an ideal life absurb. They had been sensual, now they have become cynical. Vivien, the lust of the flesh, the enjoyment of the senses alone, is full mistress of the world. Ettarre represents this society; Pelleas represents its deadly influence on an innocent heart that believes in love, purity, and truth, and their embodiment in the King. He finds a world, in which the King is thought to be a fool, purity ridiculous, love a lust, and the realm of the senses the only realm. Thrown suddenly and unprepared into this society, the full force of disillusion struck on Pelleas like a storm and sank him in the seas. He is the later Gareth of The Idylls. Frank, faithful, loving, innocent, he steps into life; but where Gareth is victor, he is victim. The conditions of society

into which Gareth enters are all on his side. He finds life as beautiful and true as he imagined it to be. The conditions of society into which Pelleas enters are all against him. He finds life the exact contrary of all he imagined it to be.

Gareth's history, the history of Pelleas, are equally common stories. When, by long neglect, by long indulgence, a base society is made, the souls and bodies of far more than half of the innocent children sent into the world are murdered. When society is just and pure, simple and loving beautiful things, the children are destined to a noble happiness. Those who make a world of which the judgment of the pessimist is true, are the worst of criminals. Its children, for the most part disillusioned like Pelleas, are driven into madness

or cynicism. And cynicism, or rather recklessness of everything but of present excitement which is the forerunner of cynicism, is what Tennyson sketches in Pelleas and Ettarre. Ettarre and her flock of girls laugh at the innocence and the love of Pelleas. A grizzled knight, they say, who knew the fashion of the world were a better companion than this baby-" raw, yet so stale." Ettarre promises him her love that he may win the prize. for her and give her fame, and when she has got her jewelled circlet, flings his love away, flings a taunt at Guinevere, and leaves Pelleas outside her gates to cool his romance. She is the great lady of a debased society in which everything ideal is only matter of mockery. Such a society lives on the very marge of the incoming tide of weariness. It only continues to live by the fierceness of its strife to gain, hour by hour, enough of light or cruel amusement to keep that tide at bay. When Pelleas will not cease to believe in Ettarre, she is bored to death, and this turns to wrath, and wrath to hate; and when he endures all, she pushes him out of doors in bonds. When he goes, for a moment she knows herself. "He is not of my kind. He could not love me did he know me well." But the momentary touch of conscience fails when Gawain comes to see her, bringing merriment and the manners of the court with him, and she is guilty at once with him. This woman is Tennyson's ethical warning against a loose and luxury-bitten society, and, as ethics, it is well enough expressed. But to bind up these modern warnings with a mediæval

tale is to render either the tale or the warnings feeble. The naturalism of the story suffers. The allegory eats it up. And the allegory suffers, for the ancient story does not carry it.

Moreover the whole Idyll is too plainly a stop-gap, a transition tale inserted to represent the kind of society which intervened between the religious excitement of The Holy Grail and the cynical languor of The Last Tournament. It does not seem to have naturally grown out of Tennyson's original conception. I conjecture

this, because there is little in it of the passion of an artist. The shaping of the poem is not fully imaginative, the work of it seems jaded, and even the verse is inferior to that of the other Idylls. When Tennyson attempts to rise into passionate expression, as when Pelleas turns and shrieks his curse at Ettarre and her harlot towers, he becomes only violent without power. Even the natural description suffers from the artist's apparent want of interest in his conception. That vivid sketch, at the beginning, of the wood and of the bracken burn⚫ing round it in the sunlight, cannot keep up its speed and fire to the end. Either the poet's memory of what he saw played him false, or he did not see the thing with his usual clearness. It is like a studio-picture, not like one painted in the open air. Nor is there a single piece of noble or passionate writing in the whole of it, save at the very end, when Pelleas breaks into the hall of Arthur swordless, and his ruined life upon his face, and will not speak to the Queen when she speaks to him.

But Pelleas lifted up an eye so fierce

She quail'd; and he, hissing “I have no sword,"
Sprang from the door into the dark. The Queen
Look'd hard upon her lover, he on her;

And each foresaw the dolorous day to be;
And all talk died, as in a grove all song
Beneath the shadow of some bird of prey;
Then a long silence came upon the hall,

And Modred thought, "The time is hard at hand."

That is finely done; there is more of gloom and coming woe in it than in all the cursing of Pelleas. But it is alone; it is the only real good piece of art in this, the poorest of all the Idylls.

The Last Tournament is more a work of art than Pelleas and Ettarre, though it is by no means up to the level, even in form, of many of the other Idylls. It also, like its predecessor, has the air of being an afterthought, of something inserted to point a moral, not to adorn the tale. Since the whole poem is a moral poem, we have no right to object that this portion of it points a moral; but we have a right to ask that it should seem a natural branch of the whole tree. Such a vital connection does exist in the first part; but the second part, the story of Tristram, is not much more than a graft, and far too plainly a graft. Tristram and his story is scarcely ever alluded to in the rest of the Idylls: he has nothing to do with the Tennysonian movement of the piece, and his story, thus foisted in at the end, is nothing more than an illustration of adultery. The form of the Idyll is

spoiled, and we are forced to place it on the lower plane, along with Pelleas and Ettarre.

The time of the year in the preceding Idyll is full summer, and this represents, in Tennyson's way, the full flowering of the brutal society which he describes. But the season in which the last tournament is held is that of departing autumn-grey skies, wet winds, and all the woods yellowing to their fall. This also is Nature's reflection of the catastrophe in the Idyll. Arthur knows, when the tale is done, the guilt of Guinevere; and Lancelot and all his kin are finally divided from the King. Meantime we are first shown the further degradation of the society drawn in Pelleas and Ettarre. The story of this social picture is well introduced. The tale is told of Lancelot and Arthur riding through a mountain-pass and hearing a child wail :

A stump of oak half-dead,

From roots like some black coil of carven snakes,
Clutch'd at the crag, and started thro' mid-air

Bearing an eagle's nest : and thro' the tree

Rush'd ever a rainy wind, and thro' the wind
Pierced ever a child's cry.

And Lancelot climbed for the child, and round its throat lay a ruby carcanet which, when the child died, the Queen bade be tourneyed for. The purest knight, she said, should win for the purest maiden the jewels of this dead innocence. Hence the tournament is called The Tournament of the Dead Innocence by a court to which innocence is unknown. The prize is won by Tristram,