It is perhaps hard to look, as any English reader of

our time must, backward through the

Guinevere. i » t o i i* t

coloured window of the greatest of the
Idylls of the King without our thoughts of the queen
being somewhat affected by it. But those who knew
their Malory before the Idylls appeared escape that
danger. Mr Morris's Guinevere in her Defence is
perhaps a little truer than Lord Tennyson's to the
original conception — indeed, much of the delightful
volume in which she first appeared is pure Extrait
Arthurien. But the Tennysonian glosses on Guine-
vere's character are not ill justified : though perhaps,
if less magnificent, it would have been truer, both to
the story and to human nature, to attribute her fall
rather to the knowledge that Arthur himself was by
no means immaculate than to a despairing sense of
\j his immaculateness. The Guinevere of the original
romances is the first perfectly human woman in
English literature. They have ennobled her unfaith-
fulness to Arthur by her constancy to Lancelot, they
have saved her constancy to Lancelot from being
insipid by interspersing the gusts of jealousy in the
matter of the two Elaines which play so great a part
in the story. And it is., curious that, coarse as both
the manners and the speech of the Middle Ages are
supposed to have been, the majority of these romances
are curiously free from coarseness. The ideas might
shock Ascham's prudery, but the expression is, with



THE MATTER OF BRITAIN. 125

the rarest exceptions, scrupulously adapted to polite
society. There are one or two coarse passages in the
Merlin and the older Saint Graal, and I remember
others in outside branches like the Chevalier as Deux
EspSes, But though a French critic has detected some-
thing shocking in Le Chevalier d la Charette, it re-
quires curious consideration to follow him.
