rron (if Robert de Borron it was), the authors of his history,
except in the version of his own fatal passion, above referred to,
have touched the subject with little grace or charm. And while the
great and capital tragedies of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Tristram and
Iseult, are wholly lacking, there is an equal lack of such minor
things as the episodes of Lancelot and the two Elaines, of Pelleas and
the Lady of the Lake, and many others. Nor is this lack compensated by
the stories of the incestuous (though on neither side consciously
incestuous, and on the queen's quite innocent) adventure of Arthur
with his sister Margause, of the exceedingly unromantic wooing of
Morgane le Fee, and of the warlock-planned intercourse of King Ban
and the mother of Lancelot.

[Sidenote: _Lancelot._]

Whether it was Walter Map, or Chrestien de Troyes, or both, or
neither, to whom the glory of at once completing and exalting the
story is due, I at least have no pretension to decide. Whosoever did
it, if he did it by himself, was a very great man indeed--a man second
only to Dante among the men of the Middle Age. Even if it was done by
an irregular company of men, each patching and piecing the others'
efforts, the result shows a marvellous "wind of the spirit" abroad and
blowing on that company. As before, the reader of Malory only, though
he has nearly all the best things, has not quite all even of those,
and is without a considerable number of things not quite the best, but
good. The most difficult to justify of the omissions of Sir Thomas is
the early history of the loves of Guinevere and Lancelot, when the
knight was introduced to the queen by Galahault the haughty
prince--"Galeotto," as he appears in the most universally known
passage of Dante himself. Not merely that unforgettable association,
but the charm and grace of the original passage, as well as the
dramatic and ethical justification, so to speak, of the fatal passion
which wrecked at once Lancelot's quest and Arthur's kingdom, combine
to make us regret this exclusion. But Malory's genius was evidently
rather an unconscious than a definitely critical one. And though the
exquisite felicity of his touch in detail is established once for all
by comparing his prose narratives of the Passing of Arthur and the
parting of Lancelot and the queen with the verse[51] from which he
almost beyond question directly took both, he must sometimes have been
bewildered by the mass of material