So far then we have traced the evolution of the Lancelot story, and found that at one period of its development, and that an advanced period, it was connected with a Grail story, which regarded Perceval as its hero and knew nothing of Lancelot's son, Galahad. How then did the latter appear upon the scene, and in what light are we to regard the romances dealing with him?
I have studied the Galahad Queste closely, and have compared versions gathered from widely different sources, French originals, and translations, and I am distinctly of the opinion that we possess the romance practically in its original form. It is a homogeneous composition, it is not a compilation from different sources and by different hands. There is no trace of an earlier and later redaction, save only in the directly edifying passages, which in some cases appear to have undergone amplification. The difference between the versions is not that of incident or sequence, scarcely even of detail, but rather of the superior clearness and coherence with which the incidents are related in some of the versions as compared with others. I am strongly inclined to think that there is no peculiarity in any of the Queste MSS. which cannot quite well be ascribed to the greater or less accuracy of the copyist, or his greater or less taste for discourses of edification.
Nor is the Queste by the same hand as was responsible for the final moulding of the Lancelot story; though so closely connected with, indeed dependent upon, that story, it yet in many points stands in flagrant contradiction with it, and there is little doubt that the Lancelot would gain greatly in coherence if the Queste were omitted, and the passages preparatory to it eliminated from the original romance. These remarks apply also to the Grand S. Graal in its present form, though, as we shall see, this last named romance does not stand on precisely the same footing as the Queste with which it is now closely connected.
The following facts seem to stand out clearly. Both these Grail romances, the Queste especially, depend entirely for their interest on Lancelot. They are the glorification of his race as that from which the Grail Winner is predestined to spring. The genealogies, however they may vary (as they do in the different versions), are all devoted to this object. They are most closely connected with, and practically presuppose each other; yet admitting, as I think we must admit, that they do not represent the original form of the Grail story, they do not produce the impression of romances which have been worked over with the view of substituting a new hero for the one in whose honour the tale was originally constructed.
Nevertheless in the case of the Grand S. Graal we must, I think, admit imitation; even as in the original Borron cycle the Joseph of Arimathea was designed as an introduction to the life and deeds of the Grail Winner, Perceval, so in this, the latest form of the cycle, the introduction to the Queste is built upon and expanded from the Joseph. The introduction is based upon and follows the lines of the old introduction, but the Queste is a new Queste.
Let us be quite clear on this point. Galahad may have in a measure supplanted Perceval, but he has neither dispossessed nor robbed him. He has taken over no one of his characteristics, no one of his feats. Such traces of the Perceval story as remain are found in connection with Perceval himself; he, too, achieves the Grail Queste. He has undergone a change, and a change for the worse, but that was quite as much due to the evolution of the Grail as a Christian talisman as to the invention of Galahad. The hero of the Didot Perceval and Perceval li Gallois is as inferior to the hero of Chrétien and Wolfram as is the Perceval of the Galahad Queste. The truth is that Perceval is still the Grail hero, but he shares that character with another whose invention is due to special and easily discernible causes.150
The point of view of the writer of the Queste is not that of the compilers of the Lancelot. As I remarked in the previous chapter, the view taken by the Lancelot of the relations between the hero and the queen is frankly unmoral. Neither is blamed for his or her action, neither is apparently conscious of wrong-doing. In the Queste Lancelot's conscience is sorely vexed, and his sin insisted upon. The compilers of the Lancelot have a very courtly respect for women—the author of the Queste despises them utterly. The interest of the Lancelot lies in the relation between the sexes—the respective duties of knight and lady—the theme which inspires the Queste is their abiding separation.
Again, compare the treatment of the various characters of the story in the two respective sections. Next to Galahad and Perceval, the hero of the Queste is Bohort (Bors). But for a single youthful lapse he yields in nothing to those doughty champions of celibacy: his purity, alike of body and soul, is emphatically insisted upon; his confession fills the priest who receives it with a fervour of admiration; yet it is precisely this saintly youth who, in the section preceding and following the Queste (the Lancelot and the Mort Artur), is the confidant and go-between of Lancelot and Guinevere. It is Bohort who seeks Lancelot at the secret bidding of the queen, Bohort who carries love-tokens between them, who arranges meetings. It is he and Lionel who consult the queen as to the delicate question of Lancelot's future relations with the lady who has cured him from the illness caused by drinking the poisoned spring; he who is the confidant of Guinevere's indignation at the supposed love-affair between Lancelot and the maiden of Escarloet; and if he tries to prevent the last fatal meeting between them it is with no view of hindering a wrong to his lord Arthur, but solely because he has reason to suspect the trap laid for the lovers. The two presentments not simply fail to agree, but stand in flat contradiction with each other.
Lionel, again, is throughout the Lancelot a valiant knight, warmly attached alike to his brother and to his cousin. Like Bohort he takes Lancelot's part on every occasion, with him he quits the court when the queen, in an access of jealousy, banishes Lancelot. When he is finally slain both Bohort and Lancelot are overcome with grief. But the Queste paints him in the most repulsive colours: violent, brutal, and unreasoning to a degree. He is so indignant with his brother for going to the rescue of a maiden rather than of himself (when both are equally in danger) that he does his best to kill him in revenge. He does kill an unoffending hermit, and a fellow knight of the Round Table who would intervene, and finally it needs a special interposition of Providence to part the two brothers before a fatal issue to the conflict forced on by Lionel has taken place.
Hector, Lancelot's half-brother, who in the later Lancelot story is one of the bravest and most distinguished knights of the court, is in the Queste held up to scorn and rebuke; while the author of this romance has no colours too black in which to paint the character of Gawain, who, though deposed from his position of chief hero, is, throughout the Lancelot proper, treated with the greatest respect. He is entirely loved and trusted by king and queen, and if his valour is in the long-run surpassed by that of Lancelot, the compiler is careful to preserve his honour intact by pointing out, first, that he never recovered from the severe wounds received in the war with Galehault, second, that he was over twenty years Lancelot's senior. The final conflict between them, the most deadly in which Lancelot was ever engaged, was fought when Gawain was seventy-two and Arthur ninety-two years of age; further, as we shall see presently, in some versions the conclusion is more of the character of a drawn battle than of a defeat for Gawain.151
It is, I think, quite clear that the Galahad-Grail romances are the work of another hand than that responsible for the main body of the Lancelot cycle; and the work of one who was at small pains to harmonise his story with the branches already existing. It is indeed doubtful whether the writer had any thorough acquaintance with the legend as a whole. It is noteworthy that the points of contact with what we may perhaps call the 'secular' section are all restricted to the later part of the story, that commencing with what M. Paulin Paris called the Agravain section. Between the Grand S. Graal, the Galahad Queste, and the later part of the Lancelot there are a number of what we may call cross-references, the precise value of which will be very difficult to determine. But they do not stray outside a certain limit—they are restricted to Lancelot, the Knight of the Round Table, the queen's lover, and father of the Grail Winner—they do not appear to know Lancelot the protégé of the Lady of the Lake. In this character the Grail romances ignore him, nor do they appear to know anything of his most famous adventure, the freeing of Guinevere from Meleagant.152
It is the later and not the earlier Lancelot story which is known to the writer of the Queste; and the more we study the romance the plainer this becomes. The Lancelot romance may really be divided into two great divisions, the Enfances, Charrette, and Galehault section, which is practically unaffected by the Grail tradition, though it shows evident signs of contact with the Perceval story; and the latter portion which (saving the Mort Artur, unaffected except by the addition of the concluding Queste paragraph, easily removed) has been redacted under the influence of the Galahad-Grail accretion.
Till the versions concerned have been critically examined we cannot determine the value or gauge the evidence of the matter common to the Lancelot, Grand S. Graal, and Queste. The most noticeable instances are the following: the keeping of the Grail at Castle Corbenic, the founding of which is related in the Grand S. Graal; the characters of King Pelles and his father, with regard to whom the evidence varies,—as a rule, the character of the Fisher King appears to be confined to the former, that of the Maimed King to the latter (the author of the Queste appears to have no idea that the two characters are one and the same);—the daughter of King Pelles, and his son Eliezer. This latter is, I think, peculiar to the Lancelot-Galahad story, the Perceval versions do not know him. The adventure of the broken sword borne by Eliezer, told both in Lancelot and Grand S. Graal, and achieved, though without satisfactory explanation, in Queste.153 The Boiling Fountain and Bleeding Tomb adventures, also told in the two first, partly achieved in the Lancelot, and achievement summarily announced in Queste. The Perilous Cemetery, origin stated in Grand S. Graal, vainly attempted by Gawain and Hector in Lancelot, final achievement barely recorded in Queste.
In these last instances the story may well have been in the Lancelot, and taken over by the compiler of Grand S. Graal; the Queste makes very little of them; they only serve to keep up the connection between the 'secular' and 'religious' sections.
With regard to the Corbenic-Grail adventures, I am inclined, as I said before, to look upon them as due to the influence of the Gawain story, and as already existing, in a purely adventurous form, in the Lancelot, before it was formally united to the Grail Quest.
On the whole, I decidedly lean to the opinion that Grand S. Graal and Queste are by one and the same hand—the one based upon and expanded from an older poem, the other a practically new invention, the two being designed to replace the Joseph of Arimathea and Perceval of the earlier Grail cycle. As I said above, the author was very little concerned about the harmony of his work. So long as by a superficial rearrangement and interpolation of incidental adventures he could produce an appearance of harmony, he cared nothing at all about the more important questions of continuity of treatment, and preservation of tone and character. The result is that his work, which stands practically as he left it, is in flagrant contradiction with the story it is designed to complete.
But what was the motive which led to the setting aside of the earlier Perceval Queste, and what the causes which determined the particular form assumed by its successor?
I do not think they are difficult to detect.
During the later years of the twelfth and earlier years of the thirteenth century we see two stories in process of gradual evolution—the Perceval-Grail story and the Lancelot legend. One early took a decidedly mystical and ecclesiastical bent, the other became more and more worldly and secular. The two appear to have had an equal hold on popular imagination, they early came into touch with each other, but they never really blended. The Lancelot, as the younger, borrowed at the outset certain features from the Perceval, but it retained its own distinctive character; while the elder story slowly changed, the Grail, at first a subordinate element in the story, gradually but surely dominating the tale, which became more and more ecclesiastical, while the hero became more and more conventional.154
But at a certain point it became evident that these lines of tradition could no longer remain parallel, they must coalesce, or the one must yield to the other. The Grail quest had become the most popular adventure of Arthur's court, one after another the knights were being drawn into the mystic circle; how could the most popular and most valiant of the knights of the Round Table, for this Lancelot had now become, remain outside the chosen group? It was plain that Lancelot must take part in the Grail quest; it was equally plain that the first knight of the court could not be allowed to come out of the ordeal with any detriment to his prestige; yet the Grail demanded purity of life, and Lancelot was the queen's lover. More, the queen's lover he must remain or forfeit his hold on popular sympathy.
How was it possible to preserve intact at once Lancelot's superiority and the purity of the Christian talisman? Only in one way: by giving him a son who should achieve the quest and then vanish, leaving Lancelot still facile princeps among the knights of the Round Table, with the added glory of having been the father of the Grail Winner.
But this son could not be the child of Guinevere. The offspring of a guilty liaison could not be the winner of the sacrosanct talisman; yet Lancelot must be faithful to his queen—how solve this problem? The story in its primitive form gave the hint for the required development. Who more fitted to become the mother of the Grail Winner than the fair maiden who filled the office of Grail-bearer?155 The obvious propriety of such a relationship was bound sooner or later to strike the imagination of some redactor. The Arthurian story already possessed the machinery by which Lancelot could become father of the elect child, while remaining Guinevere's lover; Brisane had but to do for Elaine what Merlin did for Uther, and the difficulty was overcome. Moreover, Helaine was, in the old story, the name of the Grail Winner's father, nothing more easy than to bestow the same name on the new hero's mother. All this was only a question of clever adjustment of already existing factors.
Perceval, of course, was in possession, but the later development of his story, which had converted him from a genuine, faulty, but loving and lovable human being, true man and faithful husband, into an aggressively proselytising and persecuting celibate, had made it possible for him still to retain a place in the romance; he could act as second to Galahad, and, like him, disappear, the quest once achieved. But having thus disposed in Lancelot's interest of the two who might have seriously challenged his fame as a knight, Perceval, the real, Galahad, the vicarious (for I think we can only regard him as his father's representative), achiever of the quest, it became necessary to add a third, who should bring back to court the tidings of their success. It is quite obvious, from the point of view of the Lancelot story, that Perceval and Galahad could not be permitted to return. The third was easily found in the person of Lancelot's nearest relative, the knight who, his shield unstained by the bar-sinister which marked that of Hector, had been gradually rising in popular favour; Bohort owes his position in the Queste to his position in the Lancelot proper.
The evolution of this character has not, I believe, attracted much attention hitherto, but it is one of the most remarkable features of the Lancelot story. In the earliest versions, represented by the Lanzelet, etc., he is not known at all.156 When he first appears he plays but a small part, gradually his rôle becomes more and more prominent, till in the later portion of the prose Lancelot he has become a very efficient understudy to the hero, even surpassing in valour Gawain himself. Thus, on the return of the knights from one of their numerous quests in search of Lancelot, when they are called upon to rehearse their adventures, in order that a record of them may be made, it is decided that their rank, in order of merit, is Bohort, Gawain, Hector, Gaheriet, Lionel, and Baudemagus. Gawain and his brother, the representatives of the older stratum of Arthurian tradition, are the only two who can compete with the all-conquering race of Ban, and the bosom friend of that race, Baudemagus.
Finally he is represented as the father of a son who bids fair to rival his ancestors in valour. When a critical study of the Lancelot mss. is seriously undertaken, I think we shall find that the position occupied by Bohort in the story will afford a valuable indication of the relative age of the redaction.
I am quite prepared to find that among the objections which will doubtless be advanced against the theory here advocated one will be that it is too complete in detail, too 'cut and dried,' if I may use the term, to be free from suspicion. To this I would answer that I believe in examining the later stages of Arthurian romance we must follow a somewhat different process from that which we employ for the earlier. The Arthurian poems, being in a large measure independent, and never having formed part of a 'cyclic' whole, may well be studied separately, in, and for, themselves, though of course we would not leave out of sight variants of the same story. But the later prose romances, those which have avowedly formed parts of a cycle, must be studied, not separately, but in conjunction with the other romances with which they were connected. They are in the position of the parts of a dissected puzzle, the study of one part by itself will never really help us to understand the whole, it is only by studying collective sections, and trying continually new combinations, that we can hope to find the original disposition of the parts.
It is no use to study the Queste romance by itself. If we wish to know how it stands with regard to the Lancelot, we must study it with the Lancelot, and if we do this certain points become absolutely clear. The Queste pre-supposes a very advanced stage of the Lancelot story; one at which the family of the hero, quite as much as the hero himself, is the subject of glorification.157
The Galahad Queste is absolutely unthinkable without a previous knowledge of the Lancelot romances; as a matter of fact, it stands in closer relation to these than it does to any earlier Grail quest. The Lancelot romances, on the contrary, would be quite complete and far more coherent without the Queste. I have commented already on the striking discrepancies between the sections, but I have not so far dwelt at any length on the extraordinary lack of Grail references in the Mort Artur, the section immediately following the Queste. If we set on one side the introductory passage, which I have no shadow of doubt does not belong to the Mort Artur at all, but is the concluding passage of the Queste, there is no evidence of the influence of the latter throughout the whole of this last section of the cycle. Galahad is never mentioned; he was—and is not—as completely as if he had never been. Lancelot never thinks of, never refers to, his valiant son; his whole thought and care is for the queen, whom we were previously told he had renounced. I do not think it possible for any one to read the Mort Artur and believe that the Queste forms an integral part of the Lancelot story. On the other hand, cut out the Queste, suppress the few passages in the immediately preceding section of the Lancelot story which relate to it, and you have a tale as complete and coherent as is possible for any legend which has been the fruit of long growth and evolution, and has not possessed from the outset a clear and definite purpose and outline.
Admit, as I think we must needs admit, that the Lancelot and the Grail stories form two independent streams of tradition; recognise, as we must recognise, their diverse character,—one strongly secular, the other strongly ecclesiastical,—and I think we must own that if in their completed form they were to coalesce, that coalition could only be carried out under the conditions suggested above, which conditions we find fulfilled in the Galahad Queste. For me this romance is the last word of the Lancelot evolution, the final blending of two separate and important streams of tradition, the grant conte of Lancelot and the grant conte of Perceval and the Grail, the which is chiés et fin de tous les contes.