The Arthurian Revival

Essays on Form, Tradition, and Transformation

Debra Mancoff, Debra Mancoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317656708
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Discrete inquiries into 15 forms of the Arthurian legends produced over the last century explore how they have altered the tradition. They consider works from the US and Europe, and those aimed at popular and elite audiences. The overall conclusion is that the "Arthurian revival" is an ongoing event, and has become multivalent, multinational, and multimedia. Originally published in 1992.

The Arthurian Revival

1

Skirmishes at the Periphery: Edward Howard, Eglinton, and Aristocratic Chivalry in Metropolitan Magazine

Linda K. Hughes

My title is in part self-explanatory: in a volume devoted to the Arthurian Revival the 1839 revivalist tournament arranged by the Earl of Eglinton–with no explicit reference to Arthurian tradition–may seem of marginal relevance; and most readers are unlikely ever to have heard of either Edward Howard or Metropolitan Magazine. But as recent ventures in new historicist and cultural studies have suggested, “margin” and “center” are interdependent rather than oppositional terms; indeed the margins of discourse and culture have increasingly been shown to illuminate–and expose–premises and values embedded in dominant cultural forces.¹ Thus I propose a brief foray into the margins of early nineteenth-century literature to see what a single poem and short story by a minor albeit significant literary figure reveal about the unfolding Arthurian (or, more broadly, chivalric) Revival.

As the essays in this volume by Mark Cumming and John Reed suggest, response to Arthurian or chivalric matter in the nineteenth-century popular press often fluctuated, even within a single work. Their essays also indicate the increasingly significant role played by popular media, such as the periodical, in conveying chivalric literature and iconography to a receptive public. Edward Howard’s poem and short story in Metropolitan Magazine exemplify both points. “The Grand Tournay,” in the April 1840 issue, reflects ambivalence about the aristocratic and metaphysical underpinnings of chivalry while promoting chivalric material’s connection to contemporary literature. “The Three Knights and the Lady Errant: A Tale of True Chivalry,” which appeared in the September 1841 Metropolitan Magazine, presents a more searching critique of the medieval ideal through humor that anticipates Mark Twain’s comic strategies in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Both works function to suggest how far chivalric subject matter had permeated the literary world at the beginning of the 1840s and had become a pliable cultural medium that could be used to a number of different ends and in quite diverse contexts. Both works also expose the link between this medium and aristocratic power. If nineteenth-century interest in Arthurian legend derived in part from an impulse to preserve transcendent ideals in an increasingly positivistic and technological age, Arthurian matter could also be appropriated to legitimize the longstanding tradition of class distinctions or British hegemony abroad.² The first motive, of course, could be used to mask the second when a text (or artwork) invoked high ideals while promoting power in the hands of a few. This sociopolitical dimension of the Arthurian Revival was not dependent on the figure of Arthur per se, and thus Arthurian literature and chivalric literature in general were part of a common cultural development–and mutually illuminate each other today. Within this perspective the tensions embodied in Howard’s poem and short story belong equally at the margin and the center of the Arthurian Revival.

Howard, although little remembered today, has a permanent place in literary history as a maritime novelist. His date of birth is obscure (Arthur Howse suggests 1793 as the most likely date [xix]), but the facts of his career are known. He entered the navy in 1808 and served in the West Indies, leaving the navy in 1810. In 1832 he resumed acquaintance with Captain Frederick Marryat, the well-known maritime novelist whom Howard had met as a schoolboy (Howse xix-xx; 407–08). Marryat assumed the editorship of Metropolitan Magazine the same year, taking over from the poet Thomas Campbell (Schachterle 304), and in 1833 Howard became Marryat’s subeditor (Howse xx), serializing his autobiographical novel The Life of a Sub-editor from 1834 to 1836.³ Howard’s novel, retitled Rattlin the Reefer when it appeared as a three-decker in 1836, had great success, and a third edition of the novel appeared in 1837 (Howse xx).

Rattlin the Reefer has a secure place in nineteenth-century literature, figuring in E. A. Baker’s History of the English Novel (1924–39). Moreover, as Arthur Howse convincingly argues, the novel’s treatment of the abandoned child who is neglected by parents, given warm but momentary emotional support by a loving foster mother from the working class, and then sent to an ignorant and sadistic schoolmaster, anticipates and may well have influenced Charles Dickens’s approach to similar subject matter in Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and other novels (xi-xiii). This novel also illuminates Howard’s attitudes toward chivalry and aristocracy in his poem and short story (discussed below).

As a maritime novelist Howard seems an unlikely candidate to have turned to chivalric material, a point of which he makes light in “The Grand Tournay”: “’Tis a very great shame, a pain, a grief, or, / Something much worse, that a tarry-breek’d reefer / Alone should be found / On the listed ground, / To pipe out a lay of this grand Tournay” (375). By the time this puff of light verse appeared, Howard had left Metropolitan Magazine and gone to the New Monthly Magazine,⁴ so that he had scant control over the space allotted to his verses, a point about which he complains at the poem’s end (see the final stanza in the Appendix). Whether the poem and the story he published a year and a half later represented the beginning of sustained interest in chivalric material will remain unknown, for Howard died suddenly of apoplexy after a good Christmas dinner in December 1841–three months after “The Three Knights and the Lady Errant” had appeared.

The tournament that prompted Howard’s poem was held at Eglinton on 28 August 1839. It is unclear whether Howard attended, but in any case he would have had access to the numerous contemporary accounts of the affair published in newspapers and books.⁵ The event was the project of Archibald Montgomery, thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, a wealthy young aristocrat whose stepfather, Sir Charles Lambe, was denied the role of Earl Marshal in the “Penny Coronation” of 1837. One motive ascribed to the Earl for instigating the tournament is thus the desire to retrieve an opportunity for aristocratic ritual and pageantry from which the family had been excluded in Victoria’s coronation. Like the larger Gothic Revival itself, or the associated Cult of Chivalry, the tournament was an expression of aristocracy’s desire to reassert its claims and prestige in the wake of the French Revolution’s assault on hereditary nobility. The tournament also anticipated the Young England movement, which was inspired in part by what Mancoff terms Ethical Medievalism, or the Cult of Chivalry, articulated most forcefully in Kenelm Digby’s Broad Stone of Honour (1822). In this political movement, active by 1842 and led by Benjamin Disraeli in association with Lord John Manners, George Smythe, and others, the ideals of courtesy and service were assimilated to traditional notions of aristocratic lineage and Tory bases of power. The Earl of Eglinton had met Disraeli, Manners, and Smythe at Lady Blessington’s (Anstruther 59), and enthusiasm for the tourney was especially keen among young aristocrats (Anstruther 65), who saw it as a chance to demonstrate valor and pomp–related values underpinning aristocratic ideals of chivalry as far back as the Renaissance and Middle Ages (see Keen). Girouard concludes, “As the excitement grew the tournament grew with it, until it became not only a full-scale re-enaction of a mediaeval event, but even more a symbol of Tory defiance, of aristocratic virility, of hatred of the Reform Bill, of protest against the sordid, heartless, sensual doctrines of Utilitarianism” (93).

A procession so grand that it required a program for the crowds who gathered preceded the tournament itself. Given the number of people involved (and the Earl’s lack of expertise in mounting parade extravaganzas), it is not surprising that the procession began more than three hours late. By this time clouds had gathered in the Ayrshire skies under which the events were to take place. A downpour ensued. The ladies, including the Queen of Beauty, Lady Jane Seymour, for whom thousands of spectators had waited hours, had to travel to the tourney field erected adjacent to Eglinton Castle in closed carriages. The coverings over the dais and the stands–erected for those privileged enough to hold tickets–leaked (Anstruther 202–03), and the onlookers were soaked. The knights completing the first pass of the tourney missed each other entirely (Anstruther 209–10), and the feats meant to evoke glory for manly young aristocrats instead elicited smirks and grins. Eventually Eglinton was forced to call off the day’s events, and everyone was left to find their muddy way home. Though, as Girouard remarks (103), no knights actually opened umbrellas, umbrellas and knights both appeared in the retreat from the tourney grounds and became inextricably linked in the public mind.

In fact two days later a quite respectable tournament and ball were held at Eglinton. Published reactions to the tournament, like the events of the tournament itself, were also more complex than the popular image of waterlogged knights might suggest. Ridicule was naturally the order of the day for some. A cartoon from Cleave’s Penny Gazette entitled “The Eglinton Tomfooleryment” (Plate 1) showed two men with absurd helmets, one ending in a fool’s bell, the other topped by an ass’s head, jousting atop rocking donkeys (not horses) while holding umbrellas. Other accounts were reverential, as in the text by James Aikman in An Account of the Tournament at Eglinton published in 1839: “No man, with a spark of romance in his constitution, could fail to be moved with the splendid vision, so suddenly conjured up, of all that he had been accustomed to associate with high spirit, courteous demeanour and daring valour” (quoted in Mancoff 53). Light verse published in response to the tourney also varied in tone and attitude. Anstruther reprints laudatory lines from the 21 July 1839 Bell’s New Weekly Messenger, appearing before the tournament was held: “Now Eglinton, let minstrels praise / Who, spurning cold formality, / Restores ‘the light of other days’ / And, eke, their hospitality” (113). The October 1839 New Monthly Magazine, on the other hand, made fun of both the rain and the ludicrous pretensions to chivalry that drew many to Ayrshire in August.

The Attorney at Eglintoun. A Sonnet.

Smit with romance. I left my palling home,

Madly agape for scenes of olden time

To be anew revealed in Scotia’s clime:

What joy, methought, ‘mid knighthood’s haunts to roam!

There lords and ladies, affable and grand,

Seemed but to wait my coming–while the sun

In envy hid his face. What glorious fun

In pomp’s own circle thus to take one’s stand!–

Then came “the sports;”–but–such a wash of rain!

Poor chivalry, half-drowned, lost all its beams.

Chilled, sad, I urged my wet way back again.

For Clement’s-inn renouncing splendour’s dreams.

And cried (like one who speaks as though to mourn he meant),

I, an attorney, am not for a tourney meant!

G. D

As Girouard remarks of reactions to Eglinton Tournament, “Commentators fell into three groups: those who der...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Skirmishes at the Periphery: Edward Howard, Eglinton, and Aristocratic Chivalry in Metropolitan Magazine
• 2 Allegory and Comedy in Bulwer-Lytton’s King Arthur
• 3 Teasing the King
• 4 William Morris: Arthurian Innovator
• 5 “The True and the False”: Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and the Visual Arts
• 6 Sir Noel Paton and the Grail Quest: The Arthurian Mythos as Christian Art
• 7 Art’s Moral Mission: Reading G.F. Watts’s Sir Galahad
• 8 American Arthurian Authors: A Declaration of Independence
• 9 From Romance to Ritual: Wolfram, Arthur, and Wagner’s Parsifal
• 10 Toward the Condition of (Absolute) Music: Edward A. MacDowell and the Arthurian Twilight
• 11 Rutland Boughton’s Arthurian Cycle
• 12 The First and Last Love: Morgan le Fay and Arthur
• 13 The Broken Quest: The “Perceval” Romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Eric Rohmer
• 14 Decapitation and Deconstruction: The Body of the Hero in Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac
• 15 Whom Does the Grail Serve? Wagner, Spielberg, and the Issue of Jewish Appropriation
• Contributors
• Index