“Their records written of the winds, in foam
Fly down the wind, and darkness takes them home.”[130]
At any rate, Tennyson frankly confesses that what he presents in his ‘Idylls’ is a
“tale
New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul”;
and the new element in it is a didactic purpose suited to the moral and sentimental temper of the Victorian era, and embodying what a severe critic calls “the ethics of the rectory parlour.”[131] Tennyson himself is responsible for revealing the “particular intention” which equates the Arthur of the ‘Idylls’ with the Prince Consort; for he dedicates the poems to his memory,
“since he held them dear,
Perchance as finding there unconsciously
Some image of himself.”
It is hardly likely, however, that Tennyson, when he first thought of the Arthurian stories as a poetic theme, had any very definite idea of putting them into the form of an allegory such as most of his interpreters now discover in them; but that he, from the first, intended a “modern meaning” is plain from the lines appended to the Morte D’Arthur at the time of its original publication,—