The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art, 1840-1920 (review)

The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art, 1840-1920, by Christine Poulson; pp. xvi + 268. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999, £45.00, £17.99 paper, $79.95, $29.95 paper.

In Aurora Leigh (1857), Elizabeth Barrett Browning observed that "King Arthur's self / Was commonplace to Lady Guenever; / And Camelot to minstrels seemed as flat / As Fleet Street to our poets" (5: 11.216-19). Writing in 1856, Barrett Browning spoke to a public who held an escalating fascination with the king and his court, and that gave her words a powerful resonance. Arthurian poems by Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton had recently appeared before the public and the expectation of Tennyson's own new Arthuriad was soon to be fulfilled. Painters had also begun to explore the visual potential of the legend, and a much-anticipated cycle of frescoes by William Dyce, based on Arthurian personifications, was in progress in the Queen's private chamber in the new Palace at Westminster. In Camelot, Guenevere may have found Arthur's image "commonplace," but to the Victorian public, he epitomized romance, heroism, and a splendid heritage of masculine agency.

A similar revival of involvement and interest can be traced through the last quarter-century of contemporary Victorian scholarship. The pioneering work of James D. Merriman, in The Flower of Kings: A Study of the Arthurian Legend in England between 1485 and 1835 (1973), and Alice Chandler, in A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth- Century Literature (1970), defined the importance of the legend as a cultural metaphor and opened the field for diverse methods of analysis. The work of a new generation of scholars, including John R. Reed, Linda K. Hughes, and Roger Simpson (as well as the author of this review) sheds a bright and revealing light on the Arthurian revival in Victorian culture. In her new book, The Quest for the Grail, Christine Poulson adds to this now- broad body of literature. But, traveling in well-charted waters, Poulson's thoroughly researched and lucid set of essays prompts one to ask whether current Arthurian studies have cast the image of the king in a context as commonplace as that evoked by Barrett Browning.

Poulson's involvement with the study of the legend spans the course of its revival in scholarly investigation. Her contributions to the field have been steadily forthcoming and valuable, most notably her catalogues of artists who interpreted the legend and of the subjects represented in the visual arts that appeared in the 1989 and 1990 volumes of Arthurian Literature. Over the years, Poulson has acquired an almost unparalleled fluency with the production of Arthurian imagery, as well as a broad knowledge of the social, political, and cultural issues relevant to the study of the Victorian era. She defines her interdisciplinary method in her Preface, acknowledging that she has cast her net wide, preferring to err in the direction of breadth, rather than limit the scope of her investigations. Herein is the strength, but also the weakness, of this collection: Poulson's wide range of themed essays, framing intriguing issues such as "The Grail and the Occult" and "From Anglo-Catholic Icon to War Hero," touch upon new ways to contextualize the legend in the Victorian world. But all too often, the reader gains only a glimpse of the topic at hand, rather than deep insight into it.

Poulson also informs the reader that she has not attempted a comprehensive survey of the legend, noting that such studies exist. But the early chapters of her book, particularly "The Queen's Robing Room Frescoes," detailing the ensemble created at the Westminster Palace by Dyce, and "The Brotherhood and the Quest," surveying the interest of the Pre-Raphaelites in Arthurian subject matter, appear to contradict that intention, and they offer a broad but thin introduction to the whole of the...