Yet the "Morte Darthur," if epic in plan and treatment, is by no means free from the defects of primitive literature. It was written before the age of criticism, and confusion reigns supreme in many of its pages,--a confusion which a very little critical supervision might have removed. As an instance, we find that Galahad, two years after his birth, is made a knight, being then fifteen years old. In like manner the "seat perilous" at the Round Table is magically reserved for Galahad, the author evidently forgetting that he had already given it to Percivale. King Mark's murder of his brother Baldwin is revenged by Baldwin's grandson, thirty or forty years afterward, though there is nothing to show that the characters had grown a year older in the interval. Here a knight finds one antagonist quite sufficient for one man; there he does not hesitate to attack fifty at once; here a slight wound disables him; there a dozen deep wounds are fully healed by a night's rest. Many similar instances might be given, but these will suffice. The discrepancies here indicated were perhaps due to the employment of diverse legends, without care to bring them into accordance, but they lay the work open to adverse criticism.
This lack of critical accuracy may have been a necessary accompaniment of the credulous frame of mind that could render such a work possible. It needed an artlessness of mental make-up, a full capacity for acceptance of the marvellous, a simple-minded faith in chivalry and its doings, which could scarcely exist in common with the critical temperament. In truth, the flavor of an age of credulity and simplicity of thought everywhere permeates this quaint old work, than which nothing more artless, simple, and unique exists in literature, and nothing with a higher value as a presentation of the taste in fiction of our mediæval predecessors.
Yet the "Morte Darthur" is not easy or attractive reading, to other than special students of literature. Aside from its confusion of events and arrangement, it tells the story of chivalry with a monotonous lack of inflection that is apt to grow wearisome, and in a largely obsolete style and dialect with whose difficulties readers in general may not care to grapple. Its pages present an endless succession of single combats with spear and sword, whose details are repeated with wearisome iteration. Knights fight furiously for hours together, till they are carved with deep wounds, and the ground crimsoned with gore. Sometimes they are so inconsiderate as to die, sometimes so weak as to seek a leech, but as often they mount and ride away in philosophical disregard of their wounds, and come up fresh for as fierce a fight the next day.