CHAPTER XII

IDYLLS OF THE KING

THE Idylls of the King are twelve in number, but they form one work. They do not indeed form a continuous narrative; they are scenes: but they are scenes SO selected and arranged that they give the result of a consecutive and developed story.

The story, as every one knows, is that of, or out of, the Arthurian Romance. But whereas the Arthurian Romance was, or had become, a sort of wilderness forest jungle, with tracts beautiful and tracts repulsive, tracts salubrious and tracts malarious, this is an ordered plantation, bright or solemn, exhilarating or terrible, but everywhere (quite everywhere, I trust) wholesome. <It is, from the literary point of view, a restoration, not an original invention; but it is in a deeper sense a restoration, The old Romance was in its genesis idealistic. Arthur and Chivalry were its roots-its inspiring themes. But it had forgotten itself and its own meaning, and the ideal story had become corrupted by trivial and impure accretions. In this sense the Idylls are a restoration, and indeed more than a restoration. In them the Arthurian Romance is brought back and carried farther into the ideal, and the

scenes and workings of terrible evil which it includes do not mar the ideal, but stand out in their native blackness in the light of that ideal.>

The reader is of course always to remember that he is reading a story which, however it may have been believed by those who first framed it, he does not pretend to believe in his understanding; not, that is to say, as he might a novel, for instance, of which he feels that the elements are credible though the story is fictitious. In this romance the elements, many of them, are of course not credible. The appeal, in such, is to his imagination, that through its stimulation the impression of the ideal elements of the story upon his spiritual perception may be intensified. For the appeal is to the spiritual. The Idylls are a vision of kingship, of chivalry, of loyalty, of womanhood, and of the passion of purity; this, and a wail at the desecration of these and the fruits of that desecration.

In what has just been said it is assumed that the presence of the fictitious supernatural in the Idylls is justifiable. Of this, however, I am not sure. The poet himself seems to be a little apologetic in the matter, for more than once he makes a quoted narrator responsible for the wonder tale. I myself remember feeling, when The Holy Grail was published, as if in the midst of its splendour, there was a sense of glamour about it. I should think that Tennyson would have been competent to make a very visional romance out of the elements of possible reality in the Arthurian story.

In connection with this matter, one could wish that the poet had changed at least the name of Merlin's endowments. Magic, whether thought of as a reality

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or a delusion, is spiritually unclean, and it is, moreover, discordant with most of the supposed supernatural through these legends, which is Christian in its kinship. Even where the wonders are less than Christian, they are higher, more spiritual, than “ magic suggests. The three queens, for example, belong to a sort of heavenly fairyland and not to the region. of magic, as, at all events, European ears understand the term. The conscience of one's imagination would have been more at peace had the term been absent.

The poems are called Idylls of the King. They might have been called Idealised Scenes from the Arthurian Romance, or The Tragedy of Queen Guinevere; or The Treason of the loyal Lancelot, and what came of it; or The Flesh and the Spirit, as some one has half suggested; or The Conscience and the Senses, as Tennyson himself has half suggested. In any case it is a story of conflict between good and evil, of tragedy and failure. But by it the pure are purified, the holy are made to hunger and thirst after righteousness. The last two of the above titles might suggest that the Idylls have to be studied as an allegory. This I do not mean to imply; I do not think that they should be so regarded. The Arthurian story is a legend, growing doubtless out of history. That its development was influenced by the sense of likeness, of type, by the allegorising tendency, is more than likely, and that Tennyson in the selection and manipulation of his materials was similarly affected is probable. But this is the extent of the matter, I think. To be sure, in his dedicatory poem to the Queen, he says

"Accept this old imperfect tale,

New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul

Rather than that gray king."

But by this I understand him to mean that he was writing not about a mere king and his knights, but about a king who was to his knights

"As is the conscience of a saint

Among his warring senses,"

and that while his subject was legendary, his interest in it was on account of the moral significance contained in or able to be infused into it. I think that those who speak of the Idylls as an allegory, would find themselves hard pressed if they were called upon to assign the significance of the particular characters and incidents contained and recorded in the poems.

The

The first idyll, The Coming of Arthur, sets before us an old order broken up and passing away. Roman power had collapsed; many a petty king had seized upon the fragments of their dominion, and

"Ever waging war

Each upon other, wasted all the land."

To these were added the heathen hosts who "swarmed overseas and harried what was left. In vain

Aurelius and Uther fought and died.

strong for them

Chaos was too

"And so there grew great tracts of wilderness,
Wherein the beast was ever more and more,

But man was less and less."

Upon this ruin of a departed order enters Arthur, of mysterious origin, brought by Merlin, the minister of

the supernatural, and approven king by miracle. Beside him stand Merlin, his knights, and Lancelot, sworn friend and chief of knights. The binding of his knights to him was with all solemnity

"Then the king in low deep tones,

And simple words of great authority,

Bound them by so strait vows to his own self,
That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some
Were pale as at the passing of a ghost,

Some flush'd, and others dazed, as one who wakes
Half-blinded at the coming of a light."

The binding of Lancelot to him was with all solemnity and tenderness

"Thou dost not doubt me king,

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So well thine arm hath wrought for me to-day.'
'Sir and my liege,' he cried, the fire of God
Descends upon thee in the battle-field:

I know thee for my king!' Whereat the two,
For each had warded either in the fight,
Sware on the field of death a deathless love.
And Arthur said, 'Man's word is God in man :
Let chance what will, I trust thee to the death.'"

Then comes Guinevere as queen, bound also with solemnity.

"And Arthur said, 'Behold, thy doom is mine.
Let chance what will, I love thee to the death!'
To whom the queen replied with drooping eyes,
'King and my lord, I love thee to the death!'"

So the new order was established

"And Arthur and his knighthood for a space

Were all one will, and through that strength the king
Drew in the petty princedoms under him,

Fought, and in twelve great battles overcame

The heathen hordes, and made a realm and reigned.'