"Weel is me
For I am free."


"Why took they not their pastime?" Because conscience forbade, and
Guinevere sends her lover far from her, and both die in religion.
Thus Malory's "fierce lusty epic" is neither so lusty nor so fierce
but that it gives Tennyson his keynote: the sin that breaks the fair
companionship, and is bitterly repented.

"The knights are almost too polite to kill each other," the critic
urges. In Malory they are sometimes quite too polite to kill each
other. Sir Darras has a blood-feud against Sir Tristram, and Sir
Tristram is in his dungeon. Sir Darras said, "Wit ye well that Sir
Darras shall never destroy such a noble knight as thou art in prison,
howbeit that thou hast slain three of my sons, whereby I was greatly
aggrieved. But now shalt thou go and thy fellows. . . . All that ye
did," said Sir Darras, "was by force of knighthood, and that was the
cause I would not put you to death" (Book IX. chap. xl.)

Tennyson is accused of "emasculating the fierce lusty epic into a
moral lesson, as if it were to be performed in a drawing-room by an
academy of young ladies"--presided over, I daresay, by "Anglican
clergymen." I know not how any one who has read the Morte d'Arthur
can blame Tennyson in the matter. Let Malory and his sources be
blamed, if to be moral is to be culpable. A few passages apart,
there is no coarseness in Malory; that there are conscience,
courtesy, "sweet lives," "keeping down the base in man," "amiable