e fulfilling of the other
"weirds" which have lain upon the race of Joseph, should practically
coincide with the termination of that glorious reign, with which fate
and metaphysical aid had connected them, is one felicity. The
"dolorous death and departing out of this world" in Lyonnesse and
elsewhere corresponds to and completes the triumph of Sarras. From yet
another point of view, the bringing into judgment of all the
characters and their deeds is equally complete, equally natural and
unforced. It is astonishing that men like Ascham,[59] unless blinded
by a survival of mediaeval or a foreshadowing of Puritan prudery,
should have failed to see that the morality of the _Morte d'Arthur_ is
as rigorous as it is unsqueamish. Guinevere in her cloister and
Lancelot in his hermitage, Arthur falling by (or at any rate in battle
against) the fruit of his incestuous intercourse--these are not
exactly encouragements to vice: while at the same time the earlier
history may be admitted to have nothing of a crabbed and jejune
virtue.

[Footnote 59: This curious outburst, referred to before, may be found
in the _Schoolmaster_, ed. Arber, p. 80, or ed. Giles, _Works of
Ascham_, iii. 159.]

But this conclusion, with the minor events which lead up to it, is
scarcely less remarkable as exhibiting in the original author, whoever
he was, a sense of art, a sense of finality, the absence of which is
the great blot on Romance at large, owing to the natural, the human,
but the very inartistic, craving for sequels. As is well known, it was
the most difficult thing in the world for a mediaeval romancer to let
his subject go. He must needs take it up from generation to
generation; and the interminable series of Amadis and Esplandian
stories, which, as the last example, looks almost like a designed
caricature, is only an exaggeration of the habit which we can trace
back through _Huon of Bordeaux_ and _Guy of Warwick_ almost to the
earliest _chansons de geste_.

[Sidenote: _No sequel possible._]

But the intelligent genius who shaped the Arthuriad has escaped this
danger, and that not merely by the simple process which Dryden, with
his placid irony, somewhere describes as "leaving scarce three of the
characters alive." We have reached, and feel that we have reached, the
conclusion of the whole matter when the Graal has been taken to
Heaven, and Arthur has gone to Avalon. Nobody wants to hear anything
of the doubtless excellent Duke and King C