Of Geoffrey’s book, or him of Malleor’s.”
Rather they ought to discern in him
“Ideal manhood closed in real man.”
All the same, Tennyson’s pre-occupation with “ideal manhood” did not prevent him from bestowing painful labour upon knowing the “real man,” so far as the records, historical and romantic, reveal him; and one of the outstanding features of The Idylls of the King is their remarkable fidelity to the details of Arthurian story as given in its time-honoured literary sources. “Geoffrey’s book,” and “Malleor’s,” had been carefully studied by the poet, and he had even been at pains to garner all he could from early Welsh poetry and from the Mabinogion, as presented in Lady Charlotte Guest’s charming translation. While Malory is their main source, the ‘Idylls’ contain much that shows how familiar Tennyson was with Arthurian lore generally in its most primitive forms. The story of Geraint, for example, as told by him, follows closely the Welsh version of it given by Lady Charlotte Guest.[134] Again, the description of Britain in the opening lines of The Coming of Arthur as a country where each “petty king” was ever waging war upon some other, and where the children “grew up to wolf-like men, worse than the wolves,” until
“King Leodogran
Groan’d for the Roman legions here again,”
recalls vividly the bitter lamentations of Gildas over the degeneracy of his countrymen. The account which Lancelot gives of Arthur’s wars in Lancelot and Elaine is an expansion of the record in Nennius of the twelve Arthurian battles. And Tennyson’s general conception of Arthur as the flower of kings who
“Drew all the petty princedoms under him,”
and “made a realm” in Britain, is far more in keeping with that of the early chroniclers than with the picture given of him in the later romances.
But it is not in such incidental features alone that the ‘Idylls’ are true to the older Arthurian tradition. Modern in their sentiment and ethics though they may be, Tennyson’s main purpose in them of “shadowing Sense at war with Soul” is not altogether unjustified by the general literary history of the legends. Malory, at any rate, had some such purpose, for Caxton assures us that the Morte Darthur was “written for our doctrine, and for to beware that we fall not to vice nor sin, but to exercise and follow virtue.” “In Malory’s compilation, and in later mediæval romance, the fate of Arthur means the fate of the chivalrous ideal, whose irreconcilable elements were incorporated in him. In the romantic historians the fate of Arthur is the fate of the Christian Britons in conflict with heathenism from without and treason from within. Even in the old myths, his fate, if we may trust Professor Rhys, is the fate of the culture-hero combined with Father Sky, in conflict with the powers of Darkness and the Nether-world. It was by a true inspiration that Tennyson was drawn to the old legends, and reading into them his secret found it to be their own. Accordingly, this identity of feeling with his predecessors kept Tennyson on the track of the story.... Thus the ‘Idylls’ are both truer to the authorities and nearer our own feelings than any other of the adaptations of Arthurian story. Though the adventures are now regarded from a modern point of view, this point of view is in the same spiritual watch-tower from which the framers of the legend looked: but it is the platform at the top, not a loop-hole on the winding stair.”[135]