Elaine,* appeared in 1859 as Idylls of the King, the first occasion upon which the name was employed. Three years later the dedication to the memory of the Prince Consort was prefixed to the poems, which remained unaltered, save for a few unimportant verbal changes. After another interval of seven years, in 1869, four new poems were added to the already published idylls -The Coming of Arthur, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettarre, and The Passing of Arthur. The last named was an extended version of the Morte d'Arthur of 1842. In 1871 The Last Tournament appeared in the Contemporary Review, and in 1872 Gareth and Lynette.† After yet another long interval, Balin and Balan, which serves as an introduction to Merlin and Vivien, was published in 1885, and in 1888 Geraint and Enid was divided into two parts, the first being named The Marriage of Geraint, and the second retaining the former title.

Such is the external history of the Idylls of the King. The history of the author's purpose and its gradual development, as indicated in the additions. and alterations, made from time to time in the text of successive editions, can here be but briefly sketched. Through fully half a century, as I have shown, the Arthurian story had possession of Tennyson's mind. Throughout that period it seems as if he were slowly feeling his way towards the best solution of the difficult problem--how to create a living interest in the old-world legend, how to re-tell these tales of centuries ago, that they might touch the modern mind,

*Afterwards entitled Geraint and Enid, Merlin and Vivien, Lancelot and Elaine, Arthur and Guinevere.

The lines" To the Queen" were added as a conclusion to the series in this year.

affect with real power the men who live the altered life of to-day.

Although the subject was in many respects suitable for a great English poem, and offered practically an open field which any poet might make his own possession, were his genius equal to the task, the choice of method was a difficult one. The Arthurian romances embody the ideals of chivalry, but they were never true to the real life of any age, and some indeed have thought that no treatment, however skilful, could give them more than a poetic-antiquarian interest:

No part have these wan legends in the sun,

Whose glory lightens Greece and gleams on Rome.
Their elders live; but these-their day is done;
Their records written on the winds, in foam

Fly down the wind, and darkness takes them home.
What Homer saw, what Virgil dreamed, was truth
And died not, being divine; but whence, in sooth,
Might shades that never lived win deathless youth?"

It was too late by many centuries to build out of these misty legends the heroic epic, whose readers should find in Arthur a real king, and follow with believing, beating heart the record of his knightly deeds. Whatever else may be said of Tennyson, we must willingly grant the wisdom of his choice of the only way in which the material could be handled with any measure of success in these later days. An allegorical treatment of the romance of Arthur was the sole possible treatment for a poet of the nineteenth century. Nor did the romances present any features incompatible with such treatment; they lent themselves readily to it. Already around the person of Arthur had collected many myths of symbolic import, through which inner meanings ran, and the whole story had been

treated by Malory in the spirit of one who, while he tells a particular tale, relates a chapter of universal human history.

The idea of an allegorical treatment of the Arthurian story was, I think, present with Tennyson from the first, but his conception of the whole scheme was in the beginning far from definite, and the presence of the symbolism is hardly felt in the four Idylls of 1859. He was not sure how far the allegory might be justly carried. By Arthur, as he tells us, he always meant the Soul, but it was not until 1869, when he published Pelleas and Ettarre and The Holy Grail, that the allegoric purpose is clearly present. In the address to the Queen, which concludes the whole, and was published in 1872, he sets forth the aim of his work, and speaks of it as an

"old imperfect tale,

New-old and shadowing Sense at war with Soul
Rather than 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

Of Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's, one
Touch'd by the adulterous finger of a time
That hover'd between war and wantonness,
And crownings and dethronements."

The constant revision to which, almost until the last, the various poems were subjected was designed to emphasise their true character, and to bind them into a closer unity. After the publication of Balin and Balan, in 1885, Tennyson wrote but one other poem, a lyric, on an Arthurian subject. In Merlin and the Gleam the poet seems to allegorise his own life and teaching, and, in his faith that the ideal is indeed the vera lux that must lead the world, once more

restores the hope that in the failure of the Table Round had seemed almost wholly quenched.

I have said that Tennyson's treatment of the Arthurian romances was the only possible one—a frank literary and symbolic handling of the legendary cycle; it remains to ask, Was it successful? I shall not stay to discuss the wisdom of the choice of title, nor to enter upon the barren logomachy, so long waged by the critics, whether or no the poems constitute an epic. Like all Tennyson's poems, the lyrics excepted, the Idylls of the King have the elements of strength and of weakness, we may say the elements of the author's characteristic strength, the elements of his characteristic weakness. The cardinal defect, inherent in the subject, a lack of unity, was precisely the defect which the limitations of Tennyson's genius rendered him least able to repair. It would have been repaired by Milton had he essayed the task; I believe no English poet since Milton possessed the architectural faculty, the unifying imagination essential to complete success. Tennyson's Idylls are a series of pictures as their name indeed implies; there is no link strong enough to bind the constituent parts into an organic whole. The figure of Arthur is too dim, too undefined to serve as centre to the movement of the various poems; he comes and passes away, but his influence is slight. Within the work itself, it can hardly be said that there is “a beginning, a middle point, and an end," as Aristotle justly demanded in an epic. We are conscious that many more such poems might have been added, that some might have been omitted without serious disturbance to the poem as a whole. To say so is to say what cannot be asserted of an organic growth, to which nothing can be added

and from which nothing can be taken away. Yet in the room of unity we have symmetry, a delicate balance and proportion, artistic and admirable, with which we may well be content.

Turning from the poem as it might have been to a consideration of it as given to us, the most serious defect arises out of the unfortunate contrast between the cold, colourless, faultless Arthur and the humanhearted though sinning Lancelot. It is not enough to say that, viewed in its spiritual meanings, the comparison must be in favour of the blameless king. The story affects us before the symbolism is apparent, and our sympathies are enlisted on the side of flesh and blood, and cannot again be alienated. Our instincts teach us that Lancelot is the nobler type of manhood. The story, if the poem is to be perfect, must be complete and interesting in itself. But the necessities of the symbolism clash at times and cannot be harmonised with the tale, and when "we come suddenly upon the moral, it gives us a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when one's teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of strawberries and cream.” This and the inevitable sense of depression which the failure of its ideals, the final ruin of Arthur's once noble court, leaves within the mind, are faults without remedy. But the compensations are not a few-such, indeed, as Tennyson rarely failed to supply in any work. In the Holy Grail and in Guinevere, as in Elaine and indeed. in almost all the poems, there are as noble passages as any to be found in the whole range of English poetry. The felicitous rendering, too, of natural scenery, and its equally felicitous use for purposes of illustration, are as conspicuous as ever. No better example can be adduced than the often-quoted lines that follow :