SIR TRISTRAM DE LYONESSE. BY E. M. SMITH.

The ancient adage that “there is no new thing under the sun,” has been recently applied by a popular writer of fiction to the romantic stories of the day. But surely nowhere are the words of the Preacher more abundantly illustrated than in the realm of narrative poetry. With whom did “The Canterbury Tales,” “The Fairy Queen,”“The Idylls of the King,” originate? Certainly not with Chaucer, Spenser, or Tennyson. The hidden sources of those delightful rivers of song lie far away, so far that few care to trace them. The same, or nearly the same, story is handed down from one man to another, till at last some master-mind catches its true significance, tells it for once as it was never told before, and links his name with it through all the ages. Sometimes though more rarely, different capabilities of the same story will strike more than one master-mind, and then the comparisons are full of interest, and bring out into sharp relief the idiosyncrasies of each narrator. It has been so with portions of the “Iliad,” of the “Nibelungen Lied,” and of our own “Morte D’Arthur.” It is so still with the story of Sir Tristram de Lyonesse, who, of all King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, seems to have gone the farthest and fared the best. Rarely indeed has the homage of poets so far apart in time, and varying so widely in spirit and conception, been tendered so persistently to one object. Arthur may pass away in peace to the cool valley of Avilion, Launcelot to his grave in Joyous Guard, Galahad to the Blessed Vision which last he saw with mortal eyes in the city of Estorause; but Tristram is of the earth, earthy, and on the earth he abides. Twelve centuries have not quenched the ardor of his love for fair Iseult, nor traced one wrinkle on his brow.

Briefly, the legend of his life is this: Sir Tristram de Lyonesse as his first great exploit slew Sir Marhaus, the deadly foe of his uncle, King Mark, but was by him so desperately wounded that he sailed to Ireland under the name of Tamtris, to be cured of his wound by the surgical arts of the Queen of Ireland, sister to Sir Marhaus, and mother of the beautiful Princess Iseult. On his return to Cornwall he described the Princess in words so glowing that King Mark resolved to marry her, and sent his nephew back to escort her over the sea. Fearful lest all should not go well, the Queen gave to her daughter’s faithful maid, Bragwaine, a magic potion, which the bride was to drink on the night of her marriage with King Mark, to ensure their mutual love. Unwittingly, however, Tristram and Iseult drank of it together on board the vessel; and, all their lives, it wrought them woe and misery, until at length they died together, and were buried side by side. The facts are always much the same—but the hero alters so completely as to change the whole aspect of the story, and make the interpretation put upon it different in every age.

When we first meet with him among the Welsh bards of the sixth century, he is simply Drystan, or Trystan, the Tumultuous; his name has not already doomed him to that triste existence, which grows consistently more and more tragic throughout the later records of his life. He is the son, not of King Meliodas, but of Talwz; his lady is Essylt; his uncle, Mark Meirzion; and the chief points in his character are curiously brought out by his association with Greidial and Gwgon, as one of the three heralds of Britain; with Gwair and Cai, the diademed princes; with Call and Pryderi, the mighty swineherds; with Gwair and Eiddillig, the stubborn chiefs; with Caswallan and Cynon, the faithful lovers. Heraldry, obstinacy, fidelity—no very promising material for a hero nowadays; but then the lines on which a poet worked were simpler.

For three years this tumultuous being withdrew from Arthur’s Court in disgust at the issue of one of his quarrels, and the King, with almost incredible folly, instead of rejoicing at the deliverance, sent after him twenty-eight warriors in succession, all of whom Trystan overthrew. At last, Gwalzmai with the Golden Tongue (the Gawaine of later days) tried his fortune, accosting the fierce chieftain in these words:

To which Trystan Ossianically replies:

Finally the Golden-tongued prevails, and they return together.

Our next glimpse of him is in the kingdom of the trouvères and troubadours, with whom he is a great favorite. The famous Mademoiselle Marie, in her translation, the “Lai Dee Chevrefoil,” written about the middle of the twelfth century, sings of a pretty episode in his love, which none of her successors have improved upon, and which most of them have omitted. There are allusions to him in Chrestien de Troyes, who wrote before the year 1191, and in the works of a poetical king of Navarre, about 1226. The date of the Auchinleck MS., “Sir Tristram,” which Scott raised such a tempest by ascribing to Thomas the Rhymer of Ercildoune, is said to be 1330. It is written in a curious and very effective metre; the short abrupt line of two syllables falling regularly near the end of each stanza reins in the full swing of the rest with great force and directness. The poem is full of life and vigor, and there are touches of naïf insight here and there in strange contrast with the rough, matter-of-fact tone of the whole. Many and quaint are the adventures of the hero, especially when he kills a dragon in Ireland for the sake of Iseult, that “brid bright, as blood upon snoweing,” and her mother cures him of the pain caused by its poisonous tongue, with treacle; or when, having overcome a terrible “geaunt” in Brittany, he requires him to adorn the walls of his castle with “images” of Iseult and Bragwaine, the beauty of which so astounds his young brother-in-law, evidently a novice in works of art, that he straightway falls backward and breaks his head!

This poem, or another much like it, was celebrated both at home and abroad, where “Thomas of Britain” was henceforth quoted as the great authority on the subject. About the same time lived Raoul de Beauvais, who also made it his study; Rusticien de Puise, whose work is in prose; and the authors of two metrical fragments in French, from one of which Scott completed the Auchinleck MS., though its end had not been unearthed when he became its editor. The translation, which carried the name of Tristram northward as far as Iceland, is still kept in the library at Copenhagen; and G. de le Flamma tells us that when the tomb of a Lombard king was opened in 1339, there was found inscribed on his sword, “This was the sword of Sir Tristram, who killed Amoroyt of Ireland.” Seghart von Bamberg wrote of him in 1403, and also Eylhard von Habergen. Of the same period is the Romance by Gotfried of Strasburg, who died in the midst of his work, leaving it to be finished in a less poetical spirit by Ulrich von Turheim and Heinrich von Vribert.

Our own Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to draw Sir Tristram into the magic circle of Arthur’s knights, in whose good company he has ever since remained. Lady Juliana Berners mentions him as the inventor of “venery” or terms of hunting; and his name occurs in “The Temple of Glass,” and in Gower, who states that he fell by King Mark’s own hand, a tradition followed only by Sir Thomas Malory and Tennyson. In the “Orlando Furioso” we hear of the “Rocca di Tristano,” and Ariosto and Boiardo drew from his legend, old even then, their fountains of love and hatred. Dante places him next to Paris among the lovers flitting by like cranes in his “Inferno.” In 1485 Sir Thomas Malory, himself a knight, published his noble “Morte D’Arthur,” in which Tristram is one of the most striking figures; and it is remarkable that although he never seems to have thought there was anything to condemn greatly in the nephew’s conduct, he palliates it by defaming the uncle as much as possible—a moral concession not to be found in either of the earlier romances, which he must have consulted for his work. But we will not multiply references, lest the reader should be fain to cry with the author of “Sir Hain and Dame Anieuse,”

The theme was getting wearisome. Le Seigneur Luce du château de Gast had exhausted it in his prose Romance (where, for the first time, Palamides, the Paynim lover of Iseult, and Dinadan, the foolish, knight, appear); and, besides this, there was a “Romance of Meliodas,” Tristram’s father, and afterwards a “Romance of Ysaie le Triste,” his son; so that all the details of his private life were nearly as well known as those of Mr. Carlyle’s to the present generation. “Ysaie le Triste” appeared in 1522; and in 1554, when no imagination, however vivid, could possibly add a single exploit to those which had been recounted already, Jean Maugin took a new departure, and turned the whole thing into an allegory, in which Sir Tristram became the type of Christian chivalry. His queer attempt is justly ridiculed by Scott; but it is not altogether without interest, as the first indication of the symbolic spirit in which modern poets have treated the legend—with the exception of Scott himself, whose beautiful Conclusion and Ballad are pure imitations of the mediæval spirit as well as of the mediæval form, and have nothing modern about them. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the taste for chivalrous romance died out in Europe—or rather fell asleep—and the name of Tristram was no more heard for more than two hundred years, except in a glowing stanza or two of Spenser’s “Fairy Queen.” Then came the revival of Scott and Southey to prepare the way, and lastly that signal triumph of the ancient story in our own day, when four of the greatest living poets singled it out for illustration, and it became a living power again in the hands of Wagner, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Matthew Arnold. But its power is of a different kind, for a change has come over the spirit of the dream, since it was first dreamed long ago among the Welsh mountains.

Accordingly Tristram, once the mere sport of existing circumstances, becomes a highly responsible person with correctly oppressive notions of duty. He has grown old along with the rest of the world; he rides no more light-hearted through the forest, sails no more gaily across the sea, forgetful of all but life and its deliciousness, woos no more whom he would. Nor, in the modern versions, does he die merrily, as he died in the “Morte D’Arthur” and in the “Book of Howth,” “harping afore his lady La Belle Isoud.”Wagner, to whom one might have fancied, à priori, that such an exit for his tenor would have been most welcome, sentences him to lingering death of a wound given him by the traitor Melot; Tennyson fells him with a blow of King Mark’s from behind; in Matthew Arnold he dies naturally; in Swinburne the false words of Iseult Les Blanches Mains finish the work of sickness. His love, his death, are all-important now; whereas of old the first was but an interesting episode in the life of a man who was second only to Sir Launcelot at a tourney, and the last so insignificant as to be disposed of in a single sentence. We hear nothing now of the Castle of Maidens, or of Lonazep; nothing of the wife of Sir Segwarides, or of other fair ladies; nothing at all of that great crisis in his life when he met Sir Launcelot at the peron, “and either wounded other wonderly sore, that the blood ran out upon the grass.”

Of course there may be a reason for this in the fact that we look upon Tristram as a hero by himself, and therefore have no need to illustrate his inferiority to Launcelot, and to Launcelot only, in love and in war. But where are ye now, Sir Palamides, Sir Bruno, and Sir Elias? Your very names have a forgotten sound.

But he who wishes to find any record of their doings with Sir Tristram must search through the length and breadth of Malory’s twenty-one books ere he find it. Nor is there any trace in the modern poems of the sweet old story, how after that “deep draughts of death” had taken the Lady Elizabeth, Tristram’s mother, and his father, King Maliodas, had “let call him Tristram, the sorrowful-born child,” and had actually, for love of her, “endured seven years without a wife,” he married a wicked lady, who tried to poison Tristram; and how she was condemned to death for the attempt, and he rescued her from his father’s wrath, and made them accorded, and how she “loved him ever after, and gave Tristram many great gifts.”

All these things, which relieved the sombre hues of the picture have faded into dimness. The martial glory of Tristram has passed away; nothing but tragedy remains—the sin, the sorrow, the inexplicable fate which linked two separated lives together. Long ago it was a bit of witchcraft pure and simple; now the magic drink has become the symbol of mystery and doom, and what not. Like Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, the guilty souls are hurried round and round without a moment’s respite by the whirlwind of their passion, in that wonderful opera which the most devoted followers of Wagner esteem his masterpiece of blended poetry and music. The fierce, dark, rapturous rejoicing of love on the very edge of death lights it up with a lurid glare, which makes everything else look pale and fanciful by comparison; it has no parallel in art, even among Wagner’s other works, nor can any one desire that it should have. The great difficulties which stand in the way of its representation may prevent it from ever becoming popular in the sense in which “Lohengrin” and “Tannhäuser” are popular; but those who have had the good fortune to hear it will not easily forget its unique and terrible power. It is strange that Wagner should have made King Mark an ideal uncle, tender and forgiving to the last degree, and so full of self-denial that had he but known of the fatal drink in time, he would have resigned his bride to his nephew with the best grace in the world. Dramatically the action loses by this change; the sympathies of the audience are baffled and divided; do what we will, the conduct of the hero seems mean and treacherous, and his death more arbitrary than it need have been, since Melot, the traitor who gives him his mortal wound, had far less reason to hate him than had the injured bridegroom. Indeed, it is difficult to see what Wagner himself thought that he gained by this amendment, unless that tragedy itself becomes more tragic by the needless suffering inflicted on a high and noble soul, ready to sacrifice its dearest hopes rather than undergo the agony of seeing another’s virtue tempted beyond endurance. There is also one dire offence against good taste, worthy of Wagner’s earliest models (and of Shakespeare in “King Lear”,) in the scene where Tristram tears the bandage from his wounds. But if the hero fares rather badly, until we forgive him for the sake of his death-cry, “Liebe!” the heroine has never in the course of her long life found such an interpreter. She has lost, indeed, her old, light-hearted innocence; but she has lost it to become one of the grandest and most original creations in the whole range of the drama. She surpasses even the bounds of passion; the very fury of love is upon her, from the moment when, foreseeing that she can no longer live without him, she resolves to make Tristram drink with her of the death-drink, and the charm begins to work, to the moment when she falls dead besides his body. The magic only reveals what shame forbade her to confess. The key to her whole character lies in her answer to Bragwaine’s entreaty that she will not give the signal for Tristram’s approach by extinguishing the torch in the window of her tower in King Mark’s palace—

Wagner showed his wisdom when he left her alone in her glory, and made no attempt to introduce that other Iseult of Brittany, who certainly interferes with any conception of Tristram as the most faithful of lovers. “And for because that Sir Tristram had such cheer and riches, and all other pleasures that he had, almost he had forsaken La Beale Isoud. And so upon a time Sir Tristram agreed to wed Isoud les Blanches Mains. And at the last they were wedded, and solemnly held their marriage,” But this is far too natural and unheroic for the nineteenth century; and poor Iseult the Second fares ill at the hands of our poets—excepting Matthew Arnold who, with unwonted chivalry, has taken up the cause of this distressed damsel (this “snowdrop by the sea,” whose own brother forsook her for her namesake), and made of her one of those meek, motherly, sweet little women, who are ready to forgive any one they love anything; and who, too weak either to make or mar the lives with which they come in contact, yet hold their own by the power of that clinging, lasting devotedness, which is all their innocent natures let them know of passion. Very sweet is his picture of her, standing in her gorgeous robes by the chimney-piece with the firelight flickering on her white face and her white hands, and her jewelled clasp, ready to vanish gracefully the moment her rival enters; and it is with a gentle feeling of regret that we lose sight of her at last, wandering on the seashore with her children, while she tells them the old story of Merlin and Vivien to beguile the weary hours of her widowhood. Here and here only the pure, white-handed maiden-wife bears away the palm from the old Iseult of Tristram’s dreams, with

and we rather resent her intrusion than welcome her, when she comes back to nurse him, very repentant indeed, like a sort of queenly Sister of Mercy. His dying request is also a great innovation:

The hero of “the last tournament” is a very different being. Of all those who have told the story, Tennyson alone seems to have looked upon Tristram as thoroughly base and unworthy. Such a knight as this, so rough, licentious, and wanting in courtesy, could never have been Launcelot’s second; and indeed Tennyson lays no stress whatever on the strong friendship which existed between them—so strong that neither would ever wittingly harm any relation or friend of the other. As Wagner has made the legend a symbol of that strife between man, his passions, and his circumstances, which is the complex motive of our latest tragedy,—as Matthew Arnold has drawn from it the lesson, that quiet and neglected lives often do more to make the world lovely than great and brilliant ones (a lesson which chivalry would never have found there),—so Tennyson has made it a symbol of that degradation of the whole nature, which follows the conscious surrender of the spirit to the flesh, and has drawn from it the lesson that the very happiness of partners in guilt is tainted with bitterness and turns to ashes in their mouths. Nowhere else is there such a sharp contrast implied between Launcelot, the sinner who repented and was given time for repentance, and Tristram, the sinner who repented not and was cut off in the midst of his sin. There is a great gulf between them, across which they do not even join their hands.

Iseult stands in much the same relation to Guinevere; she is coarser, more ironical, free from any feeling of remorse; but she surpasses Tristram as Launcelot surpasses Guinevere, in “faith unfaithful,” and one has a strong compassion for her in her lonely home, looking out over the wild sea, with that stealthy spy of a husband, dogging her every footstep. How full of compressed, dramatic force the last lines are!

Not so has Swinburne read the character. His Tristram of Lyonesse is once more the free, open-handed, light-hearted hero, or rather he would be if he had not inevitably contracted some of the Zeit-Geist, its weariness, its languor, its power of analysis. His gaiety is not spontaneous—his song is as labored as if he had had to send it up for an examination; his love is over-heavy with its own sweetness. The long-drawn, honied lines drag on and on through pages of description, till we almost long for a rough, dissonant note to break the eternal, soft, alliterative hissing and kissing. But Iseult bears the wealth of jewelled epithets lavished upon her, and it is easy enough to understand them when we are under the spell of her fascination, or when she is finely contrasted with the cruel, cold-blooded Iseult of Brittany, who in her jealous anger kills her husband, by telling him that the sails of the ship which is bringing his love to him are black instead of white, so that he thinks she has refused to come:

So there he lies. But he may yet be born again, and fight, and love, and die, for who knows what shall be in the days to come, or to what ancient songs the houses of our children’s children may echo? It may be there is yet a further interpretation of the riddle, the outlines of which we cannot even guess; and that the two Iseults may come to like each other. Things even more strange than this have happened. It was said that out of Tristram’s grave there grew an eglantine, which turned itself around Iseult’s; and although it was cut three times by order of the king, the eglantine was ever fair and fresh. By this time it has grown into a mighty tree, and, for all we know, it has not done growing yet.—Merry England.