Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/45

Rh really mustn't have any illusions about that. He 'will never come here again, never lie by her side.' And then, while she keeps on steadily 'grovelling, Arthur blesses her, and stalks out with a face 'as an angel's,' and disappears in due course into the night.

But this is not all. This hateful scene, the most revolting exhibition of false sentiment and fiendish cruelty in all literature, has still a climax. The woman is to be plunged into the same abysm of besotted degradation as the man. She is to accept 'the judgment' he has denounced,' and gloat over it! She is to wail that 'he forgave her, and she could not speak,' that 'his mercy choked her'; she is to renounce her 'false voluptuous pride,' and all her love for Lancelot, and recognise in this squalid and inhuman prig 'the highest and most human,' whose love ('I must not scorn myself: he loves me still: let no one dream but that he loves me still') is to regenerate her life! 'We needs,' she declares—

We needs must love the highest when we see it, Not Lancelot nor another!'

Comment seems impossible. All that one can say is that the writer who could deliberately paint such a character as Arthur—as the Arthur of this culminant Idyll of Guinevere—and present it to us