 Parfit Gentil Knyghts
The "flood-tide of chivalry", as Stephen Leacock put it, is generally seen as something which has passed. Edmund Burke, viewing the French Revolution, announced, "The age of chivalry is gone. - That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded." Forty years later, one of Disraeli's characters put it more colourfully: "Bores have succeeded to dragons." Nevertheless, the traditional figure of the knight still conjures up the chivalric ideal, from Chaucer's pilgrim to Tennyson's Sir Lancelot, in plumed helmet, with his "brazen greaves" and "burnished baldric". In the 1950s the motor manufacturer Lord Rootes, seeking for a figure of speech to express the enthusiasm aroused by a new car, said, "No other man-made device since the shields and lances of ancient knights fulfils a man's ego like an automobile."
Lancelot as envisaged by Tennyson was on his way to King Arthur's court at "many-towered Camelot", and Camelot as the home of the Round Table and Arthur's Knights is an enduring image of glittering romance and optimism. In the 1960s it was associated with the White House of a dynamic young American President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was particularly fond of the song "Camelot" from Alan Jay Lerner's Broadway musical. After Kennedy's death, his widow Jackie said, "There'll be great Presidents again - and the Johnsons are wonderful, they've been wonderful to me - but there'll never be another Camelot again." Once more the image is of "one brief shining moment" that has passed - and yet fascination with the story of Arthur, Malory's "once and future king", with his Round Table of knights, is something which remains.
Elizabeth Knowles
01/07/2004
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