Then comes the splendid invocation to Nelson, concluding with the refrain—

With honour, honour, honour, honour to him,
Eternal honour to his name.

A little farther comes the best-known passage in the whole that which describes the "path of duty". But finer by far in my judgment is the closing strophe, characteristic alike in thought and in expression, and not so well known but that one may quote it:

Peace, his triumph will be sung

By some yet unmoulded tongue

Far on in summers that we shall not see:
Peace, it is a day of pain

For one about whose patriarchal knee

Late the little children clung:

O peace, it is a day of pain

For one, upon whose hand and heart and brain

Once the weight and fate of Europe hung.

Ours the pain, be his the gain!

More than is of man's degree

Must be with us, watching here
At this, our great solemnity.
Whom we see not we revere;
We revere, and we refrain

From talk of battles loud and vain,

And brawling memories all too free
For such a wise humility

As befits a solemn fane:

We revere, and while we hear
The tides of Music's golden sea
Setting toward eternity,

Uplifted high in heart and hope are we,
Until we doubt not that for one so true
There must be other nobler work to do
Than when he fought at Waterloo,
And Victor he must ever be.
For tho' the Giant Ages heave the hill
And break the shore, and evermore
Make and break, and work their will;
Tho' world on world in myriad myriads roll
Round us, each with different powers,
And other forms of life than ours,

What know we greater than the soul?

On God and Godlike men we build our trust.
Hush! the Dead March wails in the people's ears:
The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears:
The black earth yawns: the mortal disappears;
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;

He is gone who seem'd so great.—
Gone; but nothing can bereave him
Of the force he made his own
Being here, and we believe him
Something far advanced in State,
And that he wears a truer crown
Than any wreath that man can weave him.
Speak no more of his renown,

Lay your earthly fancies down,

And in the vast cathedral leave him,
God accept him, Christ receive him.

It remains only to point out that in this, as in the very fine stanzas written for the Queen's Jubilee, Tennyson has aimed at a stately rhythm, which followed closely the modulations of prose in their variety and earnestness, yet is lifted into the sphere of poetry by almost imperceptible touches of style.

It is this extraordinary command of metre and extraordinary sense of the fitting that stamps Tennyson for the most consummate artist in verse since Keats-and, except Keats, he has no equal till you go back to Milton. His range was of the widest. When he condescended to the merely fanciful, no man ever had a lighter or a prettier touch; witness The Talking Oak, Amphion, or Will Waterproof, a poem which immeasurably goes beyond Praed and Locker in their own peculiar excellences. And in estimating a poet one must always attach some weight to everything that he did well. Few poets in the world have done so many things so well as Tennyson; that does not decide his position, but it constitutes an integral part of his fame.

Chapter VIII.

The Idylls of the King.

My business in this volume is purely with literary criticism, and in this chapter I have simply to estimate and classify the Idylls as poetry. There is, however, a formidable literature which has sprung up round the Arthurian story. It is exhaustively treated by Professor Maccallum in his book, Tennyson's Idylls of the King and Arthurian Legend. Those who do not care to follow Mr. Maccallum into his recondite researches will find as much as anybody but the special student of mediæval literature requires to know in Professor Saintsbury's volume The Flourishing of Romance and Rise of Allegory. Here I need only say that the Arthurian story was one of the three great and fertile subjects for mediæval romance-the matter of France, the matter of Britain, and the matter of Rome. Those tales which centre round Charlemagne are the matter of France; the matter of Rome includes the tale of Troy and the mythical adventures of Alexander of Macedon; the matter of Britain is the Arthuriad in one form or other, and as it was the latest to take definite literary form, so it has lasted longest as an abiding source of inspiration. Professor Maccallum traces it out in all the authors who have treated of it down to the present day, from what one may call its practical inception in the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth. It dates as a completed story from early in the twelfth century; where exactly it came from, the doctors cannot agree to decide. Some say that it was a Welsh or Armorican myth or legend, transmitted to France and there shaped; some that it is devoid of national colour, a mere literary creation;

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others, and of these is Professor Saintsbury, that it was English or Anglo-Norman, at least in its developed form. In its crude state one finds principally the heroic figure of Arthur, a great slayer of warriors in the Saxon and Norman wars. Then gradually comes in the story of Arthur's fairy origin and his mysterious passing; but only when the personage of Lancelot and the central interest of the Holy Grail are blended with the legend do we find that romance which has inspired countless poets. Professor Saintsbury believes that Walter Map invented Lancelot; at all events, whoever invented him changed the entire character of the legend. Tales of the Saxon and Norman wars were superseded by the love interest between Lancelot and Guinevere-the typical invention of an age in which chivalry, the direct offshoot of monasticism, despised marriage and saw the romance of love only in passion outside the bond; and this love interest was heightened by the mystical quest of the Holy Grail. Thus upon the story of passionate but unlawful love was grafted the extravagant medieval worship of virginity-again an offshoot of monasticism; Lancelot, though he cannot achieve the quest, attempts it, nothing but his sin of love withstanding him; and what he cannot win himself is attained by his son, the maiden knight Galahad.

We need not inquire here into the different versions of the legend as told by Chrestien de Troyes and the rest; for the source of Tennyson's inspiration is clear, the prose romance of Sir Thomas Malory. This he supplemented by the Welsh Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, whence he took the Idyll of Enid and Geraint. But it is important to emphasize at once the character both of Tennyson's work and that of the sources from which he drew. Malory's book is

not an epic; it is a romance.

The distinction is so admirably drawn in Professor Ker's Epic and Romance (p. 5) that I make no apology for quotation.

"Whatever Epic may mean, it implies some weight and solidity; Romance means nothing, if it does not convey some notion of mystery and fantasy. The two great kinds of narrative literature in the Middle Ages might be distinguished by their favourite incidents and commonplaces of adventure. No kind of adventure

is so common or better told in the earlier heroic manner than the defence of a narrow place against odds. Such are the stories of Hamther and Sorli in the hall of Ermanaric, of the Niblung kings in the hall of Attila, of the Fight of Finnesburh, of Walter at the Wasgestein, of Byrhtnoth at Maldon, of Roland in the Pyrenees' [and, I may add, of Ulysses in the hall at Ithaca against the suitors]. "The favourite adventure of mediæval romance is something different—a knight riding alone through a forest; another knight; a shock of lances; a fight on foot with swords, 'racing, tracing, and foining like two wild boars'; then, perhaps, recognitionthe two knights belong to the same household and are engaged in the same quest. This collision of blind forces, this tournament at random, takes the place, in the French romances, of the older kind of combat. In the older kind the parties have always good reasons of their own for fighting; they do not go into it with the same sort of readiness as the wandering champions of romance."

There is nothing fantastic about the epic; it is practically a drama narrated, as Aristotle saw; it is of the stuff of life.

"If its characters are not men, they are nothing; not even thoughts or allegories; they cannot go on talking unless they have something to do; and so the whole stuff of life comes boldly into the epic poem. "1

1 Ker, Epic and Romance, p. 10.