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 all art.  But Malory has not been the least successful with her:  and of Lancelot he has made, if only in study, one of the great characters of that fictitious world which is so much truer than the real.  And let no one say that we are reading Tennyson or any one else into Malory.  There are yet persons, at least at the time this was written not quite Methusalahs, who read the Morte d’Arthur before the Idylls appeared and who have never allowed even the Idylls to overlay their original idea of the most perfect and most gentle of knights.