Famous Reviews by Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

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We return to our proper task, "Maud," if an unintelligible or even, for
Mr. Tennyson, an inferior work, is still a work which no inferior man
could have produced; nor would it be difficult to extract abundance of
lines, and even passages, obviously worthy of their author. And if this
poem would have made while alone a volume too light for his fame, the
defect is supplied by the minor pieces, some of which are admirable.
"The Brook," with its charming interstitial soliloquy, and the "Letters"
will, we are persuaded, always rank among Mr. Tennyson's happy efforts;
while the "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," written from the
heart and sealed by the conscience of the poet, is worthy of that great
and genuine piece of manhood, its immortal subject.

We must touch for a moment upon what has already been mentioned as a
separate subject of interest in the "Princess." We venture to describe
it as in substance a drama, with a plot imperfectly worked and with
characters insufficiently chiselled and relieved. Its author began by
presenting, and for many years continued to present, personal as well as
natural pictures of individual attitude or movement; and, as in "Oenone"
and "Godiva," he carried them to a very high pitch of perfection. But he
scarcely attempted, unless in his more homely narrations, anything like
grouping or combination. It now appears that for the higher effort he
has been gradually accumulating and preparing his resources. In the
sections of the prolonged soliloquy of "Maud" we see a crude attempt at
representing combined interests and characters with heroic elevation,
under the special difficulty of appearing, like Mathews, in one person
only; in the "Princess" we had a happier effort, though one that still
left more to be desired. Each, however, in its own stage was a
preparation for an enterprise at once bolder and more mature.

We now come to the recent work of the poet--the "Idylls of the King."
The field, which Mr. Tennyson has chosen for this his recent and far
greatest exploit, is one of so deep and wide-reaching an interest as to
demand some previous notice of a special kind.

Lofty example in comprehensive forms is, without doubt, one of the great
standing needs of our race. To this want it has been from the first one
main purpose of the highest poetry to answer. The quest of Beauty leads
all those who engage in it to the ideal or normal man as the summit of
attainable excellence. By no arbitrary choice, but in obedience to
unchanging laws, the painter and the sculptor must found their art upon
the study of the human form, and must reckon its successful reproduction
as their noblest and most consummate exploit. The concern of Poetry with
corporal beauty is, though important, yet secondary: this art uses form
as an auxiliary, as a subordinate though proper part in the delineation
of mind and character, of which it is appointed to be a visible organ.
But with mind and character themselves lies the highest occupation of
the Muse. Homer, the patriarch of poets, has founded his two immortal
works upon two of these ideal developments in Achilles and Ulysses; and
has adorned them with others, such as Penelope and Helen, Hector and
Diomed, every one an immortal product, though as compared with the
others either less consummate or less conspicuous. Though deformed by
the mire of after-tradition, all the great characters of Homer have
become models and standards, each in its own kind, for what was, or was
supposed to be, its distinguishing gift.

At length, after many generations and great revolutions of mind and of
events, another age arrived, like, if not equal, in creative power to
that of Homer. The Gospel had given to the whole life of man a real
resurrection, and its second birth was followed by its second youth.
This rejuvenescence was allotted to those wonderful centuries which
popular ignorance confounds with the dark ages properly so called--an
identification about as rational as if we were to compare the life
within the womb to the life of intelligent though early childhood.
Awakened to aspirations at once fresh and ancient, the mind of man took
hold of the venerable ideals bequeathed to us by the Greeks as a
precious part of its inheritance, and gave them again to the light,
appropriated but also renewed. The old materials came forth, but not
alone; for the types which human genius had formerly conceived were now
submitted to the transfiguring action of a law from on high. Nature
herself prompted the effort to bring the old patterns of worldly
excellence and greatness--or rather the copies of those patterns still
legible, though depraved, and still rich with living suggestion--into
harmony with that higher Pattern, once seen by the eyes and handled by
the hands of men, and faithfully delineated in the Gospels for the
profit of all generations. The life of our Saviour, in its external
aspect, was that of a teacher. It was in principle a model for all, but
it left space and scope for adaptations to the lay life of Christians in
general, such as those by whom the every-day business of the world is to
be carried on. It remained for man to make his best endeavour to exhibit
the great model on its terrestrial side, in its contact with the world.
Here is the true source of that new and noble cycle which the middle
ages have handed down to us in duality of form, but with a nearly
identical substance, under the royal sceptres of Arthur in England and
of Charlemagne in France.

Of the two great systems of Romance, one has Lancelot, the other has
Orlando for its culminating point; these heroes being exhibited as the
respective specimens in whose characters the fullest development of man,
such as he was then conceived, was to be recognised. The one put forward
Arthur for the visible head of Christendom, signifying and asserting its
social unity; the other had Charlemagne. Each arrays about the Sovereign
a fellowship of knights. In them Valour is the servant of Honour; in an
age of which violence is the besetting danger, the protection of the
weak is elevated into a first principle of action; and they betoken an
order of things in which Force should be only known as allied with
Virtue, while they historically foreshadow the magnificent aristocracy
of mediaeval Europe. The one had Guinevere for the rarest gem of beauty,
the other had Angelica. Each of them contained figures of approximation
to the knightly model, and in each these figures, though on the whole
secondary, yet in certain aspects surpassed it: such were Sir Tristram,
Sir Galahad, Sir Lamoracke, Sir Gawain, Sir Geraint, in the Arthurian
cycle; Rinaldo and Ruggiero, with others, in the Carlovingian. They were
not twin systems, but they were rather twin investitures of the same
scheme of ideals and feelings. Their consanguinity to the primitive
Homeric types is proved by a multitude of analogies of character and by
the commanding place which they assign to Hector as the flower of human
excellence. Without doubt, this preference was founded on his supposed
moral superiority to all his fellows in Homer; and the secondary prizes
of strength, valour, and the like, were naturally allowed to group
themselves around what, under the Christian scheme, had become the
primary ornament of man. The near relation of the two cycles to one
another may be sufficiently seen in the leading references we have made,
and it runs into a multitude of details both great and small, of which
we can only note a few. In both the chief hero passes through a
prolonged term of madness. Judas, in the College of Apostles, is
represented under Charlemagne in Gano di Maganza and his house, who
appear, without any development in action, in the Arthurian romance as
"the traitours of Magouns," and who are likewise reflected in Sir
Modred, Sir Agravain, and others; while the Mahometan element, which has
a natural place ready made in a history that acknowledges Charlemagne
and France, for its centres, finds its way sympathetically into one
which is bound for the most part by the shores of Albion. Both schemes
cling to the tradition of the unity of the Empire as well as of
Christendom; and accordingly, what was historical in Charlemagne is
represented in the case of Arthur by an imaginary conquest reaching as
far as Rome, the capital of the West: even the sword _Durindana_ has its
counterpart in the sword _Excalibur_.

The moral systems of the two cycles are essentially allied: and perhaps
the differences between them may be due in greater or in less part to
the fact that they come to us through different _media_. We of the
nineteenth century read the Carlovingian romance in the pages of Ariosto
and Bojardo, who gave to their materials the colour of their times, and
of a civilization rank in some respects, while still unripe in some
others. The genius of poetry was not at the same period applying its
transmuting force to the Romance of the Round Table. The date of Sir
Thomas Mallory, who lived under Edward IV, is something earlier than
that of the great Italian romances; he appears, too, to have been on the
whole content with the humble offices of a compiler and a chronicler,
and we may conceive that his spirit and diction are still older than his
date. The consequence is, that we are brought into more immediate and
fresher contact with the original forms of this romance. So that, as
they present themselves to us, the Carlovingian cycle is the child of
the latest middle age, while the Arthurian represents the earlier. Much
might be said on the differences which have thus arisen, and on those
which may be due to a more northern and more southern extraction
respectively. Suffice it to say that the Romance of the Round Table, far
less vivid and brilliant, far ruder as a work of skill and art, has more
of the innocence, the emotion, the transparency, the inconsistency of
childhood. Its political action is less specifically Christian than that
of the rival scheme, its individual more so. It is more directly and
seriously aimed at the perfection of man. It is more free from gloss and
varnish; it tells its own tale with more entire simplicity. The ascetic
element is more strongly, and at the same time more quaintly, developed.
It has a higher conception of the nature of woman; and like the Homeric
poems, appears to eschew exhibiting her perfections in alliance with
warlike force and exploits. So also love, while largely infused into the
story, is more subordinate to the exhibition of other qualities. Again,
the Romance of the Round Table bears witness to a more distinct and
keener sense of sin: and on the whole, a deeper, broader, and more manly
view of human character, life, and duty. It is in effect more like what
the Carlovingian cycle might have been had Dante moulded it. It hardly
needs to be added that it is more mythical, inasmuch as Arthur of the
Round Table is a personage, we fear, wholly doubtful, though not
impossible; while the broad back of the historic Charlemagne, like
another Atlas, may well sustain a world of mythical accretions. This
slight comparison, be it remarked, refers exclusively to what may be
termed the latest "redactions" of the two cycles of romance. Their early
forms, in the lays of troubadours, and in the pages of the oldest
chroniclers, offer a subject of profound interest, and one still
unexhausted, although it has been examined by Mr. Panizzi and M.
Fauriel,[1] but one which is quite beyond the scope of our present
subject.

[1] Essay on the Romantic Narrative Poetry of the Italians: London,
1830. Histoire de la Poesie Provencale: Paris, 1846.

It is to this rich repository that Mr. Tennyson has resorted for his
material. He has shown, as we think, rare judgment in the choice. The
Arthurian Romance has every recommendation that should win its way to
the homage of a great poet. It is national: it is Christian. It is also
human in the largest and deepest sense; and, therefore, though highly
national, it is universal; for it rests upon those depths and breadths
of our nature to which all its truly great developments in all nations
are alike essentially and closely related. The distance is enough for
atmosphere, not too much for detail; enough for romance, not too much
for sympathy. A poet of the nineteenth century, the Laureate has adopted
characters, incidents, and even language in the main, instead of
attempting to project them on a basis of his own in the region of
illimitable fancy. But he has done much more than this. Evidently by
reading and by deep meditation, as well as by sheer force of genius, he
has penetrated himself down to the very core of his being, with all that
is deepest and best in the spirit of the time, or the representation,
with which he deals; and as others, using old materials, have been free
to alter them in the sense of vulgarity or licence, so he has claimed
and used the right to sever and recombine, to enlarge, retrench, and
modify, for the purposes at once of a more powerful and elaborate art
than his original presents, and of a yet more elevated, or at least of a
far more sustained, ethical and Christian strain.

We are rather disposed to quarrel with the title of Idylls: for no
diminutive ([Greek: _eidullion_]) can be adequate to the breadth,
vigour, and majesty which belong to the subjects, as well as to the
execution, of the volume. The poet used the name once before; but he
then applied it to pieces generally small in the scale of their
delineations, whereas these, even if broken away one from the other, are
yet like the disjoined figures from the pediment of the Parthenon in
their dignity and force. One indeed among Mr. Tennyson's merits is, that
he does not think it necessary to keep himself aloft by artificial
effort, but undulates with his matter, and flies high or low as it
requires. But even in the humblest parts of these poems--as where the
little Novice describes the miniature sorrows and discipline of
childhood--the whole receives its tone from an atmosphere which is
heroic, and which, even in its extremest simplicity, by no means parts
company with grandeur, or ceases to shine in the reflected light of the
surrounding objects. Following the example which the poet has set us in
a former volume, we would fain have been permitted, at least
provisionally, to call these Idylls by the name of Books. Term them what
we may, there are four of them--arranged, as we think, in an ascending
scale.

The simplicity and grace of the principal character in Enid, with which
the volume opens, touches, but does not too strongly agitate, the deeper
springs of feeling. She is the beautiful daughter of Earl Yniol, who, by
his refusal of a turbulent neighbour as a suitor, has drawn upon himself
the ruin of his fortunes, and is visited in his depressed condition by
(p. 1)--

The brave Geraint, a knight of Arthur's court,
A tributary prince of Devon, one
Of that great order of the Table Round....

Geraint wins her against the detested cousin. They wed, and she becomes
the purest gem of the court of Guinevere, her place in which is
described in the beautiful exordium of the poem. An accident, slight
perhaps for the weight it is made to carry, arouses his jealousy, and he
tries her severely by isolation and rude offices on one of his tours;
but her gentleness, purity, and patience are proof against all, and we
part from the pair in a full and happy reconciliation, which is
described in lines of a beauty that leaves nothing to be desired.

The treatment of Enid by her husband has appeared to some of Mr.
Tennyson's readers to be unnatural. It is no doubt both in itself
repulsive, and foreign to our age and country. But the brutal element in
man, which now only invades the conjugal relation in cases where it is
highly concentrated, was then far more widely diffused, and not yet
dissociated from alternations and even habits of attachment. Something
of what we now call Eastern manners at one time marked the treatment
even of the women of the West. Unnatural means contrary to nature,
irrespectively of time or place; but time and place explain and warrant
the treatment of Enid by Geraint.

Vivien, which follows Enid, is perhaps the least popular of the four
Books. No pleasure, we grant, can be felt from the character either of
the wily woman, between elf and fiend, or of the aged magician, whose
love is allowed to travel whither none of his esteem or regard can
follow it: and in reading this poem we miss the pleasure of those
profound moral harmonies, with which the rest are charged. But we must
not on these grounds proceed to the conclusion that the poet has in this
case been untrue to his aims. For he has neither failed in power, nor
has he led our sympathies astray; and if we ask why he should introduce
us to those we cannot love, there is something in the reply that Poetry,
the mirror of the world, cannot deal with its attractions only, but must
present some of its repulsions also, and avail herself of the powerful
assistance of its contrasts. The example of Homer, who allows Thersites
to thrust himself upon the scene in the debates of heroes, gives a
sanction to what reason and all experience teach, namely, the actual
force of negatives in heightening effect; and the gentle and noble
characters and beautiful combinations, which largely predominate in the
other poems, stand in far clearer and bolder relief when we perceive the
dark and baleful shadow of Vivien lowering from between them.

Vivien exhibits a well-sustained conflict between the wizard and, in
another sense, the witch; on one side is the wit of woman, on the other
are the endowments of the prophet and magician, at once more and less
than those of nature. She has heard from him of a charm, a charm of
"woven paces, and of waving hands," which paralyses its victim for ever
and without deliverance, and her object is to extract from him the
knowledge of it as a proof of some return for the fervid and boundless
love that she pretends. We cannot but estimate very highly the skill
with which Mr. Tennyson has secured to what seemed the weaker vessel the
ultimate mastery in the fight. Out of the eater comes forth meat. When
she seems to lose ground with him by her slander against the Round Table
which he loved, she recovers it by making him believe that she saw all
other men, "the knights, the Court, the King, dark in his light": and
when in answer to her imprecation on herself a fearful thunderbolt
descends and storm rages, then, nestling in his bosom, part in fear but
more in craft, she overcomes the last remnant of his resolution, wins
the secret she has so indefatigably wooed, and that instant uses it to
close in gloom the famous career of the over-mastered sage.

* * * * *

Nowhere could we more opportunely than at this point call attention to
Mr. Tennyson's extraordinary felicity and force in the use of metaphor
and simile. This gift appears to have grown with his years, alike in
abundance, truth, and grace. As the showers descend from heaven to
return to it in vapour, so Mr. Tennyson's loving observation of Nature,
and his Muse, seem to have had a compact of reciprocity well kept on
both sides. When he was young, and when "Oenone" was first published, he
almost boasted of putting a particular kind of grasshopper into Troas,
which, as he told us in a note, was probably not to be found there. It
is a small but yet an interesting and significant indication that, when
some years after he retouched the poem, he omitted the note, and
generalised the grasshopper. Whether we are right or not in taking this
for a sign of the movement of his mind, there can be no doubt that his
present use of figures is both the sign and the result of a reverence
for Nature alike active, intelligent, and refined. Sometimes applying
the metaphors of Art to Nature, he more frequently draws the materials
of his analogies from her unexhausted book, and, however often he may
call for some new and beautiful vehicle of illustration, she seems never
to withhold an answer. With regard to this particular and very critical
gift, it seems to us that he may challenge comparison with almost any
poet either of ancient or modern times. We have always been accustomed
to look upon Ariosto as one of the greatest among the masters of the art
of metaphor and simile; and it would be easy to quote from him instances
which in tenderness, grace, force, or all combined, can never be
surpassed. But we have rarely seen the power subjected to a greater
trial than in the passages just quoted from Mr. Tennyson, where metaphor
lies by metaphor as thick as shells upon their bed; yet each
individually with its outline as well drawn, its separateness as clear,
its form as true to nature, and with the most full and harmonious
contribution to the general effect.

* * * * *

Mr. Tennyson practises largely, and with an extraordinary skill and
power, the art of designed and limited repetitions. They bear a
considerable resemblance to those Homeric _formulae_ which have been so
usefully remarked by Colonel Mure--not the formulae of constant
recurrence, which tells us who spoke and who answered, but those which
are connected with pointing moral effects, and with ulterior purpose.
These repetitions tend at once to give more definite impressions of
character, and to make firmer and closer the whole tissue of the poem.
Thus, in the last speech of Guinevere, she echoes back, with other ideas
and expressions, the sentiment of Arthur's affection, which becomes in
her mouth sublime:--

I must not scorn myself: he loves me still:
Let no one dream but that he loves me still.

She prays admission among the nuns, that she may follow the pious and
peaceful tenor of their life (p. 260):--

And so wear out in almsdeed and in prayer
The sombre close of that voluptuous day
Which wrought the ruin of my lord the King.

And it is but a debt of justice to the Guinevere of the romancers to
observe, that she loses considerably by the marked transposition which
Mr. Tennyson has effected in the order of greatness between Lancelot and
Arthur. With him there is an original error in her estimate,
independently of the breach of a positive and sacred obligation. She
prefers the inferior man; and this preference implies a rooted ethical
defect in her nature. In the romance of Sir T. Mallory the preference
she gives to Lancelot would have been signally just, had she been free
to choose. For Lancelot is of an indescribable grandeur; but the limit
of Arthur's character is thus shown in certain words that he uses, and
that Lancelot never could have spoken. "Much more I am sorrier for my
good knight's loss than for the loss of my queen; for queens might I
have enough, but, such a fellowship of good knights shall never be
together in company."

We began with the exordium of this great work: we must not withhold the
conclusion. We left her praying admission to the convent--

She said. They took her to themselves; and she,
Still hoping, fearing, "is it yet too late?"
Dwelt with them, till in time their Abbess died.
Then she, for her good deeds and her pure life,
And for the power of ministration in her,
And likewise for the high rank she had borne,
Was chosen Abbess: there, an Abbess, lived
For three brief years; and there, an Abbess, pass'd
To where beyond these voices there is peace.

No one, we are persuaded, can read this poem without feeling, when it
ends, what may be termed the pangs of vacancy--of that void in heart and
mind for want of its continuance of which we are conscious when some
noble strain of music ceases, when some great work of Raphael passes
from the view, when we lose sight of some spot connected with high
associations, or when some transcendent character upon the page of
history disappears, and the withdrawal of it is like the withdrawal of
the vital air. We have followed the Guinevere of Mr. Tennyson through
its detail, and have extracted largely from its pages, and yet have not
a hope of having conveyed an idea of what it really is; still we have
thought that in this way we should do it the least injustice, and we are
also convinced that even what we have shown will tend to rouse an
appetite, and that any of our readers, who may not yet have been also
Mr. Tennyson's, will become more eager to learn and admire it at first
hand.

We have no doubt that Mr. Tennyson has carefully considered how far his
subject is capable of fulfilling the conditions of an epic structure.
The history of Arthur is not an epic as it stands, but neither was the
Cyclic song, of which the greatest of all epics, the "Iliad," handles a
part. The poem of Ariosto is scarcely an epic, nor is that of Bojardo;
but it is not this because each is too promiscuous and crowded in its
brilliant phantasmagoria to conform to the severe laws of that lofty and
inexorable class of poem? Though the Arthurian romance be no epic, it
does not follow that no epic can be made from out of it. It is grounded
in certain leading characters, men and women, conceived upon models of
extraordinary grandeur; and as the Laureate has evidently grasped the
genuine law which makes man and not the acts of man the base of epic
song, we should not be surprised were he hereafter to realize the great
achievement towards which he seems to be feeling his way. There is a
moral unity and a living relationship between the four poems before us,
and the first effort of 1842 as a fifth, which, though some considerable
part of their contents would necessarily rank as episode, establishes
the first and most essential condition of their cohesion. The
achievement of Vivien bears directly on the state of Arthur by
withdrawing his chief councillor--the brain, as Lancelot was the right
arm, of his court; the love of Elaine is directly associated with the
final catastrophe of the passion of Lancelot for Guinevere. Enid lies
somewhat further off the path, nor is it for profane feet to intrude
into the sanctuary, for reviewers to advise poets in these high matters;
but while we presume nothing, we do not despair of seeing Mr. Tennyson
achieve on the basis he has chosen the structure of a full-formed epic.