This is history as Geoffrey of Monmouth understood it, but hardly so in the modern sense, and Arthur remains as mystical a figure as Achilles, despite the efforts of various writers to bring him within the circle of actual kings. After the Romans left Britain, two centuries passed of whose history hardly a coherent shred remains. This was the age of Arthur, one of the last champions of Celtic Britain against the inflowing tide of Anglo-Saxon invasion. That there was an actual Arthur there is some, but no very positive, reason to believe. After all the evidence has been offered, we still seem to have but a shadowy hero before us, "a king of shreds and patches," whose history is so pieced out with conjecture that it is next to impossible to separate its facts from its fancies.
The Arthur of the legends, of the Welsh and Breton ballads, of the later _Chansons de Geste_, of Malory and Tennyson, has quite stepped out of the historic page and become a hero without time or place in any real world, a king of the imagination, the loftiest figure in that great outgrowth of chivalric romance which formed the favorite fictitious literature of Europe during three or four of the mediæval centuries. Charlemagne, the leading character in the earlier romances of chivalry, was, in the twelfth century, replaced by Arthur, a milder and more Christian-like hero, whose adventures, with those of his Knights of the Round Table, delighted the tenants of court and castle in that marvel-loving and uncritical age. That the stories told of him are all fiction cannot be declared. Many of them may have been founded on fact. But, like the stones of a prehistoric wall, their facts are so densely enveloped by the ivy of fiction that it is impossible to delve them out.
The ballads and romances in which the King Arthur of mediæval story figures as the hero, would scarcely prove pleasant and profitable reading to us now, however greatly they delighted our ancestors. They are marked by a coarseness and crudity which would be but little to our taste. Nor have we anything of modern growth to replace them. Milton entertained a purpose of making King Arthur the hero of an epic poem, but fortunately yielded it for the nobler task of "Paradise Lost." Spenser gives this hero a minor place in his "Fairie Queen." Dryden projected a King Arthur epic, but failed to write it. Recently Bulwer has given us a cumbersome "King Arthur," which nobody reads; and Tennyson has handled the subject brilliantly in his "Idyls of the King," splendid successes as poems, yet too infiltrated with the spirit of modernism to be acceptable as a reproduction of the Arthur of romance. For a true rehabilitation of this hero of the age of chivalry we must go to the "Morte Darthur" of Sir Thomas Malory, a writer of the fifteenth century, who lived when men still wore armor, and so near to the actual age of chivalry as to be in full sympathy with the spirit of its fiction, and its pervading love of adventure and belief in the magical.