balance. Lancelot is the real hero of the old "Morte Darthur,"
and Guinivere--the Helen of romance--goes almost uncensured. Malory's
Arthur is by no means "the blameless king" of Tennyson, who makes of him
a nineteenth-century ideal of royal knighthood, and finally an
allegorical type of Soul at war with Sense. The downfall of the Round
Table, that order of spiritual knight-errantry through which the king
hopes to regenerate society, happens through the failure of his knights
to rise to his own high level of character; in a degree, also, because
the emprise is diverted from attainable practical aims to the fantastic
quest of the Holy Grail. The sin of Lancelot and the Queen, drawing
after it the treachery of Modred, brings on the tragic catastrophe. This
conception is latent in Malory, but it is central in Tennyson; and
everywhere he subtilises, refines, elevates, and, in short, modernises
the _Motivirung_ in the old story. Does he thereby also weaken it?
Censure and praise have been freely bestowed upon Tennyson's dealings
with Malory. Thus it is complained that his Arthur is a prig, a curate,
who preaches to his queen and lectures his court, and whose virtue is too
conscious; that the harlot Vivien is a poor substitute for the damsel of
the lake who puts Merlin to sleep under a great rock in the land of
Benwick; that the gracious figure of Gawain suffers degradation from the
application of an effeminate moral standard to his shining exploits in
love and war, that modern _convenances_ are imposed upon a society in
which they do not belong and whose joyous, robust _naivete_ is hurt by
them.[30]

The allegorical method tried in "The Lady of Shalott," but abandoned in
the earlier "Idylls," creeps in again in the later; particularly in
"Gareth and Lynette" (1872), in the elaborate symbolism of the gates of
Camelot, and in the guardians of the river passes, whom Gareth
successively overcomes, and who seem to represent the temptations
incident to the different ages of man. The whole poem, indeed, has been
interpreted in a parabolic sense, Merlin standing for the intellect, the
Lady of the Lake for religion, etc. Allegory was a favourite mediaeval
mode, and the Grail legend contains an element of mysticism which invites
an emblematic treatment. But the attraction of this fashion for minds of
a Platonic cast is dangerous to art: the temptation to find a meaning in
human life more esoteric than any afforded by the lite