straight and that which is wanting cannot be numbered."1 The moral of the whole matter seems summed up in this conclusion: "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry." 2 Something like this is the doom of Merlin, when emerging from his great melancholy, and letting "his wisdom go for ease of heart,”3 he is enslaved, as though by the spells of a nautch-girl, to the charm "Of woven paces and of waving hands." "4 He who placed use before fame, and knew so well how to estimate fame at its true worth as "ampler means to serve mankind," 5 is now deprived of both : "Lost to life and use and name and fame." 6 Reason is captive in the toils of sensuality and can no longer help the King. And meanwhile the lawless passion of the great knight, which is cause of all the disasters, brings himself small happiness or comfort. He cannot leave his love, but he has lost his joy in it. He is none the sleeker for sinning “on such heights.” 7 Vivien notes how he is "goodly" but "gaunt." s Tristram has seen him "wan enow to make the worlding doubt if Guinevere have ever yielded him her grace. 1 Ecclesiastes, i. 15. 3 Merlin and Vivien, 890. 2 Ibid. viii. 15. 4 Ibid. 966, and passim. 8 Merlin and Vivien, 101. 9 Last Tournament, 560. 8 "The great and guilty love he bare the Queen, Had marr'd his face, and mark'd it ere his time." " 1 Like the poet in Nathaniel Hawthorne's allegory of the Great Stone Face, his lineaments give no perfect rendering of the highest. His peace is gone. "His mood was often like a fiend, and rose He is like the demoniac, "driven of the devil into the wilderness," and just as at the tournament, his party are Knights of utmost North and West, Lords of waste marches, kings of desolate isles,” 3 so in his life he leaves the bounteous order of the Table for the dismal fellowship of the desert. And faithless to the King, how can Guinevere and her lover be secure even of their faith to each · other? Suspicion, jealousy, recrimination throw The great tourna their shadows between them. ment-prize of Arthur's reign is lost to the Queen, as she drops into the waves the glorious diamonds that might have been her second crown. The great life-prize that might have been Lancelot's diamond crown, the love of the lily maid of Astolat, is lost to him; he, too, as it were, drops it in the stream and only feels its worth when it is gone. And the pity of it is, that in a manner she was destined to be his mate. Arthur tells him that this maiden was "shaped, it seems, by God for 1 Lancelot and Elaine, 244. 2 Ibid. 250. 3 Ibid. 524. as her thee alone." 1 And there is another subtle suggestion of her fitness for his deepest needs. When we think of the lily in the hand of the lily maid, either as her body comes sailing in the barge or image is graven on her tomb, we cannot but recall the last wavering struggle in Lancelot's mind between the richer bloom of Guinevere's beauty and the stainless white of virgin holiness. "Last night methought I saw That maiden Saint who stands with lily in hand Flow'd from the spiritual lily that she held." 2 The maid of Astolat seems created to fulfil these higher longings that rise in dreams to the Madonna. But the choice is already made and the guilt already incurred. Yet it must be remembered that that guilt itself has its source in something the reverse of vulgar and coarse. It originates in the innocent worship of the Queen, conceived as an end in itself and without ulterior aim, in which Lancelot was followed by some few young knights. And this love of Guinevere the wife of Arthur, "beyond all hopes of gaining," is like the disinterested love of beauty, of sense idealised, which is the soul of Art. I think we may understand the story of Lancelot, if we remember the complaint of Burns that it was the light from heaven that led him astray. This is the danger of the poet, of the imaginative man, who reaches at spirit through the 2 Balin and Balan, 255. 1 Lancelot and Elaine, 1355. 3 Merlin and Vivien, 23. : veil, and is the middle term between Soul and Sense he will always run the risk of sacrificing the former to the latter, and then he will miss the highest human love as well. But when "The passionate heart of the poet is whirl'd into folly and vice," 1 or when Art forgets its function in its material, it is tragically sad just because it is the grand apostasy. Lancelot, like Arthur himself, is a nursling of the great deep, and has been claimed by its powers. His childhood, if not his birth, has the halo of the superhuman, and she who keeps watch over the King has taken Lancelot too for her own. Him, "the Lady of the Lake Caught from his mother's arms-the wondrous one Heard on the winding waters, eve and morn Hence his style, Lancelot of the Lake, and hence his moan "Mine own name shames me, seeming a reproach.” 3 But he cannot belie his breeding, and even when false to the ideal, he passionately yearns for it in his heart, and will not rest from straining at his chains. 1 Maud, Part I. IV. vii. 2 Lancelot and Elaine, 1393. 3 Ibid. 1392. CHAPTER IX THE IDYLLS AS A SERIES (CONTINUED) WE have thus got to a stage when the first enthusiasm for the Order is dead, when the promise it held out of reconciling all parts of man's life has been falsified, when reason no longer works on its behalf, and treasons of imagination and sense are committed against its majesty. And just at this point the Holy Grail appears in the haunts of men and the fellowship is broken in the mystic quest. What is the precise meaning of the sacred vessel in Tennyson's poem? In the first place, it is no longer to be interpreted in any narrower, doctrinal sense, such as it may at one time have possessed. It is separated from its medieval paraphernalia, and is placed in a different category, for example, from the bleeding spear that smote the side of Christ. The latter is left associated with King Pellam and his superstitions, and is somewhat contemptuously described as a lance "point-painted red,"1 but the Grail is only mentioned with reverence and awe. And in the same spirit the legend of it is reduced 1 Balin and Balan, 406. |