Chapter 10
“‘“And spake I not too truly, O my knights? Was I too dark a prophet when I said To those who went upon the Holy Quest, That most of them would follow wandering fires, Lost in the quagmire?—lost to me and gone, And left me gazing at a barren board, And a lean Order—scarce return’d a tithe— And out of those to whom the vision came My greatest hardly will believe he saw; Another hath beheld it afar off, And leaving human wrongs to right themselves, Cares but to pass into the silent life. And one hath had the vision face to face, And now his chair desires him here in vain, However they may crown him otherwhere.
‘“And some among you held, that if the King Had seen the sight he would have sworn the vow: Not easily, seeing that the King must guard That which he rules, and is but as the hind To whom a space of land is given to plow Who may not wander from the allotted field Before his work be done; but, being done, Let visions of the night or of the day Come, as they will; and many a time they come, Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, This air that smites his forehead is not air But vision—yea, his very hand and foot— In moments when he feels he cannot die, And knows himself no vision to himself, Nor the high God a vision, nor that One Who rose again: ye have seen what ye have seen.”
‘So spake the King: I knew not all he meant.’”
The closing lines declare, as far as the poet could declare them, these subjective experiences of his which, in a manner rarely parallelled, coloured and formed his thought on the highest things. He introduces them even into this poem on a topic which, because of its sacred associations, he for long did not venture to touch.
In _Pelleas and Ettarre_—which deals with the sorrows of one of the young knights who fill up the gaps left at the Round Table by the mischances of the Quest—it would be difficult to trace a Celtic original. For Malory, not Celtic legend, supplied Tennyson with the germinal idea of a poem which, in the romance, has no bearing on the final catastrophe. Pelleas, a King of the Isles, loves the beautiful Ettarre, “a great lady,” and for her wins at a tourney the prize of the golden circlet. But she hates and despises him, and Sir Gawain is a spectator when, as in the poem, the felon knights of Ettarre bind and insult their conqueror, Pelleas. Gawain promises to win the love of Ettarre for Pelleas, and, as in the poem, borrows his arms and horse, and pretends to have slain him. But in place of turning Ettarre’s heart towards Pelleas, Gawain becomes her lover, and Pelleas, detecting them asleep, lays his naked sword on their necks. He then rides home to die; but Nimue (Vivien), the Lady of the Lake, restores him to health and sanity. His fever gone, he scorns Ettarre, who, by Nimue’s enchantment, now loves him as much as she had hated him. Pelleas weds Nimue, and Ettarre dies of a broken heart. Tennyson, of course, could not make Nimue (his Vivien) do anything benevolent. He therefore closes his poem by a repetition of the effect in the case of Balin. Pelleas is driven desperate by the treachery of Gawain, the reported infidelity of Guinevere, and the general corruption of the ideal. A shadow falls on Lancelot and Guinevere, and Modred sees that his hour is drawing nigh. In spite of beautiful passages this is not one of the finest of the Idylls, save for the study of the fierce, hateful, and beautiful _grande dame_, Ettarre. The narrative does little to advance the general plot. In the original of Malory it has no connection with the Lancelot cycle, except as far as it reveals the treachery of Gawain, the gay and fair-spoken “light of love,” brother of the traitor Modred. A simpler treatment of the theme may be read in Mr Swinburne’s beautiful poem, _The Tale of Balen_.
It is in _The Last Tournament_ that Modred finds the beginning of his opportunity. The brief life of the Ideal has burned itself out, as the year, in its vernal beauty when Arthur came, is burning out in autumn. The poem is purposely autumnal, with the autumn, not of mellow fruitfulness, but of the “flying gold of the ruined woodlands” and the dank odours of decay. In that miserable season is held the Tourney of the Dead Innocence, with the blood-red prize of rubies. With a wise touch Tennyson has represented the Court as fallen not into vice only and crime, but into positive vulgarity and bad taste. The Tournament is a carnival of the “smart” and the third-rate. Courtesy is dead, even Tristram is brutal, and in Iseult hatred of her husband is as powerful as love of her lover. The satire strikes at England, where the world has never been corrupt with a good grace. It is a passage of arms neither gentle nor joyous that Lancelot presides over:—
“The sudden trumpet sounded as in a dream To ears but half-awaked, then one low roll Of Autumn thunder, and the jousts began: And ever the wind blew, and yellowing leaf And gloom and gleam, and shower and shorn plume Went down it. 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; once, a knight cast down Before his throne of arbitration cursed The dead babe and the follies of the King; And once the laces of a helmet crack’d, And show’d him, like a vermin in its hole, Modred, a narrow face: anon he heard The voice that billow’d round the barriers roar An ocean-sounding welcome to one knight, But newly-enter’d, taller than the rest, And armour’d all in forest green, whereon There tript a hundred tiny silver deer, And wearing but a holly-spray for crest, With ever-scattering berries, and on shield A spear, a harp, a bugle—Tristram—late From overseas in Brittany return’d, And marriage with a princess of that realm, Isolt the White—Sir Tristram of the Woods— Whom Lancelot knew, had held sometime with pain His own against him, and now yearn’d to shake The burthen off his heart in one full shock With Tristram ev’n to death: his strong hands gript And dinted the gilt dragons right and left, Until he groan’d for wrath—so many of those, That ware their ladies’ colours on the casque, Drew from before Sir Tristram to the bounds, And there with gibes and flickering mockeries Stood, while he mutter’d, ‘Craven crests! O shame! What faith have these in whom they sware to love? The glory of our Round Table is no more.’
So Tristram won, and Lancelot gave, the gems, Not speaking other word than ‘Hast thou won? Art thou the purest, brother? See, the hand Wherewith thou takest this, is red!’ to whom Tristram, half plagued by Lancelot’s languorous mood, Made answer, ‘Ay, but wherefore toss me this Like a dry bone cast to some hungry hound? Let be thy fair Queen’s fantasy. Strength of heart And might of limb, but mainly use and skill, Are winners in this pastime of our King. My hand—belike the lance hath dript upon it— No blood of mine, I trow; but O chief knight, Right arm of Arthur in the battlefield, Great brother, thou nor I have made the world; Be happy in thy fair Queen as I in mine.’
And Tristram round the gallery made his horse Caracole; then bow’d his homage, bluntly saying, ‘Fair damsels, each to him who worships each Sole Queen of Beauty and of love, behold This day my Queen of Beauty is not here.’ And most of these were mute, some anger’d, one Murmuring, ‘All courtesy is dead,’ and one, ‘The glory of our Round Table is no more.’
Then fell thick rain, plume droopt and mantle clung, And pettish cries awoke, and the wan day Went glooming down in wet and weariness: But under her black brows a swarthy one Laugh’d shrilly, crying, ‘Praise the patient saints, Our one white day of Innocence hath past, Tho’ somewhat draggled at the skirt. So be it. The snowdrop only, flowering thro’ the year, Would make the world as blank as Winter-tide. Come—let us gladden their sad eyes, our Queen’s And Lancelot’s, at this night’s solemnity With all the kindlier colours of the field.’”
Arthur’s last victory over a robber knight is ingloriously squalid:—
“He ended: Arthur knew the voice; the face Wellnigh was helmet-hidden, and the name Went wandering somewhere darkling in his mind. And Arthur deign’d not use of word or sword, But let the drunkard, as he stretch’d from horse To strike him, overbalancing his bulk, Down from the causeway heavily to the swamp Fall, as the crest of some slow-arching wave, Heard in dead night along that table-shore, Drops flat, and after the great waters break Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves, Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, From less and less to nothing; thus he fell Head-heavy; then the knights, who watch’d him, roar’d And shouted and leapt down upon the fall’n; There trampled out his face from being known, And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves: Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang Thro’ open doors, and swording right and left Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurl’d The tables over and the wines, and slew Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells, And all the pavement stream’d with massacre: Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower, Which half that autumn night, like the live North, Red-pulsing up thro’ Alioth and Alcor, Made all above it, and a hundred meres About it, as the water Moab saw Come round by the East, and out beyond them flush’d The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea.”
_Guinevere_ is one of the greatest of the Idylls. Malory makes Lancelot more sympathetic; his fight, unarmed, in Guinevere’s chamber, against the felon knights, is one of his most spirited scenes. Tennyson omits this, and omits all the unpardonable behaviour of Arthur as narrated in Malory. Critics have usually condemned the last parting of Guinevere and Arthur, because the King doth preach too much to an unhappy woman who has no reply. The position of Arthur is not easily redeemable: it is difficult to conceive that a noble nature could be, or should be, blind so long. He does rehabilitate his Queen in her own self-respect, perhaps, by assuring her that he loves her still:—
“Let no man dream but that I love thee still.”
Had he said that one line and no more, we might have loved him better. In the Idylls we have not Malory’s last meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere, one of the scenes in which the wandering composite romance ends as nobly as the _Iliad_.
_The Passing of Arthur_, except for a new introductory passage of great beauty and appropriateness, is the _Morte d’Arthur_, first published in 1842:—
“So all day long the noise of battle roll’d Among the mountains by the winter sea.”
The year has run its course, spring, summer, gloomy autumn, and dies in the mist of Arthur’s last wintry battle in the west—
“And the new sun rose, bringing the new year.”
The splendid and sombre procession has passed, leaving us to muse as to how far the poet has fulfilled his own ideal. There could be no new epic: he gave a chain of heroic Idylls. An epic there could not be, for the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ have each a unity of theme, a narrative compressed into a few days in the former, in the latter into forty days of time. The tragedy of Arthur’s reign could not so be condensed; and Tennyson chose the only feasible plan. He has left a work, not absolutely perfect, indeed, but such as he conceived, after many tentative essays, and such as he desired to achieve. His fame may not rest chiefly on the Idylls, but they form one of the fairest jewels in the crown that shines with unnumbered gems, each with its own glory.
VIII. _ENOCH ARDEN_. THE DRAMAS.
THE success of the first volume of the Idylls recompensed the poet for the slings and arrows that gave _Maud_ a hostile welcome. His next publication was the beautiful _Tithonus_, a fit pendant to the _Ulysses_, and composed about the same date (1833–35). “A quarter of a century ago,” Tennyson dates it, writing in 1860 to the Duke of Argyll. He had found it when “ferreting among my old books,” he said, in search of something for Thackeray, who was establishing the _Cornhill Magazine_. What must the wealth of the poet have been, who, possessing _Tithonus_ in his portfolio, did not take the trouble to insert it in the volumes of 1842! Nobody knows how many poems of Tennyson’s never even saw pen and ink, being composed unwritten, and forgotten. At this time we find him recommending Mr Browning’s _Men and Women_ to the Duke, who, like many Tennysonians, does not seem to have been a ready convert to his great contemporary. The Duke and Duchess urged the Laureate to attempt the topic of the Holy Grail, but he was not in the mood. Indeed the vision of the Grail in the early _Sir Galahad_ is doubtless happier than the allegorical handling of a theme so obscure, remote, and difficult, in the Idylls. He wrote his _Boadicea_, a piece magnificent in itself, but of difficult popular access, owing to the metrical experiment.
In the autumn of 1860 he revisited Cornwall with F. T. Palgrave, Mr Val Prinsep, and Mr Holman Hunt. They walked in the rain, saw Tintagel and the Scilly Isles, and were fêted by an enthusiastic captain of a little river steamer, who was more interested in “Mr Tinman and Mr Pancake” than the Celtic boatman of Ardtornish. The winter was passed at Farringford, and the _Northern Farmer_ was written there, a Lincolnshire reminiscence, in the February of 1861. In autumn the Pyrenees were visited by Tennyson in company with Arthur Clough and Mr Dakyns of Clifton College. At Cauteretz in August, and among memories of the old tour with Arthur Hallam, was written _All along the Valley_. The ways, however, in Auvergne were “foul,” and the diet “unhappy.” The dedication of the Idylls was written on the death of the Prince Consort in December, and in January 1862 the Ode for the opening of an exhibition. The poet was busy with his “Fisherman,” _Enoch Arden_. The volume was published in 1864, and Lord Tennyson says it has been, next to _In Memoriam_, the most popular of his father’s works. One would have expected the one volume containing the poems up to 1842 to hold that place. The new book, however, mainly dealt with English, contemporary, and domestic themes—“the poetry of the affections.” An old woman, a district visitor reported, regarded _Enoch Arden_ as “more beautiful” than the other tracts which were read to her. It is indeed a tender and touching tale, based on a folk-story which Tennyson found current in Brittany as well as in England. Nor is the unseen and unknown landscape of the tropic isle less happily created by the poet’s imagination than the familiar English cliffs and hazel copses:—
“The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes, The lightning flash of insect and of bird, The lustre of the long convolvuluses That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows And glories of the broad belt of the world, All these he saw; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branch’d And blossom’d in the zenith, or the sweep Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, As down the shore he ranged, or all day long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, A shipwreck’d sailor, waiting for a sail: No sail from day to day, but every day The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts Among the palms and ferns and precipices; The blaze upon the waters to the east; The blaze upon his island overhead; The blaze upon the waters to the west; Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again The scarlet shafts of sunrise—but no sail.”
_Aylmer’s Field_ somewhat recalls the burden of _Maud_, the curse of purse-proud wealth, but is too gloomy to be a fair specimen of Tennyson’s art. In _Sea Dreams_ (first published in 1860) the awful vision of crumbling faiths is somewhat out of harmony with its environment:—
“But round the North, a light, A belt, it seem’d, of luminous vapour, lay, And ever in it a low musical note Swell’d up and died; and, as it swell’d, a ridge Of breaker issued from the belt, and still Grew with the growing note, and when the note Had reach’d a thunderous fulness, on those cliffs Broke, mixt with awful light (the same as that Living within the belt) whereby she saw That all those lines of cliffs were cliffs no more, But huge cathedral fronts of every age, Grave, florid, stern, as far as eye could see, One after one: and then the great ridge drew, Lessening to the lessening music, back, And past into the belt and swell’d again Slowly to music: ever when it broke The statues, king or saint or founder fell; Then from the gaps and chasms of ruin left Came men and women in dark clusters round, Some crying, ‘Set them up! they shall not fall!’ And others, ‘Let them lie, for they have fall’n.’ And still they strove and wrangled: and she grieved In her strange dream, she knew not why, to find Their wildest wailings never out of tune With that sweet note; and ever as their shrieks Ran highest up the gamut, that great wave Returning, while none mark’d it, on the crowd Broke, mixt with awful light, and show’d their eyes Glaring, and passionate looks, and swept away The men of flesh and blood, and men of stone, To the waste deeps together.
‘Then I fixt My wistful eyes on two fair images, Both crown’d with stars and high among the stars,— The Virgin Mother standing with her child High up on one of those dark minster-fronts— Till she began to totter, and the child Clung to the mother, and sent out a cry Which mixt with little Margaret’s, and I woke, And my dream awed me:—well—but what are dreams?”
The passage is rather fitted for a despairing mood of Arthur, in the Idylls, than for the wife of the city clerk ruined by a pious rogue.
The _Lucretius_, later published, is beyond praise as a masterly study of the great Roman sceptic, whose heart is at eternal odds with his Epicurean creed. Nascent madness, or fever of the brain drugged by the blundering love philtre, is not more cunningly treated in the mad scenes of _Maud_. No prose commentary on the _De Rerum Natura_, however long and learned, conveys so clearly as this concise study in verse the sense of magnificent mingled ruin in the mind and poem of the Roman.
The “Experiments in Quantity” were, perhaps, suggested by Mr Matthew Arnold’s Lectures on the Translating of Homer. Mr Arnold believed in a translation into English hexameters. His negative criticism of other translators and translations was amusing and instructive: he had an easy game to play with the Yankee-doodle metre of F. W. Newman, the ponderous blank verse of Cowper, the tripping and clipping couplets of Pope, the Elizabethan fantasies of Chapman. But Mr Arnold’s hexameters were neither musical nor rapid: they only exhibited a new form of failure. As the Prince of Abyssinia said to his tutor, “Enough; you have convinced me that no man can be a poet,” so Mr Arnold went some way to prove that no man can translate Homer.
Tennyson had the lowest opinion of hexameters as an English metre for serious purposes.
“These lame hexameters the strong-wing’d music of Homer!”
Lord Tennyson says, “German hexameters he disliked even more than English.” Indeed there is not much room for preference. Tennyson’s Alcaics (_Milton_) were intended to follow the Greek rather than the Horatian model, and resulted, at all events, in a poem worthy of the “mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies.” The specimen of the _Iliad_ in blank verse, beautiful as it is, does not, somehow, reproduce the music of Homer. It is entirely Tennysonian, as in
“Roll’d the rich vapour far into the heaven.”
The reader, in that one line, recognises the voice and trick of the English poet, and is far away from the Chian:—
“As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest, and all the stars Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart: So many a fire between the ships and stream Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy, A thousand on the plain; and close by each Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire; And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds, Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.”
This is excellent, is poetry, escapes the conceits of Pope (who never “wrote with his eye on the object”), but is pure Tennyson. We have not yet, probably we never shall have, an adequate rendering of the _Iliad_ into verse, and prose translations do not pretend to be adequate. When parents and dominies have abolished the study of Greek, something, it seems, will have been lost to the world,—something which even Tennyson could not restore in English. He thought blank verse the proper equivalent; but it is no equivalent. One even prefers his own prose:—
Nor did Paris linger in his lofty halls, but when he had girt on his gorgeous armour, all of varied bronze, then he rushed thro’ the city, glorying in his airy feet. And as when a stall-kept horse, that is barley-fed at the manger, breaketh his tether, and dasheth thro’ the plain, spurning it, being wont to bathe himself in the fair-running river, rioting, and reareth his head, and his mane flieth back on either shoulder, and he glorieth in his beauty, and his knees bear him at the gallop to the haunts and meadows of the mares; so ran the son of Priam, Paris, from the height of Pergamus, all in arms, glittering like the sun, laughing for light-heartedness, and his swift feet bare him.
In February 1865 Tennyson lost the mother whose portrait he drew in _Isabel_,—“a thing enskied and sainted.”