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The Return of King Arthur: The Legend through Victorian Eyes by Debra N. Mancoff

1997; Scriptoriun Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/art.1997.0018

1934-1539

Lee B. Gibson,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

154ARTHURIANA féminin' (141); Creuzé de Lesser's Les chevalierswas 'the first and only attempt in the first halfofthe century to tell the story ofthe rise and fall ofArthur and the knights ofthe Round Table' (158; for other 'firsts,' see 4, 72, 79, 133, 139, 147). Thus, despite the dearth ofArthurian material, Glencross's study is an absorbing reconstruction of French Romantic medievalism. HEATHER ARDEN University of Cincinnati debra N. MANCOFF, The Return ofKingArthur: The Legend through Victorian Eyes. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. Pp. 176, color illus. isbn: 0-8109-3782-4. $35. A respected teacher ofmine once made what, at the time, seemed to me to be a fairly startling remark. Critics ofliterature, he said, would do well to pay more attention to art historians and their practice and less attention to philosophers and theirs. I had always been, and continue to be, somewhat dubious of the analogy drawn between poetryand paintingin olderliterarycriticism. But myteacher's remark, I soon realized, had little to do with this shopworn critical practice and its often too facile employment. Rather, it had more to do with thesimple fact that it is almostalways more informative, and so more productive, to regard literaryworkswith something like the art historian's eye for style ofcomposition and arrangement of materials than it is to regard them with the philosopher's obsession with oracular pronouncements about the Nature of Being. It is also, I soon learned, more fun. I will notsoon forget the excitement I felt when I first observed, for instance, that much medieval architecture, and particularly Gothic architecture, is paratactic in composition and, bywhat cannot be a coincidence, so is much medieval literature. And so, my teacher's advice, about which I initially had my doubts, soon proved to be true. My experience overcame my reservations. I am reminded ofall this by the appearance ofDebra N. Mancoff's new book on the Arthurian Revival that figured so prominently in the culture of the Victorian period. One ofthe chiefvirtues of this work, ofcourse, is its collection within one cover ofagreat number ofrepresentative paintings, drawings, and prints from awide varietyofartistswhoseworkswere informed by the renewed interest in theArthurian cycle and transformed by the effort to adapt the Arthurian material to their own artistic practice. It is convenient to have these works readily available for study in a volume so attractively presented as this one. Reproductions, certainly, are hardly an ideal substitute for the real thing. But, as the real thing is not often so easily encountered, the convenience of access to these works Mancoff's book affords is a virtue not to be casually dismissed. More important, however, is the occasion the book provides to appreciare the contribution a volume primarily concerned with art history can make to literary criticism. While the philosophical and ethical uses the Arthurian revivalists made of the legends and the influences they exercised on the culture ofthe Victorian period are well documented elsewhere, a book such as this permits readers whose primary concern is literary not only to learn something about another artistic medium about which they may know very little, but to see and to REVIEWS155 study for themselves, within one cover, theways inwhich strategies ofrepresentation from this other medium both correspond to, and diverge from, those ofthe literary medium. This convenience of access (an altogether too pedestrian a term for this much appreciatedvirtue) ispreciselywhat creates the opportunities Mancoff's volume offers for a first hand study ofthe ways in which individual pictorial adaptations ofArthurian material and individual literary adaptations ofArthurian material mutually informed one another during the Victorian period. The reproduction ofJames Archer's 1862 engraving How KingArthur by the Meanes ofMerlin Gate His SwordExcalibur ofthe Lady ofthe Lake (54), for instance, with its deliberately archaic title and its portrayal of Arthur, in Mancoff's words, as a 'classical hero disguised in medieval costume' (56), very clearly embodies the Victorian effort to fuse classical and medieval tactics for the representation ofArthurian heroism with the Victorian era's own notions of courageous and manly optimism. Tennyson's formal decision to portray his own embodiment ofVictorian heroism through the medium ofVirgilian blank verse is of a piece with Archer's formal decision to...