream, where the serpents seize him by all his limbs. From this dream he passes into a half-waking state, in which he thinks that he sees the form of the dead Gawaine, and hears his voice warning him not to fight on the morrow, but to make a month's truce with Mordred, whose name (although little can be said of the names in these later compositions) seems to betoken him as the murderer, biter, or crusher. The king follows Gawaine's advice; but his doom is not thus to be averted. It had been agreed that if during the conference between Arthur and Mordred a sword should be raised on either side, this should be the signal for mortal battle. But while they are yet speaking, the snake again plays its part. An adder bites the heel of one of Arthur's knights, who raises his weapon to slay the venomous beast; and Mordred's people, taking alarm, rush upon their adversaries. The prophecy of Merlin is well-nigh accomplished. The father and the son See p. 276.

THE DEATH OF ARTHUR.

337

are to die, each by the other's hand. In vain Sir Lucan warns Arthur to remember his dream; Arthur will not hear. He sees the traitor who has done all the wrong, and betide him life or betide him death, he is resolved to slay him. But Mordred, writhing like a snake along the spear which has passed through his body, smites Arthur on the temples with the sword which he holds in both hands, and the king falls back in a swoon. It is the old tale of the Fatal Children, of children born to be great, born to slay their parents. There is death everywhere; and the phrases which described the death of the day and the night, of the sun and the darkness, of the dawn and the dew, explain every incident of the closing scenes in the lives of the heroes or maidens who maidens who represent them in mythical stories. One feature more remains. With the death of the sun his rays cease to shoot across the heaven. The great being is gone who could wield the unerring spear, or bow, or sword; and his weapon must go with him. Hence Arthur's sword must no more be profaned by the touch of mortal hand; and as the sun rises from the eastern waters when Phoebus springs to life on Delos, and plunges into his sleep like Endymion or Odysseus in the western sea, so the sword Excalibur must be restored to the waters from which it had arisen.

Arthur himself, as we have seen, is borne away in the barge in which the weird sisters have long waited for him ; but he departs, not to die, but only to heal Arthur in the him of his grievous wound in the valley of Vale of Avilion. Avilion, the Latmian land in which Endymion takes his rest. Still, as the ages rolled on, and experience taught men more and more that there is no man who shall not see death, and as the belief grew that in telling Arthur's story they were speaking of a man who had really lived on the earth, so was the need felt more and more of saying plainly that he died. But the old myth still retained something of its old power; and the story-tellers who chanted the lays of

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the Helgis or of Arthur were each constrained to avow that according to the older faith neither Helgi the slayer of Hunding nor Arthur the peerless knight had ever died at all, and that he who had been king should yet be king again. Arthur was now, in short, one of that goodly company which numbers in its ranks the great Karl and Barbarossa, Sebastian of Portugal, the Tells of Rutli, the English Harold, and the Moor Boabdil. None of these is dead; for the sun, while men see him not, is but slumbering under that spell of night, whether in her beautiful or in her awful forms, which keeps True Thomas beneath the hills of Ercildoune, or Tanhaüser in the caves of the Horselberg or Odysseus in the grotto of Kalypso. Arthur does but sleep in the charmed slumber of the Cretan Epimenides or the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus; and under this spell lies not Arthur only, but the wise Merlin who had foretold his birth and destiny, had received him as a babe, and had witnessed his fame.1

In his wisdom and foresight, in his perfect knowledge of a coming fate, which yet to Arthur's surprise he makes no Merlin. attempt to avoid, Merlin 2 strongly resembles the Hellenic Odysseus. But the point of the story told about him in its closing scenes is the besotted affection of the old sage for a damsel who, he knows, cares nothing for him. Yet he suffers the maiden, who is a water-nymph, to entice him into a cavern in which she imprisons him beneath a great stone. This is precisely the story of Tanhauser and the goddess of the Horselberg; with very slight modification it is the story of Thomas of Ercildoune, and of Prince Ahmed and the Peri Banou in the Arabian Nights Tales. Here he is kept fast in an imprisonment from which none can deliver him except the woman who lured him into it; or, as the story avers, not a hundred men could lift the huge stone beneath

The Arthur story has been shown by Mr. Campbell to be in all essential features the same as the Highland legend of the history of the Feinne. Popular Tales of the West Highlands, iv. 267.

2 Popular Romances of the Middle Ages, 115. See Appendix V.

which Merlin made great dole. This is substantially the legend of the philosopher Abu Ajeeb, related by Washington Irving in the Legends of the Alhambra. It is true that here it is the sage who contrives to get the Gothic princess within the gate of his enchanted paradise; but the besotted affection of the old man for the blooming maiden is precisely reproduced, and here again it is the sorceress only who can set him free. Whenever the sage shows symptoms of awakening from his charmed slumber, the tones of her magic harp speedily lull him to sleep again. As she is herself imprisoned by him, this is obviously the only way in which she can prolong his captivity. In the Merlin story she can leave him to himself, because she has enticed him to enter in, while she stands without.1

Romances like those of Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick may be regarded rather as the arbitrary fictions of

1 The notion of Merlin being a demon child is the result of the same degra dation which converted Odin and the Æsir into devils. Neither in Teutonic nor in Hellenic lands did the Christian missionaries question the existence of the gods or heroes named in the mythologies of the tribes to whom they preached. The deities were allowed to live, but they lived on under a curse. But that these deified or supernatural beings might connect themselves with mortal women, was a belief unquestioned, whether by those who framed the story of the hero Astrabakos (Herod. vi. 69), or of the loves of the angels in Hebrew tradition. Hence the child of a deified hero or demigod and of a mortal woman would, in the estimation of Christian teachers, be the offspring of a diabolical incubus. The marvellous powers of the child would be the natural result of his extraordinary parentage; and the same power which made Iamos acquainted with the language of birds would enable Merlin to vindicate the name of his mother, or at the least to convict her accusers of sins not less than those which were laid to her charge. Like most other mythical beings, Merlin has enemies who are bent on taking his life; and his wisdom is specially proved by his power of revealing the reason why the walls of a castle fall down as soon as they are built, a result due to the agency of dragons underneath a running water. This revelation of Merlin may be compared with that of the griffin or the giant in the German story of the Old Griffin (Grimm) and the Norse tale of Rich Peter the Pedlar (Dasent), and perhaps also with the problem on which depends the life of the giant or the sorcerer in the Hindu story of Punchkin (Frere, Deccan Tales), and the Teutonic tale of the Giant who had no heart in his body.

The Merlin story, which Jeffrey introduces into the life of Arthur, is found in Nennius (History of the Britons, p. 42), who, however, calls the child Ambrose, and having said that he was conceived by no mortal man, makes him assert that a Roman consul was his father. Whatever be the date of Nennius, his History' is probably two centuries earlier than that of Jeffrey.