totle had never said that
a hero must be faultless; indeed, he had definitely said exactly the
contrary, of at least the tragic hero. But one of the worst of the many
misunderstandings of his dicta brought the wrong notion about, and
Virgil--that exquisite craftsman in verse and phrase, but otherwise,
perhaps, not great poet and very dangerous pattern--had confirmed this
notion by his deplorable figurehead. It is also fair to confess that all
except morbid tastes do like to see the hero win. But if he is to be a
hero of Rymer, not merely

Like Paris handsome[34] and like Hector brave,

but as pious as Aeneas; "a rich fellow enough," with blood hopelessly
blue and morals spotlessly copy-bookish--in other words, a Sir Charles
Grandison--he will duly meet with the detestation and "conspuing" of the
elect. Almost the only just one of the numerous and generally silly
charges latterly brought against Tennyson's Arthurian handling is that
his conception of the blameless king does a little smack of this false
idea, does something grow to it. It is one of the chief points in which
he departed, not merely from the older stories (which he probably did
not know), but from Malory's astonishing redaction of them (which he
certainly did).

[Sidenote: Lancelot.]

But Lancelot escapes this worst of fates in the _Idylls_ themselves, and
much more does he escape it in the originals. In the first place, though
he invariably (or always till the Graal Quest) "wins through," he
constantly does not do so without intermediate hairbreadth escapes, and
even not a few adventures which are at first not escapes at all. And
just as his perpetual bafflement in the Quest salts and seasons his
triumphs in the saddle, so does the ruling passion of his sin save, from
anything approaching mawkishness,[35] his innumerable and yet
inoffensive virtues; his chastity, save in this instance, which chastity
itself, by a further stroke of art, is saved from _niaiserie_ by the
plotted adventures with Elaine; his courtesy, his mercifulness, his
wonderfully early notion of a gentleman (_v. inf._), his invariable
disregard of self, and yet his equally invariable naturalness. Pious
Aeneas had not the least objection to bringing about the death of Dido,
as he might have known he was doing (unless he was as great a fool as he
is a prig); and he is probably never more disgusting or Pecksniffian
than when he looks back on the flames of Dido's pyre and is really
af