ARTHURIAN LEGEND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 510, 1 April 1949, Page 11

ARTHURIAN LEGEND

ARTHURIAN TORSO. By Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis. Oxtord University Press, London. English price, 12/6. N the last years of his life Charles Williams was writing a prose work on the Arthurian legend, presumably with the intention of supplying a background for his poems on the same subject. He died before the book was finished; but he had read the manuscript to C. S. Lewis, and had discussed with him both the prose and the poetry, Arthurian Torso contains the posthumous fragment "The Figure of Arthur," and a commentary on the lyrical cycle published earlier in Taliessen Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars, Lewis clearly believes that Williams wrote some of the greatest poetry of his time. He believes also that if it were left without a commentary it "might soon become another such battlefield for competing interpretations as Blake’s Prophetic Books." Readers who have not discovered the poetry must take their impressions of it from the passages quoted by Lewis. They may then be encouraged to go forward from the criticism to the poetry, but they will need to be unafraid of mystery. Williams was a deeply religious man who was also a student of magic, and his work is made difficult by his use of symbolism. Under his treatment the Arthurian legend becomes a Christian myth in which every character and, event is given spiritual significance. Narrative turns into allegory; the intention of the music is to suggest modes of being which could be related to the subtlest conceptions of theology. Only those who share Williams’s background of thought and faith can expect the music to be intelligible; and even for them there may be many passages where words fall upon the ear without meaning. Lewis himself admits that he (continued on next page)

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(continued from previous page) cannot understand some parts of the lyrics. Great poetry may be difficult, but it must also be accessible. If Williams’s Arthuriad needs scholarly interpretation, a few years after it was written, it may have only a faint chance of acceptance and survival.

M.H.

H.