The subject is the episode, well known to English readers from Malory, of the abduction of Guinevere by Meleagraunce, the son of King Bagdemagus; of the inability of all knights but Lancelot (who has been absent from Court in one of the lovers' quarrels) to rescue her; and of his undertaking the task, though hampered in various ways, one of the earliest of which compelled him to ride in a cart—a thing regarded, by one of the odd[24] conventions of chivalry, as disgraceful to a knight. Meleagraunce, though no coward, is treacherous and "felon," and all sorts of mishaps befall Lancelot before he is able for the second time to conquer his antagonist, and finally to take his over and over again forfeited life. But long before this he has arrived at the castle where Guinevere is imprisoned; and has been enabled to arrange a meeting with her at night, which is accomplished by wrenching out the bars of her window. The ill chances and quiproquos which result from his having cut his hands in the proceeding (though the actual visit is not discovered), and the arts by which Meleagraunce ensnares the destined avenger for a time, lengthen out the story till, by the final contest, Meleagraunce goes to his own place and the Queen is restored to hers.

Unfortunately the blots of constant tautology and verbiage, with not infrequent flatness, are on all this gracious story as told by Chrestien.[25] Among the traps and temptations which are thrown in Lancelot's way to the Queen is one of a highly "sensational" nature. In the night Lancelot hears a damsel, who is his hostess, though he has refused her most thorough hospitality, shrieking for assistance; and on coming to the spot finds her in a situation demanding instant help, which she begs, if the irreparable is not to happen. But the poet not only gives us a heavily figured description of the men-at-arms who bar the way to rescue, but puts into the mouth of the intending rescuer a speech (let us be exact) of twenty-eight lines and a quarter, during which the just mentioned irreparable, if it had been seriously meant, might have happened with plenty of time to spare. So, in the crowning scene (excellently told in Malory), where the lover forces his way through iron bars to his love, reckless of the tell-tale witness of his bleeding hands, the circumlocutions are plusquam Richardsonian—and do not fall far short of a serious anticipation of Shakespeare's burlesque in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The mainly gracious description is spoilt by terrible bathetics from time to time. Guinevere in her white nightdress and mantle of scarlet and camus[26] on one side of the bars, Lancelot outside, exchanging sweet salutes, "for much was he fain of her and she of him," are excellent. The next couplet, or quatrain, almost approaches the best poetry. "Of villainy or annoy make they no parley or complaint; but draw near each other so much at least that they hold each other hand by hand." But what follows? That they cannot come together vexes them so immeasurably that—what? They blame the iron work for it. This certainly shows an acute understanding[27] and a very creditable sense of the facts of the situation on the part of both lovers; but it might surely have been taken for granted. Also, it takes Lancelot forty lines to convince his lady that when bars are in your way there is nothing like pulling them out of it. So in the actual pulling-out there is the idlest exaggeration and surplusage; the first bar splits one of Lancelot's fingers to the sinews and cuts off the top joint of the next. The actual embraces are prettily and gracefully told (though again with otiose observations about silence), and the whole, from the knight's coming to the window to his leaving it, takes 150 lines. Now hear the prose of the so-called "Vulgate Lancelot."

In this simple prose, sensuous and passionate for all its simplicity, is told the rest of the story. There are eighteen lines of it altogether in Dr. Sommer's reprint, but as these are long quarto lines, let us multiply them by some three to get the equivalent of the "skipping octosyllables." There will remain fifty to a hundred and fifty, with, in the prose, some extra matter not in the verse. But the acme of the contrast is reached in these words of the prose, which answer to some forty lines of the poet's watering-out. "Great was the joy that they made each other that night, for long had each suffered for the other. And when the day came, they parted." Beat that who can!

Many years ago, and not a few before M. Gaston Paris had published his views, I read these two forms of the story in the valuable joint edition, verse and prose, of M. Jonckbloet, which some ruffian (may Heaven not assoil him!) has since stolen or hidden from me. And I said then to myself, "There is no doubt which of these is the original." Thirty years later, with an unbroken critical experience of imaginative work in prose and verse during the interval, I read them again in Dr. Forster's edition of the verse and Dr. Sommer's of the prose, and said, "There is less doubt than ever." That the prose should have been prettified and platitudinised, decorated and diluted into the verse is a possibility which we know to be not only possible but likely, from a thousand more unfortunate examples. That the contrary process should have taken place is practically unexampled and, especially at that time, largely unthinkable. At any rate, whosoever did it had a much greater genius than Chrestien's.

This is no place to argue out the whole question, but a single particular may be dealt with. The curiously silly passage about the bars above given is a characteristic example of unlucky and superfluous amplification of the perfectly natural question and answer of the prose, "May I come to you?" "Yes, but how?" an example to be paralleled by thousands of others at the time and by many more later. Taken the other way it would be a miracle. Prose abridgers of poetry did not go to work like that in the twelfth-thirteenth century—nor, even in the case of Charles Lamb, have they often done so since.

It is, however, very disagreeable to have to speak disrespectfully of a writer so agreeable in himself and so really important in our story as Chrestien. His own gifts and performances are, as it seems to me, clear enough. He took from this or that source—his selection of the Erec and Percivale matters, if not also that of Yvain, suggests others besides the, by that time as I think, concentrated Arthurian story—and from the Arthuriad itself the substance of the Chevalier à la Charette. He varied and dressed them up with pleasant etceteras, and in especial, sometimes, though not always, embroidered the already introduced love-motive with courtly fantasies and with a great deal of detail. I should not be at all disposed to object if somebody says that he, before any one else, set the type of the regular verse Roman d'aventures. It seems likely, again, from the pieces referred to above, that he may have had originals more definitely connected with Celtic sources, if not actually Celtic themselves, than those which have given us the mighty architectonic of the "Vulgate" Arthur. In his own way and place he is a great and an attractive figure—not least in the history of the novel. But I can see nothing in him that makes me think him likely, and much that makes me think him utterly unlikely, to be the author of what I conceive to be the greatest, the most epoch-making, and almost the originating conception of the novel-romance itself. Who it was that did conceive this great thing I do not positively know. All external evidence points to Walter Map; no internal evidence, that I have seen, seems to me really to point away from him. But if any one likes let us leave him a mere Eidolon, an earlier "Great Unknown." Our business is, once more, with what he, whoever he was, did.

The multiplicity of things done, whether by "him" or "them," is astonishing; and it is quite possible, indeed likely, that they were not all done by the same person. Mediaeval continuators (as has been seen in the case of Chrestien) worked after and into the work of each other in a rather uncanny fashion; and the present writer frankly confesses that he no more knows where Godfrey de Lagny took up the Charette, or the various other sequelists the Percevale, from Chrestien than he would have known, without confession, the books of the Odyssey done by Mr. Broome and Mr. Fenton from those done by Mr. Pope. The grand-œuvre is the combination of Lancelot as (1) lover of the Queen; (2) descendant of the Graalwards; (3) author, in consequence of his sin, of the general failure of the Round Table Graal-Quest; (4) father of its one successful but half-unearthly Seeker; (5) bringer-about (in more ways than one[28]) of the intestine dissension which facilitates the invasion of Mordred and the foreigners and so the Passing of Arthur, of his own rejection by the repentant Queen, and of his death. As regards minor details of plot and incident there have to be added the bringing in of the pre-Round Table part of the story by Lancelot's descent from King Ban and his connections with King Bors, both Arthur's old allies, and both, as we may call them, "Graal-heirs"; the further connection with the Merlin legend by Lancelot's fostering under the Lady of the Lake;[29] the exaltation, inspiring, and, as it were, unification of the scattered knight-adventures through Lancelot's constant presence as partaker, rescuer, and avenger;[30] the human interest given to the Graal-Quest (the earlier histories being strikingly lacking in this) by his failure, and a good many more. But above all there are the general characters of the knight and the Queen to make flesh and blood of the whole.

Not merely the exact author or authors, but even the exact source or sources of this complicated, fateful, and exquisite imagination are, once more, not known. Years ago it was laid down finally by the most competent of possible authorities (the late Sir John Rhys) that "the love of Lancelot and Guinevere is unknown to Welsh literature." Originals for the "greatest knight" have been sought by guesswork, by idle play on words and names, if not also by positive forgery, in that Breton literature which does not exist. There do exist versions of the story in which Lancelot plays no very prominent part, and there is even one singular version—certainly late and probably devised by a proper moral man afraid of scandal—which makes Lancelot outlive the Queen, quite comfortably continuing his adventurous career (this is perhaps the "furthest" of the Unthinkable in literature), and (not, it may be owned, quite inconsistently) hints that the connection was merely Platonic throughout. These things are explicable, but better negligible. For my own part I have always thought that the loves of Tristram and Iseult (which, as has been said, were originally un-Arthurian) suggested the main idea to the author of it, being taken together with Guinevere's falseness with Mordred in the old quasi-chronicle, and perhaps the story of the abduction by Melvas (Meleagraunce), which seems to be possibly a genuine Welsh legend. There are in the Tristram-Iseult-Mark trio quite sufficient suggestions of Lancelot-Guinevere-Arthur; while the far higher plane on which the novice-novelist sets his lovers, and even the very interesting subsequent exaltation of Tristram and Iseult themselves to familiarity and to some extent equality with the other pair, has nothing critically difficult in it.

But this idea, great and promising as it was, required further fertilisation, and got it from another. The Graal story is (once more, according to authority of the greatest competence, and likely if anything to be biassed the other way) pretty certainly not Welsh in origin, and there is no reason to think that it originally had anything to do with Arthur. Even after it obeyed the strange "suck" of legends towards this centre whirlpool, or Loadstone Rock, of romance, it yielded nothing intimately connected with the Arthurian Legend itself at first, and such connection as succeeded seems pretty certainly[31] to be that of which Percevale is the hero, and an outlier, not an integral part. But either the same genius (as one would fain hope) as that which devised the profane romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, or another, further grafted or inarched the sacred romance of the Graal and its Quest with the already combined love-and-chivalry story. Lancelot, the greatest of knights, and of the true blood of the Graal-guardians, ought to accomplish the mysteries; but he cannot through sin, and that sin is this very love for Guinevere. The Quest, in which (despite warning and indeed previous experience) he takes part, not merely gives occasion for adventures, half-mystical, half-chivalrous, which far exceed in interest the earlier ones, but directly leads to the dispersion and weakening of the Round Table. And so the whole draws together to an end identical in part with that of the Chronicle story, but quite infinitely improved upon it.

Now not only is there in this the creation of the novel in posse, of the romance in esse, but it is brought about in a curiously noteworthy fashion. A hundred years and more later the greatest known writer of the Middle Ages, and one of the three or four greatest of the world, defined the subjects of poetry as Love, War, and Religion, or in words which we may not unfairly translate by these. The earlier master recognised (practically for the first time) that the romance—that allotropic form (as the chemists might say) of poetry—must deal with the same. Now in these forms of the Arthurian legend, which are certainly anterior to the latter part of the twelfth century, there is a great deal of war and a good deal of religion, but these motives are mostly separated from each other, the earlier forms of the Arthur story having nothing to do with the Graal, and the earlier forms of the Graal story—so far as we can see—nothing, or extremely little, to do with Arthur. Nor had Love, in any proper and passionate sense of the word, anything to do with either. Women and marriage and breaches of marriage appear indeed; but the earlier Graal stories are dominated by the most ascetic virginity-worship, and the earlier Arthur-stories show absolutely nothing of the passion which is the subject of the magnificent overture of Mr. Swinburne's Tristram. Even this story of Tristram himself, afterwards fired and coloured by passion, seems at first to have shown nothing but the mixture of animalism, cruelty, and magic which is characteristic of the Celts.[32] Our magician of a very different gramarye, were he Walter or 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.

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

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).

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 afraid that something unpleasant must have happened, though he can't think what the matter can be. But he, one feels sure, would never have lifted up his hand against a woman, unless she had richly deserved it on the strictest patriotic scores, as in the case of Helen, when his mamma fortunately interfered. On the other hand, Lancelot was "of the Asra who die when they love" and love till they die—nay, who would die if they did not love. But it is certain (for there is a very nice miniature of it reproduced from the MS. in M. Paulin Paris's abstract) that, for a moment, he drew his sword on Elaine to punish the deceit which made him unwittingly false to Guinevere. It is very shocking, no doubt, but exceedingly natural; and of course he did not kill or even (like Philaster) wound her, though nobody interfered to prevent him. Many of the incidents which bring out his character are well known to moderns by poem and picture, though others, as well worth knowing, are not. But the human contrasts of success and failure, of merit and sin, have never, I think, been quite brought out, and to bring them out completely here would take too much room. We may perhaps leave this other—quite other—"First Gentleman in Europe" with the remark that Chrestien de Troyes gives only one side of him, and therefore does not give him at all. The Lancelot of board and bower, of travel and tournament, he does very fairly. But of the Lancelot of the woods and the hermitage, of the dream at the foot of the cross, of the mystic voyage and the just failing (if failing) effort of Carbonek, he gives, because he knows, nothing.

Completed as he was, no matter for the moment by whom, he is thus the first hero of romance and nearly the greatest; but his lady is worthy of him, and she is almost more original as an individual. It is true that she is not the first heroine, as he is, if not altogether, almost the first hero. Helen was that, though very imperfectly revealed and gingerly handled. Calypso (hardly Circe) might have been. Medea is perhaps nearer still, especially in Apollonius. But the Greek romancers were the first who had really busied themselves with the heroine: they took her up seriously and gave her a considerable position. But they did not succeed in giving her much character. The naughty not-heroine of Achilles Tatius, though she has less than none in Mr. Pope's supposed innuendo sense, alone has an approach to some in the other. As for the accomplished Guinevere's probable contemporary, the Ismene or Hysmine of Eustathius Macrembolites (v. sup. p. 18), she is a sort of Greek-mediaeval Henrietta Temple, with Mr. Meredith and Mr. Disraeli by turns holding the pen, though with neither of them supplying the brains. But Guinevere is a very different person; or rather, she is a person, and the first. To appreciate her she must be compared with herself in earlier presentations, and then considered fully as she appears in the Vulgate—for Malory, though he has given much, has not given the whole of her, and Tennyson has painted only the last panel of the polyptych wholly, and has rather over-coloured that.[36]

In what we may call the earliest representations of her, she has hardly any colour at all. She is a noble Roman lady, and very beautiful. For a time she is apparently very happy with her husband, and he with her; and if she seems to make not the slightest scruple about "taking up with" her nephew, co-regent and fellow rebel, why, noble Roman ladies thought nothing of divorce and not much of adultery. The only old Welsh story (the famous Melvas one so often referred to) that we have about her in much detail merely establishes the fact, pleasantly formulated by M. Paulin Paris, that she was "très sujette à être enlevée," but in itself (unless we admit the Peacockian triad of the "Three Fatal Slaps of the Isle of Britain" as evidence) again says nothing about her character. If, as seems probable if not certain, the Launfal legend, with its libel on her, is of Breton origin, it makes her an ordinary Celtic princess, a spiritual sister of Iseult when she tried to kill Brengwain, and a cross between Potiphar's wife and Catherine of Russia, without any of the good nature and "gentlemanliness" of the last named. The real Guinevere, the Guinevere of the Vulgate and partly of Malory, is freed from the colourlessness and the discreditable end of Geoffrey's queen, transforms the promiscuous and rather louche Melvas incident into an important episode of her epic or romantic existence, and gives the lie, even in her least creditable or least charming moments, to the Launfal libel. As before in Lancelot's case, details of her presentation had in some cases best be either translated in full or omitted, but I cannot refuse myself the pleasure of attempting, with however clumsy a hand, a portrait of our, as I believe, English Helen, who gave in French language to French, and not only French literature, the pattern of a heroine.

There is not, I think, any ancient authority for the rather commonplace suggestion, unwisely adopted by Tennyson, that Guinevere fell in love with Lancelot when he was sent as an ambassador to fetch her; thus merely repeating Iseult and Tristram, and anticipating Suffolk and Margaret. In fact, according to the best evidence, Lancelot could not have been old enough, if he was even born. On the contrary, nothing could be better than the presentation of her introduction to Arthur and the course of the wooing in the Vulgate—the other "blessed original." She first sees Arthur as a foe from the walls of besieged Carmelide, and admires his valour; she has further occasion to admire it when, as a friend, he rescues her father, showing himself, as what he really was in his youth, his own best knight. The pair are genuinely in love with each other, and the betrothal and parting for fresh fight are the most gracious passages of the Merlin book, except the better version (v. sup.) of the love of Merlin himself and the afterwards libelled Viviane. Anyhow, she was married because she fell in love with him, and there is no evidence to show that she and Arthur lived otherwise than happily together. But, if all tales were true, she had no reason to regard him as a very faithful husband or a blameless man. She may not have known (for nobody but Merlin apparently did know) the early and unwitting incest of the King and his half-sister Margause; but the extreme ease with which he adopted her own treacherous foster-sister, the "false Guinevere," and his proceedings with the Saxon enchantress Camilla, were very strong "sets off" to her own conduct. Also she had a most disagreeable[37] sister-in-law in Morgane-la-Fée. These are not in the least offered as excuses, but merely as "lights." Indeed Guinevere never seems to have hated or disliked her husband, though he often gave her cause; and if, until the great repentance, she thought more lightly of "spouse-breach" than Lancelot did, that is not uncharacteristic of women.[38] In fact, she is a very perfect (not of course in the moral sense) gentlewoman. She is at once popular with the knights, and loses that popularity rather by Lancelot's fault than by her own, while Gawain, who remains faithful to her to the bitter end, or at least till the luckless slaughter of his brethren, declares at 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 ἁμαρτια 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.

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 copy of the form into which he himself threw the story. Independently of the fact that no MS., verse or prose, of anything like the complete story seems old enough, independently of the enormous and almost innumerable separable accretions, the so-called Vulgate cycle of "Graal-Merlin-Arthur-Lancelot-Graal-Quest-Arthur's-Death" has considerable variants—the most important and remarkable of which by far is the large alteration or sequel of the "Vulgate" Merlin which Malory preferred. In the "Vulgate" itself, too, there are things which were certainly written either by the great contriver in nodding moods, or by somebody else,—in fact no one can hope to understand mediaeval literature who forgets that no mediaeval writer could ever "let a thing alone": he simply must add or shorten, paraphrase or alter. I rather doubt whether the Great Unknown himself meant both the amours of Arthur with Camilla and the complete episode of the false Guinevere to stand side by side. The first is (as such justifications go) a sufficient justification of Guinevere by itself; and the conduct of Arthur in the second is such a combination of folly, cruelty, and all sorts of despicable behaviour that it overdoes the thing. So, too, Lancelot's "abscondences," with or without madness, are too many and too prolonged.[43] The long and totally uninteresting campaign against Claudas, during the greater part of which Lancelot (who is most of all concerned) is absent, and in which he takes no part or interest when present, is another great blot. Some of these things, but not all, Malory remedied by omission.

To sum up, and even repeat a little, in speaking so highly of this development—French beyond all doubt as a part of literature, whatever the nationality, domicile, and temper of the person or persons who brought it about—I do not desire more to emphasise what I believe to be a great and not too well appreciated truth than to guard against that exaggeration which dogs and discredits literary criticism. Of course no single redaction of the legend in the late twelfth or earliest thirteenth century contains the story, the whole story, and nothing but the story as I have just outlined it. Of course the words used do not apply fully to Malory's English redaction of three centuries later—work of genius as this appears to me to be. Yet further, I should be fully disposed to allow that it is only by reading the posse into the esse, under the guidance of later developments of the novel itself, that the estimate which I have given can be entirely justified. But this process seems to me to be perfectly legitimate, and to be, in fact, the only process capable of giving us literary-historical criticism that is worth having. The writer or writers, known or unknown, whose work we have been discussing, have got the plot, have got the characters, have got the narrative faculty required for a complete novel-romance. If they do not quite know what to do with these things it is only because the time is not yet. But how much they did, and of how much more they foreshadowed the doing, the extracts following should show better than any "talk about it."