Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/605

CHAP XXIII more fatally impeached by truth and honour trampled on. In the conflict between the two laws of life in the Lancelot story, the rights and needs and power of love maintain themselves; yet the end must come, and the lovers live out love's palinode in separate convents. For this love to be made perfect, must be crowned with repentance.

Who first created Lancelot, and who first made the peerless knight love Arthur's queen? This question has not yet been answered. Chrétien de Troies' poem, Le Conte de la charrette, has for its subject an episode in Lancelot's long love of Guinevere. Here, as in his other poems, Chrétien is a facile narrator, with little sense of the significance that might be given to the stories which he received and cleverly remade. But their significance is shown in the Old French prose Lancelot, probably composed two or three decades after Chrétien wrote. It contains the lovely story of Lancelot's rearing, by the Lady of the Lake, and of his glorious youth. It brings him to the Court of Arthur, and tells how he was made a knight—it was the queen and not the king from whom he received his sword. And he loves her—loves her and her only from the first until his death. He has no thought of serving any other mistress. And he is aided in his love by the "haute prince Galehaut," the most high-hearted friend that ever gave himself to his friend's weal.

From the beginning Lancelot's love is worship, it is holy; and almost from the beginning it is unholy. From the beginning, too, it is the man's inspiration, it is his strength; it makes him the peerless knight, peerless, in courtesy, peerless in emprise; this love gives him the single eye, the unswerving heart, the resistless valour to accomplish those adventures wherein all other knights had found their shame—they were not perfect lovers! Only through his perfect love could Lancelot have accomplished that greatest adventure of the Val des faux amants;—Val sans retour for all other knights. Lancelot alone had always been, and to