し in his most pictorial passages, the poet never fails to introduce a human element. 'Tennyson knew that nature alone was not half as delightful as nature and man together. Lover of nature as he was, he avoided the crowning fault of modern poetry—the unmitigated, merciless description of nature, trickling on for fifty and a hundred lines together, without one touch of human interest.' As an example of this the passage is quoted describing the ancient ivy-grown courtyard of the castle where Geraint and Enid first meet. Beautiful as is the picture, the personal interest is predominant. Enid's voice fills the court and awakens in Geraint the first stirrings of his love. Another quality specially noted in Tennyson's treatment of nature is the conciseness of his descriptions, and in order to contrast this with the expanded method' Mr. Stopford Brooke places side by side four lines of Tennyson, describing the bubbling up of a woodland spring, and some dozen lines of Coleridge, devoted to precisely the same description-how through the crystal water the sand is seen to dance at the bottom of the pool. Each poet has his own method, and as Tennyson grew older he used the concise method more and ' more.' As Enid has been contrasted with Lynette, so afterwards is Vivien with Elaine. The root of Vivien is conscious guilt, 'the root of Elaine is conscious innocence.' The idyll of 'Merlin and Vivien' contains much that is beautiful; there are scattered about in it islands of noble poetry;' yet the poem as a whole certainly does not fulfil the conditions which we have seen that Mr. Stopford Brooke insists upon as belonging to true art; the story itself is almost too disagreeable for art to take as its subject.' Mr. Stopford Brooke and Mr. MacCallum agree that, if the Idylls' are throughout to be treated as an allegory, Lancelot is the character which it is most difficult to fit into its place; and for this reason: that Lancelot is the most distinctly human of all the personages of Arthur's Court. Our interest is in Lancelot the man, not in any abstraction which Lancelot may be supposed to represent. Both critics are, again, at one in preferring to treat the 'Idylls' published before the 'Holy Grail' independent altogether of allegory. If allegory we must have, in obedience to the apparent wish of the poet himself, Mr. MacCallum somewhat deprecatingly suggests that the place of Lancelot may be compared with that of the imagination, or, if it be preferred, men of imaginative ⚫ temperament, in the life of the world'*-a suggestion surely which only increases one's inclination to leave the allegory alone! After all, the main purpose of these poems is clear enough. Tennyson was conscious of his own power, and he felt all its responsibility. For thirty years at least he was without rival, the poet of England. He held, as no other man did, possession of the ear of his countrymen. He was inspired with the thought that it was the function of his life to hold up to them a high ideal of what men should be. There was something almost prophet-like in the attitude which throughout his life he assumed to the English people. In his highest characters it is always Tennyson himself who speaks, rather than the person of his creation, and this it is, as has been observed by Mr. Stopford Brooke and many other critics, that diminishes the dramatic merit of his plays. His characters do not live apart from himself; they are rather the vehicles through which he conveys his own thoughts and feelings. We have noticed how in Enone' the speech of Pallas is really addressed by the poet himself to the people of England. In the 'Idylls' King Arthur, in Tennyson's thought, is, like Wordsworth's Happy Warrior, ... He That every man-at-arms should wish to be.' The ideal is that of his own age and his own country. Hence, just as the Celtic hero became in the Middle Ages the Christian knight endowed with all the qualities of Christian chivalry, we now find the King Arthur of our own time made to typify the character that is held to be the noblest in private or in public life amongst Englishmen of the nineteenth century. Tennyson undoubtedly believed that he had a message to convey to his countrymen, and he chose the old Arthurian story as his theme, partly for its own intrinsic beauty, but largely also because of its peculiar adaptability to the great object he had in view. He evidently did not intend merely to give fresh life to the old legends of the heroic times. 'For nature brings not back the mastodon, Nor we those times . . .' Of all the Round Table Lancelot was pre-eminent in the qualities that draw forth popular applause. Brave soldier and courteous knight, and trusted follower of the king, he *MacCallum, p. 335. was yet the principal cause of the utter failure that overwhelmed the work of Arthur's life. Lancelot's devotion to the king, and his passionate love for the queen, fight for mastery in his conscience. The king is painted, on the other hand, as the born leader of men. When, in the Coming of 'Arthur,' Lancelot is asked by the king himself whether he now doubts that he is king "Sir and my liege," he cried, "the fire of God Descends upon thee in the battle field: Again, we are told 'That Lancelot was first in tournament, And Lancelot, telling Elaine of the great doings of the Table Round, describes the king full of mildness at home, not caring for jousts, laughingly admitting that his knights are better men than he. "Yet in this heathen war the fire of God Fills him I never saw his like there lives While he uttered this Low to her own heart said the lily maid, "Save your great self, fair lord." It was the hope of Arthur's life by means of a 'new order' to renovate the world. For a time success rewarded his exertions, but ultimately the whole system of the Table Round broke down in complete and disastrous failure. Whilst the system and the methods perished, Arthur still hopes that in some manner, better suited to changed times, his old objects will be attained. 6 The old order changeth, yielding place to new, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.' As to the causes of the disastrous ending of the Arthurian scheme, Tennyson leaves us in no doubt. The impurity of life, spreading downwards from the throne, corrupting the whole society of his kingdom, was one cause. The other was the spasmodic zeal with which his knights abandoned their proper work in the world to pursue, under a passionate passing impulse, a mistaken ideal of religious life. The poet, in these idylls, again and again presses upon Englishmen the same teaching-that their national strength cannot * Gareth and Lynette. 6 endure if their lives are divorced from morality, and that true religion consists in the doing of work in the world, rather than in the practice of asceticism or the devotion of the cloistered cell. The passion of Lancelot and Guinevere and the Quest of the Holy Grail were the two chief agents in the destruction of the Table Round; and it is the poet's plan to hold up the life of Arthur in contrast to the vices and errors under which his system fell. Critics have complained, and doubtless will complain again, that Tennyson's devotion to the sanctity and eternity of the marriage tie carries him beyond the limits of art; and assuredly a very strong example of this occurs in the Death of Enone,' where that nymph, crying Husband,' leaps upon the funeral pile of Paris. At the end of Guinevere Mr. Stopford Brooke, like Mr. Swinburne, finds that Arthur's speech to his wife smacks rather too strongly of the pulpit, and suggests, in somewhat deprecating fashion, it is true, that the idyll would be improved by the omission of nearly a hundred lines of the king's speech. For our own part, we prefer the idyll as it stands. Arthur's final speeches are, doubtless, Tennyson all through; but it is Tennyson's Arthur, not Mr. Stopford Brooke's, nor another's, whom we like to hear. By the mouth of King Arthur he speaks, and yet the skill of the poet is such that surely no one can read those magnificent passages and feel that his eloquence in any degree mars the beauty of that last interview between king and queen. In Guinevere' and in the Passing of 'Arthur' Tennyson's poetry reaches a height of eloquence nowhere surpassed in the English language. The observation, nevertheless, that at the times when the poet is most under the influence of the two strenuous convictions that pervade his poetry he departs furthest from the simplicity and the spirit of the original tale, whether Greek fable or Arthurian legend, is a true one. Mr. Stopford Brooke points out that the whole purpose of Tennyson's 'Holy Grail' is not merely different from, but actually opposed to, the teaching of the medieval story. The Quest, which was once held up as an example, is by King Arthur treated as a warning for men. There are, again, other occasions where the poet follows very closely not merely the spirit of the story and of the characters, but even the descriptive language of the older version. It is almost with a feeling of relief that Mr. Stopford Brooke *See Stopford Brooke, p. 141. VOL. CLXXXI. NO. CCCLXXII. L L turns from the 'Idylls,' properly so called, to the 'Passing of 'Arthur,' which, though it concludes the Arthurian series, includes within it the Morte d'Arthur, composed in 1842, before the allegorical intention, if it existed at all, had taken strong possession of the poet's mind. There is no suggestion here that Arthur represents the rational soul; ' he is altogether the man, and he is dear to us throughout;' and Tennyson, in his descriptive work, has never done anything better in his later poems than the glorious setting to his account of Arthur's death. The wounded king is carried by Sir Bedivere to a chapel near the field 'A broken chancel, with a broken cross, That stood on a dark strait of barren land; Lay a great water, and the moon was full.' 'A noble framework,' exclaims Mr. Stopford Brooke; and 'with what noble conciseness it is drawn! All the landscape 'lives from point to point, as if Nature herself had created 'it; but even more alive than itself are the two human 'figures in it.' Nowhere more than in this poem does Tennyson follow so closely at times the very words of Malory. The poet makes Sir Bedivere say to the king— 'I heard the water lapping on the crag, And the long ripple washing in the reeds.' His language in the prose runs— 'Syr, I sawe no thynge but the waters wappe and the waves wanne; and the king's last speech is as follows: Comfort thyself, and do as well as thou mayest, for in me is no truste to truste in. For I will in to the valley of Awylyon to hele me of my grievous wound. And yf thou here neuer more of me praye for my soule.' Surely Mr. MacCallum is right in finding a depth of meaning in Tennyson's version of this speech which we 'should vainly look for in Malory's ringing prose.' We cannot agree with the criticism that the steady "belief of "In Memoriam" in the certainty of the end being good, and of the value, therefore, of all human effort, is gone from "the Idylls of the King." It is true that Arthur's system failed; but that the ends which he had in view will ultimately be fulfilled, in some way suited to the times, he does not appear to doubt; still less does he regret his own part or suppose that his efforts were without value. He |