“To me, methought, who waited in a crowd,
There came a bark that, blowing forward, bore
King Arthur, like a modern gentleman
Of stateliest port; and all the people cried
‘Arthur is come again: he cannot die.’”
That the ‘Idylls,’ when finally completed and put into their present order, had “an allegorical or perhaps a parabolic drift,” in them, is certain, for the words quoted are Tennyson’s own.[132] Tennyson, however, complains that critics had “taken his hobby and ridden it too hard, and have explained some things too allegorically.” “The general drift of the ‘Idylls,’” he continues, “is clear enough. ‘The whole ... is the dream of man coming into practical life and ruined by one sin. Birth is a mystery and death is a mystery, and in the midst lies the tableland of life.’” Modern though this “drift” may be, it is perennial and universal enough in its appeal to save the ‘Idylls’—notwithstanding the references to the “modern gentleman” and the Prince Consort—from being a merely Victorian poem, or series of poems. They do not, together, constitute an Arthuriad: they are not meant to represent “the epic, some twelve books” with “faint Homeric echoes” which Tennyson may have been meditating in his earlier years when he published his Morte D’Arthur. “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,’ 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.”[133]
Tennyson’s King Arthur is certainly modern enough in sentiment and speech, but the position which he holds in the ‘Idylls’ is, in many ways, in harmony with that which he occupies in history and romantic legend. Tennyson himself warns his readers that they must not expect to find in the ‘Idylls’
“that gray king whose name, a ghost,
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak,
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him