ruler or even
baron. He makes rash promises and vows, accepts charges on very slight
evidence, and seems to have his knights by no means "in hand." So, too,
though never a coward or weakling, he seems pretty nearly to have lost
the pluck and prowess which had won Guinevere's love under the walls of
Carmelide, and of which the last display is in the great fight with his
sister's lover, Sir Accolon. All this may not excuse Guinevere's conduct
to the moralist; it certainly makes that conduct artistically probable
and legitimate to the critic, as a foundation for novel-character.

Her lover may look less promising, at least at the moment of
presentation; and indeed it is true that while "la donna e _im_mobile,"
in essentials and possibilities alike, forms of man, though never losing
reality and possibility, pass at times out of possible or at least easy
recognition. Anybody who sees in the Lancelot of the foregoing scene
only a hobbledehoy and milksop who happens to have a big chest, strong
arms, and plenty of mere fighting spirit, will never grasp him. Hardly
better off will be he who takes him--as the story _does_ give some
handles for taking him--to be merely one of the too common examples of
humanity who sin and repent, repent and sin, with a sort of
Americanesque notion of spending dollars in this world and laying them
up in another. Malory has on the whole done more justice to the
possibilities of the Vulgate Lancelot than he has to Guinevere, and
Tennyson has here improved on Malory. He has, indeed, very nearly "got"
Lancelot, but not quite. To get him wholly would have required Tennyson
for form and Browning for analysis of character; while even this
_mistura mirabilis_ would have been improved for the purpose by touches
not merely of Morris and Swinburne, but of lesser men like Kingsley and
even George Macdonald. To understand Lancelot you must previously
understand, or by some kind of intuition divine, the mystical element
which his descent from the Graal-Wardens confers; the essential or
quintessential chivalric quality which his successive creators agreed in
imparting to him; the all-conquering gift so strangely tempered by an
entire freedom from the boasting and the rudeness of the _chanson_ hero;
the actual checks and disasters which his cross stars bring on him; his
utter loyalty in all things save one to the king; and last and mightiest
of all, his unquenchable and unchangeable passion for the Queen.

Henc