earnest in all its pursuits, and neither worse men than the bad, nor better than the good, can be met with.""

1 This paper (much expanded and somewhat altered) forms one of the chapters in a book entitled The Welsh People written by Principal Rhys and myself, about to be published by Mr. Fisher Unwin.-D. B. J.

GEOFFREY OF

MONMOUTH.'

BY

PROFESSOR W. LEWIS JONES, M.A.

"Bet y march, bet y guythur.

Bet y gugaun cletyfrut.

Anoeth bid bet y arthur."

"A GRAVE for March, a grave for Gwythur, a grave for Gwgawn of the ruddy sword; not wise (the thought) a grave for Arthur," or as Matthew Arnold freely translates it in a well-known passage in his Study of Celtic Literature, “Unknown is the grave of Arthur." Would, indeed, that this were all that is unknown and unknowable of the storied British king! But he comes upon the scene even as he disappears from it-a shadowy apparition, clothed in the mist of legend, stalking athwart the path of history to distract and lead astray the sober chronicler, and to beckon the romancer and the poet to boundless realms of enchantment and adventurous quest. A Melchisedec of profane history, he has "neither beginning of days, nor end of life." Neither date nor place of birth can be assigned to him any more than a place of burial; and it is left to

Read before the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion at 20, Hanover Square, on Wednesday, the 8th of March, 1899; Chairman, Mr. Thomas E. Ellis, M.P.

2 This is the translation given by Professor Rhys, Arthurian Legend, p. 19. It is worth noting that in this quotation from an undoubted twelfth century text, the Black Book of Carmarthen, we get one of the earliest literary references to the tradition as to Arthur's "return", and it conclusively proves that this tradition existed in Wales a fact which Zimmer and others question-as early at least as the twelfth century.

conjecture alone to locate that court where knights, only less famous than himself, sought his benison and behest. But all this uncertainty has but served to enhance the attraction which he had, and has, for makers and students of literature; and the immense mass of Arthurian literature extant to-day-romances, poems, critical studiesmay well make the most omnivorous reader quail before its solid bulk. The Arthurian legend has, of late especially, been the subject of so much philological, ethnological and mythological dissertation that one is tempted to say, in contemplating this huge accumulation of critical detail, that here at last is "the grave of Arthur". But when we turn to the poets, even to such extreme modernisers of the story as Tennyson, we feel that the spell continues to work, and are constrained still to follow the pale but deathless figure of the Celtic king as he moves among the shades of his forlorn fairyland.

To students of literature, pure and simple, the question of paramount interest in connection with Arthur is-Who made him for literary purposes the attractive and potent personality he is? Who drew, so to speak, the first fulllength literary portrait of him, and gave to poets and romancers without number something tangible and substantial to draw from, to enlarge, and to idealise? Literary histories generally tell us that the Arthur of romance was introduced to literature by Geoffrey of Monmouth. It matters little whether Geoffrey borrowed from a book that has been lost, or utilised popular traditions, or drew mainly upon his own imagination,-to him belongs the credit of what we may call the first literary exploitation of Arthur. The appearance of the Historia Regum Britanniae marks a real epoch in the history of medieval literature. Arthurian romance would probably have grown and flourished had Geoffrey's "History" never been written. There were

plenty of other channels through which Celtic traditions might have found their way into the European literature of romance; and as a matter of fact, Geoffrey's book exercised but little influence upon the matter of the Arthurian romances proper. Many of the most picturesque and significant features of the full-grown legend are not even faintly suggested by Geoffrey. The Round Table, Lancelot, the Grail, were unknown to him and were grafted upon the legend from other sources. But the im

1 M. Gaston Paris, writes in the Histoire Littéraire de la France, xxx, p. 5: "Rien ne serait moins juste d'ailleurs que de regarder, ainsi qu'on le faisait volontiers autrefois, l'Historia regum Britanniae comme la source des romans du cycle d'Arthur. A très peu d'exceptions près (encore ne concernent-elles guère que les moins anciens des romans en prose), les compositions en langue vulgaire n'ont, au contraire, aucun rapport avec l'ouvrage de Gaufrei, bien qu'il ait de très bonne heure et à plusieurs reprises été traduit en français. Il suffit, pour s'en convaincre, de remarquer que toutes ces merveilleuses conquêtes du prétendu roi breton, qui occupent tant de place chez son historiographe, sont absolument inconnues aux poèmes, où nous voyons Arthur séjourner toujours dans le pays de Galles, ou tout au plus dans quelque autre partie de la Grande Bretagne." Vide, also, Professor Rhys, Arthurian Legend, p. 371. Mr. Alfred Nutt, in a recent publication (The Influence of Celtic upon Medieval Romance, p. 7), writes in the same strain. "It would be a mistake to assume that because the legend found an earlier home in historical rather than in imaginative literature, the romantic element is necessarily the younger of the two. It can, on the contrary, be proved that the romantic form must have been popular in part of France for at least half a century previous to Geoffrey's History." Mr. Nutt, however, holds that the association in Geoffrey's book of Arthurian fable with what purported to be authentic history "had much to do with the vast and sudden outburst of the legend." "There can be little doubt," he continues (p. 13), "but that the Brutus element in Geoffrey's History, the story of the Trojan and Roman descent of the British, which seems to us so tedious and so ridiculous, contributed very greatly to its popularity and influence, and that the purely romantic aspects of the legend derived from their association with this pseudo-history a status and weight they would otherwise have lacked."

mediate vogue and popularity of Arthurian romance in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries were due primarily to the impulse given by his strange Latin history. It was he who showed the literary possibilities of "the matter of Britain." He it was who opened out the prospect and gave poets and professed romancers their chance. He is, besides, the father of a long line of poets and chroniclers. In English literature, at least, no medieval work has left behind it so prolific a literary offspring as the History of the Kings of Britain.

The materials for constructing a biography of Geoffrey of Monmouth are scanty in the extreme, especially as the "Gwentian Brut," upon which his biographers have hitherto mainly relied for their facts, has been proved to be a very untrustworthy record.' The date of his birth is unknown, but it is tolerably certain that he died at Llandaff in the year 1155. The first authentic record of him that we possess is in the foundation charter of the

2

The late Thomas Stephens has conclusively proved (Archæologia Cambrensis, Third Series, vol. iv, (1858), pp. 77, sqq.) the untrustworthiness of the Gwentian Brut, which is ascribed in the Myvyrian Archaiology to Caradoc of Llancarvan, and is known also as the Book of Aberpergwm, having been copied from a MS. in the possession of George Williams, of Aberpergwm. Stephens sums up his conclusions as follows:-" 1. The book of Aberpergwm is not the Chronicle of Caradoc, but ought always to be cited by the former name. 2. It is a respectable authority for the history of Glamorgan, but not for the general history of Wales. 3. It abounds in mistakes, conjectures, and unauthorised additions; it exhibits several anachronisms, and names of persons who lived in the years 1203, 1293, 1317, and 1328; it was written in or about 1555." The work is printed in the Myvyrian Archaiology under the title of "Brut y Tywysogion," and is the second chronicle of that name in the Myvyrian.

2 Brut y Tywysogion, ed. by Williams (Ab Ithel), Rolls Series, 1860. In the brief record in this Brut, Geoffrey is wrongly styled Bishop of Llandaff. Bishop Nicholas at that time held the see of I.landaff. Vide Stubbs, Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum, p. 46.