ent_, in the first of which an adventure is
usually started at Arthur's court, while the successful knight is also
accustomed to send his captives to give testimony to his prowess in
the same place. As has been said above,[61] there is a whole cluster
of such episodes--most, it would seem, owing their origin to England
or Scotland--which have Sir Gawain for their chief hero, and which, at
least in such forms as survive, would appear to be later than the
great central romances which have been just noticed. Some of these are
of much local interest--there being a Scottish group, a group which
seems to centre about Cumbria, and so forth--but they fall rather to
the portion of my successor in this series, who will take as his
province _Gawaine and the Green Knight_, _Lancelot of the Laik_, the
quaint alliterative Thornton _Morte Arthur_, and not a few others. The
most interesting of all is that hitherto untraced romance of Beaumains
or Gareth (he, as Gawain's brother, brings the thing into the class
referred to), of which Malory has made an entire book, and which is
one of the most completely and perfectly turned-out episodes existing.
It has points in common with _Yvain_,[62] and others in common with
_Ipomydon_,[63] but at the same time quite enough of its own. But we
have no French text for it. On the other hand, we have long verse
romances like _Durmart le Gallois_[64] (which both from the title and
from certain mystical Graal passages rather connects itself with the
Percevale sub-section); and the _Chevalier as Deux Espees_,[65] which
belongs to the Gawain class. But all these, as well as the German
romances to be noticed in chap. vi., distinguish themselves from the
main stories analysed above not merely by their obvious and almost
avowed dependence, but by a family likeness in incident, turn, and
phrase from which those main stories are free. In fact the general
fault of the _Romans d'Aventures_ is that neither the unsophisticated
freshness of the _chanson de geste_, nor the variety and commanding
breadth of the Arthurian legend, appears in them to the full. The kind
of "balaam," the stock repetitions and expletives at which Chaucer
laughs in "Sir Thopas"--a laugh which has been rather unjustly
received as condemning the whole class of English romances--is very
evident even in the French texts. We have left the great and gracious
ways, the inspiring central ideas, of the larger romance.

[Footnote 61: See pp. 114, 115