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- Jessie Weston and early Grail scholarship
113 associated with governmental power - whether monarch-praising chronicles, kingly pageants or pictorial adornments of Westminster Palace. Such intimacy had required a certain regulation of the Arthurian story: such ideological utility had to be maintained. Only in periods of crisis - epitomised by the fifteenth-century popular ballads and the anti-papist condemnation of the mid-sixteenth century - was the Arthurian story unregulated by such powers. In the 1920s the Grail became patronised by all reading classes. The Grail story became the subject of crime novels (such as Charles Williams’s novel War in Heaven, 1930) and the popular fiction of Arthur Machen and George Moore. Galahad and the Grail became popular names for racehorses: Prince Galahad, Sir Galahad, King of the Grail, Silver Grail, Holy Grail. Less grandly, Galahad was also a popular name for some prize-winning dogs.1 More seriously, questing knights were no longer the symbols of the conservative bourgeoisie. Although the Tory Lord Chancellor could describe the Liberal peer William Lygon as ‘the Sir Galahad of the Free Trade movement, without a stain upon his purity’, the victorious Labour party of 1924 could also appropriate the legend.2 In one election rally Ramsey MacDonald claimed that a socialist Britain was ‘the Holy Grail’ of the Labour party; it would be achieved, he said, ‘by knights like Keir Hardie’.3 No longer was the Grail a symbol of imperial endeavour and elitist institutions; now it was a value in the context of democracy and plurality. Jessie Weston and early Grail scholarship There were a multitude of Grails evident in the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: Christian Grails and Pagan Grails; Western Grails and Eastern'Grails. Their origins were found in Celtic mythology, in ecclesiastic imagination, even in the rites and rituals of Cathars, Templars and Tarot-card readers.4 Four physical Grails were
114 unearthed: one in Nanteos was put on display in 1876, another in Glastonbury in 1906, with a further two being dug up in Palestine in the 1930s - all found their believers and critics.5 But perhaps the most influential of all Grails for writers of the post-war generation was that of Jessie L. Weston. Her Ritualist account of the Grail (pre-Christian and pre-Celtic in origin) proved persuasive for many poets and novelists who sought to reinvent the Arthurian story in the 1920s and 30s - most famously, though perhaps erroneously, T.S. Eliot. Weston’s critical writings demonstrate, more eloquently than any other scholar’s corpus, how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century academia freed itself from the influence of Malory and Tennyson. The daughter of a successful tea merchant, Weston (1850-1928) received a cosmopolitan nineteenth-century upbringing, studying music at the Hildesheim conservatory in Germany, taking art classes at Crystal Palace and studying with Gaston Paris, the medieval scholar, in France.6 The continentalism, scope and eclecticism of her learning, as well as her independence from traditional English higher education (which, as a young woman in the 1870s, she was excluded from anyway), meant that Weston was never beholden to the English literary or critical archetypes which influenced many of her male Oxbridge-educated contemporaries. Although she was engaged in academic scholarship for most of her life, it was not until 1894, when she was forty-three, that she began to publish the first of twenty books and numerous articles, which were often controversial and at odds with conventional English scholarship. Weston was never wholly satisfied with the dominance of Malory and Tennyson in contemporary English conceptions of the Arthurian story. Of the Morte
115 spite of the halo of religious mysticism in which they have striven to enwrap their characters, we lay them down with a feeling of dissatisfaction.’7 Following the criticism of H. Oskar Sommer and other German medievalists (and unlike the English Strachey and Saintsbury), she thought that Malory’s redaction of the French romance tradition - which she described as a ‘rechauffee’ - was often poor in its choice of sources and the way in which he handled them.8 One of her most impressive endeavours was a seven-volume series of translations which she called Arthurian *Q
In the mid 1900s, when Weston turned to the study of the origins of the Grail in earnest, two distinct theories had emerged that dominated British and continental Arthurian scholarship. One proposed a Christian origin, the other an origin in Celtic myth. As with so much of early medieval scholarship, the German critics led the way in the Christian-origin theory - Wendelin Foerster and Wolfgang Golther being the most prominent - with the American J.D. Bruce being perhaps the most forceful of the theory’s English-language proponents.10 These held that the Grail was essentially Christian in origin and that the ‘personal invention’ of writers such as Chretien and Robert de Boron ‘was the most important factor in the creation of these romances.’11 Even if the Grail’s source lay in the dim mist of Celtic antiquity, its origins were of much less importance than the meaning which the French romancers inscribed it with. This view, as Richard Barber put it more recently, holds that the Grail ‘is a product of a certain time and a certain place [Western Christian Europe in the mid-twelfth to mid-thirteenth centuries], and the most powerful argument for this is th&way in which 19 the major romances were written within a surprisingly short time-span.’ These * Weston’s earliest scholarship is largely Germanic in orientation; indeed, she strove to make German romances well known in Britain. However, her relationship with German scholarship deteriorated in the years before the Great War - her later position being quite hostile to her former influences. This was a pattern typical of scholarship in the early twentieth century. Yüklə 2,81 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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