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 represents 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

on the hillside. She is stately and lovely, courteous, eager to please, capable of a great passion, and, in this Idyll, of a great repentance; but this is nothing extraordinary. Such a woman may be found anywhere. There is nothing especially creative in Tennyson's conception. She is a Queen, but not a queen in poetry.

Young, she threw herself recklessly into her love. In after years she loved on, but with a prudence for which Lancelot half reproaches her. She admires her husband, but the reasons for which she admires him are, she thinks, reasons why she should not love him; and she is cool and still enough—in an hour when passion is in abeyance to contrast him in Lancelot's presence with Lancelot; and to analyse why she came to love Lancelot more than Arthur, as if it were an intellectual inquiry. This, too, is essentially usual, and her passion. has little to separate her from the rest of her sex into an individual interest, such as Browning could not have failed to give to her. The central passage of her delineation is in Lancelot and Elaine. Tennyson marks it as important, for he quotes a thought from it in the last speech of Guinevere after her parting from the Kingthat phrase about light and colour. Lancelot asks if Arthur has said aught.

She broke into a little scornful laugh :
"Arthur, my lord, Arthur, the faultless King,
That passionate perfection, my good lord-
But who can gaze upon the sun in heaven?
He never spake word of reproach to me,
He never had a glimpse of mine untruth,

He cares not for me: only here to-day

There gleam'd a vague suspicion in his eyes :
Some meddling rogue has tamper'd with him-else
Rapt in this fancy of his Table Round,

And swearing men to vows impossible,

To make them like himself: but, friend, to me
He is all fault who hath no fault at all:

For who loves me must have a touch of earth;
The low sun makes the colour : I am yours,

Not Arthur's, as ye know, save by the bond."

She stands forth then-settled down in the wrong, and thinking herself right. In the same Idyll jealousy comes upon her. In her jealousy she is still the ordinary woman. It is true that a woman does not show, while she is jealous, variety of character. Jealousy eats up all other feelings and interests. But if she be a woman of intellect, power, or variety, what she says in her jealousy since it is said in the very hell of passion -will at least display shreds of these qualities. Guinevere is without them. That which Tennyson makes her say in the passage beginning

It may be I am quicker of belief

Than you believe me, Lancelot of the Lake,

has not sufficient strength for the situation. It may be that Tennyson desired to run the character on very simple lines, but, if so, the simplicity should have been either forcible or pathetic. It is neither it is somewhat commonplace. It may be, he thought that to keep her the great lady he was bound to subdue her to this moderated tone, under which she is supposed to veil

her wrath. But the passion does not appear under the phrases the tongues of flame do not lick upwards through the crust. It is worth while to read the scene between Cleopatra and the messenger who tells her that Anthony is married to Octavia, and contrast it with this passage of Tennyson's. Cleopatra is furious with jealousy; she is the passion itself, but in the very heat of it, what imagination, what power, what intellect dazzle from her like lightnings! The myriad variety of the woman emerges through the dominant passion.

After this jealousy-being convinced that it was baseless-she, like Lancelot, settles down into the pleasant peacefulness of accepted wrong; but as this peacefulness does not last with Lancelot, so it does not last with Guinevere, and Tennyson tells, and excellently, of the waking of her conscience. When the moral conduct of life, when the great sanctions of morality are to be represented, Tennyson impassionates them and lifts them into poetry. This is one of his greatest powers. He cannot draw the passions themselves or their working with the excellence of the great masters, but he does draw with a level power the moral exaltation which follows on noble passions nobly felt, or the moral depression which follows when they begin to feel themselves ignoble. Henceforth

the Powers that tend the soul,

To help it from the death that cannot die,
And save it even in extremes, began

To vex and plague her.