Part 26

The moral systems of the two cycles are essentially allied: and perhaps the differences between them may be due in greater or in less part to the fact that they come to us through different _media_. We of the nineteenth century read the Carlovingian romance in the pages of Ariosto and Bojardo, who gave to their materials the colour of their times, and of a civilization rank in some respects, while still unripe in some others. The genius of poetry was not at the same period applying its transmuting force to the Romance of the Round Table. The date of Sir Thomas Mallory, who lived under Edward IV, is something earlier than that of the great Italian romances; he appears, too, to have been on the whole content with the humble offices of a compiler and a chronicler, and we may conceive that his spirit and diction are still older than his date. The consequence is, that we are brought into more immediate and fresher contact with the original forms of this romance. So that, as they present themselves to us, the Carlovingian cycle is the child of the latest middle age, while the Arthurian represents the earlier. Much might be said on the differences which have thus arisen, and on those which may be due to a more northern and more southern extraction respectively. Suffice it to say that the Romance of the Round Table, far less vivid and brilliant, far ruder as a work of skill and art, has more of the innocence, the emotion, the transparency, the inconsistency of childhood. Its political action is less specifically Christian than that of the rival scheme, its individual more so. It is more directly and seriously aimed at the perfection of man. It is more free from gloss and varnish; it tells its own tale with more entire simplicity. The ascetic element is more strongly, and at the same time more quaintly, developed. It has a higher conception of the nature of woman; and like the Homeric poems, appears to eschew exhibiting her perfections in alliance with warlike force and exploits. So also love, while largely infused into the story, is more subordinate to the exhibition of other qualities. Again, the Romance of the Round Table bears witness to a more distinct and keener sense of sin: and on the whole, a deeper, broader, and more manly view of human character, life, and duty. It is in effect more like what the Carlovingian cycle might have been had Dante moulded it. It hardly needs to be added that it is more mythical, inasmuch as Arthur of the Round Table is a personage, we fear, wholly doubtful, though not impossible; while the broad back of the historic Charlemagne, like another Atlas, may well sustain a world of mythical accretions. This slight comparison, be it remarked, refers exclusively to what may be termed the latest "redactions" of the two cycles of romance. Their early forms, in the lays of troubadours, and in the pages of the oldest chroniclers, offer a subject of profound interest, and one still unexhausted, although it has been examined by Mr. Panizzi and M. Fauriel,[1] but one which is quite beyond the scope of our present subject.

[1] Essay on the Romantic Narrative Poetry of the Italians: London, 1830. Histoire de la Poésie Provençale: Paris, 1846.

It is to this rich repository that Mr. Tennyson has resorted for his material. He has shown, as we think, rare judgment in the choice. The Arthurian Romance has every recommendation that should win its way to the homage of a great poet. It is national: it is Christian. It is also human in the largest and deepest sense; and, therefore, though highly national, it is universal; for it rests upon those depths and breadths of our nature to which all its truly great developments in all nations are alike essentially and closely related. The distance is enough for atmosphere, not too much for detail; enough for romance, not too much for sympathy. A poet of the nineteenth century, the Laureate has adopted characters, incidents, and even language in the main, instead of attempting to project them on a basis of his own in the region of illimitable fancy. But he has done much more than this. Evidently by reading and by deep meditation, as well as by sheer force of genius, he has penetrated himself down to the very core of his being, with all that is deepest and best in the spirit of the time, or the representation, with which he deals; and as others, using old materials, have been free to alter them in the sense of vulgarity or licence, so he has claimed and used the right to sever and recombine, to enlarge, retrench, and modify, for the purposes at once of a more powerful and elaborate art than his original presents, and of a yet more elevated, or at least of a far more sustained, ethical and Christian strain.

We are rather disposed to quarrel with the title of Idylls: for no diminutive ([Greek: _eidullion_]) can be adequate to the breadth, vigour, and majesty which belong to the subjects, as well as to the execution, of the volume. The poet used the name once before; but he then applied it to pieces generally small in the scale of their delineations, whereas these, even if broken away one from the other, are yet like the disjoined figures from the pediment of the Parthenon in their dignity and force. One indeed among Mr. Tennyson's merits is, that he does not think it necessary to keep himself aloft by artificial effort, but undulates with his matter, and flies high or low as it requires. But even in the humblest parts of these poems--as where the little Novice describes the miniature sorrows and discipline of childhood--the whole receives its tone from an atmosphere which is heroic, and which, even in its extremest simplicity, by no means parts company with grandeur, or ceases to shine in the reflected light of the surrounding objects. Following the example which the poet has set us in a former volume, we would fain have been permitted, at least provisionally, to call these Idylls by the name of Books. Term them what we may, there are four of them--arranged, as we think, in an ascending scale.

The simplicity and grace of the principal character in Enid, with which the volume opens, touches, but does not too strongly agitate, the deeper springs of feeling. She is the beautiful daughter of Earl Yniol, who, by his refusal of a turbulent neighbour as a suitor, has drawn upon himself the ruin of his fortunes, and is visited in his depressed condition by (p. 1)--

The brave Geraint, a knight of Arthur's court, A tributary prince of Devon, one Of that great order of the Table Round....

Geraint wins her against the detested cousin. They wed, and she becomes the purest gem of the court of Guinevere, her place in which is described in the beautiful exordium of the poem. An accident, slight perhaps for the weight it is made to carry, arouses his jealousy, and he tries her severely by isolation and rude offices on one of his tours; but her gentleness, purity, and patience are proof against all, and we part from the pair in a full and happy reconciliation, which is described in lines of a beauty that leaves nothing to be desired.

The treatment of Enid by her husband has appeared to some of Mr. Tennyson's readers to be unnatural. It is no doubt both in itself repulsive, and foreign to our age and country. But the brutal element in man, which now only invades the conjugal relation in cases where it is highly concentrated, was then far more widely diffused, and not yet dissociated from alternations and even habits of attachment. Something of what we now call Eastern manners at one time marked the treatment even of the women of the West. Unnatural means contrary to nature, irrespectively of time or place; but time and place explain and warrant the treatment of Enid by Geraint.

Vivien, which follows Enid, is perhaps the least popular of the four Books. No pleasure, we grant, can be felt from the character either of the wily woman, between elf and fiend, or of the aged magician, whose love is allowed to travel whither none of his esteem or regard can follow it: and in reading this poem we miss the pleasure of those profound moral harmonies, with which the rest are charged. But we must not on these grounds proceed to the conclusion that the poet has in this case been untrue to his aims. For he has neither failed in power, nor has he led our sympathies astray; and if we ask why he should introduce us to those we cannot love, there is something in the reply that Poetry, the mirror of the world, cannot deal with its attractions only, but must present some of its repulsions also, and avail herself of the powerful assistance of its contrasts. The example of Homer, who allows Thersites to thrust himself upon the scene in the debates of heroes, gives a sanction to what reason and all experience teach, namely, the actual force of negatives in heightening effect; and the gentle and noble characters and beautiful combinations, which largely predominate in the other poems, stand in far clearer and bolder relief when we perceive the dark and baleful shadow of Vivien lowering from between them.

Vivien exhibits a well-sustained conflict between the wizard and, in another sense, the witch; on one side is the wit of woman, on the other are the endowments of the prophet and magician, at once more and less than those of nature. She has heard from him of a charm, a charm of "woven paces, and of waving hands," which paralyses its victim for ever and without deliverance, and her object is to extract from him the knowledge of it as a proof of some return for the fervid and boundless love that she pretends. We cannot but estimate very highly the skill with which Mr. Tennyson has secured to what seemed the weaker vessel the ultimate mastery in the fight. Out of the eater comes forth meat. When she seems to lose ground with him by her slander against the Round Table which he loved, she recovers it by making him believe that she saw all other men, "the knights, the Court, the King, dark in his light": and when in answer to her imprecation on herself a fearful thunderbolt descends and storm rages, then, nestling in his bosom, part in fear but more in craft, she overcomes the last remnant of his resolution, wins the secret she has so indefatigably wooed, and that instant uses it to close in gloom the famous career of the over-mastered sage.

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Nowhere could we more opportunely than at this point call attention to Mr. Tennyson's extraordinary felicity and force in the use of metaphor and simile. This gift appears to have grown with his years, alike in abundance, truth, and grace. As the showers descend from heaven to return to it in vapour, so Mr. Tennyson's loving observation of Nature, and his Muse, seem to have had a compact of reciprocity well kept on both sides. When he was young, and when "Oenone" was first published, he almost boasted of putting a particular kind of grasshopper into Troas, which, as he told us in a note, was probably not to be found there. It is a small but yet an interesting and significant indication that, when some years after he retouched the poem, he omitted the note, and generalised the grasshopper. Whether we are right or not in taking this for a sign of the movement of his mind, there can be no doubt that his present use of figures is both the sign and the result of a reverence for Nature alike active, intelligent, and refined. Sometimes applying the metaphors of Art to Nature, he more frequently draws the materials of his analogies from her unexhausted book, and, however often he may call for some new and beautiful vehicle of illustration, she seems never to withhold an answer. With regard to this particular and very critical gift, it seems to us that he may challenge comparison with almost any poet either of ancient or modern times. We have always been accustomed to look upon Ariosto as one of the greatest among the masters of the art of metaphor and simile; and it would be easy to quote from him instances which in tenderness, grace, force, or all combined, can never be surpassed. But we have rarely seen the power subjected to a greater trial than in the passages just quoted from Mr. Tennyson, where metaphor lies by metaphor as thick as shells upon their bed; yet each individually with its outline as well drawn, its separateness as clear, its form as true to nature, and with the most full and harmonious contribution to the general effect.

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Mr. Tennyson practises largely, and with an extraordinary skill and power, the art of designed and limited repetitions. They bear a considerable resemblance to those Homeric _formulae_ which have been so usefully remarked by Colonel Mure--not the formulae of constant recurrence, which tells us who spoke and who answered, but those which are connected with pointing moral effects, and with ulterior purpose. These repetitions tend at once to give more definite impressions of character, and to make firmer and closer the whole tissue of the poem. Thus, in the last speech of Guinevere, she echoes back, with other ideas and expressions, the sentiment of Arthur's affection, which becomes in her mouth sublime:--

I must not scorn myself: he loves me still: Let no one dream but that he loves me still.

She prays admission among the nuns, that she may follow the pious and peaceful tenor of their life (p. 260):--

And so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer The sombre close of that voluptuous day Which wrought the ruin of my lord the King.

And it is but a debt of justice to the Guinevere of the romancers to observe, that she loses considerably by the marked transposition which Mr. Tennyson has effected in the order of greatness between Lancelot and Arthur. With him there is an original error in her estimate, independently of the breach of a positive and sacred obligation. She prefers the inferior man; and this preference implies a rooted ethical defect in her nature. In the romance of Sir T. Mallory the preference she gives to Lancelot would have been signally just, had she been free to choose. For Lancelot is of an indescribable grandeur; but the limit of Arthur's character is thus shown in certain words that he uses, and that Lancelot never could have spoken. "Much more I am sorrier for my good knight's loss than for the loss of my queen; for queens might I have enough, but, such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in company."

We began with the exordium of this great work: we must not withhold the conclusion. We left her praying admission to the convent--

She said. They took her to themselves; and she, Still hoping, fearing, "is it yet too late?" Dwelt with them, till in time their Abbess died. Then she, for her good deeds and her pure life, And for the power of ministration in her, And likewise for the high rank she had borne, Was chosen Abbess: there, an Abbess, lived For three brief years; and there, an Abbess, pass'd To where beyond these voices there is peace.

No one, we are persuaded, can read this poem without feeling, when it ends, what may be termed the pangs of vacancy--of that void in heart and mind for want of its continuance of which we are conscious when some noble strain of music ceases, when some great work of Raphael passes from the view, when we lose sight of some spot connected with high associations, or when some transcendent character upon the page of history disappears, and the withdrawal of it is like the withdrawal of the vital air. We have followed the Guinevere of Mr. Tennyson through its detail, and have extracted largely from its pages, and yet have not a hope of having conveyed an idea of what it really is; still we have thought that in this way we should do it the least injustice, and we are also convinced that even what we have shown will tend to rouse an appetite, and that any of our readers, who may not yet have been also Mr. Tennyson's, will become more eager to learn and admire it at first hand.

We have no doubt that Mr. Tennyson has carefully considered how far his subject is capable of fulfilling the conditions of an epic structure. The history of Arthur is not an epic as it stands, but neither was the Cyclic song, of which the greatest of all epics, the "Iliad," handles a part. The poem of Ariosto is scarcely an epic, nor is that of Bojardo; but it is not this because each is too promiscuous and crowded in its brilliant phantasmagoria to conform to the severe laws of that lofty and inexorable class of poem? Though the Arthurian romance be no epic, it does not follow that no epic can be made from out of it. It is grounded in certain leading characters, men and women, conceived upon models of extraordinary grandeur; and as the Laureate has evidently grasped the genuine law which makes man and not the acts of man the base of epic song, we should not be surprised were he hereafter to realize the great achievement towards which he seems to be feeling his way. There is a moral unity and a living relationship between the four poems before us, and the first effort of 1842 as a fifth, which, though some considerable part of their contents would necessarily rank as episode, establishes the first and most essential condition of their cohesion. The achievement of Vivien bears directly on the state of Arthur by withdrawing his chief councillor--the brain, as Lancelot was the right arm, of his court; the love of Elaine is directly associated with the final catastrophe of the passion of Lancelot for Guinevere. Enid lies somewhat further off the path, nor is it for profane feet to intrude into the sanctuary, for reviewers to advise poets in these high matters; but while we presume nothing, we do not despair of seeing Mr. Tennyson achieve on the basis he has chosen the structure of a full-formed epic.

In any case we have a cheerful hope that, if he continues to advance upon himself as he has advanced heretofore, nay, if he can keep the level he has gained, such a work will be the greatest, and by far the greatest poetical creation, that, whether in our own or in foreign poetry, the nineteenth century has produced. In the face of all critics, the Laureate of England has now reached a position which at once imposes and instils respect. They are self-constituted; but he has won his way through the long dedication of his manful energies, accepted and crowned by deliberate, and, we rejoice to think, by continually growing, public favour. He has after all, and it is not the least nor lowest item in his praise, been the severest of his own critics, and has not been too proud either to learn or to unlearn in the work of maturing his genius and building up his fame.

From his very first appearance he has had the form and fashion of a true poet: the insight into beauty, the perception of harmony, the faculty of suggestion, the eye both in the physical and moral world for motion, light, and colour, the sympathetic and close observation of nature, the dominance of the constructive faculty, and that rare gift the thorough mastery and loving use of his native tongue. Many of us, the common crowd, made of the common clay, may be lovers of Nature, some as sincere or even as ardent as Mr. Tennyson; but it does not follow that even these favoured few possess the privilege that he enjoys. To them she speaks through vague and indeterminate impressions: for him she has a voice of the most delicate articulation; all her images to him are clear and definite, and he translates them for us into that language of suggestion, emphasis, and refined analogy which links the manifold to the simple and the infinite to the finite. He accomplishes for us what we should in vain attempt for ourselves, enables the puny hand to lay hold on what is vast, and brings even coarseness of grasp into a real contact with what is subtle and ethereal. His turn for metaphysical analysis is closely associated with a deep ethical insight: and many of his verses form sayings of so high a class that we trust they are destined to form a permanent part of the household-words of England.

Considering the quantity of power that Mr. Tennyson can make available, it is a great proof of self-discipline that he is not given to a wanton or tyrannous use of it. An extraordinary master of diction, he has confined himself to its severe and simple forms. In establishing this rule of practice his natural gift has evidently been aided by the fine English of the old romances, and we might count upon the fingers the cases in which he has lately deviated into the employment of any stilted phrase, or given sanction to a word not of the best fabric. Profuse in the power of graphic[1] representation, he has chastened some of his earlier groups of imagery, which were occasionally overloaded with particulars; and in his later works, as has been well remarked, he has shown himself thoroughly aware that in poetry half is greater than the whole. That the chastity of style he has attained is not from exhaustion of power may easily be shown. No poet has evinced a more despotic mastery over intractable materials, or has been more successful in clothing what is common with the dignity of his art. The Downs are not the best subjects in the world for verse; but they will be remembered with and by his descriptive line in the "Idylls"--

Far o'er the long backs of the bushless downs.

[1] We use the word in what we conceive to be its only legitimate meaning; namely, after the manner and with the effect of painting. It signifies the _quid_, not the _quale_.

How becoming is the appearance of what we familiarly term the "clod" in the "Princess"! (p. 37)--

Nor those horn-handled breakers of the glebe.

Of all imaginable subjects, mathematics might seem the most hopeless to make mention of in verse; but they are with him

The hard-grained Muses of the cube and square.

Thus at a single stroke he gives an image alike simple, true, and poetical to boot, because suited to its place and object in his verse, like the heavy Caryatides well placed in architecture. After this, we may less esteem the feat by which in "Godiva" he describes the clock striking mid-day:--

All at once, With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon Was clashed and hammered from a hundred towers.

But even the contents of a pigeon-pie are not beneath his notice, nor yet beyond his powers of embellishment, in "Audley Court":--

A pasty, costly made, Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied.

What excites more surprise is that he can, without any offence against good taste, venture to deal with these contents even after they have entered the mouth of the eater ("Enid," p. 79):--

The brawny spearman let his cheek Bulge with the unswallowed piece, and turning, stared.

The delicate insight of fine taste appears to show him with wonderful precision up to what point his art can control and compel his materials, and from what point the materials are in hopeless rebellion and must be let alone. So in the "Princess" (p. 89) we are introduced to--

Eight daughters of the plough, stronger than men, Huge women _blowzed_ with health, and wind, and rain, And labour.

It was absolutely necessary for him to heighten, nay, to coarsen, the description of these masses of animated beef, who formed the standing army of the woman-commonwealth. Few would have obeyed this law without violating another; but Mr. Tennyson saw that the verb was admissible, while the adjective would have been intolerable.