It is probable indeed that Malory invented little or nothing in the various situations, by which the character of Lancelot, and the history of his fatal love, are evolved.  We know in most cases that this is so.  It is possible, too, that at first (probably because the possibilities had not dawned on him, as it has been admitted they never did very consciously) he has not made the most of the introduction of lover and lady.  But when the interest becomes concentrated, as in the various passages of Guinevere’s wrath with her lover and their consequences, or in the final series of catastrophes, he is fully equal to the occasion.  We know—­this time to his credit—­how he has improved, in the act of borrowing them, the earlier verse-pictures of the final parting of the lovers, and there are many other episodes and juxtapositions of which as much may be said.  That except as to Lancelot’s remorse (which after all is the great point) there is not much actual talk about motive and sentiment is nothing; or nothing but the condition of the time.  The important point is that, as the electricians say, “the house is wired” for the actual installation of character-novelling.  There is here the complete scenario, and a good deal more, for a novel as long as Clarissa and much more interesting, capable of being worked out in the manner, not merely of Richardson himself, but of Mr. Meredith or Mr. Hardy.  It is a great romance, if not the greatest of romances:  it has a great novel, if not the greatest of novels, written in sympathetic ink between the lines, and with more than a little of the writing sometimes emerging to view.

Little in the restricted space here available can be, though much might be in a larger, said about the remaining attempts in English fiction before the middle of the sixteenth century.  The later romances, down to those of Lord Berners, show the character of the older with a certain addition of the “conjuror’s supernatural” of the Amadis school.  But the short verse-tales, especially those of the Robin Hood cycle, and some of the purely comic kind, introduce an important variation of interest:  and even some of the longer, such as that Tale of Beryn, which used to be included in Chaucer’s works, vary the chivalrous model in a useful way.  Still more important is the influence of the short prose tale:—­first Latin, as in the Gesta Romanorum (which of course had older and positively mediaeval forerunners), then Italian and French.  The prose saved the writer from verbiage and stock phrase; the shortness from the tendency to “watering out” which is the curse of the long verse or prose romance.  Moreover, to get point and appeal, it was especially necessary to throw up the subject—­incident, emotion, or whatever it was—­to bring it out; not merely to meander and palaver about it.  But language and literature were both too much in a state of transition to admit of anything capital being done at this time.  It was the great good fortune of England, corresponding to that experienced with Chaucer in poetry three quarters of a century earlier, that Malory came to give the sum and substance of what mediaeval fiction could do in prose.  For more, the times and the men had to come.