piece of Merlin and The Gleam. But this is the aftermath of his production. His genuine inspiration was derived not from tradition but from Romance.1 the Hahe 1 When a procession has gone past, the street boys may be seen leaping the barriers and turning summersaults in the rear, but this does not form part of the function. Behind the procession of Arthurian literature come the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, and The New King Arthur. In theʼ opinion of the present writer they are unworthy alike of their subjects and their authors, and being without even the humble merits of good parody or burlesque, are not to be described as literature at all. The mention of them in a foot-note seems sufficient. Right! CHAPTER VI TENNYSON AS ARTHURIAN POET TWENTY years ago, when the Idylls wore the new gloss of a connected whole, they were sometimes described and admired as forming a great "Epic of Arthur."1 But epical they obviously are not, and it is now the fashion in some quarters to compare them unfavourably in this respect with Malory's story, which, we are told, in them "loses its epic grandeur, and is broken up into a series of petty miniatures."2 One school of criticism goes further, seeing in them "little beyond dexterity, a rare eloquence, a laborious patience of hand," and would deny them not only epical merit, but any transcendent merit at all. Such, however, is hardly the general view. Among ordinary readers Tennyson's Idylls are a great deal more read than Malory's romance, and whether epical or not, they contain something that makes them, as I believe, the most widely beloved of all 1 This is the title and the attitude of an article in the Edinburgh Review, April, 1870. 2 E. Rhys, Introduction to King Arthur. 3 Swinburne, Essays and Studies, page 115. T Camelot Series. the poet's longer works. The popular verdict is at least worth considering. Tennyson was the favourite poet of his time in virtue of certain qualities of his genius, and the public in its preference for the Idylls has probably fixed on the work in which these qualities have fullest play and freest expression. This would not necessarily mean that they are the best specimens of his poetry; it would mean that they are the most characteristic. In estimating the achievement of a writer, it is sometimes useful to determine the period to which that achievement peculiarly belongs. In Tennyson's case it may be roughly described as extending from the appearance of the volume of 1842 to the appearance of Gareth and Lynette in 1872., Before the former year, despite the excellence of many previous pieces, he was still winning his way to note. After the latter year, though several of his finest poems were yet to be composed, he, was chiefly occupied with new, and not wholly successful, experiments in dramatic writing. But for the thirty years within these dates he was practically the supreme English poet, without rival in national recognition. the Now these years correspond generally with a period of secure and tranquil movement in the history of the country. The calm was interrupted chiefly by a few distant wars, of which those in Crimea and in suppression of the Indian Mutiny were the chief, a few commercial crises that did not affect the general course of prosperity, a few social outbreaks of which none was really dangerous. New But it was not the calm of stagnation. aptitudes for refinement were being developed: the general temper of thought was becoming mor genial and tolerant ; a gentle course of reform, which perhaps left the hardest problems untouched, was pursued by constitutional means without violence or hurry, but also without pause. The close of the period brings us to another state of things. The Franco-German war affected the position of England as a European power. Bolder speculations, philosophic and social, both of Englishmen and foreigners, began to tell on the public mind. Since the disestablishment of the Irish Church, the political measures that have been before the country may be described both by their friends and foes as more drastic in character than those that preceded them. In short, more troublous and vehement years have come. It is the brighter aspects of the previous period that have passed into Tennyson's verse. Whatever they possessed of ordered calm, of tempered hope, of reconciling culture, was congenial to the nature of the man. All that is seemly, gracious, and 'refined in the life of the English gentry and the English Church was gathered up in the stock from which he sprung, and enfolded the home of his early years. The same influences were round him at the university, where he lived in an atmosphere of noble memories and liberal thought, amid a group of kindred spirits with kindred tastes. In the after years he held aloof from the town with its clamour of jostling life and jarring views, but this from no lack of sympathy with the higher mind of the nation. And the nation in all its ranks delighted to do him honour. His poems became household words, and pension, laureateship, and peerage were the well-merited rewards bestowed on him by the Queen and her statesmen. But all this did not tempt him from his refined retreat, where, amid the cherished sanctities of friendship and home, he unfolded" the white flower of a blameless life." His lines on Hallam are applicable to himself— 66 'High nature amorous of the good, But touch'd with no ascetic gloom; "A love of freedom rarely felt, Of freedom in her regal seat Of England; not the schoolboy heat, 1 It It was natural that this pure, tranquil culture should first reveal itself in the domain of style. was the point in which Tennyson could show his originality as compared with his predecessors. It was his sense of technic that was the distinctive note of his early verse. "Just as Pope gave the finishing artistic touch to the poetry of wit and rhetoric which came in with the Restoration, so Tennyson gave the finishing artistic touch to the romantic poetry that came in with the French ¡ Revolution."2 Few English poets have had so keen 1 1In Memoriam, cix. The quotations from Tennyson are taken from the single volume edition of his collected works, Macmillan & Co., 1893. 2 I think this is a remark of Mr. E. C. Stedman's. |