When a novelist enchanted by one of the world's great matters reaches his third volume, as Mr. White does in his successor to "The Sword in the Stone" and "The Witch in the Wood," he has committed himself to a quest that will not let him go. ["The Ill-Made Knight"] matches the others in virtuosity and wit, and it outdoes them in wisdom, swift, scalpel-sharp, of a kind infrequently consorting with cleverness….
As he should be in any treatment of the Round Table, Lancelot is the hero. Straightway the reader needs one warning: here is no nineteenth-century sentimentalizing, no languishing, soft condonement of sin in the guise of "fated passion" and "great love." The men and the morals follow more ancient models. Even as a boy, Lancelot is ugly, soul-tormented, ferocious with himself, powerful, and pitiable, self-named "the Chevalier Mal-Fet—the Ill-Made Knight." Beyond his beloved Malory, Mr. White knows surely the poets of the deep Middle Ages, Chrétien de Troyes and others who judged their material in the light of a critical moral realism…. His Lancelot dreams and prays, struggles toward God, falls, strives to live in and by his conscience, goes mad in his own decision that he is but a swindle, and, in the end, is "forced to have it out with his spiritual doom." His is the human dignity and agony of self-knowledge. The violence of our day is recapturing one honesty at least for literature: as in Homer and Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, a strong man may weep and be the more honorable and manly for his tears.
This is a free excerpt of 261 words. There are 287 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our White, T(erence) H(anbury) 1906–1964: Critical Essay by Olive B. White Access Pass.
