ART. VII.-Idylls of the King. By ALFRED TENNYSON, D.C.L., Poet-Laureate. London: E. Moxon and Co., 1859. 8vo.

THE legends of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have always been regarded as one of the very few great epic subjects open to a British poet. Milton balanced it with that of Paradise Lost, before he determined on the choice of the latter. Of late years there has been a great development of the feeling in favour of this subject; although, with the exception of one short poem published by Mr Tennyson, nearly twenty years ago, and a few ballad pieces by Mr W. Morris, nothing of any note until now has been executed in consequence of that feeling.

The reason has, no doubt, been, that the subject is one which is surrounded by difficulties and drawbacks, and that its advantages themselves are of a kind which can be turned to account only by a great poet. To English readers, the Arthurian legends are represented by the collection of Sir Thomas Malory, a work which high authorities have pronounced to be written in finer and purer English than any other, except the translation of the Scriptures. Any poet undertaking the subject would inferentially commit himself to equal or surpass one of the noblest works ever written in our or in any language. The standard of style was thus already fixed. No poet could treat the subject effectually, unless he could do in verse what Sir Thomas Malory had done in prose. From this standard of style we seemed every year to be more widely departing. The over Latinisation of our tongue, which, until lately, had been the sin of scholars, has of recent years extended to even the lowest and least instructed class of writers. But a Latinised vernacular could never have been the poetic medium for the legends of the Round Table. Until the appearance of Mr Tennyson's short specimen of the Arthurian epic in his "Poems," it seemed almost hopeless that we should ever have a style so truly and unaffectedly Saxon as to reinstate the sublime simplicity of the spirit of Arthurian chivalry, as it appears in the medieval romances. Then, again, there was the difficulty as to the poetic form into which these traditions should be cast. There is no epic unity in them collectively. Arthur himself, in all the romances, stands vaguely and loftily in the background. The nobility and prowess of "the blameless King" seem always to be taken for granted. He is simply the looker-on, while his knights, Tristram, Lancelot, and the rest, are proving their chivalry, which they do in a way that leaves them perfectly independent of one another, each having his own story, which, if it connects itself

with the stories of the others, does so, as Southey observed, as one branch of a cactus connects itself with the others, namely, without a pretence of proportion of predominance and subordination. The tone of the traditions is highly epic; the form incorrigibly the reverse.

Furthermore, it seemed very difficult to represent the manners and morals of these heroic, and once exemplary, personages, without either falsifying them or giving offence to modern readers. In the Arthurian romances, love is held as more than half justifying a great deal for which modern ethics make no excuse.

Yet another difficulty was that of coming to a decision as to the point of view from which the stories of the Round Table should be treated. Whether as pure romance, allowing of great latitude to the poet's invention, or as a mass of traditions, corrupted, indeed, and exaggerated into a mythology, but still demanding the adherence of the poet to every detail of incident.

These and other difficulties presented a very formidable front to all who could appreciate them—that is to say, to all who had the slightest chance of making anything out of this magnificent subject. Mr Tennyson has met them deliberately, and it appears to us that he has in each case perceived and done the right thing. He has invented a style which we can unhesitatingly pro- nounce to be the most purely Saxon of modern poetry, and which in prose is probably unequalled in this respect, except in the work of Sir Thomas Malory. Indeed, the resemblance of the style in the work of the old prose writer and the modern poet is very remarkable; and the more so, when we find that the latter has been very little indebted to the former. Mr Tennyson appears, in most cases, to have drawn his materials, not from the work of Malory, but from those original sources, French and Welsh, from which Malory himself drew; and the resemblance of style has probably arisen from the poet's strong instinct of the exclusive propriety of the use of the most primitive intelligible English style to the representation of the most primitive phase of British civilisation. In order that those of our readers who may not be acquainted with the work of Malory may judge for themselves of the resemblance we speak of, we give a short extract :

Then after these quests of Sir Gawaine, of Sir Tor, and of King Pellinore, Merlin fell in a dotage on the damsel that King Pellinore brought to the court with him; and she was one of the damsels of the lake which hight Nimue. But Merlin would let her have no rest, but always he would be with her in every place; and ever she made Merlin good cheer, till she had learned of him all manner of things that she desired, and he was so sore assotted upon her that he might not be from her. So, upon a time, he told unto King Arthur, “That he should not endure long, and that for all his crafts, he should be

put into the earth quick," and so he told the king many things that should befal; but always he warned Arthur to keep well his sword Excalibur, and the scabbard, for he told him how the sword and the scabbard should be stolen by a woman from him that he most trusted. Also he told King Arthur that he would miss him, yet had ye rather than all your lands to have me again. "Ah," said the king, "sith I know of your adventure, purvey for it, and put away by your crafts, that misadventure." "Nay," said Merlin, "it will not be." And he departed from King Arthur. And within a while, the damsel of the lake departed, and Merlin went evermore with her wheresoever she went, and oftentimes Merlin would have had her privily away by his subtle crafts; and then she made him swear that he should never do none enchantment upon her if he would have his will: and so he swore. ... And she was ever passing weary of him, and fain would have been delivered of him; for she was afraid of him because he was a devil's son, and she could not put him away by any means. And so upon a time it happened that Merlin showed her in a rock where there was a great wonder, and wrought by enchantment, which went under a stone. So by her subtle craft and working, she made Merlin to go under that stone to let her witness of the marvels there; but she wrought so there for him, that he never came out, for all the craft that he could do; and so she departed and left Merlin.”

Let us put in immediate juxtaposition with this, a piece, not only of Mr Tennyson's poetry, but of his invention; for the following incident, so admirably in keeping with the legend into which it is introduced, is a pure invention, and has no counterpart of any kind among the ancient romances.

For Arthur, when none knew from whence he came,
Long ere the people chose him for their king,
Roving the trackless realms of Lyonness,
Had found a glen, grey boulder and black tarn.
A horror lived about the tarn, and clave

Like its own mists to all the mountain side:
For here two brothers, one a king, had met
And fought together; but their names were lost.
And each had slain his brother at a blow,
And down they fell, and made the glen abhorr'd;
And there they lay till all their bones were bleach'd,
And lichen'd into colour with the crags;

And one of these, the king, had on a crown
Of diamonds, one in front and four aside.
And Arthur came, and labouring up the pass

All in a misty moonshine, unawares

Had trodden that crown'd skeleton, and the skull
Brake from the nape, and from the skull the crown
Roll'd into light, and turning on its rims

Fled, like a glittering rivulet to the tarn:

And down the shingly scaur he plunged and caught

Difficulties of the Subject.

And set it on his head, and in his heart

Heard murmurs, Lo! thou likewise shalt be king!

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The second difficulty we spoke of-namely, the right choice of a. poetic form-Mr Tennyson has met by at once rejecting all idea of a single epic, and adopting the form of a series of comparatively short pieces, varying from seven hundred to two thousand lines, which, although they are called Idylls, occupy in reality a position something between the idyll, as the phrase is usually understood, and the epic. The tone of these pieces is not idyllic, but purely epic; nor is their range of incident sufficiently narrow to bring them within the idyllic order. The several pieces are connected exactly as the romances (which Malory has run into one) are connected, namely, by the reappearance of the same characters, especially King Arthur himself, who constitutes the ideal standard of purity and honour and prowess, around which all else is grouped. The sequence of these. poems is also regulated by carefully studied contrasts, whereby the idylls become mutually illustrative as much and evidently as if they were separate books of a single poem.

The third difficulty on our list, namely, that of how to treat the moralities of primitive chivalry, is done away with by an admixture of the improbable and supernatural to such an extent, that the interest is removed beyond that immediate human sympathy, the existence of which would have rendered such things objectionable. Some writer has cleverly shown that our famous nursery songs constitute one of the most immoral collections of poetry in existence; but the immorality is so mixed with the marvellous, that it becomes a part thereof, and is perfectly innocuous. It is just so with the "Idylls of the King."

Finally, Mr Tennyson has determined the question of Romance. or Tradition in favour of the former; and he has no doubt done this in accordance with the best light that can be obtained upon the subject. The conclusion leaves him the great advantage of perfect freedom in dealing with his theme; and this freedom, as may be judged from the quotation already given, he has largely and skilfully used. When he has added to or altered a story, he has done so with a mind so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the romances, that we defy any one who is not as learned in the subject as the Laureate himself, to point out the work of the modern artist. If there is one thing we have to regret, it is that the poet has not more freely used the liberty he has assumed. It\ seems to us that in the fine, but somewhat formless story of "Enid," Mr Tennyson has relied too much on the charm which we somehow derive from the mere oddity and exaggeration of these stories in their original forms. Now, to the full effect of

this charm, the excuse of antiquity seems to us to be essential;
and our pleasure much diminishes when we find these peculi-
arities set forth without mitigation in the verse-however noble
-of a modern poet. Let it be understood, however, that this
remark applies in no way to the bulk of this volume, of which
we now proceed to give a more particular account.
Thus commences the first and longest idyll:-

The brave Geraint, a knight of Arthur's court,
A tributary prince of Devon, one

Of that great order of the Table Round,

Had wedded Enid, Yniol's only child,

And loved her as he loved the light of heaven.
And as the light of heaven varies, now

At sunrise, now at sunset, now by night
With moon and trembling stars, so loved Geraint
To make her beauty vary day by day,

In crimsons, and in purples, and in gems.
And Enid, but to please her husband's eye,
Who first had found and loved her in a state
Of ruined fortunes, daily fronted him

In some fresh splendour; and the queen herself,
Grateful to Prince Geraint for service done,
Loved her, and often with her own white hands
Arrang'd and deck'd her, as the loveliest,
Next after her own self, in all the court:
And Enid loved the queen, and with true heart
Adored her, as the stateliest, and the best,
And loveliest of all women upon earth.
And seeing them so tender and so close,
Long in their common love rejoiced Geraint.
But when a rumour rose about the queen,
Touching her guilty love for Lancelot,

Tho' yet there lived no proof, nor yet was heard
The world's loud whisper breaking into storm,
No less Geraint believed it; and there fell

A horror on him, lest his gentle wife,
Thro' that great tenderness for Guinevere,
Had suffered, or should suffer, any taint
In nature.

So, making pretence that his princedom needed his care, Geraint obtained permission from the king to withdraw from court. Once with Enid, in his own land,

Thinking that if ever yet was wife

True to her lord, mine shall be so to me,
He compass'd her with sweet observances
And worship, never leaving her, and grew
Forgetful of his promise to the king,