ediaeval
"imitations" and works of art. And as such it is inevitable that it
should carry with it the sense of the greatest medieval _differences_,
Chivalry and Romance. The strong point of these differences is the way
in which they combine the three great motives, as Dante isolates them,
of Valour, Love, and Religion. The ancients never realised this
combination at all; the moderns have merely struggled after it, or
blasphemed it in fox-and-grapes fashion: the mediaevals _had_ it--in
theory at any rate. The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrate
Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot and
Guinevere with the minor instances, Love. All these have their [Greek:
amarthia]--their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw. The knight
wastes his valour in idle bickerings; he forgets law in his love; and
though there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live up
to the ideal that he does not actually forswear. To throw the
presentation--the _mimesis_--of all this into perfectly worthy form
would probably have been too much for any single genius of that curious
time (when genius was so widely spread and so little concentrated)
except Dante himself, whose hand found other work to do. To colour and
shape the various fragments of the mosaic was the work of scores. To put
them together, if not in absolutely perfect yet in more than sufficient
shape, was, so far as we know, the luck of Malory only: though some one
(Map or another) had done a mighty day's work long before in creating
the figure and the adventures of Lancelot and imagining the later quest
of the Graal with the figure of Galahad--that "improved Percivale," as
the seedsmen say.

But besides this power of shaping (or even of merely combining)
scattered elements into a story, Malory has another--_the_ other of the
first importance to the novelist proper--in his attraction to character,
if not exactly in his making up of it. It has been said above that the
defect of the pure romances--especially those of continental origin--is
the absence of this. What the Greeks called [Greek: dihanoia]--"sentiment,"
"thought," "cast of thought," as it has been variously rendered--is even
more absent from them than plot or character itself: and of its almost
necessary connection with this latter they often seem to have no idea.
Very rare is such a touch as that of Sir Amadas being unable at the feast
to get rid of the memory of the unburied corpse