commonly evoked chivalric figure throughout the war. Rather, this absence was the
direct result of the increased domestication of the legend in the years after Tennyson’s
death. From 1892 to the eve of war, poets and dramatists had steadily increased the
domesticity of the Idylls - hardly a martial epic anyway - and the focus of most
Arthurian works was placed solely on the marital infidelities of Guinevere and the
mischievous plotting of Arthur’s nephew/son, Mordred. Arthur was an aged cuckold,
Lancelot was not heroic enough to drive back the Boche hordes, Tristram spent too
much time swooning over Iseult to be an effective leader o f men and no text of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had taken Gawain, the most obviously
English knight, as its protagonist.
The jingoists, however, had an alternative in one o f Arthur’s knights -
Galahad. Galahad and the Grail had not been essential components of the Arthurian
story for many writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scarcely
any dramatist had included Galahad in their Arthurian plays, focussed as they were
almost exclusively on the love triangle of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot. The
‘maiden knight’ had become an ancillary figure, with his own literary and artistic
tradition, which was only intermittently incorporated into the larger Matter of Britain
- even though, like the larger Arthurian story, it achieved popularity through
Tennyson’s verse.
It was not the Galahad of the Idylls that headmasters, poetasters, painters and
moralists had encouraged the public (and particularly the young) to admire. Rather, it
was Tennyson’s 1842 poem, ‘Sir Galahad’, that ignited and maintained interest in
Lancelot’s illegitimate son. The moral complexities of Tennyson’s mature Galahad of
‘The Holy Grail’ (1869) were o f much less appeal than the knight who demonstrated
that physical and martial strength follows causally from moral health:
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My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.4
By 1914 this direct relationship would define the propagandists’ chivalric ethos. It
simplified the whole Arthurian story and during the war it temporarily replaced it, as
it was free from any o f the morally complicated issues which enriched Arthurian
literary production throughout the nineteenth century. The story of Galahad was
essentially a subsidiary paradigm - in its righteous simplicity it became a version of
the Tennysonian paradigm fit for sermonising bishops, jingoists and sloganeers.
The most notable thing about Tennyson’s ‘Sir Galahad’, in terms of the
subsequent development o f the cult of Galahad, is that Tennyson depicted the maiden
knight in the midst of his quest for the Holy Grail, rather than at the point of achieving
it. Had Tennyson portrayed Galahad accomplishing his ambition, the figure would
have been of much less use to Victorian writers and artists. He would have been, as in
the thirteenth-century Queste del Saint Graal or Malory’s Morte Darthur, explicitly
and exclusively bound up with the Grail story, along with its associations with the
Eucharist, Catholicism and, even more dangerously in the 1840s and 50s, the Oxford
Movement. Yet, although works such as Tennyson’s ‘The Holy Grail’ and Robert
Stephen Hawker’s ‘The Quest of the Sangrail’ (1863) would treat Galahad exclusively
in terms of the holy vessel, many - if not the majority - of nineteenth-century
Galahad texts regarded the maiden knight independent of his Grail associations.
Galahad became an emblem of questing youth, irrespective of whether that quest was
for chivalric, spiritual, martial or moral purposes.
Presentations of Galahad in the nineteenth century were multifarious. For
many, he was a spiritual ideal, removed from the earthly plane. For Tennyson in ‘The
Holy Grail’, Galahad’s single-minded pursuit of the Grail, tinged with Anglo-
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Catholicism, lessened him as a suitable heroic principal, as did his total disregard for
secular virtue.5 In other works, his virtuousness became associated with a somewhat
effeminate character. Representations of Galahad as a passive, feminine youth were
common in the Pre-Raphaelite art of Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal and the young
Bume-Jones (figs 3-5). In Davidson’s ‘The Last Ballad’, Galahad’s traditional epithet,
‘the maiden knight’, is largely dispensed with in favour of calling him, simply, a
‘maiden’.* And the Galahad of Elinor Sweetman’s ‘Pastoral’ (1899) is more interested
in making himself floral garlands than in more typical knightly activity:
Eleven at the Table Round
With gemmy carcanets are crowned:
The twelfth hath flowers of woodroffe wild
Around his forehead bound.
He cometh singing like the lark -
He entereth gay with garlands green -
‘Art shepherd-clown or chapel-clerk,
O knight?’ said Guinevere the queen
To Galahad undefiled.6
Yet an effeminate Galahad was not ubiquitous in the nineteenth century. Kate
Ramage in 1884 depicted an ‘honest, manly, tender, true’ knight, with hands that are
‘[r]ough [...] and work soiled’.7 Her muscular portrait was more in accord with the
larger body of medievalist literature which sought to reconcile Galahad’s spiritual
idealism with more secular social issues - a trend that began with Charlotte M.
Yonge’s novel, The Heir o f Redclyffe (1853).8 Yonge’s first novel was written in the
midst of the Victorian cult of the hero: Thomas Carlyle had published his On Heroes,
Hero Worship and the Heroic in Literature in 1841 and Thomas Hughes would
publish his Carlylean children’s novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays in 1857.^ The Heir o f
* This effeminate Galahad perhaps explains why Galahad did not become a popular name for children
bom in the second half of the nineteenth century, while Arthur, Gareth and Lancelot all did. Perhaps
the most famous (literary) bearer o f this name was the ineffectual aged man-about-town, Sir Galahad,
of P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings novels - an ignominious descendant.
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