Essay by Joseph D. McDowell, Professor of English

A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.
-Robert Herrick (1591-1674), Delight in Disorder.

King Arthur, if ever there was such an historical figure, flourished between the late 5th and the mid 6th centuries in Romano-Celtic Britain. He won a few battles against the invading Anglo-Saxons, wavered there on the verge of hope, and quickly retreated into song for the next few centuries. We know nearly nothing about that Arthur.

But the Arthur who emerged from obscurity a few centuries later in the Middle Ages quickly became the most talked about figure in Western culture, and his story the most frequently published, of any figure outside of the Bible. Arthur is newly born with nearly each new generation, shouldering the concerns and exemplifying the values of each new generation from about 1115 'til now.

The etching you see here is part of the British Arthur story as exemplified by the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its second-generation practitioner, Sir Edward Burne-Jones. It was a world of contradictions: either exciting or terrifying. Britain, at the height of its Empire, was both beguiled by her conquered races and feared them. British society, an impregnable bastion of male privilege and authority, was governed by a Queen. With the Industrial Age raging around them, many British intellectuals sought a reaffirmation of humanity in a return to natural themes and forces. An education which valued pure rationality engendered worries about deeper emotional and erotic roots.

The chaotic age of Victoria sought symbols that would reconcile these disparate characteristics, especially in the realm of the other: the female, the exotic, the romantic, the emotional, and in a false historicity of the past-a phenomenon often referred to as "medievalism," a romanticisation of an era as distant in time as India is in miles.

In this picture we see Arthur's most powerful minister of state, the Druid Merlin, ensnared by the powers that he himself had taught to a trusted devotee. Merlin is captured by the Other in all the ways enumerated above. Does he regret this? Or is his "beguilement" a willing, almost urgent need to sublimate the stated values of his Victorian age? Perhaps there is something guilt-inducing about conquering once sovereign peoples? In ignoring the value of half of our society based only on gender? In pretending that intellect and emotion must be constantly at war? In taking too literally the command that humans must "subdue" the earth?

Finally, it seems to me that this picture illustrates perfectly what an earlier literary age would have called a "wild civility." The images are balanced and the patterns nicely symmetrical. However, there are few right angles or straight lines. All is fluctuating and moving. The patterns are too complex to follow easily and that is, in part, what beguiles.