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 gratitude,” 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 gratitude 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 gratitude! 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 gratitude? 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 gratitude 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 gratitude. 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 Persæ of Æschylus. The poet who can transfigure the hot present is fortunate, but most, and the greatest, have visited the cool quiet purlieus of the past.
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 Institutions. 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 mediæval 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 mediæval 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 mediæval knights, and still more the knights of mediæval 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 mediæval 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 mediæval 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 pass 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 lusty 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, . . . noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, love, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil.”