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There he was visited, as he himself relates, by "many noble and divers gentlemen" demanding why he had not printed the "noble history of the Saint Grail and of the most-renowned Christian King ... Arthur." To please them, and because he himself loved chivalry, Caxton printed Sir Thomas Malory's story, in which all that is best in the many Arthurian romances is woven into one grand narrative.
But the process of idealising him went on: still incomplete in Malory's compilation, where he is often rather otiose and far from royal. Tennyson, for his purpose, completed the idealisation. As to Guinevere, she was not idealised in the old Welsh rhyme "Guinevere, Giant Ogurvan's daughter, Naughty young, more naughty later."
In the Middle Ages evil was spoken of plainly as in Scripture; there was no blinking of facts, no dressing-up of vice to make it look like virtue, and consequently much "bowdlerising" was necessary before Malory's outspoken language should be sufficiently veiled to suit the susceptibilities, to which we have a perfect and legitimate right in so far as they are genuine, and no cloak for an hypocrisy that delights in the loathsome indecencies and disgusting suggestiveness of the modern problem novel.
In reaction against the bold-faced heroines and sensual amours of some of the old French romances, an ideal of exaggerated asceticism, of stainless chastity, notoriously pervades the portion of Malory's work which deals with the Holy Grail. He was human, the Lancelot of Malory, and "fell to his old love again," with a heavy heart, and with long penance at the end.
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