His charger trampling many a prickly star
Of sprouted thistle on the broken stones....
the image is hardly less at the centre of things than Shelley’s superb “blue thistles bloomed in cities,” of which it is inevitably, but finely, reminiscent. Geraint’s splendid challenge to Edyrn’s labourers, beginning “A hundred pips eat up your sparrow-hawk,” Yniol’s beautiful iteration of the refrain in Enid’s song, “Our hoard is little but our hearts are great,” Lancelot’s discovery to Lavaine on their approach to Camelot, “Hear, but hold my name Hidden, you ride with Lancelot of the Lake,” are but casual instances of the abounding poetic energy that informs the poems. Nor are there wanting yet greater triumphs of the imagination, things at the very heart of poetic mastery. Geraint’s self-imposed penance never to ask Enid the significance of the accusation which he supposed he had heard her make against herself is a master-stroke of vision of which the dramatic genius of Shakespeare himself might have been proud, while I know of no moment in all English poetry more surging with the tides of tragic and heroic beauty than that in which the great Arthurian epic comes to its close, with the throwing of Excalibur back into the Cornish water.
So flash’d and fell the brand Excalibur:
But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
And caught him by the hilt, and brandish’d him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere....
The power of visualisation here is tremendous. The lines are charged with a mystery that has in it nothing that is inexact or nebulous, and we see not an enchanted pool of a romantic wonderland, but an actual water by the rockbound Cornish coast, the heart of a country where was played out the immortal drama of England’s legendary chivalry. Here is the beauty that transcends the beauty of pathos, the beauty of trembling and poignant vision such as we find in some great chorus of Euripides. By the evidence of such things, which are not seldom within Tennyson’s reach, it is a very lean and jealous humour of criticism that can deny him a place among even the greatest.
A more debatable element in Tennyson’s work may also be illustrated from the Idylls. When Arthur takes his last leave of Guinevere at the Almesbury convent he follows a touching recital of the founding and the character of the Round Table with an uncompromising indictment of Guinevere’s sin. He announced separation as the only possible course to be taken in spite of his professions of indestructible love, and the assurance in which, perhaps, may be found just a grain of comfort for the detractors, “Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God forgives.” Guinevere accepts the impeachment and its consequences and in turn renounces her allegiance to Lancelot, not only in her life but in her heart, and the crux of the argument may be given in this passage from the king’s parting charge—