of this theme may not treat such subject-matter capriciously, nor otherwise than in harmony with its inherent nature and spirit.  It is recognized that the stuff whereof great poetry is made is not the arbitrary creation of the poet, and cannot be manufactured to order.  “Genuine poetic material,” it has been said, “is handed down in the imagination of man from generation to generation, changing its spirit according to the spirit of each age, and reaching its full development only when in the course of time the favorable conditions coincide.”  Inasmuch as the subject-matter of the Arthurian legends is not the creation of a single poet, nor even of many poets, but is in fact the creation of the people,—­indeed, of many peoples widely separated in time and space, and is thus in a sense the voice of the race,—­it resembles in this respect the Faust legends, which are the basis of Goethe’s world-poem; or the mediaeval visions of a future state, which found their supreme and final expression in Dante’s ‘Divina Commedia,’ which sums up within itself the art, the religion, the politics, the philosophy, and the view of life of the Middle Ages.

Whether the Arthurian legends as a whole have found their final and adequate expression in Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King,’ or whether it was already too late, when the Laureate wrote, to create from primitive ideas so simple a poem of the first rank, is not within the province of this essay to discuss.  But manifestly, any final judgment in regard to the treatment of this theme as a whole, or any phase of the theme, is inadequate which leaves out of consideration the history of the subject-matter, and its treatment by other poets; which, in short, ignores its possibilities and its significance.  With respect to the origin and the early history of the Arthurian legend, much remains to be established.  Whether its original home was in Wales, or among the neighboring Celts across the sea in Brittany, whither many of the Celts of Britain fled after the Anglo-Saxon invasion of their island home, no one knows.  But to some extent, at least, the legend was common to both sides of the Channel when Geoffrey wrote his book, about 1145.  As a matter of course, this King Arthur, the ideal hero of later ages, was a less commanding personage in the early forms of the legend than when it had acquired its splendid distinction by borrowing and assimilating other mythical tales.

It appears that five great cycles of legend,—­(1) the Arthur, Guinevere, and Merlin cycle, (2) the Round Table cycle, (3) the Holy Grail cycle, (4) the Launcelot cycle, (5) the Tristan cycle,—­which at first developed independently, were, in the latter half of the twelfth century, merged together into a body of legend whose bond of unity was the idealized Celtic hero, King Arthur.

LANCELOT BIDS ADIEU TO ELAINE.  Photogravure from Drawing by Gustave Dore.

[Illustration]

This blameless knight, whose transfigured memory has been thus transmitted to us, was probably a leader of the Celtic tribes of England in their struggles with the Saxon invaders.  His victory at Mount Badon, described by Sir Launcelot to the household at Astolat,—­