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and beauty making all their atmosphere-of poems like

A voice by the cedar tree,

or, still more varied in interwoven changes of feeling, each change it makes with its own metrical form-that high canzone of enchanted love

I have led her home, my love, my only friend.

But why should I say more? It is impossible to criticise these things, to explain why they or the Garden Song are beautiful, or why the poem of the broken heart, "O that 'twere possible," reaches in simplicity those depths of sorrow where beauty sits in the garb of pity and subdues the soul.

IN

CHAPTER X

IDYLLS OF THE KING

N the Idylls of the King Tennyson has worked up into a whole the ancient story of Arthur, a story which is at least a thousand years old. How it first arose none can tell. Whether it has any historical basis, it is also impossible to decide. It is supposed that there was an historical Arthur who fought twelve great battles with the English heathen, and who had many hero-chieftains under his sway and in his devotion, but the more we look at him the more his figure recedes into the mist of legend or of myth. Even the country where he reigned, and the lands over which his wars were waged, are not known to us. Some scholars make him a warrior of Southern Britain. Others place him in the North, beyond the Border, and he fights with the Saxon chiefs from Dumbarton to the eastern coast, beating them back in twelve great battles. Out of the dim vapour of ancientry these two great figures rise, and the name of Arthur alone mingles them into one. Tennyson takes the first tradition, and it is the one that has the most prevailed in literature.

It is not, however, with an historical, but with a mythical Arthur that we have to deal, and we

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need not be forced to surrender the wild island of Tintagil, the mystic expanse of Lyonnesse, the rock of Glastonbury rising from its marshes, and the lovely meadows round Caerleon upon Usk. There is our romantic country; there the legendary land where Arthur was born; there the valley of Avalon where he took refuge when wounded to the death. There is not one touch of the real world in all the scenery that Tennyson invents in his poem. It belongs throughout to that country which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, but which the heart of man has imagined. It is more than invented landscape. It often breathes the atmosphere of the fairy lands, and of those dreams which open the spaceless realms beyond our senses. It seems to be born before the sight and then to die and be born in another form-changing, yet unchanged. No mortal hands have built the city of Arthur and his palace. It is no land dwelt in by bold bad men we see, when Arthur rides through the mountains and finds the diamonds; when Geraint and Enid go through the green gloom of the wood; when Galahad rides over the black swamp, leaping from bridge to bridge till he sail to the spiritual city; when Lancelot drives through the storm to the enchanted towers of Carbonek seven days across the sea. Nor is the Nature actual Nature, but that which is seen

From magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.

And when we can disburden ourselves of the ethics and allegory, the personages are still as dreamlike as the landscape, old as the seas that roll over

Lyonnesse, and yet young for ever in imagination. In our everyday world the Arthur and Guinevere of Romance, Lancelot and the Lady of the Lake, Gawain and Galahad, Percivale and Elaine are unreal shapes; yet how real they are in a better world! The interests of the world we call real fade and die, our children will not care for them; for half of them, for those that are not founded on love, we do not care ourselves; but the interests of romance are eternal. They blossom into a new spring year by year, and we take more thought for the fates of Lancelot and Guinevere than we do for what the Swede intends or what the French. For "fable is Love's world," and the great myths and their figures are the dear inhabitants of the heart of man. Centuries have been stirred and thrilled by Arthur and his knights. England, France, Germany, and Italy have awakened into creation at their Celtic touch; and poetry, painting, sculpture, and music have replied to their enchantment. From Cornwall or the North the story got to Wales; from Wales it fled to Brittany. From Brittany it returned to Wales and crossed the March into England in the Brut of Layamon, the first English poem of the imagination after the Conquest. But before that time, it had got from Brittany into France, and from France in French to England, where prose tales in Latin and poems in English and in Norman French sent it far and wide. Chaucer owned its power; Malory embodied it; Spenser seized it; Milton thought of it as an epic; Dryden considered it; Wordsworth touched it; Tennyson took up its lyre again; Morris and Swinburne and Arnold entered into its

enchanted land. But it was characteristic of Tennyson's steadiness of temper and fulness of thought that he should try to make his form of it complete and new-created. At first it moved him only as romance, and we have seen how his youth played with it in The Lady of Shalott, in Sir Galahad, and in the ride of Lancelot and Guinevere through woods of love and spring. Then in the Morte d'Arthur the story was fitted in 1842 by certain modern touches to modern life, yet these had to be explained by the prologue and epilogue. In that poem itself the tale was chief; it follows the old romance and breathes its air.

In 1842, when the Morte d'Arthur appeared, Tennyson does not seem to have thought of making the story allegorical. I do not even think that when the first four Idylls were published-Geraint and Enid; Merlin and Vivien; Lancelot and Elaine; and Guinevere-Tennyson wrote them with a set allegorical intention. They are only modernised by being made a representation of true love and false love. Vivien the harlot is set over against the tender innocence of Elaine. Enid, the true wife, is opposed to Guinevere who has been untrue. The men also represent different phases of love as modern as they are ancient. Geraint and Merlin, Lancelot and Arthur, have each their distinct lesson-beyond the storyto modern life. They have not yet become allegorical, and even the lesson, the ethical aim, is as yet subordinate to the story. True conduct, as is just in art, is indirectly, not directly taught.

But when we come to 1870-to the volume which began with The Coming of Arthur-the inner

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