unity of this great work, or indeed at all that it is one thing with a definite purpose, and not a collection of beautiful tales. Though we do not doubt that the poet intended it so from the beginning, yet the succession of new episodes executed afterward, but each filling its proper place in the great undertaking, shows how it expanded in his hands. It is no vague collection of beautiful romances like the original" Morte d'Arthur" of old Mallory. This old imperfect tale, New old and shadowing Sense at war with Soul,"

is the growth of a great design, selecting and shaping the ancient story for higher ends. The epic of Arthur thus forms itself out of all the traditions and superstitions of the ages which have made of that visionary hero the emblem of all that is noblest in ancient chivalry. He is something still more than this in the hands of Tennyson-the true knight but at the same time the ideal king, guardian of his people, ruler of men, an enthusiast yet a sage, ruling himself chief of all, and demanding of every officer of his that he too should rule himself as the first condition of his help to others. It is chivalry complete, yet it is more than chivalry-it is the highest dream ever conceived of a Utopia, an ideal kingdom. These fair visions have all but this, partaken of the character of that island of dreams far separated from the shock of actual life, where sometimes the lotus is eaten, but always peace and well-being reigns, an earthly paradise lulled with celestial breezes and freed from all elements of shame or pain. Not so was Arthur's kingdom, in which at first wrong and cruelty were rampant, and disorder reigned, and the distant Roman power exacted tribute, and every little king ground down his subjects to the dust-not to speak of the plague of wandering knights-errant, each following his own devious way, and keeping forlorn ladies and all the weak in constant peril. The hero king, no classic leader, but a Christian monarch, bearing the trouble around him upon his heart, comes out of the unknown, and into the unknown departs again, as in the prevailing legend dear to every primitive people, all human nature holding close in its heart that hope of a return. But it would be little if Arthur were merely a patriot chief inspiring with his own valor the chosen band of

knights to drive forth invaders and subdue rebels. The enthusiasm of high courage and of warlike achievement is not even now slow to spread a battalion of English ne'er-do-weels, a regiment of darkskinned Goorkhas, or even a band of negroes, the least elevated of human races, will take it from a brave commander even in this diminished day. It is one of the first of human qualities to be awakened, and the last to be destroyed.

But the kingdom of Arthur is something more. It is "Sense at war with Soul.' "" It is a kingdom in which dwelleth righteousness. All knights of romance are brave, and every conqueror has had his encircling ring of paladins bent not only upon his service, but upon carving out kingdoms and principalities for themselves. But a king who will bring the highest order out of chaos, and erect an ideal kingdom of God on earth, must lay a different foundation. These heroes must be pure as they are brave: no selfregard, no wantonness, no treachery must be among them. They must be above reward, beyond temptation, white in their shining panoply of purity, and compassion, and truth. The easy rule of the old knight-crrantry, by which a wandering champion defeated the foes of the beautiful princess, and received her and her lands as the prize, is not the chivalry of Arthur. It is the poet's task to tell how this fairest dream of earth, after the first moment of an enthusiasm which carried all before it, crumbled and fell away, leaving behind it nothing but a vision. yet the vision itself is more than conquered realm or kingdom. It is scarcely to be expected, perhaps, that the careless reader, seeing Enid's patient following of her lord, and hearing Elaine's song, and the soft sweep down the river of the solemn barge that bears her, should concern himself with the construction of the poem or its unity of thought and purpose. It is enough that these charmed tales of constancy and of love, and of the dread impossible which surrounds our mortal footsteps wherever they turn, should fill ear and heart. But beyond is the larger purpose, the tragedy of man's endeavor, the ever-recurring failure in which all, yet never all, perhaps nothing in the widest sense, is lost.

And

Tennyson was no creator in the Shakespearian sense of the word. It was not

his to people the world for us with the noble and wonderful figures which are more distinct in our hearts than our own nearest kindred, less sundered by those "eils of individuality that divide us from every soul we know. Yet there is one image with which he has filled the earth, and which can never die. He had no skill, like Shakespeare, to make us women wonderful in their womanhood, almost as if they had come from the hand of God Himself. But there is one man who will yield to none, as noble a conception as ever human genius has given birth to. We will not compare him with Hamlet, for nothing could be more futile than comparison between two so unlike; and yet to ourselves Lancelot gives place in the world, if to Hamlet, yet to him alone. There are some points in which he is more near and touches us more deeply than even that prince of all our thoughts. He is the greatest prop of Arthur's throne, his most spotless and bravest kuight, his first brother in-arms, the chief of all that surround him and yet his betrayer, the first foe of his glorious reign, the one of all who shows its impossibility and that it is but a dream. What curious limited poverty-stricken soul was that who spoke of King Arthur and his court as of "schoolgirl tales"-because, we presume, there is no filth in them, nor what the French call "passion." It is said to be, yet we cannot but hope they do him wrong who -Mr. John Morley no less who has been so bold as to mark himself with this sentiment for the admiration of the ages. We-though perhaps a less authoritycan but say that we know no such embodiment of high and fatal passion, of that extraordinary capacity of human nature, which sometimes can combine the sublime of noble character with deadly and degrading sin, as it can also combine some flower of noble virtue with the greatest imperfection, as in the character of Lancelot of the Lake. Is it perhaps a discovery of this age, in which, amid all its banal wonders and advancements, there is a certain strange impartiality of view, and sense of moral complications insupportable to the first primitive judgment? We can scarcely venture to affirm this, for we are deeply incredulous, not to say impatient, of the vaunts of progress and development. And yet, as sure as we get another great poet from heaven, so surely must we find

say so

some new revelation in his hands. We know no other instance in which this one has been disclosed in flesh and blood. The poets in general have been over-facile about the lovers: but even in the wonderful tale of Francesca and Paolo, the husband is a curmudgeon the lover a inere shadow of passionate youth. Shakespeare, with his imperial band, cognizant of all things, never touched the subject at all; and perhaps Mr. John Morley thinks that his, too, are school-girl tales in consequence. Browning, to come to the latest example, made his Guido a still more dreadful curmudgeon than the Lord of Ravenna, while his Deliverer was no lover at all, but a knight as stainless as Sir Galahad. But Tennyson dared to take up this blot and work it into the most noble, the most sad, the most wonderful of sinning men. The moralist might suppose that this was a rash proceeding, as inaking us too lenient to the sin for the sake of the sinner. reader of the tragedy of Lancelot, which these poems constitute as much as they constitute the Epic of Arthur, will think

But no

This perfect, gentle knight, the greatest of Arthur's Court, the glory of the Round Table, the first of soldiers, the right-hand of the king, is the cause of the ruin of the ideal kingdom and the blameless monarch. His person threads throughout every tale, a sad man whether he rides in the jousts where men fall at the very sight of his shield, or stands in the chamber of the queen, soothing the petulance and irritability which a sense of guilt works in her, or by Arthur's side heavy with the shadow of that guilt which stands between him and his friend, or wandering through the rural ways with the reins laid softly on his charger's neck, and the musings of a still despair in his heart. He is the dearest friend of Arthur, in very truth loving his king better than he does the queen for whom he sins, and with whom and by whom not only their lives but all their work is brought to destruction. But it is not the fatal progress of this love through all its disenchantments to an inevitable end-that commonest theme of commonplace Romance, that is the purpose here-but the far more awful spectacle of the confusion and disorder which it works in the world around, the extinction of every better hope, the sweet bells

jangled out of tune and harsh, and all the human harmonies turned into discord. We have been made familiar with many versions of this disastrous subject, from the Russian novelist's terrible picture of the degradation and awful passion of the woman clinging in despair to the man who is weary of her, to the cynical narratives of household treachery familiar in all French literature: but never anything like this story of the man

"Whose honor rooted in dishonor stood, While faith unfaithful made him falsely true."

The woman tells for little in comparison; indeed we have little sympathy, little feeling for Guinevere, who is nothing to the poet until the last chapter of her career, and whose rehabilitation through Arthur's generous foregiveness awakens no faith in our minds. It is Lancelot who secures all the reader's interest:

"The great and guilty love he bore the Queen, In battle with the love he bore his lord, Had marred his face, and marked it ere his

time.

Another sinning on such heights with one,
The flower of all the West, and all the world
Had been the sleeker for it; but in him
His mood was often like a fiend, and rose
And drove him into wastes and solitudes
For agony, who was yet a living soul.
Marr'd as he was, he was the goodliest man
That ever among ladies ate in hall."

It is strange that the poet of purity the laureate of that kingdom which the spotless king founded upon it should be the one to give us this wonderful picture of the great spirit stained with sin. Arthur's historian, we might have thought, would have made the disturber of his peace into a monster of iniquity, as inferior artists do. So do invariably the singers of the school-girl tales-unworthiest of false and foolish judgments !-the easy contrast of white with black which pleases the vulgar mind. More than that was needed to overthrow the kingdom of Arthur, established so nobly when we see it first with every splendor of poetic vision in the "dim rich city," in the well-won peace which has come after strenuous fighting, the rebels quelled, the country out of all its divisions restored to unity, the noble company about the king living amid the pleasures of a stainless Court, in instant readiness to set forth on any noble quest, or to dare any adventure for the love of God and the honor of the Round

Table. Upon that perfect houor, obedience, truth, and, above all, purity, is the whole visionary power dependent; for how can he right wrong who is wrong himself, or defend the innocent who is the enemy of innocence? The sin that comes in is not a vulgar stain. 'Happier, cries Lancelot, after the failure of his wild search for the Grail—

66

'Happier are those that welter in their sin, Swine in the mud that cannot see for slime, Slime of the ditch: but in me lived a sin So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure, Noble, and knightly in me twined and clung Round that one sin until the wholesome flower

And poisonous grew together, each as each,

Not to be pluck'd asunder: and when thy knights

Sware, I sware with them, only in the hope That could I touch or see the Holy Grail, They might be pluck'd asunder."

This first and fatal secret saps the foundations of the ideal kingdom. It is the lie hidden behind truth, the little rift within the lute, the canker slowly spreading, getting to the knowledge of all before that of him who is most concerned, secretly loosening every bond. The gradual rising again of the serpent-heads of evil, never wholly crushed in a human sphere, finding warrant and encouragement in that dread rupture of law and truth, come up before our eyes in tragic sequence: the Vivien with all mockery in her eyes and all impurity in her heart; the Modred, keen with envy and hatred-ill things which had been awe-stricken for a moment and overborne: the fierce and half-mad terror of Geraint, heaping cruelty and insult upon the ife whom he had adored, lest she might have shared in the sin of the Queen : the coarser horrible travesty of that sin in the story of Tristram and Isolt; the vile preference of evil to good in Ettarre ;— until in the fierce overthrow and overturn of all things, the evil triumphant and the good desperate, a wild mysticism comes in, and those knights who are half-maddened by the sense of coming chaos and the downfall of all hope, fling themselves madly into the Quest of the Holy Grail with that hope in a miracle which survives all human failures. All this springs from that fatal love of Lancelot and the Queen. Such an interposition of lovely and touching romance as the story of Elaine is caused by it also, yet with the relief of a sweeter inevitable catastrophe, which softens the strain of tragic advanc

ing ruin. It is this that breaks up the kingdom, lets loose the dogs of war, and proves over again and over that the ideal reign, which had seemed to eager hope so nearly realized, the dream of all fine spirits, is under these our earthly conditions never to be.

But it is the special splendor and inspiration of these poems that the source of all the evil is no outburst of what the sickening science of this age calls the Bête Humaine. It is a far deeper tragedy: the finest of all fine spirits, the one most near the throne, he in whom the spotless glory of Arthur had been most closely reflected, and whose life had been risked a hundred times for the establishment of that high kingdom, who is the culprit. It has been said that the blameless king is beyond human sympathy. "The low sun makes the color," says the queen, in her warped and inferior perceptions. We do not stop to question that sentiment: for indeed the figure of Lancelot is that to which we turn, with the ache of sympathetic pain. No one can know so well as he all that is involved in his sin; no one can hate it more than he, whose whole purpose and glory of life is distracted and ruined by it as well as that of Arthur; but with a deeper tragedy in that he is himself the cause of the world's disappointment and his own, and of the triumph of every mean and miserable thing. In his despair, when all the horrible forces that sin has freed and set in motion are about to clash in the last struggle, he cries out in that helplessness which his strength makes more bitter :

"For what am I? what profits me my name Of greatest knight? I fought for it and have it,

Pleasure to have it, none; to lose it, pain,
Now grown a part of me; but what use in it?
To make men worse by making my sin known?
Or sin seem less, the sinner seeming great?
Alas for Arthur's greatest knight, a man
Not after Arthur's heart! I needs must break
The bonds that so defame me: not without
She wills it; would I if she will'd it? Nay,

Who knows? but if I would not, then may

God,

I pray Him, send a sudden Angel down
To seize me by the hair and bear me far,
And fling me deep in that forgotten mere,
Among the tumbled fragments of the hills."

We think that the conception of this Lancelot will be Tennyson's great crown in poetry to after-ages, who will judge more calmly than it is possible for us to

do, especially so near his grave. It is his highest effort of imaginative and creative power. That he had a longing, as so many poets have had, to prove himself master of the dramatic lyre, as well as that which was his own, was, we think, one of those mistakes from which the greatest are not exempted. His Arthur, too, mistook, as does not misbecome a man. But none will dare, we think, a century hence, to dispute the creative force of an imagination which produced this noblest sorrowful image so great, so true-to whom nothing was impossible but discourtesy or unkindness, and who is throughout, even in his careless humor with young Gareth and Gawaine, even in his cheerful friendliness in the hall of Astolat, always lowly in his loftiness, always tragic with the great burden of his sin,that it should have been he who fell into that sin, being at all times the greatest tragedy of all.

We need not linger much longer on this record, which is not a criticism of the life-work of Alfred Tennyson, but only a reproclamation proudly, as is just, of the honor given him sixty years ago by our great predecessor on this self-same page. He was young then, and made reflections, for which we cheerfully forgive him, upon Christopher: as Christopher no doubt did with a laugh, big as himself, at the boy calling names-who was yet so wise as to adopt almost every suggestion he made. The present writer is not fit to tie the shoes of Christopher, but has been nourished upon Tennyson from what seems the beginning of time. Yet what there is to say now is not more than the great critic then said. A poet-then as now and the first utterance of that great name is the hardest; for who can tell with any certainty whether his first opinion, warm with all the excitement of the hour, will stand or not? Most of us mince the matter, not venturing upon a judgment too strong or final. There are

some new voices now which certain authorities answer for, yet with a faltering confidence. Our old "6 Maga" did not falter, but put on the laurel crown upon those brows of twenty-three, with her old and gay defiance of the chances of time and change. "We feel assured that we have not exaggerated his strength, and that the millions who delight in Maga

11*

will with one voice confirm our judgment -that Alfred Tennyson is a poet." What more can we add to this? In all reverence, Christopher's poor successor laid a wreath of the poet's laurel, culled in a homely garden, woven by maiden fingers, at Tennyson's head, at Chaucer's feet, amid the sound of the mourning of a mighty nation, the other day when he was laid to his rest. The great Abbey seemed still to peal with the echoes of his own parting song, and the still later, last whisper of musing and hope, breathed from his death-bed to his wife-which we are permitted by Lord Tennyson's publishers, Messrs. Macmillan, to quote here

"When the dumb hour clothed in black
Brings the dreams about my bed,
Call me not so often back,
Silent voices of the dead,
Toward the lowland ways behind me,
And the sunshine that is gone.
Call me rather, silent voices,
Forward to the starry track
Glimmering up the heights beyond me,
On, and ever on!"

This last utterance of the poet was set to music, a touching melody, full of sorrow. yet exultation, most touching circumstance of all, by his faithful wife. These silent voices have called him to join his noble peers, his Pilot has met him beyond the bar from the great deep to the great deep he goes." A soul born with God's noblest gift, a life never unfaithful to that trust, a genius perfected by all the noblest arts of song.

It may not be unfit to say something on a subject which called forth so much curious controversy and discussion some time since. Should Tennyson the poet have accepted a peerage, like any other man of the highest distinction in the less immortal arts? There is a mixture of the fictitious in most things, and we think that the objection to this, though made with a show of higher reverence, and on the ground that all such distinctions were be

neath him, were full of this fictitious element. In all simple honesty and nature, why should a poet reject the honor which is all his country and his Queen can give as the visible symbol and token of his deserts, because these are too great for any recompense? Tennyson of all poets that have ever been, was one of the most a man, an English citizen, a loyal son of the nation and race which gave him birth. Many fables have been told of his vanities and impatience of criticism and opposition, and that he flaunted his garland and singing robes on all occasions-than which nothing, we believe, could be more untrue. But that vanity, had it existed, and not a true and lofty consciousness of his position, would have prompted refusal. It is not good when a man placed on the highest elevation that man can reach despises the ancient traditional tribute, the rank which may be profaned in many cases, yet remains the sign of honor, palpable, so that any clod and clown may know and share in the gift. If it was little to Tennyson it was much to the Peers of England that there should be one peerage founded upon nothing ignoble, upon the highest and most elevating of all gifts and we rejoice now that it should stand and be known as such in the ages of the future when men may make their proofs of bonor: "My forefather was a great soldier and mine a great legislator: and mine-the greatest poet of his age!" Is that derogatory, or will the unborn peer despise it who draws bis blood a hundred years hence from Tennyson? We trow, no. That there may be others who must gasp and keep silent, knowing that nothing but wealth is the foundation of their honors, is little to us. So it was always and so will ever be, and no shame to men who redeem their wealth and justify their honors by the noble life which is in every man's reach, whether poet, peer, or nameless man. --Blackwood's Magazine.

IT is a frequent remark that we moderns of the nineteenth century live fast. The speed at which we travel increases every

* Blackwood's Magazine, May 1832.

year, and an announcement, the other day, that one of our great railway companies had just constructed a locomotive engine, capable of whisking us through the air at the rate of one hundred miles