Two of the latest letters amused my father much, one from Canada from a little boy who said that his mother liked cheeses, and he would like Tennyson to send him money to buy a good cheese: the other from an English artist who said that his speciality was drawing cows, but that he must have a cow of his own to live with and make proper studies of, would therefore Tennyson give him a cow?
APPENDIX D
TENNYSON’S ARTHURIAN POEM[119]
By Sir James Knowles, K.C.V.O.
[This letter was written after a talk with my father, and no doubt Sir James Knowles has caught much of the meaning of “The Idylls of the King.” About this poem my father said to me, “My meaning was spiritual. I only took the legendary stories of the Round Table as illustrations. Arthur was allegorical to me. I intended him to represent the Ideal in the Soul of Man coming in contact with the warring elements of the flesh.”—Ed.]
The fine and wholesome moral breeze which always seems to blow about the higher realms of Art comes to us fresh as ever from this great poem, and more acceptably than ever just now. A constant worship of Purity, and a constant reprobation of Impurity as the rock on which the noble projects of the “blameless king” are wrecked, appear throughout upon the surface of the story.
But besides this, there doubtless does run through it all a sort of under-tone of symbolism, which, while it never interferes with the clear melody of the poem, or perverts it into that most tedious of riddles, a formal allegory, gives a profound harmony to its music and a prophetic strain to its intention most worthy of a great spiritual Bard.
King Arthur, as he has always been treated by Tennyson, stands obviously for no mere individual prince or hero, but for the “King within us”—our highest nature, by whatsoever name it may be called—conscience; spirit; the moral soul; the religious sense; the noble resolve. His story and adventures become the story of the battle and pre-eminence of the soul and of the perpetual warfare between the spirit and the flesh.
For so exalting him there is abundant warrant in the language of many old compilers, by whom “all human perfection was collected in Arthur”; as where, for instance, one says,—“The old world knows not his peer, nor will the future show us his equal,—he alone towers over all other kings, better than the past ones, and greater than those that are to be”; or another, “In short, God has not made, since Adam was, the man more perfect than Arthur.”