But besides this power of shaping (or even of merely combining)
scattered elements into a story, Malory has another--_the_ other of the
first importance to the novelist proper--in his attraction to character,
if not exactly in his making up of it. It has been said above that the
defect of the pure romances--especially those of continental origin--is
the absence of this. What the Greeks called [Greek: dihanoia]--"sentiment,"
"thought," "cast of thought," as it has been variously rendered--is even
more absent from them than plot or character itself: and of its almost
necessary connection with this latter they often seem to have no idea.
Very rare is such a touch as that of Sir Amadas being unable at the feast
to get rid of the memory of the unburied corpse, kept by enemies from the
kindly earth that would hide it, and the rites that would help it to peace:
still rarer that in _Guy of Warwick_ when the hero, at the height of
his fame and in the full enjoyment of his desires, looks from the tower and
is struck by the selfishness and earthliness of his career. The first
notion is not "improved" in the original at all, and the second very badly;
but in most of the others such things do not even exist. Now the greater
Legend is full of situations which encourage such thoughts, and even of
expressed thoughts that only need craftsmanship to turn them into the
cornerstones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty words
long, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid that determine the
relations of Tristram and Iseult; the unconscious incest of Arthur and
Margause with its Greek-tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity of
Palomides, and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant allegory)
his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all these are matters in
point. But of course the main nursery of such things is the
Lancelot-and-Guinevere story itself. Nobody has yet made Guinevere a
person--nobody but Shakespeare could have done so perhaps, though
Shakespeare's Guinevere would probably have been the greatest woman in