Chapter 7

--THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.

The Idylls may probably be best considered in their final shape:
they are not an epic, but a series of heroic idyllia of the same
genre as the heroic idyllia of Theocritus. He wrote long after the
natural age of national epic, the age of Homer. He saw the later
literary epic rise in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, a poem
with many beauties, if rather an archaistic and elaborate revival as
a whole. The time for long narrative poems, Theocritus appears to
have thought, was past, and he only ventured on the heroic idyllia of
Heracles, and certain adventures of the Argonauts. Tennyson, too,
from the first believed that his pieces ought to be short.
Therefore, though he had a conception of his work as a whole, a
conception long mused on, and sketched in various lights, 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" (as if one were to "break into blank the gospel of"
Herr Kant), 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. Later he thought
of a musical masque of Arthur, and sketched a scenario. Finally
Tennyson dropped both the allegory of Liberal principles and the
musical masque in favour of the series of heroic idylls. There was
only a "parabolic drift" in the intention. "There is no single fact
or incident in the Idylls, however seemingly mystical, which cannot
be explained without any mystery or allegory whatever. The Idylls
ought to be read (and the right readers never dream of doing anything
else) as romantic poems, just like Browning's Childe Roland, in which
the wrong readers (the members of the Browning Society) sought for
mystic mountains and marvels. Yet Tennyson had his own
interpretation, "a dream of man coming into practical life and ruined
by one sin." That was his "interpretation," or "allegory in the
distance."

People may be heard objecting to the suggestion of any spiritual
interpretation of the Arthur legends, and even to the existence of
elementary morality among the Arthurian knights and ladies. There
seems to be a notion that "bold bawdry and open manslaughter," as
Roger Ascham said, are the staple of Tennyson's sources, whether in
the mediaeval French, the Welsh, or in Malory's compilation, chiefly
from French sources. Tennyson is accused of "Bowdlerising" these,
and of introducing gentleness, courtesy, and conscience into a
literature where such qualities were unknown. I must confess