r Chrestien or some third--Norman, Champenois,
Breton,[33] or Englishman (Welshman or Irishman he pretty certainly was
_not_)--had therefore before him, if not exactly dry bones, yet the
half-vivified material of a chronicle of events on the one hand and a
mystical dream-sermon on the other. He, or a French or English Pallas
for him, had to "think of another thing."

And so he called in Love to reinforce War and Religion and to do its
proper office of uniting, inspiring, and producing Humanity. He
effected, by the union of the three motives, the transformation of a
mere dull record of confused fighting into a brilliant pageant of
knightly adventure. He made the long-winded homilies and genealogies of
the earlier Graal-legend at once take colour from the amorous and
war-like adventures, raise these to a higher and more spiritual plane,
and provide the due punishment for the sins of his erring characters.
The whole story--at least all of it that he chose to touch and all that
he chose to add--became alive. The bones were clothed with flesh and
blood, the "wastable country verament" (as the dullest of the Graal
chroniclers says in a phrase that applies capitally to his own work)
blossomed with flower and fruit. Wars of Arthur with unwilling subjects
or Saxons and Romans; treachery of his wife and nephew and his own
death; miracle-history of the Holy Vessel and pedigree of its
custodians; Round Table; these and many other things had lain as mere
scraps and orts, united by no real plot, yielding no real characters,
satisfying no real interest that could not have been equally satisfied
by an actual chronicle or an actual religious-mystical discourse. And
then the whole was suddenly knit into a seamless and shimmering web of
romance, from the fancy of Uther for Igerne to the "departing of them
all" in Lyonnesse and at Amesbury and at Joyous Gard. A romance
undoubtedly, but also incidentally providing the first real novel-hero
and the first real novel-heroine in the persons of the lovers who, as in
the passage above translated, sometimes "made great joy of each other
for that they had long caused each other much sorrow," and finally
expiated in sorrow what was unlawful in their joy.

Let us pass to these persons themselves.

[Sidenote: Especially in the characters and relations of Lancelot and
Guinevere.]

The first point to note about Lancelot is the singular fashion in which
he escapes one of the dangers of the hero. Aris