Malory : Sir Thomas (c.1470), English writer famous as author of Morte d’Arthur, the first prose account in English of the rise & fall of King Arthur & the fellowship of the Round Table. Malory’s original title The Book of King Arthur & His Knights of the Round Table was abbreviated to Morte d’Arthur by book’s printer Caxton.
... of the King miss both the romantic and the idyllic beauty and arrive only at a graceful decorated effective triviality. The grand old Celtic myths and traditions already strangely mediaevalised by Malory, but full still of life and large humanity Page 152 and colour are modernised into a baffling and disappointing superficiality and miss all greatness and power of life. There is no congruity ...
... goldenest height is for him the romance-cum-fantasy of Aucassin and Nicolette with its dei- fication of love at once intensely, tenderly, unsophisticatedly. A testament of Romanticism to Lucas is also Malory's Morte d'Arthur where the essence of the tradition of Chivalry is distilled, though with less lovely art. The Renaissance he cannot consider Romantic because it "tended to look scorn on the rags ...
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