To put them together, if not in absolutely perfect yet in more than sufficient shape, was, so far as we know, the luck of Malory only: though some one (Map or another) had done a mighty day's work long before in creating the figure and the adventures of Lancelot and imagining the later quest of the Graal with the figure of Galahad--that "improved Percivale," as the seedsmen say.
But besides this power of shaping (or even of merely combining) scattered elements into a story, Malory has another--_the_ other of the first importance to the novelist proper--in his attraction to character, if not exactly in his making up of it.

It has been said above that the defect of the pure romances--especially those of continental origin--is the absence of this.

What the Greeks called [Greek: dihanoia]--"sentiment," "thought," "cast of thought," as it has been variously rendered--is even more absent from them than plot or character itself: and of its almost necessary connection with this latter they often seem to have no idea.
Very rare is such a touch as that of Sir Amadas being unable at the feast to get rid of the memory of the unburied corpse, kept by enemies from the kindly earth that would hide it, and the rites that would help it to peace: still rarer that in _Guy of Warwick_ when the hero, at the height of his fame and in the full enjoyment of his desires, looks from the tower and is struck by the selfishness and earthliness of his career.

The first notion is not "improved" in the original at all, and the second very badly; but in most of the others such things do not even exist.

Now the greater Legend is full of situations which encourage such thoughts, and even of expressed thoughts that only need craftsmanship to turn them into the cornerstones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty words long, of literature.