alrously permissible but very inconvenient habit of
disguising himself and taking the other side--must have annoyed the
whole Table. Yet these very things, properly managed, help to create and
complicate the "novel" character. For one of the most commonly and not
the least justly charged faults of the average romance is its deficiency
in combined plot and character-interest--the presence in it, at most, of
a not too well-jointed series of episodes, possibly leading to a death
or a marriage, but of little more than chronicle type. This fault has
been exaggerated, but it exists. Now it will be one main purpose of the
pages which follow to show that there is, in the completed Arthuriad,
something quite different from and far beyond this--something perhaps
imperfectly realised by any one writer, and overlaid and disarranged by
the interpolations or misinterpretations of others, but still a "mind"
at work that keeps the "mass" alive, and may, or rather surely will,
quicken it yet further and into higher forms hereafter. (Those who know
will not, I hope, be insulted if I mention for the benefit of those who
do not, that the term "Vulgate" is applied to those forms of the parts
of the story which, with slighter or more important variations, are
common to many MSS. The term itself is most specially applied to the
_Lancelot_ which, in consequence of this popularity throughout the later
Middle Ages, actually got itself printed early in the French
Renaissance. The whole has been (or is being) at last most fortunately
reprinted by Dr. Sommer. See Bibliography.)

[29] This is another point which, not, I suppose, having been clearly
and completely evolved by the first handler, got messed and muddled by
successive copyists and continuators. In what seems to be the oldest,
and is certainly the most consistent and satisfactory, story there is
practically nothing evil about Viviane--Nimiane--Nimue, who is also
indisputably identical with the foster-mother of Lancelot, the
occasional Egeria (always for good) of Arthur himself, and the
benefactress (this is probably a later addition though in the right key)
of Sir Pelleas. For anybody who possesses the Power of the Sieve she
remains as Milton saw her, and not as Tennyson mis-saw part of her. The
bewitching of Merlin (who, let it be remembered, was an ambiguous person
in several ways, and whose magic, if never exactly black, was sometimes
a rather greyish or magpied white) was not an unmixed