Engulfed Cathedral

Theodore Sabo

Description

The Engulfed Cathedral is the expression of a mental state. It is not archaic, but it seeks to defend a place that exists only in the mind: the Gesamtkunstwerk, the sacred book of the arts. The author uses his philosophy and love of lore to create a series of vignettes, any one of which will entertain the deeper reader and all of which serve as a collection of ideas to be viewed, savoured and considered. The book consists of twenty essays on literature, music and fantasy, covering figures like Malory, Spenser, Shakespeare, Rossetti and Joyce. 'The Romantic Temperament' explores the youthful writers of the Romantic era; 'Edvard Grieg' spends time with the composer, his myth and legacy; 'The History of Middle-earth' brings high fantasy into the unexpected periphery of Goethe. There is a thinking reader on each of our six continents, and The Engulfed Cathedral offers them repose with a like mind.

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528921794
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Engulfed Cathedral
Essays on Literature, Music, and Fantasy
Theodore Sabo
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-11-30
The Engulfed Cathedral About the Author Copyright Information © The Arthurian Legends The Elizabethans The Romantic Temperament The Imaginative Novel The Engulfed Cathedral Stephen Dedalus in Mullingar Richard Wagner Götterdämmerung Ernest Newman on Wagner The Sources for The Ring Edvard Grieg Twentieth-century Opera Two Tales from Australia The Fenian Legends Memories of Pagan Iceland Andersen’s Faery Tales The History of Middle-earth Tolkien the Artist An Admirable Fantasy The Earthsea Trilogy
About the Author
Theodore Sabo is a resident of Washington State and an extraordinary lecturer at North-West University of South Africa. He has published in  Acta Classica  and the  Journal of Early Christian History .
Copyright Information ©
Theodore Sabo (2020)
Cover photo copyright © Theodore Sabo (2013)
The right of Theodore Sabo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Austin Macauley is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone and portrayed to the best of their recollection. In some cases, names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528920636 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528921794 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ
The Arthurian Legends

1
Prison, destructive to Villon, freed Malory from the crude companions of his youth and forced him to concentrate on an ideal world in which the Holy Grail provided a contrast to the endless knightly combats. But that world was doomed to end with a Götterdämmerung because nothing is lasting and few of the great will survive, and Malory accepts religion as the final and best answer for man. I am disappointed by the oath of asceticism Galahad, Percivale, and Bors make. There must have been some way to reconcile the spiritual and the material. Lancelot, who loves earthly pleasures, is bequeathed a vision of heaven which proves his salvation. The worst part about his vision is that it has an ending, and he is angered when awakened from it. It was the same kind of eye-opening vision Aquinas had and after which he came to think of all his writings as straw. Someday we too will realise that the greatest literature and art is only a reflection of the glory to be revealed. After the vision Lancelot returns to solely earthly delights, but he could have reconciled his earthly and spiritual desires by marrying Elaine the daughter of King Pelles.
Galahad was taken into heaven without dying because he abstained from fornication. He was thus free from earthly pleasures and sufferings alike. His righteousness gives him spiritual power Lancelot does not have, and he will fight no one except those foolhardy enough to attack him. Lancelot’s frailty is described by his need of sleep during his Grail vision, whereas Galahad, who needs no sleep to experience the Grail, goes from strength to strength. The relationship between Galahad and Lancelot is instructive. Galahad does not criticise Lancelot’s morals and shows no resentment toward the father who sired and abandoned him, and the warmth of Lancelot’s feelings is revealed by the fact that the days he spends with Galahad on the bark which bears the corpse of Percivale’s sister are some of the happiest of his life.
Even those of Arthur’s knights who are not religious long for something better for their lives, and all of them learn much about their spiritual natures during the holy quest. At the opposite end of the pole from the quest is Palomides’ pursuit of the Questing Beast which represents all the things men strive for which will not ultimately give them happiness; but the one who does not pursue any of these things can never be counted on to pursue the highest thing, and therefore the pursuit of the Questing Beast is not fruitless but serves as the first stage of a long journey.

2
Tennyson’s Idylls of the King has a disquieting beauty like that of the wild swans King Christian II must have seen from his prison cell in Sønderborg. It can no more replace Malory than the swans could replace throne and freedom. Its plots are never an improvement on Malory, and its handful of characters are unable to make a colourful world; but there are many passages of lyrical depth which increase our appreciation of the Arthurian experience, and in places Tennyson hints at an epic greater than Malory’s:

The Queen
Look’d hard upon her lover, he on her,
And each foresaw the dolorous day to be;
And all talk died, as in a grove all song
Beneath the shadow of some bird of prey.
Then a long silence came upon the hall,
And Modred thought, ’T he time is hard at hand.’
Imagine those lines being written not about Guinevere and Lancelot but about a king and queen who existed before Arthur and Guinevere and of whom Arthur and Guinevere were only shadows. They would rule over a realm greater than Logress, and the queen by magic would make the realm safe from harm by nature or men until treachery from within the realm would destroy it. Such a realm never existed except in an Atlantis of the mind, but it is comforting to think of forgotten kings and chronologies waiting to be expounded by scholars. There is a time when one longs for someone greater than Arthur and feels that even in Malory’s narrative something is missing, that he was able to preserve only a fraction of the legends and capture only a fragment of their majesty.
Speaking of Homer, Robert Fitzgerald writes, ‘Artist and writer know that any work, ancient or modern, even any masterwork, could easily have been very different from what it is. If you are curious about these matters, you can often see, in drafts and sketches, part at least of the sheaf or spectrum of possible forms of which the “final” version of a story or poem or picture represents a selection—not necessarily or invariably the best—or simply a terminus at which effort stopped.’
If these different stories, names, and legends are more fascinating to us than the stories we know it is because they are unknown. Once they are converted into the dull mediums of verse or prose they will lose their mystery, and we will regard the story of King Arthur as the greatest man has devised. Malory, who wrote the best tales of King Arthur in any language, saw more of the Holy Grail than did Wolfram whose Parzival , in at least one American version whose translators prefer it to Wagner’s, is a parade of clownish appetites, and unlike the Arthur of many continental stories, who is weak and ineffectual, the king who presides over Malory’s Round Table is neither an ordinary cuckold nor a laughingstock.
1997
The Elizabethans

1
I have been wondering whether I like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene because it is good or because of memories I associate with it. I am uninterested in the allegorical implications and still less in the historical ones, but it seems beyond dispute that Spenser had in his day the hatred of the commonplace without which no one can achieve success.
The reader of Spenser, no matter how ravenous, must read him in portions and take as side courses the works of more accessible writers, but he will be well rewarded, even if he only finishes the first book, and whether he reads about the dawn Una sees after Redcrosse’s second dragon-slaying or the schemings of Archimago who comes disguised as a messenger for the shamed Duessa and is even in victory defeated because he brings jealousy into a home where habit and acquaintance would have vanquished all emotion, he will find himself in a world so difficult to tear himself from and so compelling that if it is spring he will not notice the blossoms and if it is autumn he will not notice the falling leaves. Spenser knew that meter and rhyme were a way of holding his readers’ attention and used them with more understanding of their hypnotic power than any other poet of his time. He wrote when the age of faith, though it had been unsettled by the Reformation, was still strong but when the age of chivalry was dying. He wanted to return to that age and remove his art from the everyday, but he was unable to because he had nothing like the Holy Grail to work with and instead had the Palmer of Book Two of The Faerie Queene . It was the Palmer who rebuked Guyon’s wandering eyes and prevented him from helping what he thought was a damsel in distress. Book One succeeds better than Book Two because Una is a healthier incentive to chastity than the Palmer. How can Guyon be the knight of temperance when he has no chance to be temperate on his own? He is helped at important times by the Palmer, but he cannot make a move without him. One is forced to believe that Spenser thinks of the Palmer, who unlike Sir Satyrane is incapable of laughing at a bawdy joke, as a worthy character. In spite of his grandiose mocking treatment of the ‘prudent heads’ of state and ‘the rugged forehead’ whom he glossed as an ‘ill judge of love, that cannot love,’ he admired authority and government and probably saw in the Palmer a prophecy of Cromwell.
Guyon’s plight is repeated with that of Artegall and his iron man who represents t