, kept by enemies from the
kindly earth that would hide it, and the rites that would help it to peace:
still rarer that in _Guy of Warwick_ when the hero, at the height of
his fame and in the full enjoyment of his desires, looks from the tower and
is struck by the selfishness and earthliness of his career. The first
notion is not "improved" in the original at all, and the second very badly;
but in most of the others such things do not even exist. Now the greater
Legend is full of situations which encourage such thoughts, and even of
expressed thoughts that only need craftsmanship to turn them into the
cornerstones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty words
long, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid that determine the
relations of Tristram and Iseult; the unconscious incest of Arthur and
Margause with its Greek-tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity of
Palomides, and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant allegory)
his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all these are matters in
point. But of course the main nursery of such things is the
Lancelot-and-Guinevere story itself. Nobody has yet made Guinevere a
person--nobody but Shakespeare could have done so perhaps, though
Shakespeare's Guinevere would probably have been the greatest woman in
all art. But Malory has not been the least successful with her: and of
Lancelot he has made, if only in study, one of the great characters of
that fictitious world which is so much truer than the real. And let no
one say that we are reading Tennyson or any one else into Malory. There
are yet persons, at least at the time this was written not quite
Methusalahs, who read the _Morte d'Arthur_ before the _Idylls_ appeared
and who have never allowed even the _Idylls_ to overlay their original
idea of the most perfect and most gentle of knights.

It is probable indeed that Malory invented little or nothing in the
various situations, by which the character of Lancelot, and the history
of his fatal love, are evolved. We know in most cases that this is so.
It is possible, too, that at first (probably because the possibilities
had not dawned on him, as it has been admitted they never did very
consciously) he has not made the most of the introduction of lover and
lady. But when the interest becomes concentrated, as in the various
passages of Guinevere's wrath with her lover and their consequences, or
in the final series of catastrophes, he is fully equal