A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1: From the Beginning to 1800Saintsbury, George
History
A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1: From the Beginning to 1800
Saintsbury, George
French fiction -- History and criticism
But this idea, great and promising as it was, required further
fertilisation, and got it from another. The Graal story is (once more,
according to authority of the greatest competence, and likely if
anything to be biassed the other way) pretty certainly not Welsh in
origin, and there is no reason to think that it originally had anything
to do with Arthur. Even after it obeyed the strange "suck" of legends
towards this centre whirlpool, or Loadstone Rock, of romance, it yielded
nothing intimately connected with the Arthurian Legend itself at first,
and such connection as succeeded seems pretty certainly[31] to be that
of which Percevale is the hero, and an outlier, not an integral part.
But either the same genius (as one would fain hope) as that which
devised the 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.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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