Alfred Tennyson Part 9

The first four Idylls of the King were prepared for publication in the spring of 1859; while Tennyson was at work also on Pelleas and Ettarre, and the Tristram cycle. In autumn he went on a tour to Lisbon with Mr F. T. Palgrave and Mr Craufurd Grove. Returning, he fell eagerly to reading an early copy of Darwin's Origin of Species, the crown of his own early speculations on the theory of evolution.

"Your theory does not make against Christianity?" he asked Darwin later (1868), who replied, "No, certainly not." But Darwin has stated the waverings of his own mind in contact with a topic too high for a priori reasoning, and only to be approached, if at all, on the strength of the scientific method applied to facts which science, so far, neglects, or denies, or "explains away," rather than explains.

The Idylls, unlike Maud, were well received by the press, better by the public, and best of all by friends like Thackeray, the Duke of Argyll, the Master of Balliol, and Clough, while Ruskin showed some reserve. The letter from Thackeray I cannot deny myself the pleasure of citing from the Biography: it was written "in an ardour of claret and grat.i.tude," but posted some six weeks later:-

FOLKESTONE, September.

36 ONSLOW SQUARE, October.

My Dear Old Alfred,--I owe you a letter of happiness and thanks.

Sir, about three weeks ago, when I was ill in bed, I read the Idylls of the King, and I thought, "Oh, I must write to him now, for this pleasure, this delight, this splendour of happiness which I have been enjoying." But I should have blotted the sheets, 'tis ill writing on one's back. The letter full of grat.i.tude never went as far as the post-office, and how comes it now?

D'abord, a bottle of claret. (The landlord of the hotel asked me down to the cellar and treated me.) Then afterwards sitting here, an old magazine, Fraser's Magazine, 1850, and I come on a poem out of The Princess which says, "I hear the horns of Elfland blowing, blowing,"--no, it's "the horns of Elfland faintly blowing" (I have been into my bedroom to fetch my pen and it has made that blot), and, reading the lines, which only one man in the world could write, I thought about the other horns of Elfland blowing in full strength, and Arthur in gold armour, and Guinevere in gold hair, and all those knights and heroes and beauties and purple landscapes and misty gray lakes in which you have made me live. They seem like facts to me, since about three weeks ago (three weeks or a month was it?) when I read the book. It is on the table yonder, and I don't like, somehow, to disturb it, but the delight and grat.i.tude! You have made me as happy as I was as a child with the Arabian Nights,--every step I have walked in Elfland has been a sort of Paradise to me. (The landlord gave TWO bottles of his claret and I think I drank the most) and here I have been lying back in the chair and thinking of those delightful Idylls, my thoughts being turned to you: what could I do but be grateful to that surprising genius which has made me so happy? Do you understand that what I mean is all true, and that I should break out were you sitting opposite with a pipe in your mouth? Gold and purple and diamonds, I say, gentlemen, and glory and love and honour, and if you haven't given me all these why should I be in such an ardour of grat.i.tude? But I have had out of that dear book the greatest delight that has ever come to me since I was a young man; to write and think about it makes me almost young, and this I suppose is what I'm doing, like an after-dinner speech.

P.S.--I thought the "Grandmother" quite as fine. How can you at 50 be doing things as well as at 35?

October 16th.--(I should think six weeks after the writing of the above.)

The rhapsody of grat.i.tude was never sent, and for a peculiar reason: just about the time of writing I came to an arrangement with Smith & Elder to edit their new magazine, and to have a contribution from T.

was the publishers' and editor's highest ambition. But to ask a man for a favour, and to praise and bow down before him in the same page, seemed to be so like hypocrisy, that I held my hand, and left this note in my desk, where it has been lying during a little French- Italian-Swiss tour which my girls and their papa have been making.

Meanwhile S. E. & Co. have been making their own proposals to you, and you have replied not favourably, I am sorry to hear; but now there is no reason why you should not have my homages, and I am just as thankful for the Idylls, and love and admire them just as much, as I did two months ago when I began to write in that ardour of claret and grat.i.tude. If you can't write for us you can't. If you can by chance some day, and help an old friend, how pleased and happy I shall be! This however must be left to fate and your convenience: I don't intend to give up hope, but accept the good fortune if it comes. I see one, two, three quarterlies advertised to-day, as all bringing laurels to laureatus. He will not refuse the private tribute of an old friend, will he? You don't know how pleased the girls were at Kensington t'other day to hear you quote their father's little verses, and he too I daresay was not disgusted. He sends you and yours his very best regards in this most heartfelt and artless

(note of admiration)!

Always yours, my dear Alfred, W. M. THACKERAY.

Naturally this letter gave Tennyson more pleasure than all the converted critics with their favourable reviews. The Duke of Argyll announced the conversion of Macaulay. The Master found Elaine "the fairest, sweetest, purest love poem in the English language." As to the whole, "The allegory in the distance GREATLY STRENGTHENS, ALSO ELEVATES, THE MEANING OF THE POEM."

Ruskin, like some other critics, felt "the art and finish in these poems a little more than I like to feel it." Yet Guinevere and Elaine had been rapidly written and little corrected. I confess to the opinion that what a man does most easily is, as a rule, what he does best. We know that the "art and finish" of Shakespeare were spontaneous, and so were those of Tennyson. Perfection in art is sometimes more sudden than we think, but then "the long preparation for it,--that unseen germination, THAT is what we ignore and forget."

But he wisely kept his pieces by him for a long time, restudying them with a fresh eye. The "unreality" of the subject also failed to please Ruskin, as it is a stumbling-block to others. He wanted poems on "the living present," a theme not selected by Homer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Virgil, or the Greek dramatists, except (among surviving plays) in the Persae of AEschylus. The poet who can transfigure the hot present is fortunate, but most, and the greatest, have visited the cool quiet purlieus of the past.

CHAPTER VII.--THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.

The Idylls may probably be best considered in their final shape: they are not an epic, but a series of heroic idyllia of the same genre as the heroic idyllia of Theocritus. He wrote long after the natural age of national epic, the age of Homer. He saw the later literary epic rise in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, a poem with many beauties, if rather an archaistic and elaborate revival as a whole. The time for long narrative poems, Theocritus appears to have thought, was past, and he only ventured on the heroic idyllia of Heracles, and certain adventures of the Argonauts. Tennyson, too, from the first believed that his pieces ought to be short.

Therefore, though he had a conception of his work as a whole, a conception long mused on, and sketched in various lights, he produced no epic, only a series of epic idyllia. He had a spiritual conception, "an allegory in the distance," an allegory not to be insisted upon, though its presence was to be felt. No longer, as in youth, did Tennyson intend Merlin to symbolise "the sceptical understanding" (as if one were to "break into blank the gospel of"

Herr Kant), or poor Guinevere to stand for the Blessed Reformation, or the Table Round for Liberal Inst.i.tutions. Mercifully Tennyson never actually allegorised Arthur in that fashion. Later he thought of a musical masque of Arthur, and sketched a scenario. Finally Tennyson dropped both the allegory of Liberal principles and the musical masque in favour of the series of heroic idylls. There was only a "parabolic drift" in the intention. "There is no single fact or incident in the Idylls, however seemingly mystical, which cannot be explained without any mystery or allegory whatever. The Idylls ought to be read (and the right readers never dream of doing anything else) as romantic poems, just like Browning's Childe Roland, in which the wrong readers (the members of the Browning Society) sought for mystic mountains and marvels. Yet Tennyson had his own interpretation, "a dream of man coming into practical life and ruined by one sin." That was his "interpretation," or "allegory in the distance."

People may be heard objecting to the suggestion of any spiritual interpretation of the Arthur legends, and even to the existence of elementary morality among the Arthurian knights and ladies. There seems to be a notion that "bold bawdry and open manslaughter," as Roger Ascham said, are the staple of Tennyson's sources, whether in the mediaeval French, the Welsh, or in Malory's compilation, chiefly from French sources. Tennyson is accused of "Bowdlerising" these, and of introducing gentleness, courtesy, and conscience into a literature where such qualities were unknown. I must confess myself ignorant of any early and popular, or "primitive" literature, in which human virtues, and the human conscience, do not play their part. Those who object to Tennyson's handling of the great Arthurian cycle, on the ground that he is too refined and too moral, must either never have read or must long have forgotten even Malory's romance. Thus we read, in a recent novel, that Lancelot was an homme aux bonnes fortunes, whereas Lancelot was the most loyal of lovers.

Among other critics, Mr Harrison has objected that the Arthurian world of Tennyson "is not quite an ideal world. Therein lies the difficulty. The scene, though not of course historic, has certain historic suggestions and characters." It is not apparent who the historic characters are, for the real Arthur is but a historic phantasm. "But then, in the midst of so much realism, the knights, from Arthur downwards, talk and act in ways with which we are familiar in modern ethical and psychological novels, but which are as impossible in real mediaeval knights as a Bengal tiger or a Polar bear would be in a drawing-room." I confess to little acquaintance with modern ethical novels; but real mediaeval knights, and still more the knights of mediaeval romance, were capable of very ethical actions. To halt an army for the protection and comfort of a laundress was a highly ethical action. Perhaps Sir Redvers Buller would do it: Bruce did. Mr Harrison accuses the ladies of the Idylls of soul-bewildering casuistry, like that of women in Middlemarch or Helbeck of Bannisdale. Now I am not reminded by Guinevere, and Elaine, and Enid, of ladies in these ethical novels.

But the women of the mediaeval Cours d'Amour (the originals from whom the old romancers drew) were nothing if not casuists. "Spiritual delicacy" (as they understood it) was their delight.

Mr Harrison even argues that Malory's men lived hot-blooded lives in fierce times, "before an idea had arisen in the world of 'reverencing conscience,' 'leading sweet lives,'" and so on. But he admits that they had "fantastic ideals of 'honour' and 'love.'" As to "fantastic," that is a matter of opinion, but to have ideals and to live in accordance with them is to "reverence conscience", which the heroes of the romances are said by Mr Harrison never to have had an idea of doing. They are denied even "amiable words and courtliness."

Need one say that courtliness is the dominant note of mediaeval knights, in history as in romance? With discourtesy Froissart would "head the count of crimes." After a battle, he says, Scots knights and English would thank each other for a good fight, "not like the Germans." "And now, I dare say," said Malory's Sir Ector, "thou, Sir Lancelot, wast the curtiest knight that ever bare shield, . . . and thou wast the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies." Observe Sir Lancelot in the difficult pa.s.s where the Lily Maid offers her love: "Jesu defend me, for then I rewarded your father and your brother full evil for their great goodness. . . .

But because, fair damsel, that ye love me as ye say ye do, I will, for your good will and kindness, show you some goodness, . . . and always while I live to be your true knight." Here are "amiable words and courtesy." I cannot agree with Mr Harrison that Malory's book is merely "a fierce l.u.s.ty epic." That was not the opinion of its printer and publisher, Caxton. He produced it as an example of "the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knights used in these days, . . .

n.o.ble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen n.o.ble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, love, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil."

In reaction against the bold-faced heroines and sensual amours of some of the old French romances, an ideal of exaggerated asceticism, of stainless chast.i.ty, notoriously pervades the portion of Malory's work which deals with the Holy Grail. Lancelot is distraught when he finds that, by dint of enchantment, he has been made false to Guinevere (Book XI. chap. viii.) After his dreaming vision of the Holy Grail, with the reproachful Voice, Sir Lancelot said, "My sin and my wickedness have brought me great dishonour, . . . and now I see and understand that my old sin hindereth and shameth me." He was human, the Lancelot of Malory, and "fell to his old love again," with a heavy heart, and with long penance at the end. How such good knights can be deemed conscienceless and void of courtesy one knows not, except by a survival of the Puritanism of Ascham. But Tennyson found in the book what is in the book--honour, conscience, courtesy, and the hero -

"Whose honour rooted in dishonour stood, And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true."

Malory's book, which was Tennyson's chief source, ends by being the tragedy of the conscience of Lancelot. Arthur is dead, or "In Avalon he groweth old." The Queen and Lancelot might sing, as Lennox reports that Queen Mary did after Darnley's murder -

"Weel is me For I am free."

"Why took they not their pastime?" Because conscience forbade, and Guinevere sends her lover far from her, and both die in religion.

Thus Malory's "fierce l.u.s.ty epic" is neither so l.u.s.ty nor so fierce but that it gives Tennyson his keynote: the sin that breaks the fair companionship, and is bitterly repented.

"The knights are almost too polite to kill each other," the critic urges. In Malory they are sometimes quite too polite to kill each other. Sir Darras has a blood-feud against Sir Tristram, and Sir Tristram is in his dungeon. Sir Darras said, "Wit ye well that Sir Darras shall never destroy such a n.o.ble knight as thou art in prison, howbeit that thou hast slain three of my sons, whereby I was greatly aggrieved. But now shalt thou go and thy fellows. . . . All that ye did," said Sir Darras, "was by force of knighthood, and that was the cause I would not put you to death" (Book IX. chap. xl.)

Tennyson is accused of "emasculating the fierce l.u.s.ty epic into a moral lesson, as if it were to be performed in a drawing-room by an academy of young ladies"--presided over, I daresay, by "Anglican clergymen." I know not how any one who has read the Morte d'Arthur can blame Tennyson in the matter. Let Malory and his sources be blamed, if to be moral is to be culpable. A few pa.s.sages apart, there is no coa.r.s.eness in Malory; that there are conscience, courtesy, "sweet lives," "keeping down the base in man," "amiable words," and all that Tennyson gives, and, in Mr Harrison's theory, gives without authority in the romance, my quotations from Malory demonstrate. They are chosen at a casual opening of his book. That there "had not arisen in the world" "the idea of reverencing conscience" before the close of the fifteenth century A.D. is an extraordinary statement for a critic of history to offer.

Mr Harrison makes his protest because "in the conspiracy of silence into which Tennyson's just fame has hypnotised the critics, it is bare honesty to admit defects." I think I am not hypnotised, and I do not regard the Idylls as the crown of Tennyson's work. But it is not his "defect" to have introduced generosity, gentleness, conscience, and chast.i.ty where no such things occur in his sources.

Take Sir Darras: his position is that of Priam when he meets Achilles, who slew his sons, except that Priam comes as a suppliant; Sir Darras has Tristram in his hands, and may slay him. He is "too polite," as Mr Harrison says: he is too good a Christian, or too good a gentleman. One would not have given a tripod for the life of Achilles had he fallen into the hands of Priam. But between 1200 B.C. (or so) and the date of Malory, new ideas about "living sweet lives" had arisen. Where and when do they not arise? A British patrol fired on certain Swazis in time of truce. Their lieutenant, who had been absent when this occurred, rode alone to the stronghold of the Swazi king, Sekukoeni, and gave himself up, expecting death by torture. "Go, sir," said the king; "we too are gentlemen." The idea of a "sweet life" of honour had dawned even on Sekukoeni: it lights up Malory's romance, and is reflected in Tennyson's Idylls, doubtless with some modernism of expression.

That the Idylls represent no real world is certain. That Tennyson modernises and moralises too much, I willingly admit; what I deny is that he introduces gentleness, courtesy, and conscience where his sources have none. Indeed this is not a matter of critical opinion, but of verifiable fact. Any one can read Malory and judge for himself. But the world in which the Idylls move could not be real.

For more than a thousand years different races, different ages, had taken hold of the ancient Celtic legends and spiritualised them after their own manner, and moulded them to their own ideals. There may have been a historical Arthur, Comes Britanniae, after the Roman withdrawal. Ye Amherawdyr Arthur, "the Emperor Arthur," may have lived and fought, and led the Brythons to battle. But there may also have been a Brythonic deity, or culture hero, of the same, or of a similar name, and myths about him may have been a.s.signed to a real Arthur. Again, the Arthur of the old Welsh legends was by no means the blameless king--even in comparatively late French romances he is not blameless. But the process of idealising him went on: still incomplete in Malory's compilation, where he is often rather otiose and far from royal. Tennyson, for his purpose, completed the idealisation.

As to Guinevere, she was not idealised in the old Welsh rhyme -

"Guinevere, Giant Ogurvan's daughter, Naughty young, more naughty later."

Of Lancelot, and her pa.s.sion for him, the old Welsh has nothing to say. Probably Chretien de Troyes, by a happy blunder or misconception, gave Lancelot his love and his pre-eminent part.

Lancelot was confused with Peredur, and Guinevere with the lady of whom Peredur was in quest. The Elaine who becomes by Lancelot the mother of Galahad "was Lancelot's rightful consort, as one recognises in her name that of Elen, the Empress, whom the story of Peredur"

(Lancelot, by the confusion) "gives that hero to wife." The second Elaine, the maid of Astolat, is another refraction from the original Elen. As to the Grail, it may be a Christianised rendering of one or another of the magical and mystic caldrons of Welsh or Irish legend.

There is even an apparent Celtic source of the mysterious fisher king of the Grail romance. {12}

A sketch of the evolution of the Arthurian legends might run thus:-

Sixth to eighth century, growth of myth about an Arthur, real, or supposed to be real.

Tenth century, the Duchies of Normandy and Brittany are in close relations; by the eleventh century Normans know Celtic Arthurian stories.

After, 1066, Normans in contact with the Celtic peoples of this island are in touch with the Arthur tales.

1130-1145, works on Arthurian matter by Geoffrey of Monmouth.

1155, Wace's French translation of Geoffrey.