"And return'd
Among the flowers, in May, with Guinevere."


Then their long love may have begun, as in the story of Tristram sent
to bring Yseult to be the bride of King Mark. In Malory, however,
Lancelot does not come on the scene till after Arthur's wedding and
return from his conquering expedition to Rome. Then Lancelot wins
renown, "wherefore Queen Guinevere had him in favour above all other
knights; and in certain he loved the Queen again above all other
ladies damosels of his life." Lancelot, as we have seen, is
practically a French creation, adopted to illustrate the chivalrous
theory of love, with its bitter fruit. Though not of the original
Celtic stock of legend, Sir Lancelot makes the romance what it is,
and draws down the tragedy that originally turned on the sin of
Arthur himself, the sin that gave birth to the traitor Modred. But
the mediaeval romancers disguised that form of the story, and the
process of idealising Arthur reached such heights in the middle ages
that Tennyson thought himself at liberty to paint the Flos Regum,
"the blameless King." He followed the Brut ab Arthur. "In short,
God has not made since Adam was, the man more perfect than Arthur."
This is remote from the Arthur of the oldest Celtic legends, but
justifies the poet in adapting Arthur to the ideal hero of the
Idylls:-


"Ideal manhood closed in real man,
Rather than that grey king, whose name, a ghost,