Launcelot and Guenevere :: :: University of Virginia Library

—The Castle of Morgause, Queen of Orkney. A Chamber. Morgause, standing by a window. Morgana.
Morgause.
Is there no charm to overturn his state?
No magic net to cast about his legs
And trip him in his triumph? Where's that skill
For which the ignorant people call you witch
And even the learned, seeing the strange control
With which you make the laws of things o'ercome
And contradict themselves, call by your name
The emancipated worlds that hang in the clouds,
Fata Morgana—where's the use of witchcraft
When Arthur lives and waxes? Oh, for some horror
To strike him helpless, paralyzed, aghast,

With doom advancing on him! Why, he grows
Too great for this small world, and his vast stride
Will shortly plant one foot out on the moon
And straddle space for empire. The old heroes
Are clean forgot, and every piping poet
Must squeak of Arthur, where the antique bards
Sang the divine deeds of the sons of gods.

Morgana.
What share have we in it? We are his sisters,
Or else he is no king. Where, then, our part
I' the pageant and the power?

Morgause.
He knows well
We are no sisters to him. He is a changeling,
A base-born upstart, an abandoned bastard—
Who knows save Merlin?—Merlin's son, perhaps,
And grandson to the Devil.

Morgana.
He has scorned us.
You know that once I stole Excalibur,
The sword and scabbard, and for proxy left
A false and brittle weapon by his bed,
Where he slept heavily beneath my spell;
And that Sir Accolon took the great sword

And fought with him, and yet the King o'ercame,
Though weak with wounds and well-nigh weaponless.
He slew Sir Accolon—

Morgause.
Alas, my sister!

Morgana.
Tut, can a dead man longer give us joy?
He slew Sir Accolon, but slew not me,
Who was his worser foe. You knew all this,
But knew not that I sought his couch again
Where, seeing the sword clutched in his sleeping hand,
I durst not touch it; but the sheath I took
And cast it in the pool.

Morgause.
And to what end?
Men fight not with their sheaths.

Morgana.
There spoke the unlearned.
Not by the forthright and the obvious way
Is knowledge won or power. Upon this sheath
There is a prophecy that his fortunes hang
And on its loss the loss of all his weal.

Morgause.
And you believe this?

Morgana.
I have studied long
In learning fearsome to the general,
And marvels have become my commonplaces,
And now I prophesy that from this hour
The flood of Arthur's destiny stands still
And lapses to its ebb.

Morgause.
Look yonder! Look!
A rider in the road!—a knight!—Ah me,
If it were Lamoracke!

Morgana.
Give heed to me.
You were not wont to be a lovesick girl
In your amours. I go to Camelot,
Where I would have your son, Sir Mordred, come—

Morgause.
Mordred, my son?

Morgana.
You shudder at his name.

Morgause.
He and his name alike are dreadful to me.

Morgana.
Your son, Sir Mordred, whom you bore to Arthur,
Before you found him so unlovable.

Morgause.
What said he then of brother or of sister?
An idle tale to help him to the throne,
For which he spat on me!—The knight draws near.—
Hell were too brief to give my outrage ease!—
'Tis he! 'Tis Lamoracke.

Morgana.
Now out upon you
For a weak fool! Is this to wreak revenge?
I come to show the way. Send Mordred to me
Disguised, for Arthur cannot bear his face.
It is as sure as there is truth in hell
That he shall kill the King. My nightly devil—

Morgause.
He is at the drawbridge. See, he enters in!
—Oh, Mordred shall be told. His hate no more
Than mine needs your exciting. I have lived
So long with hate it hath become unconscious;
Nor would I think of it,—it has grown tiresome,—
And I would have some joy before I die.
Love is more novel. Oh, I shall remember!
[Enter Lamoracke.]
O Lamoracke!

Morgana.
Nay, farewell then! I'll not stay
To listen love-songs.

Lamoracke.
Not so fast, fair lady,
For I have news to make you gasp with wonder.

Morgause.
No tenderer greeting! Do you fear my sister?
I do not say that she's not dangerous;
But since when have we loved like timid wives
And startled cavaliers that meet by stealth
And dare not fling their deeds in the world's face
And scoff at scandal? Would all Camelot
Knew with what scorn their coward decencies
And creeds that have no birth behind the lips—
Why, what's the matter, sir?

Lamoracke.
Though all my soul
Cry out to reach you, I may not advance.
I have sworn a vow.

Morgana.
This is most strange.

Morgause.
A vow!

Lamoracke.
'Tis but three days ago I left you. Well,

Three days will serve as well as thirty years
To make the world all over. I have seen
It is another kind of world than that
I thought it. I accept what I have seen.

Morgana.
More mysteries! Your news, sir.

Lamoracke.
Yesterday
There came a young lad to the Court,—by heaven,
A beardless boy, as frail as some slim girl
With pale thin face and sad unheeding eyes
That men remember when they have passed by.
This child—what think you that he came to seek?
Knighthood—the heavy arms of strong men and
The stress of errantry. By God, no less!
Then came Sir Launcelot and called him son
And knighted him; and in the joust that day
He did unhorse me, me whose name men speak
With Launcelot's and Tristram's. This he did,
This stripling, Galahad, Sir Launcelot's son.

Morgana.
What, has the faithful Launcelot proved untrue?

Lamoracke.
No man dare say that Launcelot e'er was false

To Guenevere. This is the tale they tell.
Elaine, the daughter of King Pelleas,
Loved him, and knowing him too true to see
In all the world but one fair woman's love,
Got her old nurse, Dame Brisen, with enchantments
To clothe her in the likeness of the Queen.
Then came she in to Launcelot and he,
Unwitting was deceived; and in this wise
Was Galahad engendered.

Morgause.
Come, your vow!

Morgana.
This is the tale he told to Guenevere;
How easily men think us to be gulled.

Morgause.
What care I for this boy? There's more behind.

Lamoracke.
The selfsame night, the jousting being done,
And the King being absent with Sir Galahault,
Sir Kaye and others on affairs of state,
We sat us down to feast; whereat this boy,
This Galahad, being new-come to our board,
Cast but a glance about the great Round Table,

And with the sudden sureness of a shaft
Gained his quick-chosen seat,—a throne wherein
Not the great King himself e'er dared to rest,
And Merlin called it the Siege Perilous.
For it was written that no man might sit
Within that seat, save one it waited for,
But he should die. Therein the boy sat down
And died not, but his face seemed glorified,
And a great marveling went about the hall.

Morgana.
So had it been with you, had you sat there,
Or any other knight. Now it is strange
How men will dread their own imaginings.

Lamoracke.
There as we sat, expectant of strange things,
A sudden storm arose, and the quick lightnings
Made pale and lurid in recurrent change
The torches of our feast; and each man spoke
Hoarse or in whispers or with measured voice
As each one felt in his own way the awe
That calms the air before prodigious births.
What happened then I cannot well report,

For I was all confused; but Percival
My brother saith it was the Holy Graal
That passed before our eyes, the very Cup
Wherein Our Lord first shed his mystic Blood,
Brought by the saint from Palestine and shrined
At Glastonbury many centuries.
Long since it vanished and it now returns
To bring the golden ages back to us.
I saw it not but saw its radiance
And felt its power. So, silent for a space
We stood, till Gawaine broke the hush and swore
An oath that for a twelvemonth and a day
No lust of body nor no lust of praise
Nor aught that chains us to this middle-earth
Should intercept him but he should attain
This quest. And all we swore it after him.

Morgana.
Virgins! Ha! Ha! The Knights of Camelot
Sworn virgins for a year!

Lamoracke.
It is our oath.

Morgana.
Then I may safely leave you with my sister.

Farewell, sir. I'm in haste for Camelot
Where lords are welcome more than ladies now.
Sister, forget not to send on a man.
Farewell! La! virgins!

[Exit laughing.]
Morgause.
Lamoracke!

Lamoracke.
Morgause!
I could not leave—I could not go away
Upon so far—so vague—I know not what—
Without a last farewell.

Morgause.
So far? Would you be further
If you in truth had found the Holy Graal
On the other side of Nowhere?

Lamoracke.
I have sworn.

Morgause.
Sworn what? Sworn infidelity? Sworn hate?
Then why are you come here? O Lamoracke!
Say it is false, say that my ears have lied,
You said it not, you swore no vow. Kiss me
And say it is not true.

Lamoracke.
It is the truth.

Morgause.
Why should you take a quest like this upon you?
You are no visionary.

Lamoracke.
The rest swore and I swore.

Morgause.
How little we are to you? Why, a woman—
[OMITTED]
And you betray us for a summer dream.

Lamoracke.
Look you, I have no great faith in this quest.
Such things may be for Galahad—not for me.
But I have undertaken it. Stand not you
Between me and the trial. I have come
Straining a bond which yet I will not break
For parting and not pleasure. Let us part.

Morgause.
Since it must be, then, and the love you swore
Is all so weak, since all our joy must pass
And that sweet season when life san for us
With lips that half forgot old cruelties,
—Do you remember when you kissed me first?
Ah, I remember, for the sun seemed then

To burst the black clouds that o'erroofed my life,
And all the quivering color of the day
And happy voices of all living things
Began then. Ah, how wicked I had been—
How joyless you will never know. You saved me
—Love saved me, love reconciles all ill—
But let that pass. Since all this now is done,
One boon, for dead love's sake, ere love be dead.

Lamoracke.
So that it be not to forego the quest,
Anything!

Morgause.
One last night of joy.

Lamoracke.
Of joy?

Morgause.
Nay, start not, nothing that your vow forbids.
One night of revelry in innocence
As in the old days when you found me here
And cheered my desolation ere we loved
As we have loved.

Lamoracke.
So be it.

Morgause.

Lionors!

[Sings]

O merry when the owlet calls
Across the moonlit snow!
And merry in the Devil's halls
Where such as we must go

Lionors!
[Enter Lionors.]
Quick, uncorslet the good knight—
Or stay, no hands but mine shall do that office.
Be ready with a bowl to lave his hands
In orient perfumes—and fetch in a mantle
Of softest sarsnet, rich in broideries.
[Exit Lionors]
[Sings as she undoes his armor.]

It was a Knight and a fair Lady—
Sing, all the winds are still!
She took the helmet from his head
And oh but her cheeks were rosy-red—
And hark, the partridge over the hill!

[Re-enter Lionors with mantle, and Attendant with bowl, etc.]

It was a Knight and a fair Lady—
Sing, all the winds are stirring!
She loved him more than love can tell,
But he left her soul to the hounds of hell—
A soul or a bird, in the wind went whirring?

[Exeunt Lionors and Attendant.]
[The context of this song of Morgause is among the lost material.]

O I've come back to hell, My Dears,
O I've come back to hell.
The bliss of the saints is long complaints,
So I've come back to hell.

O I've come back to hell, My Dears,
O I've come back to hell.
Love's joy is sweet but bitter fleet,
So I've come back to hell.

O I've come back to hell, My Dears,
O I've come back to hell.
Love's joy being done what better fun
Than back to the joys of hell.

SCENE II.

—A Courtyard. Fountain playing, flowers, etc. Pander and Porter on a bench, throwing dice.
Pander.

The devil's in the dice. I'll play no more to-day. God be praised, trade was never more brisk, and we have the finest pieces of women's flesh in fifty leagues. Else your cursed luck had drained me as dry as a worm-eaten walnut.

Porter.

Fortune's a balky filly; you must ride hard while she is in mood to carry you.

[Knocking.]
Pander.
More gallants! Well, I see Venus isn't ungodessed yet.
[Exit Porter.]
He that would get gold, let him sell the necessities of life.
[Enter Percival and Galahad.]
Good evening, gentlemen, and a merry night to you. I'll go call the ladies.
[Exit Pander.]

Percival.
That's an odd varlet.

Galahad.
Ay? I did not mark him.

Percival.
I liked him not. This is a pleasant place.

Galahad.
How beautiful are lilies! See them raise
Their crowned heads like royalties above
Their lowlier fellows. There's no king on earth
So simply all-sufficient to his life
As these. There is a touch of God in them.

Percival.
It is the glory of man that he must strive.

Galahad.
That he may reach their rounded life at last.

Percival.
No more than these?

Galahad.
Ay, more than these, no doubt,
But filling out his vaster orb of life
And love and contemplation with the same
Serene completeness and untroubled poise,
Not fretful, not unsatisfied, not eager,
But calm, great, un ...
Like lilies in the garden of the Lord.

[Enter Sendal and Guimere.]
Guimere.
...

SCENE III.

—Camelot. Hall of the Palace. Dubric and Launcelot.
Dubric.
Now God be praised that thou, Sir Launcelot,
Art wrought to this resolve. One act of thine
Outsermons my whole Lent,—so much art thou
The secret heart of every Knight-at-arms
Made manifest, his pattern and desire.
For what thou hast revealed, I have entombed it.
Even had confession no safeguarding oath,
Yet were my love for thee, my son, too great
And my desire to help thee to an end
So nobly vowed, too keen—Be not afraid;
This sleeps, for me, until the great awakening
At the Last Day.

Launcelot.
My sin has rent my heart;
I have seen day by day unworthy loves
Taking in vain the name of that which was,
So help me Christ, howe'er an act of sin,
In both our hearts a holy mystery.
I have seen myself, unworthy that I am,
Chosen of men a captain and exemplar,
And by the same lips that exalted me
Debased with attribution of vile thought
Until the holiest secrets of my heart
Showed shameful and malign, and so deformed
Became a scripture for the vulgar spirit
To justify its filth with. So I saw
That that which was the cause of sin in others,
Howe'er itself immaculate at heart,
Must be by circumstance made interdict.

Dubric.
Man cannot live unto himself alone,
But every deed returns upon the doer
A thousandfold. What he hath done to one,
He doth admit that all may do to him,
And who shall say how many will accept
The gage?

Launcelot.
I had a quarrel with the world;
It had done me wrong; therefore I put it by
And took my own, or so I thought. But now,
Even to take my own, I would not do
This evil to my fellows.

Dubric.
Ay, well said;
And yet do not too much forget, my son,
That howsoe'er your heart betray your conscience,
Confusing good and ill, it was a sin,
Essentially a sin, for coveting
Gives no true title, though it lead to theft.
Self masques so oft as conscience there's no safety
Save in submitting conscience, self and all,
To her who only can distinguish them
Unerringly, the Church. To her hath God
Committed this, and what she binds on earth
Is bound in heaven, and what she looses here
Is loosed there also.

Launcelot.
I would in all things
Submit myself to Holy Church as unto
God visible and audible on earth.
Therefore, resigning all pretence to judge,

I have committed to the Church and God
The argument of sin, content myself
To execute their warrants. And now, absolved,
I leave the past and with a single heart
Devote myself to this most holy quest,
Whereof the vision and the miracle
Vouchsafed us in the coming of the Graal
Is as the rainbow covenanting hope;
And to what service else the Church may will.

Dubric.
God's blessing be an Eastern star to thee
And lead thee to His peace.

[Enter Galahault and Bors.]
Galahault.
Old friend, what's this?

Launcelot.
Welcome to Camelot!

Galahault.
Sir Bors hath told me
A tale so strange I scarce can credit it.
Go you upon this quest?

Launcelot.
Ay, if so be
In any way I may renew good deeds.

Galahault.
Or any way employ your soul. I see
You too have known at last life's weariness.
Ah well, pray God you find a better cure
Than I!

Launcelot.
Will you not come with me, my friend?

Galahault.
Not I; I am too far gone in weariness.
I have not faith enough to serve a flea
To jump from dog to dog. Besides, you leave
The King alone; scarce one of his great knights
But goes upon the quest. Needs must that some
Remain nor leave him all disretinued.

Launcelot.
Mayhap your service will be more than ours;
But I am hushed with hope. What tidings, Bors?
Is all made ready for our setting forth?

Bors.
Our steeds stand saddled at the palace gates,
Yours, Galahad's, Percival's and my own.

Launcelot.
And where
Is Galahad?

Bors.
With Percival. They are
Inseparable as doves. Even such a pair
Meseemeth you and I in the old days
Dreamed and aspired together. Twenty years
Sink out of time, and over the long gap
My soul leaps back to boyhood when I see them,
And my eyes fill with tears.

Launcelot.
God grant that they
Make good our failures! Though I lose all else,
I am most happy that I have my son,
My Galahad, in whose more perfect life
I shall not be left all unjustified.

[Enter Dagonet, with a lantern.]
Galahault.
What do you with the lantern, Fool?

Dagonet.

I am a philosopher hunting mice. When the wise men all turn fools, it is time for the fool to turn wise man. And, in truth, I think my search will bring me to a bottle before theirs will them to a cup.

Dubric.
Let not your folly grow blasphemous.

Dagonet.

Nay, the King will not let my tongue be slit; he is too poor in advisers. The whole Court is Graal-mad, and Sir Galahault and I are all that is left of the Privy Council.

Galahault.
Even so, fellow-counsellor. Where left you the King?

Dagonet.
At his wit's end.

Galahault.
No; but whereabouts?

Dagonet.
Beside himself.

Galahault.
But in what place?

Dagonet.

In a tight one; for his knights leave him to chase fireflies, while all the lamps of the kingdom are left untrimmed—all save the Fool's lantern, and that serves but to show empty benches. But, in good sooth, the King is coming hitherward quite outcaptained and helpless even to show his own vexation.

[Enter Arthur, Kaye and others; Percival and Taliesin.]

Arthur.
Is it true, Launcelot?
Was there no thought of me or my great dream
To build the perfect State (whereto ye all
Were bound with a great oath)—did naught of this
Speak for me in your heart? Heaven may be served
In many ways. I trust I serve no less,
Who would extend God's justice and knit close
The solid race, than they that seek new ways
To bring the grace of heaven into our hearts.
Even to do good, will you forsake that good
Whereto your hands are set?

Launcelot.
My lord, believe me,
I serve you best in this.

Arthur.
Nay, go thy way.
Thou art the noblest man my swarming life
Has yet been fronted with. What thou doest
Must have some glory in it; nor would I
Have anyone for me break sacred vows,
Though they were madness. Yet I must bewail
That which deprives my kingdom of thy sword,
My heart of thy great spirit. God be with thee!

ACT III.

SCENE II

Arthur.
O Guenevere, you have made me the happiest man
To-night in all my kingdoms. I have craved
Long years, and have not spoken. I have held
Your selfhood far more royal than my crown
And your soul's privacy more sacred from
Irreverent entrance than the sanctuary.
Your husband, I have held your loveliness
Exempt; your King, I ne'er profaned your will.

Guenevere.
O sir, you have been royal.

Arthur.
Nay, I think
That I have been but just. There's nought so dear
To man or woman as that crag of life
Where each walks lonely. There's no bond on earth,
Nor wedlock nor the sacred rule of kings,
So strong that it may overbear this right
Of each soul to itself. The holy place
Of the heart's temple no man lawfully
May enter, save he bear the high election

Of priest to the divinity within.
You have withheld from me; it was your right
And I have not complained. But now that you
Have razed the wall you chose should be between us,
I am more laureled and victorious
Than with ten empires or a thousand battles.
Ay, though the flower of my fair knights be lost,
Following a quest that few or none may gain,
Even Launcelot, my greatest—why, I have made
A fellowship that fifty knights were lost in.
And when our children take our place and theirs—

Guenevere.
Children!

Arthur.
Ay, sweetheart, when the throne of Britain
Shall have an heir to keep what we have won,
There'll not be fagots in the wood enough
To feed the bonfires. Guenevere, you have done
A deed to-night that sets a star i' the brow
Of womanhood, and rounds my dream of empire
To its proportioned close. I will not seize
My new-found joy too violently, to make
Your bounty, like the first buds of the spring

Met by a blast of March, shrink back again
And shrivel in the bark. Good night, sweet Queen,
And God be with us and our house!

[Exit.]
Guenevere.
Children?
To bear him children! No, God strike me dead!

CURTAIN.

NOTES ON THE HOLY GRAAL.

At first thought the association of the words “Holy Graal” with scenes of evil life may seem startling to the reader. But the dramatic achievement of the knights of the Graal required the whole picture. The plotting of the sisters and the seduction scenes furnish dramatic motive and prepare us for the story of those knights who abandoned the quest. It must show the temptation resisted by Galahad, temptation that to a high nature was not temptation, as in the scene in the brothel, where the pure knight, born out of the sacramental love of Launcelot and Guenevere, saw but the lily beds.

It will be readily understood by all who knew Richard Hovey that he could not have intended to show that Galahad, the typical knight of purity, should have attained his height through any ascetic or otherwise morbid ideal of life. Not by living less than the best but by living all things better than the best is the whiteness of the soul attained. Speaking about Galahad in Taliesin he says:

“In him ye shall behold how light can look on darkness and forgive,
How love can walk in the mire and take no stain therefrom.”

The temptations of physical life, which mostly to the knights of legendary days meant the life of the flesh minus the soul, would not tempt Galahad more than they would many Galahads of later civilizations, —all those men by whom the sacramental nature of love has been really perceived.

That Galahad was to be shown in relation to women is apparent. We have the names of women introduced in the list of persons of the Holy Graal who are shown by the notes to be in Galahad's story. It is plain that if Galahad had “died a maid,” as we are told in a very early fragment of “Avalon,” it must have been from the absence from his life of a love as pure as that of which he was born, and because by his very nature nothing less than the spirituality of passion could to him have the name of love.

However portentous is the subject of sexual purity in woman, it is still partly a question of legal legitimacy, of social respectability, and of economic convenience.

The Galahad, or masculine idea of purity, “The Pure Knight,” one who stood above a knighthood in which loyalty to his lady in all her interests was the very basis of every knight's oath of arms, would be one in whom the renunciation was not a sacrifice of the passional but of the merely sensual. He would be one whom the consciousness of the sacramental love lifted to a plain quite beyond renunciation, —to inspiration. And such a one,— elected to the redemption of lost womanhood by restoring woman's faith in herself and love, through her faith in the untempting and untemptable man,—

the Galahad of the “Poem in Dramas” would have been.

The Holy Graal brings into direct contrast the characters of two illegally born sons, Mordred and Galahad. One is of superhuman goodness and power, the other of diabolical selfishness. Modred, tool of fate, gives opportunity to draw a character bruised and marred by his untoward relation to his environment; one, having not only a soul born to discords, but a life full of deprivations in the direction of family life and love and social opportunity, by lack of legal inheritance; all this with that virility in brain and body so often found outside of birth from the easy debauchery of married-life-propinquity.

Galahad one day finds himself called bastard. But he is one of those who many wear the word as a star on his brow, a consecration on his life, an invisible angel thought—such as some souls feel floating over them,—and in the great moments of life touching upon consciousness.

There are parents wickedly below the law of what makes a wholesome order for all. There are also those so subject to psychological law that they live above the order of the many. Mordred's ill-starred life arose among the former, Galahad's immaculate conception gave him being among the latter.

One might almost say that the whiteness of Galahad was like the whiteness of light, made up of all colors, out of which, as in diamond brilliance, all

color could flash, rather than any mere purity of cleanly, opaque, earthly white. In this connection one remembers the diamond sphere which Taliesin saw in the Graal chapel when Uriel knighted him poet, the diamond sphere a transparent light itself, flashing all colors, symbol of a wisdom containing all knowing, from clear heavenly blue through the burning spirit of yellow to the warm red flame of earthly things.

It was in the Holy Graal that Launcelot and Guenevere were to renounce their personal good in the service of society, Launcelot to go on the quest of the Graal and Guenevere to take up her cross by returning to Arthur and her rôle as mother of the realm. How inadequate a solution this action proved may be suggested by the one page of this play in which Guenevere meets Arthur. The situation is once more truly tragic, there being no solution. Turn which way she would she saw sin and suffering, the sacrifice of inner purity if she returned and the sacrifice of the peace of the realm if she did not.

The dignified ending of Tennyson's Guenevere in a convent, full of gentle deeds and repentance for her great sin in not having “loved the highest,” stands in marked contrast to her rôle in Richard Hovey's poem. Launcelot's confession to Dubric and his soliloquy before Rome bring to view, however, the pain he suffered at this point of his experience and show once more that the central character in the whole series of dramas is one not placed

in the list of persons. That character is the social system of the age.

After the departure of the knights on the quest of the Graal, the court at Camelot would have resumed its ordinary routine of life.

All through Southern and Northern Europe during the few hundred years in which we place the story of the Round Table, Courts of Love were of frequent occurrence. We find that a Court of Love was planned for one of the acts of “The Holy Graal.”

The falcon carrying the scroll with the laws which were to govern in these courts was said to come from Broceliande, a sometime location in the Arthur myths. So, doubtless, this naïve and interesting code, administered by a concourse of the great ladies of each locality, seems to have had great influence in the formation of the standards and customs regarding the behavior of both ladies and lovers through all Europe. These Courts of Love are credited by high authority as having created manners. This could not be without there being underneath a marked influence upon morals.

In fact, the early history of woman, first in an accidental relationship to man, then as something owned, and later as party to a marriage bargain without any pretense to what has lately been called romantic love, culminated in a condition of society in which spiritual and mystical personal attractions were recognized—and lived, with loyalty according to the ordinances of these “Courts” by persons not married to one another and also when either party might be stably married to some other.

Better a world with the love of the heart in it, even outside of marriage, than not at all. Naturally jealousies and dissensions arose, and by degrees husbands and wives began to see as the ideal, and to expect in marriage, friendship, and those mystic relations of affectionate loyalty which have now so completely become the ideal, that we must read history to remind us that our present expectation, even if it is not our constant attainment, is a wide advance upon martial conditions in earlier days. Having found the relations between love and the doctrine of the trinity in human kind, we now see that the greatest happiness and the best birth have their origin in an inextricable combination of physical, mental, and emotional attraction.

Our present ideal of love has come to include— on the physical plane—sensation, sympathy, instinct; then sentiment, adoration, intuition in the emotions; and judgment and conscience as the results of reason.

Such an ideal of love had the author of Launcelot and Guenevere.

DIGEST OF THE HOLY GRAAL, MADE UP FROM THE FRAGMENTS AND STRAY NOTES LEFT BY MR. HOVEY.

The play opens at the Castle of Morgause, Queen of Orkney, with a scene of evil counsel between Morgause and Morgana, her sister.

Then Lamoracke, the lover of Morgause, comes to bid her good-by, saying that he has sworn a vow since he left her three days before; that a great wonder has happened at the Court of King Arthur, for Galahad, son of Launcelot, has taken the seat at the Round Table which Merlin, the Magician, had called the Siege Perilous, in which no man might sit and live until one came for whom it waited; that a vision of the Holy Graal had appeared to them assembled; and that Gawaine swore an oath, which they had all sworn after him, that for a twelvemonth and a day they would seek the Graal.

Morgause lures Lamoracke away from the idea of the quest and wins him to herself again, he thus being the first knight to fail in the performance of the vow.

Launcelot, before going on the quest confesses to Dubric, Archbishop of Canterbury, who gives him his blessing.

Arthur does not wish his knights to leave the Court and go on the quest of the Graal; but on seeing that Launcelot is determined to go, he bids him God speed.

Galahad then enters the hall and is by Launcelot presented to the king; then Arthur and Galahad are left alone together.

In the garden of Camelot we are introduced to Madelon, the saintly sister of Sir Percival, and Sendal, the temptress. The influence of these two women follows Galahad throughout the play; and from the notes we believe that Madalon dies, as in Malory's story, and that Sendal repents on realizing the purity and strength of Galahad, who releases her from her own evil nature as he did the prisoners in the “Castle of the Maidens” in the early legend.

Before leaving the Court, Launcelot and Galahad bid Guenevere good-by, and a scene between these three is the end of the first act.

After the departure of the Graal knights a “Court of Love” is held in the garden at Camelot, at which Arthur the King, Taliesin the poet, Dagonet the jester, Kaye the Lord Seneschal, the sad Galahault, Mordred, Agravaine, Guenevere, Fata Morgana and the women of the Court are present. Mordred and Agravaine, who have lingered after the departure of the other knights, say that they never really intended to seek the Graal.

At Tintagel, Morgause, Lamoracke and Agravaine plot together to send Sendal and Guimere, disguised in men's clothes, to meet the Graal knights on the road pretending to be desirous of joining the

quest and then to seduce them from the performance of their vow.

Galahad and Percival on their journey arrive at a beautiful garden which turns out to be the courtyard of a brothel, and there they meet Sendal and Guimere.

In the next act we have the attempt to carry out this plan. “The fickle Gawaine,” who has already fallen in love again, has resisted that new love and continued the quest.

Riding through the mountains, the Graal knights meet the women in their masculine disguise. The women, being attacked in revenge for their treachery, are saved by Galahad. Then Sendal confesses the plot, which implicates Morgause and Lamoracke. Gawaine, Morgause's son, furious at his mother and at Lamoracke, her lover, turns back for vengeance.

Meanwhile at Camelot Guenevere attempts to harmonize the tragic situation by turning to Arthur. Renunciation fails.

Gawaine goes to Tintagel and kills his mother and Lamoracke; then utterly disheartened, turns to his new love and gives up the quest of the Graal.

In another scene we are at Camelot again with King Arthur and Guenevere.

A note for the last scene of the fourth act shows it to have been between Galahad and Launcelot at Glastonbury, outside the Abbey, whither Launcelot comes on the miraculous ship which brings also the body of Madelon after her vicarious death. Here Galahad attains the Graal. From here Launcelot, broken in spirit, wanders away and is in the next

play, “Astolat,” cared for by Elaine and finally restored to strength, goes to Camelot only to pass through new sunderings in the experience of the death of Elaine and the jealousy of Guenevere, and the death of Arthur in the next play.

The last act is at Camelot. The Court is assembled in the garden when Bors and Launcelot return.

The play closes with a scene between Launcelot and Guenevere.