ess branchings of special knights' adventures,
and of the wars with the Saxons and the Romans, and the episode of the
False Guinevere--with whom for a time Arthur lives as with his
queen--for middle; and the story of the Graal-quest, the love of
Lancelot for the Queen, and the rebellion of Mordred with its fatal
consequences, for close. Exactly how much of this Malory personally had
before him we cannot of course say: but of any working up of the whole
that would have spared him trouble, and robbed him of credit, we do not
know. In fact the favourite term "compiler" gives up the only dangerous
point. Now in what way did Malory _compile_? In the way in which the
ordinary compiler proceeds he most emphatically does not. He cuts down
the preliminaries mercilessly: but they can be perfectly well spared. He
misses almost all the wars with the Saxons, which are the most tedious
parts of the originals. He adopts, most happily, the early, not the
late, placing of those with the Romans. He drops the false Guinevere
altogether, which is imperative, that the true one may have no right to
plead the incident--though he does not represent Arthur as "blameless."
He gives the _roman d'aventures_ side of the Round Table stories, from
the great Tristram and Palomides romances through the Beaumains episode
downwards, because they are interesting in themselves and lead up to
the Graal quest. He gives that Quest as plentifully because it leads up
to the "dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all." How
he gives the Lancelot and Guinevere tragedy we shall see presently. And
the catastrophe of the actual "departing" he gives perfectly; with the
magnificent final scenes which he has converted, sometimes in almost
Shakespearean fashion, by the slightest verbal touches from mediocre
verse to splendid prose. A very remarkable compiler! It is a pity that
they did not take him and cut him up in little stars for a light to all
his brethren in compiling thereafter.

For he has what no compiler as such can have--because the moment he has
it he ceases to be a compiler, and becomes an artist--the sense of
_grasp_, the power to put his finger, and to keep it, on the central
pulse and nerve of the story. That he did this deliberately is so
unlikely as to be practically impossible: that he did it is certain. The
Arthurian Legend is the greatest of mediaeval creations as a subject--a
"fable"--just as the _Divina Commedia_ is the greatest of m