The splendid quest, stories of knights on the pilgrims' way

Front matter

MATHEW

SPLENDID

QUEST

Preface

The charm of knights lies partly in the fact that they have the spirit of great grown-up boys and girls. They are boys because they are as careless of danger and as eager for an adventure at forty as they are at fourteen. They sing of

", , . the wild joys of living ! The leaping From rock up to rock —

The rending their boughs from the palm-trees, The cool silver shock Of a plunge in the pool’s living water.**

Their energy and zest are inexhaustible. The oldest and weariest of them leaves the most eager of Boy Scouts panting breathlessly behind.

Yet they are also, in a sense, grown-up girls, for they healthily let out all the feelings which a modern boy is ashamed to own. After a lusty fight, in which he has cheerfully taken and given a hundred hard blows, a knight will weep at the sight of a brother whom he has

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PREFACE not seen for many months, and will eagerly fall on his neck and kiss him. When Arthur’s knights went out, a hundred and fifty strong, on the splendid quest, the mighty king himself “ could not speak for weeping.”

The knights in this book are just people who have carried the boy’s wild joy of living and the girl’s sensitiveness into the fighting days of manhood.

Mr. William Watson writes of that world “of crimson and of gold,” with

'*. . . Beauty snatched from ogre’s dungeoned hold. Ever the recreant would in dust be rolled,

Ever the true knight in the joust would win,

Ever the scaly shape of monstrous Sin At last lie vanquished, fold on writhing fold.”

Mr. Watson, however, wonders whether the day of chivalry is dead, and he asks —

“ Was it all false, that world of princely deeds,

The splendid quest, the good fight ringing clear? ”

There have, indeed, always been some knights false to the Quest and cowardly in the face of adventure. And many pilgrims have dropped into a comfortable seat in the innparlour before their pilgrimage was well begun. But the Quest still shines, high and unsullied.

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The great adventure is to follow that Quest. And there are as many adventures for the boy or girl or grown-up to-day as ever there were in “the forest of adventure ” itself.

Adventures are to the venturesome. This is as true to-day as it was a thousand years ago. All the knights and pilgrims in this book had real adventures, though some never touched a sword, and others died only yesterday. The reason why so few of us achieve them is that the first hard knock sends us home whimpering. The heroes of these stories had exciting adventures because, when they started on their quest, they took all the risks and hazards.

The greatest of our school songs declares that there are still

“Fights for the fearless,

And goals for the eager.”

This book salutes that fearless and eager young chivalry of to-day, the Table Round of the Twentieth Century. Then — out swords for

“ The splendid quest, the good fight ringing clear ! ”

No Quest, no Adventured No Quest, no Conquest 1

The Greatheart or Papua James Chalmers no

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The Man in a Coracle Columba 123