Mr. White has now brought to a conclusion the great work which began in 1938 with the publication of The Sword in the Stone. In 1940 The Witch in the Wood and in 1941 The Ill-Made Knight, carried on the tangled story; at last The Candle in the Wind completes a crowded architectural design. The Candle in the Wind is published as the fourth book in an omnibus volume, The Once and Future King, which contains revised versions of the three previous works. The whole 300,000 words make a unity, whose tone appears now as something much deeper and more serious than a casual reading of the earlier volumes would lead the reader to suppose.

The subject of the long book is the complete Matter of Britain, the cycle of King Arthur from his mysterious birth to the mystery surrounding the close of his reign. As the author points out in a note on the jacket (which should surely be printed more permanently within the text) the Matter of Britain is a solemn theme Malory, weaving together many strands of legend, fills his pages with exciting tales of adventure, awful tales of enchantment, and heartrending tales of forbidden love.

Malory called his work The Morte d'Arthur. Arthur's death is what matter; for it teaches the lesson that God is not mocked, and that retribution will overtake the sinner even in this world.

The sin Arthur had committed was, of course, incest. Of course, because incest is the natural foundation of tragedy. It is a sin, or at any rate an occurence, which stirs feelings of revulsion in even the most free-thinking pagan; it can be committed by inadvertence, and once committed cannot be undone. The story may be unfamiliar, since it is unsuitable for treatment in the books for boys from which most of us derive our knowledge of the Round Table. But it is the essential skeleton of the full legend. Arthur was the only son of King Uther Pendragon, and illegitimate. He was brought up in secret, far from the court, so that only Merlin knew the identity of his mother. Presently Arthur himself committed adultery, and the fruit of that illicit intercourse was Mordred. Arthur did not know, could not know (because Merlin had forgotten to inform him) that Queen Morgause was his half-sister. But he knew that adultery is mortal sin; from that sin came the ruin of the Round Table and the downfall of the rule of righteousness on earth.

The tragedy is implicit in the very beginning of the Matter of Britain; in the words of Mr. White "it is the tragedy, the Aristotelian and comprehensive tragedy, of sin coming home to roost." Yet, although Arthur failed in the end, he enjoyed a happy and glorious youth; his happiness and glory make up the atmosphere of the first book in the tetralogy. That opening book has been largely rewritten, for in 1938 the world was a pleasanter and more innocent place than it is to-day. As originally published The Sword in the Stone had two themes, the wonder and beauty of the world of nature, and the slightly comic conventions of the chivalrous life.

All this is reproduced in the revised version; but reproduced in a grimmer form, suitable to our Age of Iron.

In general, the new version of The Sword in the Stone has lost the flippancy of the original. At the close, when young Arthur has drawn the magic sword and unexpectedly finds himself rightful King of Britain, chivalry intrudes, and duty, and a reminder that the task of ruling is a heavy burden. As a whole, the tale has been refashioned by a writer who remembers the gas-chambers of Belsen; we cannot recapture nowadays the innocent optimism of the League of Nations.

The second book, The Witch in the Wood, was as originally written the weakest part of the composite structure. This section, now named The Queen of Air and Darkness, has been wholly rewritten and greatly improved. There is deeper horror at the wicked magic of Queen Morgause, and less tittering at her promiscuity. It is a loss that we see so little of Sir Palomides, the heathen knight who talks Babu English; but he still appears, as do King Pellinore and his quarry, the Blatant Beast. The book ends with a description of the wedding of King Pellinore and his Flemish princess, a description which epitomizes, in its mingled love and mockery, Mr. White's attitude to the Middle Ages.

In this second book Mr. White introduces his sole personal contribution to the legendary Matter of Britain; though, as he points out, he has added nothing that cannot be deduced from Malory. He suggests that King Arthur stands for the centralizing power of the Anglo-Norman monarchs, and that his enemies represent Gaelic hostility to the Saxon. Perhaps it is a mistake thus to rationalize the feuds of a fairy story; but the Matter of Britain, as handled by Mr. White, is strong enough to carry this additional superstructure. The third book, The Ill-Made Knight, is little altered. This is the core of Arthurian romance as most of us remember it: the Round Table, the Grail, and the love of Lancelot for Guinevere. Mr. White expounds the complicated subject of courteous love very fairly. At a time when most marriages were arranged, and bride and bridegroom might meet as strangers on their wedding day, nobody expected a passionate devotion between husband and wife. It may very well happen that a man falls in love with the wife of his friend, and he cannot be blamed for such a happening. But he must not allow his love to issue in physical adultery; partly because that is sinful, still more because it is dishonourable.

Arthur, of course, knew that Lancelot was in love with his Queen, and that she returned his love. But he took it for granted that two people of such scrupulous honour would never cuckold him. That is why on a careless reading of the story he appears as a complaisant husband. Lancelot himself truly loved and admired King Arthur, which made his remorse all the stronger when he knew himself to be false to the ideal of courtly chivalry.

The Grail, on the other hand, which some see as the mainspring of the Matter of Britain, is here deliberately played down. In Mr. White's version the quest for it came about more or less by accident. To some readers this may seem a fault of emphasis, for the Grail is a subject far above the matter of most romances; yet, considered in cold blood, the Grail has very little to do with King Arthur. The disadvantage of this quest, as an element in any story, is that its achievement is the crown and end of life. Those who attain it have nothing left to accomplish on earth, and can only go on to their eternal reward in Heaven.

So we come to the new book, the end of this great work. The Candle in the Wind deals with the plotting of Mordred and his kinsmen of the house of Orkney, and with their undying enmity to King Arthur. We have now reached the autumnal decay of the Middle Ages, and Mordred in his person and in his dress deliberately foreshadows Shakespeare's King. Richard III. He foreshadows also a greater villain of a more recent epoch; Sir Agravaine, his half-brother, suggests casually that he can stir up discontent by playing on the racial enmity between Saxon and Gael, and their common enmity to the Jews; the Eylfot, the cross with crooked limbs, might make a handy badge for the new movement. This is surely a mistake of tact. Such a neat double meaning will tempt any author, but any author ought to resist it; the thoroughgoing parable sends the reader searching for more parables on every page, and when he cannot discover them he grows restless.

The story is familiar. The characters are not, for all that Mr. White claims to have taken them directly from Malory. Moralists have noted with regret that wickedness is in general more interesting than virtue. It is the author's achievement to have drawn good men, Lancelot, Arthur, and the misguided Gawaine, and to have made their goodness as exciting as any evil. They are brave, they keep their promises, they accept with their eyes open the consequences of their actions: compared to the characters in contemporary popular fiction they are strangely adult. Even Guinevere is a good woman, though not quite good enough. As a study of intelligent people, living in the light of a code which they cannot always obey, this is a tale for grown-up readers.

But Mr. White is much more than a spinner of good plots; his prose gives as much pleasure as his matter. There are witty and learned asides on every subject under the sun, from the correct method of bending the long bow to the misadventures of medieval flying machines. Perhaps it is a mistake to mingle genuine history with myth; occasionally the author gets himself into a tangle when he seeks to reinforce some detail of his background with an example from recorded history. The world of Malory is a universe complete in itself; we do not need to be reminded that the "legendary" King William Rufus swore by the Holy Face of Lucca, or that the Holy Shroud lurked unrecognized until the late fourteenth century. When we are told, as an example of the medieval career open to talent, that the father of Pope Adrian IV was a serf, we cannot help recalling that the serfs of the Abbey of St. Alban never owed obedience to the dynasty of Pendragon. But that is the only false note in the book which lives continuously in the same atmosphere, an atmosphere devised by its author. To sustain one ambience through such a long work is evidence of astonishing technical skill.

In three fields particularly the author excels. He can draw living people; he can describe a landscape; and he can enter into the inmost minds of birds and beasts. Whether it is a hedgehog disputing with a badger, or a white-fronted goose flying across the North Sea, we see with their eyes and feel with their limbs. This ambitious work, so long in the building, now stands complete. It will long remain a memorial to an author who is at once civilized, learned, witty and humane.