century as in others, surrounds the marriage tie, and the situation is at once ethically tragic. Lancelot's fidelity to the King jars with his fidelity to Guinevere, and his life is rent to pieces between the two. Both are the deepest things in him, and both are at war in his heart; and the best piece of character-work in the Idylls is the slow delineation of this intimate and tormented strife. He is true to the King and true to the Queen, but his truth to the King makes him shrink from the Queen, and his truth to the Queen makes him shrink from the King. Tennyson puts this terrible positionterrible to the character he represents Lancelot to be— in the two well-known lines

His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.

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The battle in his soul comes to a crisis in the Idyll of Lancelot and Elaine. Arthur asks Lancelot if he will come to the jousts for the Diamond. "No," he replies, for he thinks the Queen wishes him to stay with her. "To blame, my Lord Lancelot," the Queen says, when Arthur is gone. "You must go; our knights and the crowd will murmur if you stay." Are you so wise, my Queen?" answers Lancelot, vext that he must seem to have lied to the King, once it was not so." But he obeys, and on his way to the jousts he meets Elaine, who loves him, and who, being unloved by him, dies of her love. The Queen is jealous, and her suspicion makes Lancelot realise the restlessness and misery of a

life which absolute trust between him and Guinevere can alone make endurable. Moreover, he is wronged by her jealousy, and to be thus wronged in love by one we love, while it deepens love, makes it seem for the time contemptible. He is thought to be untrue when he is conscious he is most true. And he disdains love, life, and all things.

Then the King is sorry that his knight is unable to love-why could he not love this maiden? And the unsuspiciousness of the King makes Lancelot conscious of friendship failed and of honour lost. He is thought to be true when he knows he is most untrue. This is a double torture, and it is finely wrought out by Tennyson. It comes to a point of self-knowledge and selfabasement in his soliloquy, when, leaving the Queen wrathful, and Arthur sorrowing and surprised, and the girl who loved and died for him in her grave, he sits thinking by the river, and wishes that his life had never been. The lines in which he analyses his inmost soul are equally plain and subtle, full of that curious truth with which a man, embittered for the moment, views himself; and as concentrated as if they had been done by Milton's intellectual force. Indeed, some of them are entirely in Milton's manner :

For what am I? What profits it my name

Of greatest knight? I fought for it and have it ;
Pleasure to have it, none; to lose it, pain;
Now grown a part of me: but what use in it?
To make men worse by making my sin known?
Or sin seem less, the sinner seeming great?

Alas for Arthur's greatest knight, a man
Not after Arthur's heart! I needs must break
These bonds that so defame me: not without
She wills it would I, if she will'd it? nay,
Who knows? but if I would not, then may God,
I pray him, send a sudden Angel down

To seize me by the hair and bear me far,

And fling me deep in that forgotten mere,
Among the tumbled fragments of the hills!

It is the commonest cry of weakness in the unhappy hours of passion to ask the gods to work a miracle. But what the will does not will to do the gods leave alone.

And now, remorse, envenomed by love's vexation, grew in the man; and when the quest of the Holy Grail arose, Lancelot, thinking he might get rid of his sin, thinking the miracle had come-his love less dear to him for the moment, because the Queen had been unjust to him-said to himself: "If I can but see this Holy Thing, my sin may be plucked out of my heart." But while he strove, his love awoke again, for not from without but from within is passion quelled; and the strife so deepened that madness came upon him,

And whipt him into waste fields far away.

Afterwards, when he half saw the Holy Grail, it knew that his wrong love was dearer than his desire to be right, and it smote him down. Yet nobleness lived in him, and might have come to flower had he but willed to surrender his love. But how could he surrender it when the surrender meant misery to Guinevere? Was he not bound to be faithful to her, even if he perished

for it eternally? And in that thought, which was of course half made up by his own desire, the personal wrong to Arthur, the still greater wrong to the kingdom and to society which his love was slowly accomplishing, became like vapours in the sun. He ceased to desire freedom from his guilt. And as in all the heat of his feeble remorse and of his search for the Grail, he had never willed, but only wished for righteousness, the failure of the spiritual excitement left him weaker than before, but less repentant. In Pelleas and Ettarre, the Idyll which succeeds the Holy Grail, he has wholly lost his remorse. He is at peace, and has given himself wholly to his love. These are the lines from Pelleas and Ettarre, in which we see the quiet content of accepted guilt:

Not long thereafter from the city gates

Issued Sir Lancelot riding airily,

Warm with a gracious parting from the Queen,
Peace at his heart, and gazing at a star

And marvelling what it was.

But this peaceful pleasure in wrong, when all effort to overcome it is over, does not endure. Love in unrighteousness loses animation at last, and the pleasure of it passes into languor. In the Idyll of The Last Tournament Lancelot presides in Arthur's seat instead of the King, and all the world seems to him lifeless. He has lost all care, even for the laws of chivalry:

Sighing weariedly, as one

Who sits and gazes on a faded fire,

When all the goodlier guests are past away,

Sat their great umpire, looking o'er the lists.
He saw the laws that ruled the tournament

Broken, but spake not.

Nevertheless, long love, in spite of languor, holds him by a thousand ties to the Queen, till she herself, fearful of discovery, bids him go. But to the very close he is loveloyal, courteous, obedient to the woman whom he loved; and when he leaves her he repents and dies. His faithfulness even in false love is reckoned to him for righteousness, or rather, when he ceases to violate his conscience, becomes a root of righteousness in him. This is Tennyson's ethical picture of this tragic situation, and it is done with great poetic insight into the human heart. Moreover (though it is charged throughout with a moral lesson) the artistic representation is, on the whole, the foremost thing.

I may say the same, though not so strongly, of the representation of Guinevere. It is said that Tennyson intended her, in his allegory, to image forth the Heart (or what we mean by that term) in human nature. She certainly does not represent the infinite variety of the human affections. However, by falling short of the allegorical aim of the poet, she gains as a real person. She is a living woman, not an abstraction. But at the same time she is not an interesting woman. She repre

sents a somewhat common type. Her intelligence is of the slightest, and her character has little variety. We infer that she had charm, but it does not appear in the Idylls of the King, save once when she talks with Gareth