Tennyson himself tells us that in this, his longest poem, he has meant to shadow "sense at war with soul," the struggle in the individual and in the race, between that body which links us with the brute and the soul which makes us part of a spiritual order. But the mastery of the higher over the lower is only obtained through many seeming failures. Wounded and defeated, the King exclaims:
For I, being simple, thought to work His will,
And have but stricken with the sword in vain;
And all whereon I lean'd, in wife and friend,
Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm
Reels back into the beast, and is no more.
But he also half perceives the truth which it is the poet's purpose to suggest to us. It is short-sighted to expect the immediate sanctification of the race; if we are disheartened, striving to "work His will," it is because "we see not the close." It is impossible that Arthur's work should end in failure—departing, he declares, "I pass, but shall not die," and when his grievous wound is healed, he will return. The Idylls of the King is thus the epic of evolution in application to the progress of human society. In it the teachings of "In Memoriam" assume a narrative form.
Move upward, working out the beast,
may be taken as a brief statement of its theme: and we read in it the belief in the tendency upward and an assurance of ultimate triumph:
Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet,
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void
When God hath made the pile complete.
—Pancoast.[4]
As an interlude study which shall look back to the step we have just taken, and forward to the one we are about to take, let us test our growth in vitality in thinking and our need of intelligence in feeling, by voicing the following selections from didactic poetry. This form affords the best exercise in both activities because it makes a double appeal, and so a double demand upon the interpreter—an appeal through form to emotion, through aim to intelligence, and through message and atmosphere to both. I have chosen examples of this form in which the beauty and fascination of meter, rhythm, and rhyme, and the didactic nature of the thought do not seem to overbalance each other. If either should predominate you must, by your interpretation, strike the balance. In reading Robert Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra (from which I shall quote but a few verses) you must carry to your auditor the full import of the philosophy, but in doing so you must not lose the beauty of the verse in which the poet has set it.