Page:Tennyson; the Leslie Stephen lecture.djvu/17

 admire it. It may be so sometimes, but the poem that is damaged in this way is not worth troubling about. The Commentator of course needs to be carefully watched. He must not here debate the question whether Astolat is Guildford, as Malory says, or Dumbarton, as another author has surmised. But he will gain something if he follows out Mr Palgrave's note to the Golden Treasury and finds the old Italian story in the Cento novelle antiche, which was read by Tennyson and from which he took the matter of his poem. This original story is not the same thing as Malory. It is taken from the same source as Malory, 'the French book' of Lancelot. But it has quite a different effect, and the effect is nearly related to the English poem. The Italian story, like the English poem, is detached from its context; it is not like the Idyll of Elaine, part of a large and complicated history. The Italian story has no ties and dependencies; it is a thing by itself, in the old clear language, one of the beautiful small things of medieval art. It