Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson Part 17

Critics have agreed for the most part in considering the _Morte d'Arthur_ as the most Homeric of Tennyson's poems. Bayne writes: "Not only in the language is it Homeric, but in the design and manner of treatment. The concentration of interest on the hero, the absence of all modernism in the way of love, story or pa.s.sion painting, the martial clearness, terseness, brevity of the narrative, with definite specification, at the same time, are exquisitely true to the Homeric pattern." Brimley notes, with probably greater precision, that: "They are rather Virgilian than Homeric echoes; elaborate and stately, not naive and eager to tell their story; rich in pictorial detail; carefully studied; conscious of their own art; more anxious for beauty of workmanship than interest of action."

It has frequently been pointed out in this book how p.r.o.ne Tennyson is to regard all his subjects from the modern point of view:

a truth Looks freshest in the fashion of the day.

The Epic and the epilogue strongly emphasize this modernity in the varied modern types of character which they represent, with their diverse opinions upon contemporary topics. "As to the epilogue," writes Mr.

Brooke (p. 130), "it ill.u.s.trates all I have been saying about Tennyson's method with subjects drawn from Greek or romantic times. He filled and sustained those subjects with thoughts which were as modern as they were ancient. While he placed his readers in Camelot, Ithaca, or Ida, he made them feel also that they were standing in London, Oxford, or an English woodland. When the _Morte d'Arthur_ is finished, the hearer of it sits rapt. There were 'modern touches here and there,' he says, and when he sleeps he dreams of

"King Arthur, like a modern gentleman Of stateliest port; and all the people cried, 'Arthur is come again, he cannot die.'

Then those that stood upon the hills behind Repeated--'Come again, and thrice as fair:'

And, further inland, voices echoed--'Come With all good things and war shall be no more.

"The old tale, thus modernised in an epilogue, does not lose its dignity, for now the recoming of Arthur is the recoming of Christ in a wider and fairer Christianity. We feel here how the new movement of religion and theology had sent its full and exciting wave into Tennyson. Arthur's death in the battle and the mist is the death of a form of Christianity which, exhausted, died in doubt and darkness. His advent as a modern gentleman is the coming of a brighter and more loving Christ into the hearts of men. For so ends the epilogue. When the voices cry, 'Come again, with all good things,'

"At this a hundred bells began to peal, That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed, The clear church-bells ring in the Christmas-morn."

THE ALLEGORICAL ELEMENT.--The statement is made on p. x.x.xv of this book that in _The Idylls of the King_ "the effort is made to reconcile the human story with the allegory, and in consequence the issues are confusedly presented to our mind." It is characteristic of the _Morte d'Arthur_ fragment that it is apparently free from all allegorical intention. It is merely a moving human story with a fascinating element of mystery inspired by the original Celtic legend. An element of allegory lies in the epilogue, and _The Pa.s.sing of Arthur_ still further enforces the allegorical purpose. But here, as Mr. Brooke again writes (p. 371), "we are close throughout to the ancient tale. No allegory, no ethics, no rational soul, no preaching symbolism, enter here, to dim, confuse, or spoil the story. Nothing is added which does not justly exalt the tale, and what is added is chiefly a greater fulness and breadth of humanity, a more lovely and supreme Nature, arranged at every point to enhance into keener life the human feelings of Arthur and his knight, to lift the ultimate hour of sorrow and of death into n.o.bility.

Arthur is borne to a chapel nigh the field--

"A broken chancel with a broken cross, That stood on a dark strait of barren land; On one side lay the Ocean, and on one Lay a great water, and the moon was full.

"What a n.o.ble framework--and with what n.o.ble consciousness it is drawn! .

. . . All the landscape--than which nothing better has been invented by any English poet--lives from point to point as if Nature herself had created it; but even more alive than the landscape are the two human figures in it--Sir Bedivere standing by the great water, and Arthur lying wounded near the chapel, waiting for his knight. Take one pa.s.sage, which to hear is to see the thing:

"So saying, from the ruin'd shrine he stept, And in the moon athwart the place of tombs, Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men, Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang Shrill, chill with flakes of foam. He, stepping down By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock, Came on the shining levels of the lake.

"Twice he hides the sword, and when Arthur asks: 'What hast thou seen, what heard?' Bedivere answers:

"'I heard the ripple washing in the reeds, And the wild water lapping on the crag,'

"--lines so steeped in the loneliness of mountain tarns that I never stand in solitude beside their waters but I hear the verses in my heart. At the last he throws it.

"The great brand Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the northern sea.

"'So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur,' and never yet in poetry did any sword, flung in the air, flash so superbly.

"The rest of the natural description is equally alive, and the pa.s.sage where the sound echoes the sense, and Bedivere, carrying Arthur, clangs as he moves among the icy rocks, is as clear a piece of ringing, smiting, clashing sound as any to be found in Tennyson:

"Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves And barren chasms, and all to left and right The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rung Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels.

"We hear all the changes on the vowel _a_--every sound of it used to give the impression--and then, in a moment, the verse runs into breadth, smoothness and vastness: for Bedivere comes to the sh.o.r.e and sees the great water;

"And on a sudden lo! the level lake, And the long glories of the winter moon,

"in which the vowel _o_, in its changes is used, as the vowel _a_ has been used before.

"The questions and replies of Arthur and Bedivere, the reproaches of the King, the excuses of the Knight, the sorrow and the final wrath of Arthur, are worthy of the landscape, as they ought to be; and the dominance of the human element in the scene is a piece of n.o.ble artist-work. Arthur is royal to the close, and when he pa.s.ses away with the weeping Queens across the mere, unlike the star of the tournament he was of old, he is still the King. Sir Bedivere, left alone on the freezing sh.o.r.e, hears the King give his last message to the world. It is a modern Christian who speaks, but the phrases do not sound out of harmony with that which might be in Romance. Moreover, the end of the saying is of Avilion or Avalon--of the old heathen Celtic place where the wounded are healed and the old made young."

In the final a.n.a.lysis, therefore, the significance of the _Morte d'Arthur_ is a significance of beauty rather than moralistic purpose. It has been said that the reading of Milton's _Lycidas_ is the surest test of one's powers of poetical appreciation. I fear that the test is too severe for many readers who can still enjoy a simpler style of poetry.

But any person who can read the _Morte d'Arthur_, and fail to be impressed by its splendid pictures, and subdued to admiration by the dignity of its language, need scarcely hope for pleasure from any poetry.

THE EPIC

3. SACRED BUSH. The mistletoe. This plant was sacred to the Celtic tribes, and was an object of particular veneration with the Druids, especially when a.s.sociated with the oak-tree.

8. OR GONE=either gone.

18. THE GENERAL DECAY OF FAITH. The story of Arthur is intended to show how faith survives, although the form be changed. See esp. _Morte d'Arthur_, ll. 240-242.

27-28. 'HE BURNT--SOME TWELVE BOOKS.' This must not be taken literally.

See, however, p. x.x.xiii. of the Biographical Sketch, as to Tennyson's hesitation in treating the subject.

48-51. This is self-portraiture. Lord Tennyson's method of reading was impressive though peculiar.

MORTE D'ARTHUR

THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND. Throughout the mediaeval period three great cycles of stories commanded the imagination of the poets. Of these cycles one, the tale of Troy in its curious mediaeval guise, attested the potent spell of antique legend.[1] The two other great cycles were of later origin, and centred around the commanding historical figures of Charlemagne, and the phantom glory of the legendary Arthur.

[1]The extraordinary interest in the half legendary career of Alexander the Great must be noticed here, as also the profound respect amounting to veneration for the Roman poet, Vergil.

The origin of the Arthurian story is involved in obscurity. The crudest form of the myth has doubtless a core of historic truth, and represents him as a mighty Celtic warrior, who works havoc among the heathen Saxon invaders. Accretions naturally are added, and a miraculous origin and a mysterious death throw a superst.i.tious halo around the hero. When the brilliant personality of Lancelot breaks into the tale, and the legend of the Holy Grail is superadded, the theme exercised an irresistible fascination upon the imagination of mediaeval Europe.

The vicissitudes of the Celtic inhabitants of Britain are as romantic as any of which history holds record. After the departure of the Roman invaders from the island, the native population swiftly rea.s.serted itself. The Picts of Caledonia and the Scots of Ireland were their natural foes, but conflict with these enemies served only to stimulate the national life. But actual disaster threatened them when in the fifth and sixth centuries the heathen Angles and Saxons bore down in devastating hordes upon the land. It is at this critical period in the national history that Arthur must have lived. How long or how valiant the resistance was we cannot know. That it was vain is certain. A large body of Britons fled from annihilation across the channel, and founded in the region of Armurica in France, a new Brittany. Meanwhile, in the older Britain, the foe pressed hard upon their fellow-countrymen, and drove them into the western limits of the island, into the fastnesses of Wales, and the rocky parts of Cornwall. Here, and in Northern France, proud in their defeat and tenacious of the instincts of their race, they lived and still live, in the imaginative memories of the past. For them the future held little store of earthly gain, and yet they made the whole world their debtor.

Even in the courts of the conqueror Saxon their strange and beautiful poetry won favour, and in a later century the Norman kings and barons welcomed eagerly the wandering minstrels from Brittany and Wales. But it was not from these scattered sources that Celtic traditions became a European possession, as a brief statement of literary history will clearly show.

The first recorded mention of Arthur's name occurs in a brief and anonymous _History of the Britons_, written in Latin in the tenth century, and attributed to Nennius. This history is curiously amplified in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, first in a story dealing with the prophecies of Merlin, and later in a _History of the Kings of Britain_. This book, with its brilliant description of the court of Arthur, gave the legend a widespread popularity. It was four times within the same century translated into French verse, the most famous of these renderings being the version of Wace, called _Le Brut_, which makes some addition to Geoffrey's original, gathered from Breton sources. In the same century, too, Chretien de Troyes, the foremost of Arthurian poets, composed his famous cycle of poems.

Of all these manifold sources Tennyson was confessedly ignorant. Where the details are not of his own invention, his _Idylls of the King_ rest entirely upon Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, which Caxton printed in 1485, supplemented in the case of _Enid and Geraint_, and _The Marriage of Geraint_ by a translation of the Welsh _Mabinogion_ by Lady Charlotte Guest.

THE STORY OF THE IDYLLS.--It is well to remember the events that led up to Arthur's death. Guinevere's guilty love for Lancelot had been discovered and revealed by Arthur's nephew, the traitor Modred. The Queen fled the court and sought refuge with the nuns of Almesbury.

Lancelot fled to his castle in the north, where the King in vain besieged him. Meanwhile Modred had stirred up a revolt, and leaguing himself with the Saxon invaders, had usurped Arthur's throne. On his march southward to resist his nephew, Arthur halts at the nunnery of Almesbury, and in the Guinevere idyll the moving story of their last farewell is told.

Then the King advanced to meet Modred. The description of that "last weird battle in the west" is given in _The Pa.s.sing of Arthur_, and leads up to the impressive line with which our present poem opens. Towards the close of that fateful day, there came--

A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew The mist aside, and with that wind the tide Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field Of battle: but no man was moving there; Nor any cry of Christian heard thereon, Nor yet of heathen; only the wan wave Broke in among dead faces, to and fro Swaying the helpless hands, and up and down Tumbling the hollow helmets of the fallen, And shiver'd brands that once had fought with Rome, And rolling far along the gloomy sh.o.r.es The voice of days of old and days to be.

The King speaks despairingly to Bedivere, who answering, swears to him undying allegiance, and points to the traitor, Modred, who still stands unharmed:

Thereupon:--

the King Made at the man: then Modred smote his liege Hard on the helm which many a heathen sword Had beaten thin; while Arthur at one blow, Striking the last stroke with Excalibur, Slew him, and all but slain himself, he fell.

4. LYONNESSE. The geography of the _Idylls of the King_ is designedly vague. The region of Lyonnesse was supposed to be adjacent to Cornwall, and the sea now covers it. The Scilly Islands are held to have been the western limit of this fabulous country.