the beginning that
she is the fairest and most gracious, and will be the wisest and best of
queens. She shows something very like humour in the famous and fateful
remark (uttered, it would seem, without the slightest ill or double
meaning at the time) as to Gawain's estimate of Lancelot.[39] She seems
to have had an agreeable petulance (notice, for instance, the rebuke of
Kay at the opening of the _Ywain_ story and elsewhere), which sometimes,
as it naturally would, rises to passionate injustice, as Lancelot
frequently discovered. She is, in fact, always passionate in one or
other sense of that great and terrible and infinite[40] word, but never
tragedy-queenish or vixenish. She falls in love with Lancelot because he
falls in love with her, and because she cannot help it. False as she is
to husband and to lover, to her court and her country,[41] it can hardly
be said that any act of hers, except the love itself and its
irresistible consequences, is faulty. She is not capricious,
extravagant, or tyrannical; in her very jealousy she is not cruel or
revengeful (the original Iseult would certainly have had Elaine poisoned
or poniarded, for which there was ample opportunity). If she torments
her lover, that is because she loves him. If she is unjust to him, that
is because she is a woman. Her last speech to Lancelot after the
catastrophe--Tennyson should have, as has been said, paraphrased this as
he paraphrased the passing of her husband, and from the same texts, and
we should then have had another of the greatest things of English
poetry--shows a noble nature with the [Greek: hamartia] present, but
repented in a strange and great mixture of classical and Christian
tragedy. There is little told in a trustworthy fashion about her
personal appearance. But if Glastonbury traditions about her bones be
true, she was certainly (again like Helen) "divinely tall." And if the
suggestions of Hawker's "Queen Gwennyvar's Round"[42] in the sea round
Tintagel be worked out a little, it will follow that her eyes were
divinely blue.

[Sidenote: Some minor points.]

When such very high praise is given to the position of the (further)
accomplished Arthur-story, it is of course not intended to bestow that
praise on any particular MS. or printed version that exists. It is in
the highest degree improbable that, whether the original magician was
Map, or Chrestien, or anybody else (to repeat a useful formula), we
possess an exact and exclusive