Though he, devoutest of all Champions, ere Whereon diffused like snow the Damsel lay, Gawain in his "high expectancy," Tristram “disencumbered of his harp," Lancelot, craving a sign, "tired slave of vain contrition," touch the corpse in vain, till at last Galahad draws near. "Now, while his bright-haired front he bowed, And stood, far-kenned by mantle furred with ermine, The enrapt, the beautiful, the young, That he the solemn issue would determine. "Nor deem it strange; the youth had worn The day when he achieved that matchless feat, Which whosoe'r approached of strength was shorn, This poem, written in 1830, was published in 1835. Two years earlier The Lady of Shalott had appeared. The connection between the two is more than chronological. Both have the same feeling for old romance while freely varying its material; both breathe into it a deeper significance that belongs to the new time; both are half lyric in their treatment, and tell their mystic tale in verse of strange and subtle structure. Tennyson may be said to begin where Wordsworth leaves off, but before proceeding to his achievement it will be well to notice the work of some of his contemporaries at home and abroad. CHAPTER IV TENNYSON'S CONTEMPORARIES ON THE CONTINENT AMONG the ingredients of the medieval cycle of Arthur few were more daring and enigmatic than the story of Merlin. The almost blasphemous fiction of his origin, that he was conceived by the power of the Evil One and born of a maiden, to undo as Antichrist the work of Christ on earth; the reversal of the diabolic counsels and his election to prepare the way for the return of the Sangreal; the ambiguity that the ambiguity that nevertheless clings to his work and character, so that the order he has founded is broken on the quest he has ordained, while he himself after many dubious feats, lies bespelled in the toils of his own magic; all these form a complex, that exacts yet defeats an imaginative solution. Merlin is literally a Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, his double nature seems an epitome of all humanity; like Faust, he might exclaim, "Two souls, alas! inhabit in my breast," and his story like Faust's affects the heart with the power of a religious myth. "Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust."-Scene, Vor dem Thor. It is therefore only natural that at the date we have reached, when Goethe had completed, or all but completed, his great nineteenth century mystery, and when his influence was practically unchallenged on the minds of men, a mythic material of this kind should be rescued from oblivion and newmodelled, like the story-book of Dr. Faustus, as the mutations of time required. There was, indeed, a difference between the two cases. Goethe's was the grand original deed, and a work undertaken in imitation or rivalry, just because so undertaken, would lack the epoch-making importance of the great example; it would be the work of those who follow and do not set the fashions. And, again, Goethe was supported by a genuine national tradition, for the puppet-plays of Dr. Faust had kept the legend in living growth; while, though the name of Merlin as arch-enchanter survived, the continuity of his story had suffered many a breach. Thus those who took him as their hero would have both less spontaneous inspiration of their own and less of the inspiration of popular imagination. The subject would be apt to lay hold of men who with great aspirations had a certain amount of culture, and who were consciously on the look-out for a theme which might serve by its strangeness and unfamiliarity to give an impressive vastitude to their work. A feeling of its greatness, a dim sense of a meaning that it must possess, would lure them to the task. It would seem fit to gratify their yearning to say deep things and give them the chance of posing as thinkers and poets—a rôle that was made popular by the treatment of art in German philosophy and by the example of Goethe in his principal work. To the man with a share of genius who would fain write as though he had more, the story of Merlin was a godsend. And such men, when put on their mettle, as happens when the theme is a noble one, often produce work that is of high historical and even literary interest. The present is a case in point. The subject of Merlin occurred almost simultaneously to two distinguished writers, to Edgar Quinet (1803-1875) in France, and to Karl Leberecht Immermann (1796-1840) in Germany, and their works were and are among the most notable that British legend has evoked in modern times. They may be assigned to the year 1830, for by that date Quinet, according to his own statement, had already worked out the plan of his Merlin l'Enchanteur, though it was not finished till 1860; and Immermann's Merlin, Eine Mythe, appeared in 1832. "My subject," says Quinet, "is the legend of the human soul till death and beyond." Merlin is sprung from Satan and Seraphina, the rebel and the saint, the principles of alienation from and of community with the Deity. He begins life with aspirations after the divine that give him his magical powers; "my runes," he says, are written in my heart": he is able to see the invisible, and Viviane, the ideal of life, is revealed to him in the beauty of the earth. In his first enthusiasm he founds Paris to be the seat of civilisation and culture, and he sets over it Arthur, the King of the Just. Seized with the thirst of knowledge he starts on his travels, visiting the abode of eternal ideas where he revels in the future creations of art, venturing down into the realm of negations and presenting himself to his father in Hell. He makes friends with Jacques Bonhomme, the type of the French populace; falls foul of the mercantile spirit in England; and beats with his own weapons Faust, the genius of the Teutonic race. It is given him to found the Round Table, at which kings and peoples may feast, and the Holy Grail appears. Meanwhile, amidst these experiences, he has parted from Viviane and forfeited the gift of seeing the invisible. He sets out to rediscover his lost love, and, after many misfortunes, comes to the Emperor Lucius in Rome; passes on to the outworn culture of Greece, where the gods have become dwarfs and are transformed to fairies; and thence to the community of Prester John, where all religions are recognised and where Merlin worships the unknown God. Returning to France he enters on a time of disillusion, when he loses his powers of enchantment, hitherto retained in his worst distresses, and fears that his passion for Viviane has been a dream. And all around him are signs of collapse. The nations are disenchanted, and Arthur, slowly dying of an invisible wound, sinks into a deathlike sleep. Merlin, rejected and depressed, unable any longer to prophesy, withdraws from men and becomes a comrade of the wolves; fit silvester homo. In his desolation, when he seeks solace in the Bible, he finds that everywhere the name of God has |