to his attempt to give it a humorous turn. Lynette in Malory's hands is entirely in earnest, and her character is throughout consistent. She repents of her abuse, but she has no humour, and she has no delicate sentiment. But in Tennyson's hands we cannot quite tell whether she is in earnest or not, and what humour there is attempted is like that of an undergraduate.* Lynette, overdone in this way, is more a study of the saucy type of woman than a real Moreover, when Tennyson wants to improve her, and shows fineness of nature in her, he divides her from herself. She becomes full of sentiment, and when she sings those charming little songs which one by one woman. *It is curious that a poet, whose humour is so excellent in The Northern Farmer, and the other dialect poems, should fail so completely when he tries to be humorous in the Idylls of the King and in the Dramas. When, for example, Geraint is irritated by the villagers who answer all his questions by talking of the knight who calis himself the Sparrow-hawk, he cries: A thousand pips eat up your sparrow-hawk! Tits, wrens, and all wing'd nothings peck him dead! Tennyson means him to be spleenfully humorous, and he is only absurd. When in the next two lines he leaves humour alone, he is excellent. Geraint cries out : Ye think the rustic cackle of your bourg The murmur of the world! What is it to me? Then he tries to be humorous again : O wretched set of sparrows, one and all, That pipe of nothing but of sparrow-hawks! This is ridiculous on the lips of a stately knight. The only explanation I can make is that the solemn vehicle of heroic blank verse, and especially of blank verse so elaborate and academic as that of the Idylls of the King, is wholly unfitted for the expression of humour. embody the change of her view of Gareth, they are over-delicate for her previous character. We cannot fit O trefoil, sparkling on the rainy plain, O rainbow with three colours after rain, Shine sweetly thrice my love has smiled on me, with a voice like this: Dish-washer and broach-turner, loon !—to me Malory does not make that mistake. Lynette is one woman in his hands. In Tennyson she is two, and the two do not agree. I cannot make the same criticism with regard to Enid, whose character fills the next two Idylls, The Marriage of Geraint and Geraint and Enid. Enid is one woman, both as girl and wife. As Lynette is the type of petulance, so Enid is the type of patience. She is Tennyson's Griselda. Lynette is audacious and free of tongue. Enid is silent in endurance of wrong. She is silent also when she ought to speak. She is afraid to blame Geraint for his sloth, because she knows he is slothful from love of her. And her fear, falling in with Geraint's suspiciousness, makes the trouble of the piece. Patience, when it is accompanied by fear or over-fancy, is turned from doing good to doing wrong. But, independent of this evil side of patience, Tennyson seems to like this kind of womanhood. Of all his women, Enid is the most carefully drawn, the most affectionate. She is gracious, but she is one of those women who do a great Ideal of harm to men. The defects of their patience make in men tyranny and selfishness, jealous overbearing and ugly suspicion. In bad men these evils grow worse, till the man turns into a brute. In a suspicious but noble-hearted man as Geraint originally was, they produce, and often with startling suddenness, detestable conditions of mind and life, out of which men like Geraint, being good at root, are shocked back again into self-knowledge and repentance. This effect, however, is overdone by Tennyson. It would be difficult to find, outside of bad men, any one whose conduct is made more odious than Geraint's. Tennyson could not have recognised how far apart he wanders from what we call honour, nor do I think that his conduct is sufficiently motived from the point of view of art. Only the madness of jealousy, and not mere suspicion, is enough to partly excuse all he thought and all he did. He is not even represented as having sufficient cause for his conduct. He is expressly said not to believe in Enid's loss of honour. Moreover, from the very beginning he is not quite a gentleman. A few days. before his marriage, he doubts Enid's affection for him; he wishes to prove her obedience, to test whether it is love for him she has, or desire for the splendours of a Court. If she will at a word, without reason given, come in her shabby dress to Court, then he will rest, fixed in her faith. What sort of a man is this? He, at least, does not know what love means; lost in himself, in vanity and suspicion. There is nothing of this suspicion in the original story. Geraint there is, like Leontes, suddenly attacked by jealousy and its special anger when he hears his wife say that he is not the man he was. And this furious jealousy motives his rude conduct. Jealousy maddens, and the Welsh writer, careful for his hero's repute, expressly says that for the time he was insane. But Tennyson does not make Geraint jealous in this way, nor put him into the madness of jealousy. He is only suspicious and angry, and his conduct to Enid, far worse than it is in the original, has not cause enough at the back of it to make it possible. The position is overdone. Nor does Tennyson's short introduction to the second part in Geraint and Enid O purblind race of miserable men, give a sufficient reason for the meanness of Geraint. Many men, indeed, lose the use of life in that fashion, but if they are of noble nature, as Geraint is represented at first, they do not fall so low as he, they do not quite dishonour their original character, they do not lose all chivalry to a woman. Or if they do, they do it because they believe their wife to be utterly false to them. This cause is excluded by Tennyson. Geraint falls too low, and his fall has not sufficient motive. Art has failed Tennyson. When the rumour about the Queen and Lancelot comes to Geraint's ear, he thinks that his wife may suffer taint because she is the Queen's friend, and he removes her from Court. Then he forgets all his duty and his fame in uxorious love of her. He fights no more; he lets his province fall into confusion. This is natural enough, and though he is suspicious and feeble, he has not yet altogether lost gentlehood. Men laugh at him for his weakness. His wife saddens, and seeing her sad, his base suspicion that she is tainted deepens. He hears her murmuring one morning that she is no true wife, and leaps at once to the conclusion that she is not faithful in thought to him, bursts out into a reckless passion, and bids her ride into the wilderness with him-utterly careless of her, careful only for himself. When he meets the first three bandits, and she warns him, he cries: "If I fall, cleave to the better man -an odious insult. In the midst of all this wrath, he eats like a man who has no trouble, and jokes at the mowers whom he has deprived of their dinner. When Limours (Enid's old lover) comes into the inn, and, seeing Enid alone, asks leave to speak to her, Geraint answers: My free leave, Get her to speak; she doth not speak to me. This is partly in the original, but what follows is not. While Enid sits in the room, Limours drinks and jests and tells loose tales. Geraint is pleased, and bursts into laughter! Then it is that he gives Limours leave to tell |