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1 2 3

AN ATHBNJBUM BSSA7.

THEIR GROWTH AND MEANING.

R. W. BOODLE,

MONTREAL.

'^\

Jifl

(Reprinted trom the " Canadian Monthly," April, 1881.)

KOSE-BELFOKD PUBLISHING (X)MPANY.

1881

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■ ri*'fft

1 , „^ . ' * y - 'I

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'..;^

THE IDYLLS OF THE KING:

THEIR GROWTH A:N^D MEANING.*

BY R. W. BOODLE, MOMTUEAL.

f pHERE can be litt'e doubt that, by
X • The Idylls of theKing,' rather
than by any other of his works, pos-
terity will measure the greatness of
their author. To the mass of the read-
ing public, notwithstanding all that
-critics have said about its merits, 'In
Memoriam' is almost as unreadable as
* The Anatomy of Melancholy,' its per-
sistent obscurity and the narrow range
of feelings and interests, to which it
appeals, being in themselves faults and
bringing their own reward. But be-
yond this, in his Arthurian poem, its
author has taken higher ground. He
has challenged comparison with Homer
and Virgil, with Milton and Tasso. He
has realized the dream of Milton and
Diyden, and fulfilled the promise of
the long years of English literature,
by enriching the language with an
Epic taken from the Plistory of Eng-
land. Far then from dating, with Mr.
Buxton Forman, the decadence of Ten-
nyson from his writing the Idylls, we
ftilly agiee with the American critic,
Mr. Stedman, when he calls them their
author's muster-work — the greatest
narrative poem since ' Paradise Lost.'
The greatness of the Arthuriad is
two-fold. It is great from an artistic
as well ns from a moral point of view,
for the artistic and moral purposes
of their author are in equal promi-
nence. Tennyson's perfection us an
artist, when at his best, has never been
doubted, and he is never greater than
in the best parts of the Arthuriad. But

* Head before tlie AtlitiKkuiu Club, Mon-
treal.

no onecan read the poem without being
touched more deeply than he would be
by mere artistic perfection. Much cre>
dit is due to the dexterity with which
Tennyson has selected and recast his
materials; but by far the hardest part
of his task was to give to his recon-
struction of the Arthurian legend an
ideal moral unity. How far he has
succeeded in this part of his task must
be allowed to be an open question.
Moral unity is very hard to attain ;
and, where Milton has failed, we must
not be too rigorous with other& Yet
the attempt had to be made. If he
had merely told again the tale of Ma-
lory, he might have written a series of
intcesiing narrative poems of the kind
that charm our leisure in the 'Earthly
Paradise'; but he would not have taken
his place among those poets, who have
reconstructed our views of the past,
by giving an ideal reality to that back-
ground of mingled fact and legend,
which is at once the pictv a that we
dwell upon, and the curtain that con-
ceals what is lost to us.

The Aclia'ans became a subject race,
or lurked in obscure corners of Hel-
las ; the feudal grandeur of the High-
land clans is ro more ; the dominion
of Puck and the fairies is over ; yet
the glorit's of their past still linger
among us, owing to the genius of Ho-
mer, Shakespeare and fc'cott. What
they did for their subjects, Tennyson
has done for the British King who re-
sisted the English invaders. The Ar-
thurian legend is, in fact, one of many
similar formations, that the time spirit.

THE IDYLLS OF THE KIKU.

OS it were, by way of compensation,
has allowed to gi-ow about what is
past ; BO that what inexorable nature
with its death-struggles and eventual
survival of the fittest has banished from
the world of fact, survives as a new
creation and a fit representative in the
ideal world of fiction. Like the canopy
of vapours above, like a ruin in the
world about us, this and like tales of
the past have taken different shades
from the rays of the rising and the set-
ting sun ; variously viewed by different
ages,' the historical has been re-co-
loui-ed, and an unhistorical element
added. History is bafiled, and the work
of fancy triumphs over the critical in-
stinct of the inquirer.

In the case of the Arthurian le-
gend,* this has been a work of time.
At first a reality in the writings of the
Welsh poets, Arthur soon became a
tradition. This tradition, magnified
and distorted, is found in the work
that goes by the name of Nennius.
From a tradition, nominally historical,
the story of Arthur was changed to a
mere romance by Geoffrey of Mon-
mouth ; from this point it began to
gi'ow, attracting to itself fragments
from different sides, taking colour
fi-om the periods in which these addi-
tions w ere made, from the institutions
among which the tangled web was
spun, from the countries of the wri-
ters, from their beliefs and modes of
life. Among the additions that were
made to the original romance, none was
of greater importance in determining
the ultimate fate of the story than
the element contributed by Walter de
Map. ' The Church, jealous of the
popularity of the legends of chivalry,
invented as a counteracting influence
the poem of the Sacred Dish, the "San
Grual.'" Walter de Map made this a
part of the Arthurian cycle, and in
doing so, takes his place as the first of
the allegorizer&

• The gradual develojjment of the Arthurian
legend, from itH beginning to the days of
Spenser, is the stibject of a paper contributed
by the writer to the Canaiiian Monthly,
IJec 1880.

The legend, in its latest shape, was
i-e-written by Sir Thomas Malory, and
printed by Caxton, as a work valu-
able historically, as well as for its
moral tendency. Thus the allegoric
turn, given to the legend by Walter de
Map, was confirmed, Caxton's preface
holding up the character of Arthur aa
an example for imitation. The bint
thus given was taken by Spenser, whO'
treated Arthur as an embodiment of
the Aristotelian virtue of Magnificence.
From Spenser, in whom the moralizing
tendency is confirmed, to Tennyson in
our owu days, the position of the Ar-
thurian cycle in men's minds may be
described as that of an episode, re-
garded as more or less historical, but
as a fair subject for expansion, and
most valuable as illustrating the play
of the virtues and the passiona Still,
all early writers regarded Arthur and
his knights, as part of their secular
faith, just as Milton regarded the story
of the Creation and the Fall as a reli-
gious belief. To us, Arthur and Gui-
nevere are, if anything, more real than
Adam and Eve ; to Milton, who ac-
tually thought of writing a great poem
upon the subject,* they were only less
so. It is not proposed to examine the
various additions to Arthurian litera-
ture made, between the days of Sjienser
and Tennyson, by Blackmore, Dryden,
Lytton and others; but as a prepara-
tory step to the chronological study of
the Idylls, it will be well to notice the
main points, in which the treatment
of Tennyson differs from that of the
earlier writers.

The leading differences between Ten-
nyson and his predecessors lie in their
aspect with regard to Arthur's mission.
By all of them he is regarded as a
great king, the creator of an order of
knights with a high ideal, the perso-
nification of an early chivalry. But
in Geoffrey and his followers, it is his
success which is brought into promin-
ence ; while in Tennysnn the pathos of
the whole poem lies in his failure. The

* See the Latin poems entitled ' Mansus*
and 'Kpitnphium Uamonis . '

THE IDYLLfi OF THE KINO.

M»

mournful beauty of decline, which is
imaged by the dying year, and the
Bympalhy that the magnificent failure
of Arthur excite*, are, ho to speak, the
ground tone of the Idylls ; while the
triumphant glory of success pervades
the earliest writers. What was inci-
dental with them has become essen-
tial in Tennyson.

Soloa bade us call no man happy
till we have looked to his end, and
these early writers adopted the maxim.
They gave their hero a gloiious life,
and he leaves it by the most glorious
of all deaths — death in battle. Dunlop
has noticed this point in his ' History
of Fiction.' 'It appears strange at first
sight, that Arthur and his knights
should be represented in romance, as
falling in battle, as well as Charle-
magne with all his peerage, at a time
when success in wur was thought ne-
cessary to complete the character of a
warrior. But the same fate has been
attributed to all the fabulous chiefs of
half-civilized nations, who have inva-
riably represented their favourite
leaders as destroyed bya concealed and
treacherous enemy. . . . This has
probably ariHen from poets and ro-
mancors, wishing to spare their heroes
the Buspicioit of having died in bed by
the languor of disease, to which any
violent death is preferred by barbarous
nations.' But what was incidental,
because inevitable in early writers, has
l>ecome the chief point in Tennyson.
We have, it is true, two Idylls devoted
to Arthur triumphant, but the inter-
est of the poem iK centred in the de-
cline and fall. The notes of approach-
ing ruin sound more loudly as the tale
proceeds, and the interest of most of
the Idylls, as well as of the Arthuriad
as a whole, clearly culminates in the
catastrophe.

The world, like the individual, as
age advances, becomes more sensible
to the beauty of pathos ; it has not the
same contempt for the unsuccessful.
Our admiration may be excited by the
career of a successful man, but our

sympathy lies with the struggle of the
doomed. Though Homer is a greater
poet than Virgil, it is the Trojans ra-
ther than the Greeks, who have our
love and pity ; our favourites in fiction,
and history are the advocates of a
fallen cause — Hector and Tumus,
Demosthenes and Hannibal, Mont-
calm and Lee. Life presents a constant
paradox. The world has pronounced a
cynical maxim about success, and its is
the shrine at which our worship is of-
fered up. So far our practical instincts
take us ; but imagination, constantly
in antagonism with the facts of the
world, sides against our reason. What
has failed is idealized ; success is left to
rest upon its merits. Thus the aspect
of the whole story of Arthur has been
changed ; the Romance writers des-
cribed the glorious king, Tennyson en-
lists our sympathy for an unsuccessful
reformer and a falling cause.

The form that this idealization of
failure assumes, is also distinctive and
important. Living in an age, when in-
dustrialism and the commercial spirit
were beginning to feel their strength,
while the influence of chivalry, though
fast declining, was not yet extinct,
Spenser, as his model of a perfect man,
took Prince Arthur, an ideal embodi-
ment of the chivalric feeling. A simi-
lar tendency has influenced Tennyson
in the process of writing the Idylls,
and in the colouring he has given to
them. Many writers have read in the
character of Arthur an allegory, and
Tennyson himself lets us into the se-
cret, that his object was to shadow
forth sense at war with soul. It is not
inconsistent with this to see, in the
gradual dissolution of Arthur's order,
a symbolic account of the decline of
supernaturalism, a regretful picture of
the growing disregard of miracles, and
of the lessening hold of Christianity
upon the world — the partial rejection
of which has been a marked result of
the movements of the thought of late
years. Fifty years have passed since
Carlyle describad the 'Temple now

THE IDYLLS OF THE KINO.

lying in ruins, overgrown with jungle,
the habitation of doleful creatures.'*
What was so long xgo apparent to the
philosopher has been brought more
strikingly home to us all since. The
last decade has been a period of rapid
growth of thought ; of large expansion,
during which, if not Christianity it-
self, yet various doctrines and ways of
thinking that were generally associat-
ed with Christianity, have been dis-
carded and sent to join ' all things
transitory and vain' in the wilds of the
Miltonic Limlo. These have been
years of intense mental effort and
strivings of spirit, and have for the
present ended in a kind of world-
wearied Pessimism. And this period
has left deep traces on the ideal of
Arthur created by Tennyson. From
this point of view, as well as from
many others (e. g. the characters of
^neas and Arthur), it would be in-
structive to compare Tennyson with
the writer of the .^neid. Just as
Virgil, while describing the coming of
his hero to Italy and the foundation of
the Trcjan kingdom, is constantly
thinking of the fortunes of the Julian
family in his own day, and of the
Empire that was being founded while
he wrote ; so Tennyson depicts the de-
cline of the Hound Table, and the gene-
ral laxity of itb morals in language that
would be equally appropriate to what
was going on while he wrote, and is
still continuing — the Religious Revo-
lution of the nineteenth century. In
the following pages it will be shown
that the Arthuriud, from first to last,
faithfully reproduces the political and
moral atmosphere of the period during
which it was taking shape, in jnst as
marked u manner as the feelings that
most Englishmen entertained with re-
gard to the Manchester Peace Party,
at the time of the Crimean War, are
mirrored in our author's ' Maud.' One
of the special marks of Tennyson's
workmanship is the manner in which
he introduces into an apparently for-

Sartor ReBartus, 1831.

eign subject matters of contemporary
interest and significance. A striking
thought in a book, published at the
time when some poem of his may be
supposed to have been in the process
of construction, will often be found
echoed quite naturally in the strange
context. But though this feature is
very marked in Tennyson— a poet, it
must be remembered, whose origina-
lity, like Virgil's lies far more in his
style that in his manner, in the turn he
gives a thought, rather than in the
thought itself — it is a feature that is
to a greater or less extent common to
most poets.

The poet is one possessed of nicer
feelings, quicker sensibilities than or-
dinary men. Hence he is the first to
perceive the changes in the tone of
public opinion. He is like a thin-
skinned animal, with an animal's
quickness of instinct, an animal's sen-
sitiveness to what is external and at-
mospheric in nature. When, however
it is said that a poet is more quickly
affected than the ordinary individual,
it must not be forgotten that all he sees,
he sees as a poet, and not exactly as
the rest of us do. The lens of his mind
is a coloured medium, and so every-
thing appears to him coloured and
refracted. Imagination and artistic
proprieties affect his impression of ex-
ternal nature and of events. He can-
not see the thing as it is, or at least he
cannot see things exactly as they
appear to the rest of the world. To
illustrate this will be unnecessary to
those who remember how constantly
Scott's pictures of scenery are medi-
evalized, and how Wordsworth tills
his descriptions with religious thought.
And this is not only true, when it is
external nature, that the poet is study-
ing. The emotions and feelings, the
religious and political beliefs of the
poet, are after all, those of the poet,
and not those of the ordinary man,
and so perhaps are felt in a sense less
deeply. This qualification has to be
made and must be illustrated.

A political landmark or a church,

K^wMirt^MMMnaatrwMi

THE IDYLLS OF THE KIKO.

let UB say, is doomed. It is invested
with the love and veneration, the
countless feelings so hard to analyze
which go to make up the ordinary con-
servative frame of mind. To part with
it is a sore blow to the ordinary indi-
vidual ; it is a strain to his feelings,
and he deeply regrets the loss. The
poet, too, feels this to some extent; but
then he is a poet, and he has also ano-
ther point of view. The collapse ap-
pears to him as a ruin, and the artistic
beauty of the ruin is some compensa-
tion to him for the melancholy fact.
He feels the loss less deeply, because
he does not look at the facts as clear-
ly — or, perhaps, we should say, be-
cause be takes in their import more
thoroughly. His eyes are fixed alike
on the present and the past ; he sees
institutions rise and fall, and the pre-
sent loss is to him no new one. He
is able to grasp more clearly than
others the permanent, that is un-
changeable and that will last when
time has done its work with what is
mutable and evanescent. Thus the poet
is a kind of spiritual Captain Cuttle,
with his gaze turned into the distance,
even when he is considering what is
present before him. Sometimes this
feeling is expressed consciously, as by
Tennyson in the lines —

Our little systems have their day ;
They have their day and cease to be :
They are hut broken lights of thee.

And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

Sometimes it finds unconscious ex-
pression, as in the fine lines that end
the battle scene in the ' Passing of Ar-
thur,' where the wave is described,
creeping over the field strewn with
the dead.

And rolling far along the gloomy shores
The voice of days of old and days to be.*

What then 1 The |)oet sees more
clearly, we see less clearly : he feels
more quickly, we feel less deeply. He

* This is Matthew Arnold's habitual mood.
Cf the conclusion of Sohrah and Rustum, and
of the second part of Tristram and Iseult. He
has given a, description of the feeling, as part
of the true poetic nature, in the poem ' Resig-
nation.'

is almost an Hegelian contradiction —
that is, he is a poet It follows that
he is more prone than the ordinary
thinker to acknowledge facts, for in
every fact he has a consolation. A nd
the more of the true poetic nature he
has, the more instinctive are his utter-
ances. What he feels forces itself in-
to what he writes. It cannot be kept
out If in one way his view of things
is less true because less common-place,
in another he is a tru^r witness be-
cause his mind is stronger, being self-
sustained by its width of interest He
is a strong man where others are weak.
His strength even appears to many to
be a lack of feeling, and occasionally,
as in the character of Goethe, is capa-
ble of producing it. We accordingly
find in the Idylls, read chronologically,
a veracious echo of the tone of public
opinion and a test of the average feel-
ing in regard to questions, which it is
so hard to gather from the mere party
statements of writers and thinkers ac-
tively engaged in the contest upon
either side. The Round Table sym-
bolizes more or less distinctly the Chris-
tian world, at first with an enthusias-
tic belief in, and full of the feelings of,
Christianity, but by def,ree8 falling
away and lapsing into immorality and
scepticism. Arthur in its midst, an
ideal and not a real man, speaks and
acts like a modern Christ, passing ver-
dict after the manner of aGreek chorus
upon the phases of thought as they are
presented to the reader. All this will
be shown in further detail, as we ex-
amine the poem chronologically.

It has been noticed before now, that
the two great sources of Romance that
were the glory of the Middle Ages,
the Carlovingian and Arthiirian cy-
cles, took shape under the influence
of the story of the Gospels ; that Char-
lemagne and Arthur were pictures of
the Christ adapted to the lay life of
Christians in general. This is espe-
cially the case with Arthur ; and the
likeness has been increased by Tenny-
son in his new rendering of the Ar-
thurian legend (e.g., by his striking out

THE IDYLLS OF THE KINO.

such episodeg as Ai*^«ir'8 incest, re-
sulting in the birth of Modred), so
that it is impossible to read the Idylls
without thinking of the Gospels. It
is not only that we have points of ex-
ternal similarity, such as the mystery
of their life and death, their position
as leaders of bands of reformers,
their failure brought about by treach-
ery, and their immaculate and almost
colourless piety. But Tennyson has
supplemented all this by making his
hero constantly use the words of his
prototype. This is a feature of such
constant occurrence that it will be un-
necessary to illustrate it Should illus-
tration be needed, it will be found in
detached passages in the following
pages.

I will now sum up the results at
which I have arrived from this part
of my study. The story of the Idylls,
as we have it, is a kind of idealization
of failure — the picture of how Arthur
came into the world and lived the life
of a reformer, founding an order and
binding them

By such vowR, as is a sliame
A man should not be bound by, yet the which
No man can keep.

So the order dissolves internally, and
the high ideal of Arthur passes away.
In the midst he is a kind of chivalrous
Christ ; and the decline of belief in
Arthur and his vows, and the corre-
sponding dissolutionof the oietythey
held together, are a picture, the origi-
nal of which is to be found, as will be
seen, in the sentiments and feelings of
the years during which the poet was
framing his Idylls. Tennyson had be-
fore his eyes the decline of orthodox
Christianity, while he was occupied in
describingthe fall of his chivalric ideal,
and sometimes his description of the
latter reads like a page from the his-
tory of the former — to such an exl-ent
had the times impressed themselves
upon his nature. At the same time,
it has been proved by other writers
that the poem is an allegory of sense
at war with soul. King Arthur being
the King within us. Nor shall we find

any difficulty in accepting this dupli-
cate interpretation (remembering how
it is certainly true in the case of the
' Fairy Queen') if we realize the compa-
ratively conservative aspect with which
Tennyson regards the religious move-
ments of the day. The real incon-
sistency, as will be seen, arises from
the difference of the aim with which
he set out from that with which ho
concluded his Arthuriad. Starting in
1832 and 1842 with purely tentative
work, which, however, included a poem
afterwards a part of the whole, he pro-
duced, in 1 8.59, the four original Idylls,
King Arthur being an 'ideal knight'
As he grew older, the tendency to alle-
goric meaning increased, and was pro-
minent in his volume of 1869 entitled
' The Holy Giail ; ' the poem ' Gareth
and Lynette,' (published latest of all in
1872), is a pure allegory of the temp-
tations that assail men at different
stages of life. After this came the
additions and alterations made through
the whole series of poems (published
in the Complete Edition of 1875) —
alterations, which have changed the
pc3m to such an extent that Tenny-
son was quite justified in at last pro-
claiming it, in his Epilogue to the
Queen, as

' Shadowing sense at war with soul
Rather than that gray king.'

As, however, in no case has Tenny-
son deliberately destroyed the old
work, the series of poems, composing
the Arthuriad, when analyzed care-
fully, present the appearance of suc-
cessive strata of thought contorted and
inspissated into one another. I shall
now proceed to consider these periods
chronologically.

Of the four pieces that make up
the early work upon the subject of
Arthur, two only deserve attention,
the othei-8, Sir Galahad and Sir Lance-
lot, being interesting merely as show-
ing that the young poet's thought
dwelt early

THE IDYLLS OF THE KINO.

On the (IruntiiH of all
"Whish fiUeil.the earth with pasMiig lovelineBo,

to quote his own words in 'Timbuctoo'
— and that he was specially interested
in Arthurian literature. Of the other
two the ' Lady of Shalott ' is an early
treatment of the theme that Tennyson
afterwards turned into the most touch-
ing of all the Idylls, the story of
Elaine. It is quite different in char-
ftcter from the Idylls being wijtten in
the so-called Pre-Raphaelite manner.

In the ' Morte d' Arthur ' we have
the earliest contribution to the com-
pleted series It was accompanied by
an introduction, relating how Hall
had written an epic on King Arthur
in twelve books, but had destroyed all
but one, because they were 'faint
Homeric echoes.' The day is past for
Homeric epics, ' nature brings not
back the Mastodon,' and ' truth looks
freshest in the fashion of the day.'
The remainins? book in the ' Morte
<r Arthur.' How far are we to take
this sot iously 1

At a much later period the Ar-
thuriad became an allegory, and the
lines have been pronounced to be an
early sketch of the plan of the series.
But, if so, the idea was dropped, for
in the first instalment of the Idylls
(in fact, in the case of the only Idylls
properly so called), we have an ideal
picture, but not an allegory ; a beauti-
ful quartette of poems, but no hidden
meaning. But it will be quite safe
to say that the lines point to an early
project to write upon a subject, pointed
out; by our history, by the romances
of the Middle Ages and by the inten-
tion of Milton and Dryden. The most
natural mode of treatment, the old-
fashioned epic, seemed to the author,
apparently, unsuitable to the times.
It was accordingly leftfor him to write
a narrative poem, with moi-e or less
application to his own day ; and this
he has done.

With the words of Hall before
them, critics have agreed in noticing
how much more Homeric the • Morte
-d'Arthur' is than any other part of

the completed poem. This must strike
everybody. As a rule, Tennyson's
manner is more that of Virgil (whom
he constantly imitates and translates,
doing so even in the poem before us)
than that of Homer, but here it is not
so. We may say then generally, in
regard to Tennyson's early essays upon
the Arthurian legend, that we have
two inconsiderable pieces and two of
more account — one in the Pre-Raph-
aelite, another in the Homeric style,
the latter differing so little from the
Idylls that next followed that it was
worked into the body of the complete
poem. And when we compare the
calm dignity of the * Morte d'Arthur '
with the world-worn mystical tone
pervading the latest written poems of
the series, we feel that it was fortunate
that the Laureate wrote when he did
the conclusion of his modern epic.
H is feelings were probably moi'e hope-
ful with regard to the future, he had
more belief in the ideals of the re-
forming spirit, with which the times
that preceded the Reform Bill of 1832
were informed.*

It is instructive to compare Arthur's
parting-speech with the original in
Malory. ' Comfort thyself,' said the
king, ' and do as well as thou mayest,
for in me is no trust for to trust in.
For I will into the vale of Avilion, to
heal me of my grievous wound. And if
thou hear never more of me, pray for
my soul.' It will be seen that all by
which we best remember the speech is
Tennyson's work. The imagery of
the passage is due to two sources.

• Since writiiij» the above, I tind this differ-
ence of tone noticed by Mr. Swinburne in an
article upon ' Tennyson and Musset ' in the
February number of the t'ortniyhtlii Review.
The following is the cluvrai-teriHtic comment
passed on the lines,

I have lived my life, and that whieh I have doiu->
May he within himself uialvd pure !

' It this be taken iw the last natural expres-
sion of a gallant, honest, kindly, sinful crea-
ture like the hero of old Maloiy, it strikes
home at once to a man's heart. If it be taken
as the last deliberate snuffle of " the blame-
less* king," it strikes us in a different fashion'
- a merciless but acute piece of ciiticism.

THE IDYLLS OF THE KINO.

The description of A vilian is ulmost a
literal translation from the ' Odyssey '
(VI. 43-6). The idoe of the ' round
world bound by gold chains about the
feet of God,' comes from the ' Iliad '
(VIII, 19), read by the light of Bacon's
words, ' when a man passeth on fur-
ther, and seeth the dependence of
causes, and the works of Providence ;
then, according to the allegory of the
])oets, he will easily believe that the
liighest link of nature's chain must
needs be tied to the foot of Jupiter's
chair.' ('Advancement of Learning'
I. 1.3.)

To come to what is more relative to
the present study, the thoughts of the
passage, we are struck by two leading
ideas — Arthur'n hopefulness about the
future, and his discourse upon prayer.
For the origin of these we must look
to the times. As to the former, the
celebrated lines, • the old order
changeth,'ifec., were quite in keeping
with the ' times, when reforms were
begun with a young hopefulness of
immediate good which has been much
checked in our day&'* Now in all
Tennyson's early works he appears to
us as a moderate. Liberal, full of sym-
pathy with the progress of the day.
For the origin of the lines upon
prayer, we have to look to the Oxford
Movement, then in its first decade.
With rigorous logic the efficacy of
jirayers for the dead was insisted up
on, if the efficacy of prayer at all was
to be a part of the belief of Christians.
It was i)ointed out that prayers for
the dead had been left an open ques-
tion in the Thirty-nine Articles of
1571, while the doctrine was expressly
condemned in the previous Forty-five.
In view of this we can better under-
stand Tennyson's niotive for adding
the lines —

More tliinj,'s are wrought by jmiyer
Tliaii tliis world dreams of, &c.

It is not necessary to tie our author
down to a l)plief in the fashionable
doctrine. All that need be said is.

*(5eori,'e Kliot'n ' Middleiiiurch.'

that the doctrine was ' in the air ' at
the time when the poem was in pro-
cess of gestation ; that it was his-
torically in keeping with Arthur and
his times; and that Tennyson was
thus led to insert the lines as we have
them.

If, then, we are to sum up the im-
pression derived from the earliest in-
stalment of the Idylls, we shall say
that it is an Homeric picture of the
|>assing of a great king, suggesting two
thoughts as uppermost in the mind of
thfc writer^ — the efficacy of prayer for
the dead, and belief in the future to>
bo brought about by progresa

The next contribution to the story
of Arthur was made in the year 1859.
The Volume, entitled « Idylls of th(-
King ' and containing Enid, Vivien,
Elaine, and Guinevere, was prefaced
by a Dedication to the memory of the
Prince Consort. This, the motto of
volume ' flos regum Arthurus,' and
its title, sufficiently indicate the na-
ture of the work, as a series of pic-
tures from the court of Arthur. But
what was Arthur ? He was not, as
l)erhaps Tennyson originally intended
him to be, the hero of an Homeric-
epic, nor was he an allegorical charac-
ter, as he has since become. The de-
dication tells us that he was intended
as an ' ideal knight.' Now an ideal
character must be kept distinct in.
thought, on the one hand from an
allegorical personage, on the other
from a study from real life.

The history of fiction, and especially
of poetry, shows a constant action and
reaction from Realism to Idealism,
from nature [>ainting to typical repre-
sentation ; and in accordance with this
there are two distinct theories of ])oe-
try — Aristotle defining it as a process
of imitation, Bacon as one of creation
or, we may say, of idealization. Mean-
while, as poetry becomes ide.vl, as it
tends to desi'ril)e types rather than
the realities of nature, in so far it »p-

-f<i

THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.

proximates to allegory. So that, as
iu the case of Tennyson, we find the
same mind at different periods pro-
ducing three different kinds of work
— Realistic, Idealistic, and Allegori-
cal — great minds naturally falling into
allegorical writing as age comes upon
them. This is manifestly the case with
Goethe, as may l»e seen by comparing
the different parts of 'Faust' anc" of
' Wilhelm Meister ' ; it is even true in
the case of such a master of realistic
]>ainting as Shakespeare. In some of
his early work, he is so far from alle-
gory, or from having ' riioral purpose '
in what he writes, that he is not even
Realistic. The best instance of this is
the ' Midsummer Niglit's Dream ' — a
mere work of fancy, without an after-
thought in it, except as an illustration
of the wonder-working poet's eye. By
degrees his plays become more realis-
tic, the perfection of this branch of
art being attained in his two plays of
' Henry IV.' From this ])oint his art
changes into something higher, into
the creation of ideal concretes — the
chiracter of ' Hamlet being an illus-
tration of this fitage. A.i last his woi'k
becomes distinctly allegorical in the
'Tempest.' 1 accordingly view ideal
representation as the connecting-link
between Nature- painting and Allegory.
To this intermediate stage belong
the four original Idylls, four ))ictures
of Arthur's court, four attempts to
give an ideal representation of chi-
valry or the Cliristianized heroic from
a modern point of view, —

Arthur'w wars in weird devices done,
New tilings and old co-twisted, iis if Time
Were notliing,

as Tennyson wrote, when his work
became more self-conscious. These
four picttires, to which unity is given
by the sin of Lancelot and the IJueen,
a thread that runs through all, have
accordingly nothing but the tradition-
ally miiaculouH about them — nothing,
I mean, of the supernatural intro-
duced, the justification fi.r which is
found in the hidden meaning that
is conveyed by it. As an instance of

this the description of the gate at
Camelot, given in Elaine, —

The stran^e-stattted g.ate,
Where Arthur's wars were renc ler'd mystically,

may be compared with the later des-
cription in ' Gireth and Lynette,' of
the • Lady of the Lake,' with her arm»
stretched * like a cross ' —

And drops of water fell from either hand ;
[ And down from one a sword was hung ; from
' one

I A censer, either worn with wind and stomi ;
! And o'er her breast floated the sacred iish.

1 Nor is there anything in the four beau-
tiful poems which cannot be said to

' tell simply the tale apparent on the
face of it, though there is a single
passage that calls for attention. In a
soliloquy, after Arthur has left her,
Guinevere speaks of him in the fol-
lowing terms, —

I Ah, LTeat and gentle lord,

' Who wast, as is the conscience of a saint
; Among his warring senses, to thy knights.

This is in perfect keeping with the
; Arthuriad in its latest phase, and shows
I that Tennyson had thus early con-
; ceived the idea of Arthur, as Soul
; warred upon by Sense, with thediffer-
: ence, however, that in the earlier
j poems, Arthur is a concrete ideal of
this sentiment ; in the later, Soul i»
\ the prominent notion and the King
' the allegory under which it is typified.
! The line between the two is, perhaps,
hard to draw, hut in the absence of
other allegorical indications, I am jus-
tified in drawing it We may, in fact,
look on this as the point where Ideal
and Allegory meet. In the earlier work
I the character is the chief point, and
the simile is introduced to illustrate
the religious sentiment, so common in
the Middle Ages, of which the Arthur is
the ideal ; yet he lives and moves like
a man among other men. He has not
yet passed into the company of alle-
gorical phantoms, such as the St;ars
, and Death in ' Gareth and Lynette,'
I Having ascertained the precise na-
ture of the poems with which we are
concerned, our next task will be to
see to what extent Ihey reflect the

THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.

years in which they were composed.
The special bearing of • Maud,' pub-
lished in 1855, upon the times has been
noticed ; we have to ask what are the
prominent religious or political ideas
that are illustrated by the volume of
Idylls, published in 1859 1 In what
colours is the back-ground painted be-
fore which the characters move 1 What
impression of the mental state of the
writer do the poems convey t The an-
swer, that most people would natur-
ally give, would be that from a poli-
tical or theological point of view the
]X)ems are without special significa-
tion, that there is nothing in them to
indicate any disturbance of faith on
the writer's part, nothing to mark them
as the product of an age of mental or
moral disturbance.

1 will make this clear by a piece of
negative criticism. Every one must
remember the plaintive beauty of the
death of Elaine, her calm resignation
to fate. Had Tennyson written the
poem in 1871, could he have resisted
the hint of a quite different death-
scene, given by Malory (xviii. 19),
'then she shrived her clean and re-
ceived her Creator. And ever she
complained still upon Sir Lancelot.
Then her ghostly father bade her leave
such thoughts. Then she said. Why
should I leave such thoughts'! am I
not an earthly woman 1 and all the
while the breath is in my body I may
complain me, for my belief is I do
none offence though I love an earthly
man . . . .' The poem is perfect as
it is, but it would have been different,
had it been written twelve years later.
There is nothing in it of the turbid
passion that marks the Last Tourna-
ment. Thus, as far as poems of this
nature can be taken as indicative of
beliefs of their author, we should eay
that his out-look into life was hopeful.
There are no approaches to the fatal-
ism of despair, that is reflected in the
latest poem of the series, < Man is man
and master of his fate.' Fortune and
her wheel, ' are shadows in the cloud.'
Heaven is not yet ' the dream to come '

of Tristram, but ' that other world,'
' where we see as we are seen,' ' where
beyond these voices there is peace,'
the place of general restitution. The
belief in divine judgment ('be hears
the judgment of the King of kings ') is
undisturbed. The preface points to a
period of contented loyalty to the con-
stitutional monarchy, and the poems
to a satisfied acquiescence in the pow-
ers that be. The guilty Guinevere is
made an abbess ' for the high rank she
had borne,' and Lancelot * reverences
the king's blood in a bad man.' Nor is
there, on the other hand, any over-
strained pietism. The great knights
do not yet take refuge from an evil
time in cloistered gloom ; and nunnery
life is regarded as ignorance of the
world. It is from this source only,
from the garrulousness of the little
novice, 'closed about by narrowing
nunnery walls,' that we gather an ink-
ling of the supernatural halo that
shrouded the birth and early days of
Arthur.

In this manner, in the absence of
anything striking in their thoughts
from a controversial point of view,
these poems are in keeping with the
times in which they were written.
The years that followed the Crimean
war were a period of lull in political
history (there being changes of Admin-
istration, but for trivial causes), a de-
cade of Whig rule conducted in a Con-
servative spirit,culmiiiatinginthe long
and comparatively uneventful domin-
ion of Lord Prtlmerston. If froni the
political we look to the religious an-
nals of the times, we read the same
story. Justin McCarthy has re-
marked that the literature of Queen
Victoria's reign divides clearly into two
periods, and that ' it was in the later
period that the scientific controversies
sprang up, and the school arose which
will bo, in the historian's sense, most
c'osely associated with the epoch ' (ch.
29). The Idylls are the natural pro-
duct of the earlier period, and of the
calm, as regards controversy, which
was broken in the very year of their

mtm

■umpMi
ii'

THE IDYLLS OF THE KIA'G.

|)ublication, by the appearance of Dar-
win's ' Origin of Species.' Tbig ab-
sence of controversial spirit is, iu real-
ity, one of the charms of the poems.
Their interest lies rather in the field
of every day life, in the loves and
hatreds that agitate the breasts of or-
dinary men, than in the considerations
of the high problems with which later
poems, such as the ' Holy Grail,' and
' Gareth and Lynette,' are concerned.
Jealousy between husltand and wife,
and self-reformation, are the theme of
Enid ; the guilty love of Guinevere,
the pure love of Eluine, and the re-
morse of Lancelot, distracted between
the two, are the subject of the third
poem ; the pathos of a ruined life and
life purpose is ennobled in Guine-
vere. * In the second of the series the
tale is different, and the feelings and
emotions to which it appeals are not so
obvious. Yet neither has it a theolo-
gical bearing. It seems to be the tale
of one ' lost to life, and use, and name,
and fame,' through the baneful influ-
ence of a woman. But this, which is
the impression produced by Vivien,
in its original shape, has been altered
by the additions which Tennyson sub-
sequently made to the poem.

In his rendering of this episode, our
author has changed the story as we
find it in Malory (Book iv., chap. 1).
Merlin • was assotted and doted on '
Nimue, and 'would let her have no reht,

• Eniil Ih taken, with very little altei-iitioii,
from Mleift lit ab Krbin,' traiiHlated by liatly
01iarlotte(f(ieBt, in her ' Mabino^Mitn.' Elaine
and Guinevere (uinie from Mttlory'8 * Arthur.'
In the oasc of the former, TennyHon had two
tales of love to work upon. By one Klaine,
Lancelot l^ecomeH the father of Galahad, and
this story in allude(l to in the 'Holy (Jrail,'
The other Elaine Ih Tennyson "h heroine. She
ha», however, been Homewhat toned down in
the change from Mnhiry to TennyHon. It in
intereHtinu to remark that the celebrated
Hceno in the oriel window between Ijancelot
and the Queen, occnrr* in both epiHodeH. In
the Rtory of Elaine, tiie mother of Galahad,
the Queen and Ijancelot are at the window
(Malory xi. 8) : in thentoryof Elaine of Axto-
lat, the KiuK U witli the Queen at the window
when the dead Elaine paHneH up the river be-
low (xviii. 20). It Ih, nerhapH, unncc?HHary
to say, that the other Elaine doew not <lie in
die story.

but always would be with her ....
to have her love, and she was ever
passing weary of him, and fain would
have been delivered of him, for she
was afeard of him because he was a
devil's son, and she couhl not put him
away by no means. And so on a time
it happed that Merlin shewed to her
in a rock whereas was a great wonder,
and wrought by enchantment, that
went under a great stone. So by her
subtle working, she made Merlin to
go under that stone to let hei wit of
the marvels there, but she wrought so
thei'e for him that he came never out
for all the craft that he could do.
And so she departed and left Merlin.'
Tennyson's poem is the reverse of this,
Vivien feigning love for Merlin, who
flies from her to Broceliande. There
he tells her the dream that drove him
from the court, a dream of a wave
ready to break —

You neem'd that wave about to break up on

me.
And sweep me from my hold upon the world,
My use, and name, and fame.

Thus, in the original edition, it was a
personal fear that drove Merlin away ;
but, in the new * Merlin and Vivien,'
besides the long passage describing her
migration from Mark's court to that of
Arthur, and her stay there, seven lines
are introduced to explain Merlin's
' great melancholy.' Tliis passage,
which begins with the words ' He
walk'd with dreams ' and alludes to
the ' battle in the mist,' gives a more
general turn to the seer's melancholy
and adds a theological touch that was
wanting in the first edition.

There is another point of view from
whicli 'Vivien' dema* dsour attention.
The years immediately preceding the
publication of these Idylls will be re-
collected as the time when the English
public first began to interest theu>-
selves in table-turning, spirit-rapping
and other ghostly doings. These phe-
nomena and others, falling under the
head of Spiritualism, had interested
Americans ever since the year 1848;
but though reports of marvels crossed

THE IDYLLS OF THE KINO.

the 'Atlantic, tliey excited, for some
time, little attention in England, and
were received with ridicule and con-
tempt. The first thing that drew
any considerable degree of attention to
them was the coming to Jx>ndon of
Mrs. Haydon, the American medium,
in 1854. She was visited by several
scientific men, Mr. D. D. Home,
another medium, came to England in
1855, and the manifestations which
occurred in his presence soon aroused
newspaper controversy. 'Vivien' must
have beea written in the midst of
thia ; and we at once have the reason
why Tennyson was attracted to this
special subject rather than to any other.
It admitted of his giving it a turn
suited to his genius. Merlin was
mesmerized — for so may we interpret
the account given by our author of
' woven paces and of waving hands.'
Tennyson must have been thinking,
too, of Spiritualistic phenomena when
he wrote of Enid ; —

So Hhe tiliiled out,
AmonK the heavy breiithingH of the houHC,
And, iikfu hoiinelwlt Spirit, at the wall*
Beat till whe woke the Bleei)er8.

Another such touch comes in the
lines :

And tlien from dixcant wallx
There came a chipi)in^ a» of phmitom hanih.

As well as in the following ,

In the dead :iight, fjrim faces came and went
Before lier, or a vuifue wpiritual fear
Likt to x'tme doiilitfiil noinc of cvfiikiiiij iIiiovk,
Hwrd lijj tliv H'dtrlii'V in ii liiiiinteil kotisv.

This again Ih an illustration of Ten-
nyson's way of working. He tloes not
necessarily feel sym|)athy with Spi-
ritualists and Table-turners ; but tiio
phenomena attracted attention at the
time, and, by a natural process find-
ing their way into his mind, are pre-
served, like Hies in amber, in the
pages of his immortal poetn.

III.

We may now |)a8H to the next
period of Tennyson's work. All his
latest contributions to the Idylls
might be classed together as belonging

to the allegorical and didactic period,
but it will be convenient as well as
more in accordance with chronology
to consider by themselves the volume
published in 18G9 and the ' Last
Tournament,' which first appeared in
the ' Contemporary Review,' in the
year 1871. • Gareth and Lynette,'
the ' Epilogue,' and the alterations
made in the completed poem, will
form a supplement to the rest.

Reforming England of 1869 had
strangely clianged from England of
the year 185i). The diiference of the
two periods is sufficiently well shown
by the political leaders — Palmerston,
the popular statesman who gave his
])eople rest, and Gladstone, the mas-
tfT-spirit of Reform. Since the year
18G5 politics had become a very
serious matter. For three years Eng-
land had been agitated by the Reform
Bill, Disraeli had educated his party,
and the Fenian troubles had brouglit
up the Irish question. With the ad-
vent of the Liberal party to power,
an era of great changes seemed at
hand. If, turning from politics, we
look to the literary and religious an-
nals of the times, we shall find a cor
responding advance. The awakening
had been earlier here. The * Origin
of Sp.'^cies ' had been published in the
same year as the first volume of Idylls.
In 1802, appeared Maurice's •Claima
of the Bible and of Science,' and
(Jolenso's • Pentatetich and Book of
Joshua Examined.' In 180.3, caiae
Huxley's ' Evidences as to Man's
Place in Nature,' and in 1804, the
* Papal Syllabus,' and, what testified
to the troubled state of moral and re-
ligious thought, Swinburne's 'Atalanta
in Calydon.' The • Fortnightly Re-
view ' was established in 18G5. as an
organ of extreme opinion, and Dixon's
'Spiritual Wives' followed in 1808.
This list is the best test of what people
were thinking about.

It would be natural in the case of
Ttsnnyson, no cloistered poet, or one
self centred iu the Palace of Art
which he had tried and abandoned^

THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.

that his new poems should bear the
impress of the times. The volume
entitled the ' Holy Grail ' contained
the Higher Pantheism, which, if it
means anything, seems to indicate a
changed point of view.

The sun, the moon, the stars, the hills and

the plains-
Are not these, O soul, the vision of Him who

reii^s ?
Is not the vision He ? tho' Ho be not that

which He seems ?
Dreams are true while they lost, and do wo

not live iu dreams ?

Such are the lines in which he re-
turns, though from another point of
view to the opinion of the ' the flow-
ing philosophers,' who had been the
subject of a spirited little poem pub-
lished in 1830, but omitted in late
editions : —

All thoughts, all creeds, all dreams are true.

All visions wild and strange ;
Man is the measure of all truth

Unto himself. All truth is change :
All men do walk in sleep, and all

Have faith in thi*t they dream :
For all things are as they seem to all,

And all things flow like a stream.

How the changes in tho atmosphere
of thought affected and still affect the
moral tone, we all know. The years
1868-9 were specially tainted by Mrs.
Beecher Stowe's publication of Lady
Byron's confessions about her lord,
and by the strange perversion of moral
sentiment that the discussion in the
public press exhibited. I will quote
by way of illustration a solemn protest
made by the Saturday Review, tlie
appropriateness of which struck me
forcibly at the time. ' The old and
m'xnly protests against the immorality
and turpitude of Byron's life and
works are now silenced, Tiio tradi-
tional representatives of that part of
the press which used to arrogate to
itself special claims to be the guardian
of religion and morality, have gone
over to the other side. Tlie Tory Quar-
terly, and Black mood, and Staialard,
uphold the Satanic Scliool and its
Coryphajus. It is announced to be a
kind and good deed to introduce Don
Juan to family reailiug ; and an epi-

grammatist congratulates the world
and himself, that at last the sinner —
and such a sinner as Byron, a delibe-
rate and inveterate offender against
everything that has been held to be
true, and pure, and good — has been
canonised. And we are simply scorned
and sneered at, because we think that
it is a duty to confront an author, who
is always a teacher, with his life, and
we are told that it is simply "ludicrous
to test genius by morality," and we am
forbidden to object to the authority of
Sterne or Rousseau, on the [)lain and
homely ground that their lives were
foul and licentious. This is the present
aspect of the popular mind towards
Byron, and it is of evil omen . . .
Not only must we not utter word or
protest against the shameless immor-
ality of "the noble poet," but we must
accept the man Byron as more sinned
against than sinning. His wife is a
moral Olytemnestra, a moral Brinvil-
liers, but the man who could and did
violate every sanctity of life, every
truth, and every honour, is the spoiled
child of England, and our national dar-
ling and idol. This, we again assert,
is of no good omen. We must, with
all sorrow and indi^-nation, confess
that the popular verdict is with Byron.
But what then 1 "A wonderful and
horrible thing is committed in the
land; and the prophets prophesy falsely,
and my people love to Iiave it so ; and
what will ye do in the end thereof?"'
(Jan. 29, 1870.)

It is now time to turn to the consi-
deration of the poems. I must again
utter a word of caution relative to
Tennyson's own position. Because he
is the mouthpiece of certain sentiments,
it is by no means necessary to look,
upon them as his. He is often like
Hamlet's actor, but tho abstract and
brief clironicle of the times — bi.s
poems, from this point of view, being
mainly valuable as telling us, not what
we should think or what he thougiit,
but what he saw and what people said.
In reviewing the poems of this period
we find three tendencies illustrated.

THE IDYLLS OF THE KINO.

First, Arthur becomes more allegor-
ical ; the poems as a whole running
to mysticism and double meaning.
This is due to change in the author
liimself, and is especially marked in
the 'Coming of Arthur,' the 'Holy
Grail,' and the additionsto the 'Morte
d' Arthur.' Secondly, the spirit of the
times is reflected in two ways : (1)'
The time was distinctly theological:
points in relation to theology, suggest-
ed by the advance of science and by cri-
ticism, were discussed openly in the
Press and the Pulpit. As a conti-ibu-
tion to these questions the ' Holy Grail'
was added to the series. (2) Side by
side with this, a laxity had come over
morals, and a tendency had shewn
itself to drift from the moorings of
Christianity and Cliristian morala Of
this, ' Pellas and Ettarre,' and the
♦ Last Tournament,' are distinctly il-
lustrativ*.

These three tendencies, once re-
marked, will be recollected by all who
have studied the poems, but it will be
well to illustrate what has been said
by I few points, and first by two con-
trasts which are suggested by the
•Holy Grail.' The superhuman power
of knowledge is there associated with
intensity of religious feeling in the
person of the holy nun. In 'Vivien,' it
had been identified with intellect in
the 'little, glassy-headed, hairless man,'
who 'rond but one book.' The simi-
larity of language in the two jiassages
shows us, as such similarity does in
Shakespeare, that theirauthor intended
us to contrast them. There is no in-
consistency between them, but there is
clearly a change of view. With regard
to Lancelot's sin, the 'Holy Grail' may
1)6 compared with ' Elaine.' In the
earlier written poem its moral as-
pect is prominent, ' his honour rooted
in dishonour stood ;' in the later
work we have the theological point
of view,' in me lived a sin.' As be-
fore, there is a marked similarity of
language with contrasts of thought.
In the ' Holy Grail ' we have probably
more of Tennyson's own thoughts than

elsewhere. It is doubtless the author's
commentary upon the religious ques-
tions of the day, and specially upon
the miraculoua One is reminded of
Hegel's summary of the spiritual re-
sults of the Crusades. As these war»
were the logical result and culmination
of Christianity, so were they the
reductio ad absurdum of the old view
of the Catholic Church. Somewhat
similarly does Arthur look upon the
Holy Quest In the early days of in-
nocence, heaven, symbolized by the
Holy Cup, had touched earth.

But then the timen
Grew to such evil that the Holy Cup
Was caught away to Heaven, and disappear'il.

The saintly Galahad catches a glimpse
of higher things, ' but one hath seen,
and all the blind will see.' In Malory,
Arthur welcomes the incentive given
by Galahad. • Sir, ye be welcome, for
ye shall move many good knights to
the quest of the Sancgreal, and ye
shall achieve that never knights might
bring to an end.' (B. xiii. ch. 4.) In
Tennyson, Arthur looks upon the
quest as ' a sign to maim this order
which I made.'

In reading the poem, we cannot
help thinking it a distinct failure, tak-
ing it, as it was doubtless intended, as
a contribution to the religious ques-
tion. If Arthur believed in the sign
he should not have blamed his knights
for following it ; if it was an halluci-
nation, the whole poem is a mistake.
That Tennyson himself does not feel
this, is another proof of the compara-
tively superficial view — superficial l>e»
cause poetical — that he takes of reli-
gious questiona We can expect no
new revelation just yet ; we are still
in what has been aptly called the period
of dormant anai-chy, the second period
of all I'e volutions. If we did expect
one, Tennyson is hardly one who is
able to give it. Still he felt impera-
tively drawn to take up the theologi-
cal question ; and in doing so, in work*
ing out his allegory of the quest after
holiness, he was compelled to use me-

THE IDYLLS OF THE KINO.

taphor and imagery that were hardly
novel, just as the writer of the Apo-
calypse had to draw upon the Books
of Daniel and Enoch. His allegory
has sometimes a meaning imderlying
it and sometimes is mere imagery. At
the conclnsion, Arthur pronounces
beatitudes, clearly imitated from those
of the Sermon on the Mount, • Blessed
are Bors, Lancelot and Percivale,' the
different characters brought before us
in the poem, representing five types
of holiness at the present day. Whe-
ther the five correspond to the meek,
to those that hunger and thirst, to the
pure in heart, to the peacemakers who
are pure in spirit, and to the merciful,
I cannot feel certain. Some sort of
correspondence, it is probable, Tenny-
son intended, adapting the ideas of
Scripture to the requirements of an
ideal Christiiin chivalry. These ideas
are brought out by Galahad, the type
of sanctity, that lives in a higher world j
by the pure and great Percivale, who,
lacking humility only attains holiness
by effort. Bors, is a type of mundane
goodness; Ambrosius, of mechanical
religion, without much spiritual exalt-
ation. In Lancelot we have a noble,
passionate nature, that would make reli-
gion beget purity, and not purity holi-
ness. With all of these there is con-
trasted the low volu[)tuou8 nature of
Gawain.* Arthur's concluding har-

very
hard

angue gives, to my mind, a
iincertain sound. It would be
to imagine a more unpoetical theme
than the confessions of an half-hearted
believer.! Dante and Shelley, Keble
and Swinburne, Wordsworth and Mat-

* It may be remarked, in i)asHiu^', that
'reniiysoii has done threat violence to tradition
in the character of (Jawain. In the VVelsli
triads, Gwalchmai is one of the three learned
KnightH, and by no means deserves the rank
j,'iven him in the Idylls.

t C'f Tennyson's early iwem of 18;<0, since
omitted by our author, upon the ' (Confessions
of a second-rate sensitive mind not in unity
with itself,' with its three emphatic lines :

' Oh, weary life ! oh, weary death !
Oh, spirit and heart made desolate !
Oh, damned vacillating state ! '

thew Arnold, have each of them a
poetical justification ; but what has
Tennyson in this unlucky passage?
Still, it is redeemed by the power of
style, and is interesting too, as being
characteristic of the average beliefs
of the day, and of Tennyson, their
bom exponent. Arthur firet rebukes
the age that will not see miracles,
adding a qualified acceptance of the
miraculous and of the higher life.
Then follows a regret for those who
have determined to act upon their be-
liefs, and adopt a mere life of religious
seclusion. The conclusion follows, that
a man should do his work here, and
after death, he shall see — what he will
see ; yet, even here, we are occasion*
ally visited by higher visions.

In reviewing the allegorical work
of this period, it will be unnecessary
to notice the account of Arthur's birth
at any length ; so much has been writ-
ten by others upon this point. That
the coming of the Soul into being is
cenveyed under the type of Arthur's
birth, is sutliciently apparent, through
the passage, that brings this view most
unmistakably before us, comes from
the subsequently published ' Gareth
and Lynette ' :

For there is nothing in it as it seems

Saving the King ; tho' some there be that hold

The King a, shadow and the city real.

It is clear too, that the varying ac-
counts of the manner of birth repre-
sents the comments of different schools
upon the origin of being. At the same
time the whole story, and especially
I Leodogran's Dream, reminds us of the
Gospel HiHtory and of tiie reluctance
\ of his own people to recognise tho
Christ as king upon earth.

As another piece of distinctly alle-
gorical writing, I may point to the last
1 battle scene. The original in Malor}'
i is as follows : — ' Never was there seen
a more doleful battle in no Christian
land. For there was but rushing and
I riding, foining and striking, and many
j a grim word was there spoken either
to other, and many a deadly stroke.

THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.

And thus they fou>^bt

all the long day, and never stinted
till the noble knighta were laid to the
cold ground, and ever they fought
atill, till it was near night, and by that
time was there an hundred thousand
laid dead upon the down.' Tennyson's
version is as like a confused battle as
he could make it without losing the
allegory. Yet, the following words
•clearly point to his intention to depict
a strife of such an allegorical charac-
ter :

And sonif had visions out of golden youth.

And Home beheld the faces of old ghosts,

Look in upon the battle ; . . .

, . . . . shrieks,

After the (Jhrist of those who falling down

Luok'd up for heaven, and only saw the mist ;

. . ....

Oaths, insult, filth and monstrous blasp/iemies,
>Sweat writhingM, anguish, labourings of the

lungs.
In that close mist, and crying for the light.
Moans of the dying, and loiccs of the dead.*

In regard to this battle, it must be
acknowledged that we have a real dif-
ficulty in its interpretation. As a piece
of writing it is very eflTective, and Ten-
nyson could hardly have omitted it in
the history of Arthur, so prominent a
place does it occui)y, not only in the
pages of Geoffrey, from whom its grim-
ness comes originally, and in those of
Malory, but also as the battle of Uam-
lan, in the accounts of the Welsh
writei's (c. f. the notes to T.iidy Char-
totte Guest's ' Mabinogjon'). It had
therefore to V)e in the poem, but bn-
yond this it is emphatically allegorized.
Of what struggle between good and
evil, we may reasonably ask, is the
battle a type ? The importance of the
question is enhanced by Tennyson's
reference to the battle in some lines
added to ' Vivien,' as well as in the
' Epilogue to the Queen.' The laureate
there expresses his hopes for the future
of England, adding that the fears of

* Even in his most serious p.ossages, Teu-
nyi^oii loves an allusion to other WTitini^'s. In
the jireseut we have allusions to Cardinal New-
man's hymn, ' Lead kindly light,' and to
Hamlet's melancholy estimate of man and
nature, IT. '?.

those who mark signs of storm in the
future may turn out to be vain —

Their fears
Are morning shadows, huger than theshapeii.
That cast them, not those gloomier which

forego,
The Hf.rkness of that battle in the West,
Where all of high and holy dies away.

A writer in the Contemporary Re-
view (May, 1873), regards the battle
as ' a picture of all human death, its
awfulness and confusion. The soul
enduring sees the mist clear up.' This
I do not mean to deny, yet, though
Tennyson himself surrounds the last
contest with Death, in ' Gareth and
Lynette,' with every semblance of
horror, the battle itself proves to be the
least formidable of all the encounters,
and ends in a piece of most unreal and
unbecoming burlesque, ' Lady Lyonors
and her house making merry over
death.' Nor in fact does the battle of
good and evil in the soul of man take
place in the hour of his death. It is the
struggle of his life time, and specially
of his maturing youth and mellowing
manhood. By thetime of his attaining
three score years and ten, the victory
has been given to one of the contend-
ing forces, anil the human soul is
already an heaven or an hell, as the
principles of good or evil have attained
the mastery. It would, it seems, be
safest not to press the interpretation
too far, to regat d the battle as neces-
sary, poetically and traditionally, the
allegoric turn being given to it to make
it a piece with the rest of the poem as
well as to enhance its horror and mys-
tery. This does not preclude a secon-
dary interpretation as in Spencer,
alluding to the ultimate battle in the
world at large, between the principles
of Christianity and of renascent Paga-
nism. Protestant Christianity ' that
once had fought with Home,' dying by
those of its own household. ' Mv
house,' says Arthur, 'hath been my
doom.' *

* The gloom that surrounds the last battle
is also justified, if we recollect the perioil
which closeil the era of the gods of Asgarf',
Kagnurok, or tlie twilight of tlie gods. Should

THE JttYLLS OF THE KINO.

It iM an eaMy Htup froui this to tbe
testimony given )iy theite poetus, to the
waning influence of Christianity in the
world, its cause and effects. Absolute
truth is unattainable,

Truth In tliiN U> tn«, and that to the* ;

the sacred lire of Christianity is con-
fessedly low,

Poor men, when yule is cold,
MuNt be content to wit by little fires.

The advance of knowledge has caus-
ed faith to wither, ' seeing too much
wit makes the world rotten '; yet this
faith, while it lasted, was a potent
means of good.

My G«)d, the power
Wa8 once in vo wm when men believed the King !
They lied not then, who swore, and thro' their

vow*
The King prevailing made his realm.

But the causes, that kept alive a vivid
Christian enthusiasm, are over,

Fool, I came late, the heathen wara were o'er.
The life had flown, we sware but by the shell.

We are in times of change, and the
religion of Christianity, of monastic
Puritanism, of self-denial, self-repres-
sion, is over, and we are free to act
as we will, ' the days of frost are o'er ';
' thou nor I have made the world.'
We must take facts as we find them.

Can Arthur make me pure
As any maiden child ? . . - -
Bind me to one ? The wide world laughs at it,

• V/u are not angels here
Nor shall Im,

Thus in the midst of a standard of
morals that is disregarded, and of ram-
pant hyijocrisy, there is a tendency,
as with Rousseau before the French Re-
volution, to cast aside the restraints
of civilization, to follow the instincts
of animal nature.

further illuxtration be iicuded, we have oxm
ready to hand in ('arlyle's deMuiiption of his
father's death, ' That last act of hiH life, when
in the last itiouy, with the thick <ihai>thj vapours
of death rinny rouwl him to choke him, he burst
tnrouglt and called with a man's voice on the
Great Ood, . . , God gave him strength
to wrestle with the KiiiK otTei rors, and as it
were even then to prevnil ' (Hrininiscettces).

Ltive ? -we be all alike : only the King
I[ikth made us fools and liars. U, noble vows !
U, great and sane and simple race of brutes
That owu no lust because they have no law !

These aro a few passages in which
these Idylls reflect the mood of thought
current at the time of their produc-
tion. Antinomianism, that constantly
tends to burst out in times of revo-
lution, when ' the gloom, that fol-
lows on the turning of the worlu,
darkens the common path,' had open-
ly shown itself in the England of
the day. Any one, who would seek
for illustration of the state of
things I have described, should turn
over the pages of three forgotten pub-
lications, in which a lax morality and
cynical indifference to proprieties is
coarsely exhibited. These writings,
which appeared as Christmas Annuals
for the edification of the prurient taste
of the age, were entitled the ' Coming
K— ,' 'Siliad' and 'Jon Duan.' Tenny-
son on his side, though his utterances
as we have seen upon points of dogma
are of rather an uncertain, fluctuating
nature, keeps before the minds of his
readers, the presence of the ideal
ignored on earth, but bright in the
heavens. The harp of Arthur unseen
by Tristram

Makes a silent music up in heaven,
And I, and Arthur, and the angels hear.

We may now turn to the latest ad-
ditions to the Arthuriad.

IV.

The last written portions of the
work are the poem of ' Gareth and
Lynette,' published in 1872, the ' Epi-
logue to the Queen, and the alterations
introduced throughout the entire series
of poems. In the political and reli-
gious state of England a slight change
had taken place, for while on the one
hand the same tendencies that were no-
ticed before continued — ' the Descent
of Man ' appearing in 1871, and Tyn-
dal's 'Belfast Adviress,' the so-called
' high water-mark of materialism,'
being delivered in 1 874 — on the other,

THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.

the Conservative reaction, which in
the hands of Lord Beaconsfield took
an Imperialistic turn, occuiTed in the
early part of 1871. Now the au-
thor's edition of the poenis in their
latest shape was issued in 1875. We
should, therefore, natui-ally expect
little chanQ;e in the texture of reli-
gious thought of which the tales aie
composed, while if we found something
that betokened political reaction, we
should be able to account for it Per-
haps we may read an indication of
this feeling in the lines,

Ye are over tine
To mar stout knaves with foolish cointesies.

So, too, the Epilogue, alluding to Can-
ada, takes for a moment the tone that
afew years afterwards was exaggerated
by coarser npirits into the bray of Jin-
goism.

The song of Arthur's knighthood be-
fore the king has, to my mind, some-
what of the hollow ring of the so-called
Conservative reaction, brought on by
the combined forces of Beer and Bibles,
by harrassed interests and fear of Ro-
man Catholicism :

8hall Rome or heathen rule in Arthur's realm 7
Flash brand and lance, fall battleaxe upon

helm.
Fall battleaxe and Hash brand I Let the King

reign.

Meanwhile the allegory is more pro-
nounced. Arthur is now ' the Sun of
Glory.' The hero of * Gareth and Ly-
iiette ' no longer fights with Hesh and
blood, but with Death and other sym-
bolical personages :

He seem'd as one
That all in later, sadder age begi
To war against ill uses of a life.

ins

The words with which Lancelot hails
the young knight are scriptural :

Blessed be thou, Sir Gareth ! Knight art thou
To the King's best wish.

What small belief we may have had
in the reality of Cauielot is rudely
disftelled by the beautiful lines, which
reveal its mystiral and allegoric na-
ture "

I The city is built

To music, therefore never built at all.
And therefore built for ever.

The religious belief inculcated by the
poems has more of a Pantheistic ten-
dency. ' In Memoriam ' spoke of

The great Iiittlliyennii fair
That range above our niortii) state.
In circle round the hhmrd yule.

We now read of ' the Fotvers who walk
the world.' Two lines freshly added
to the poems, taken together, bring
this strain of thought clearly before
u& * Man's word,' Arthur says, and
the words have a didactic sound about
them, ' is God in man.' Thin in illus-
trated by a fresh charge added to the
list in * Guinevere,' ' to honour his
own word as if his God'a ' Tennyson's
first great teacher, it would seem, had
come to be his last. We recognize in
these lines a recollection from him,
the strength and dignity of whose
verses, when most inspired, is unsur-
passed even by Milton, and who spoke
of his God as ' a presence,'

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
And the round ocean and the living air.
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

Duty, too, which the master had seen
as the stay of the stars and of the most
holy heavens, is thus attributed to a
cataract :

Thou dost Mis will,
Tlie Maker's, and not knowest.

In considering the additions and
alterations made to the poems, for the
benefit of those who have not com-
pared them, I may say that the origi-
nal Dedication, * Gai-eth and Lynette,'
and the ' Holy Grail,' are unaltered.
One verbal alteration only occurs in
the ' Last Tournament,' and several of
more account in Geraint, Elaine and
Guinevere. To the 'Comingof Arthur,'
' Pelleas and Ettarre,' the ' Passing of
Arthur,' and especially to ' Vivien,'
considerable additions have been made.
Some of these changes have been no-
ticed in previous pai-ts of this study.
None of them is more striking than
the verses that give the moanings of

Trr

-! ".■V J"»l-P,--

f^'L.lIli

THE IDYLLS OF THE KINff.

Ian
of

the King in his tent liefove the battle.
These twenty lines begin with the
words, ' I found him in the shining
of the stars/ and are of great signiti-
cance ; for, First of all, the whole scene
reminds us of the scene of the passion
in the Garden of Gethsemane. It was
obviously in our author's mind when
he wrote them.

Secondly, the confusion of Panthe-
ism, Duodsemonism and general hope-
lessness in Arthur's mind is significant
at once of the times and of their ex-
])onent.

Thirdly, the contrast between the
despair embodied in these lines, and
the calm hope that marks Arthur's
concluding speech, is notic«iiil)le, if not
actually amounting to inconsistency.

♦ The last line,' I have written else-
whei-e,* * is obviously added to clear
the speaker from inconsistency, but it
does not clear the poet' The key to
this is the fact that, though the two
passages come in the same poem, they
were written at the interval of more
than thirty years.

Lastly, the thoughts of this passage
are easily traced to their source. J. S.
Mill's 'Autobiography' was published
in 1873. No one can forget the ex-
cited discussions that this book pro-
voked. There were two passages es-
pecially that were the subject of fre-
quent reference. One was James
Mill's opinion, given by his son, which,
though not a new remark, struck the
people with anovel force, that * human
life was a poor thing at best, after the
freshness of youth and of unsatisfied
curi ity had gone by.' The other was
his opinion that Duodswrnonism was,
as a theory of tlie world, a more ten-
able view than the current Monothe-
ism. ' He found it,' writes his son,

• impossible to believe that a world so
full of evil was the work of an Author
combining infinite jxiwer with perfect
goodness and righteousness.

The Sabtean, or Munichwan, theory of

* ' Modern Pe88iini!iim,'rANAmANM(»NTHi.T,
December, 1870.

a good and an evil principle struggling
against each other for the government
of the universe, he would not have
equally condemned, and I have heard
him express surprise that no one re-
vived it in our timea' To this passage,
and to the discussion it produced, I
should trace part of the thoughts of
Arthur's speech. The feeling of hope-
lessness as to individual effort, a dis-
appointed feeling that aided in bring-
ing on li'? Pessimism of our day, was
widel^V fy.Li at the same time, and it,
too, f>r,«l8 expression in this passage.
As a striking embodiment of the same
thoughts, I may quote an obituary
notice of Earl Stanhope, written by
8. R. Gardiner in the Academy (De-
cember, 1875). ♦ Instead of carrying
into literature,' he writes, ' the heat
of political battle, he seems to have
regarded politics with the sober judg-
ment of a student who has become
aware how very little effect is pro-
duced by the best-intentioned actions
of the ablest men.'

The long passage introduced at the
beginning of • Vivien ' calls for special
remark. It is the account of Vivien's
coming to the court at Oamelot from
the tainted atmosphere that surround-
ed King Mark in Cornwall Here
she settled, creating scandals and pol-
luting the air where she lived :

Thro' the peaceful court she crept

And whiHper'd : then au Arthur in the highest

Leaven'd the world, ao Vivien in the loweat,

Arriving at a time of golden rest,

And (iowing one ill hint from eAr to ear,

Leaven'd his hall.

The special appropriateness of these
lines to the time in which they ap-
peared must be obvious to those who
remember a leading feature of the era
of Lord Beaconsfield's administration.
It was not one, ])(>rliapH, of the faults of
Iuq>eriali8m; but it happened to coin-
cide in time with the period of its sway.
These years were the times in which
the papers dealing with {letty personal
scandal, such as ' Vanity Fair,' ' The
World ' and ' Truth,' played a leading

I :l

THE IDYLLS OF THE KINO.

piift ' Vanity Fair ' was of earlier
birth, itH literary anceutor having been
the 'Tomahawk' (now extinct); but
the other papers will be specially re-
membered as having their palmiest
days in this period of underhand poli-
tics and intrigue. The disreputable

series of the ' Coming K ' and its

successora in part also coincides with
this period.

The series of ])oen)H upon Arthur is
appropriately closed by the ' Epilogue
to the Queen.' The passage in which
the writer pointx out the true nature
of the poems, as an allegory, has been
quoted before. With what limitations
we may accept this has been shown.
In this Epilogue, Tennyson recurs to
the underlying subject of the whole
series, the hopes and fears, the politi-
cal and religious prospects of the day.
He expresases his trust —

That Heaven
Will blow the tempest in the diHtance back
From thine and oufh : for some are scared,

who mark,
Or wisely or unwisely, signs of storm

And, in the lines that succeed, these
signs were enumerated — political in-
stability, infidelity, luxuiy, cowardice,
licentious art, and ignorance supreme.
It may not be unnecessary to remind
the reader that, about the time that
Tennyson published these lines, there
appeared • The Warnings of Cassan-
dra,' by Mr. W. R. Greg. These
warnings, which excited no small share
of public attention, insisted on many
of the points here specified. The Epi-
logue ends with the belief that the

' crown'd Republic's common -sense '
will bring England safe thi-ough her
troubles.

Thus wisely, with hope for the fu-
ture, has Tennyson closed his series.
His last word shall be mine. In this
Study much has been omitted. I have
not attempted to show what has been
shown before, the meaning of the alle-
gory in each individual case, or the
correspondence of season from the
birth of Arthur on ' the night of the
New Year ' to his Passing just before
* the new sun rose bringing the New
Year.' Much, doubtless, that would
"have fittingly made a part of this
Chronological Study, has been neglect-
ed also. fiut I cannot close without
a remark on the interesting comment
upon the age and its ditficulties that
the Arthuriad will afford to posterity.
Not with less certainty, than that with
which we recognise the utterances of
extinct theories of science, the reli-
gious belief of the Puritan, and the
influence of the classical Renaissance
in the majestic roll of ' the organ voice
of England ' ; will a future age listen
in the haunting music of Tennyson's
lyre to the last and noblest hopes
of Old-World Christianity, mingling
with the daring thoughts of new-bom
Science, with the Scepticism and Mel-
ancholy Unrest of this our Nineteenth
Century. The poem is a distinctive pro-
duct of the age : to it with its mingled
stream of Art and Science, of moral
earnestness and intellectual perplexity
it belongs.

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