profane romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, or another,
further grafted or inarched the sacred romance of the Graal and its
Quest with the already combined love-and-chivalry story. Lancelot, the
greatest of knights, and of the true blood of the Graal-guardians, ought
to accomplish the mysteries; but he cannot through sin, and that sin is
this very love for Guinevere. The Quest, in which (despite warning and
indeed previous experience) he takes part, not merely gives occasion for
adventures, half-mystical, half-chivalrous, which far exceed in
interest the earlier ones, but directly leads to the dispersion and
weakening of the Round Table. And so the whole draws together to an end
identical in part with that of the Chronicle story, but quite infinitely
improved upon it.

[Sidenote: Its approximation to the novel proper.]

Now not only is there in this the creation of the novel _in posse_, of
the romance _in esse_, but it is brought about in a curiously noteworthy
fashion. A hundred years and more later the greatest known writer of the
Middle Ages, and one of the three or four greatest of the world, defined
the subjects of poetry as Love, War, and Religion, or in words which we
may not unfairly translate by these. The earlier master recognised
(practically for the first time) that the romance--that allotropic form
(as the chemists might say) of poetry--must deal with the same. Now in
these forms of the Arthurian legend, which are certainly anterior to the
latter part of the twelfth century, there is a great deal of war and a
good deal of religion, but these motives are mostly separated from each
other, the earlier forms of the Arthur story having nothing to do with
the Graal, and the earlier forms of the Graal story--so far as we can
see--nothing, or extremely little, to do with Arthur. Nor had Love, in
any proper and passionate sense of the word, anything to do with either.
Women and marriage and breaches of marriage appear indeed; but the
earlier Graal stories are dominated by the most ascetic
virginity-worship, and the earlier Arthur-stories show absolutely
nothing of the passion which is the subject of the magnificent overture
of Mr. Swinburne's _Tristram_. Even this story of Tristram himself,
afterwards fired and coloured by passion, seems at first to have shown
nothing but the mixture of animalism, cruelty, and magic which is
characteristic of the Celts.[32] Our magician of a very different
gramarye, were he Walter o