Malory undertakes the quest and is not sent upon it; there is no word of Gawain's love-making with the "lily maid"; he behaves him like a courteous knight. I need not point out how exquisitely Tennyson has elaborated the few hints in Malory for the figure of Elaine; nor with what fine tact he has cut down the unnecessary tourneyings. It is important, however, to notice first that he chooses this occasion to suggest through the mouth of Guinevere a contrast between the king and Lancelot; then less explicitly, a contrast between the loyal though sinful knight and the fickleness of Gawain; and, again by implied contrast, he shows the shortcoming of such a passion as Guinevere's when set against the pure devotion of Elaine. Elaine would not have thought, we are to understand, that "the low sun makes the colour". You have, in short, in Elaine, Malory's story just as it stands in broad outline, but simplified by the omission of endless details of tournament, everywhere profuse in Malory; by the omission of Bors, who is a necessary figure in Malory, since all Lancelot's kin serve him in his love no less than in his wars, but in Tennyson's story has no place; you have it heightened and at least pointed by a conscious moral purpose; and you have it unquestionably embellished by the beauty of such passages as that which describes the castle where Elaine lives, the hermit's cave, where The green light from the meadows underneath or again the description of the king's dragonblazoned chair and garments. To these must be added many touches of beautiful invention; for instance, Lancelot's disclosure of himself to Lavaine (M 535) N -how admirably conceived from the mere suggestion of Lavaine's words to his father: "Father, I dare make it good that she is a clean maid as for my lord Sir Launcelot; but she doth as I do. For sithence that I first saw my lord Sir Launcelot I could never depart from him; nor nought I will an I may follow him." Tennyson's also is the invention of Lancelot's "one discourtesy that he used"; and Tennyson's also, I regret to say, the combination by which it is Arthur who, bringing word of the red sleeve, first wakes jealousy in Guinevere. Altogether, whether in what is added or what omitted, the Idyll may stand for a fair example of Tennyson's treatment of Malory's material; except that here there is no touch upon the story of the Grail, which, as it completes and gives meaning to Malory's whole book, so, in spite of all the beauties of style which are lavished on the telling it, destroys the reasonable coherence and even the artistic sincerity of Tennyson's. Chapter IX. Tennyson's Dramatic Works. The Idylls of the King (with the exception of Balin and Balan) were completed in 1872. The poet was then in his sixty-fourth year, but in the score of years which were still to run almost a half of his entire works were composed and published. And of these later harvests more than half was dramatic poetry. Considered in bulk his plays make nearer a third than a quarter of his entire work. Considered as part of the achievement by which he will rank among poets, I fear they are almost a negligible quantity. They are admirable productions, and three at least of them stood the test of stage representation with a large measure of success; but the same may be said of Dryden's tragedies, and who now reads All for Love or The Indian Emperor? Still the plays are things that cannot be omitted in a critical study of Tennyson's work, and in many respects they well repay attention. Three of them, however, may be dismissed with little ceremony. The Falcon is a graceful trifle, and the large style of Tennyson's blank verse hardly fits itself to trifles; while the story in itself, pretty in its original setting as an Italian tale, lacks human nature "the saving touch of saving common sense". The Foresters, his last work, is what the Elizabethans called a masque-simply a framework which gives occasion to elaborate pageants, interspersed with songs. The fairy interlude in it is perhaps the worse thing that Tennyson ever wrote, and the humorous passages are terribly_mechanical. By common consent of his friends Tennyson abounded in humour, as I have observed, but except in his Lincolnshire verses, the Northern Farmer and the rest, this quality scarcely appears in his work. As for The Promise of May, which was produced by Mrs. Bernard Beere at the Globe Theatre, and gave rise to the witty saying that the poetlaureate, after filling the world with his verse, was now emptying the Globe with his prose, it seems to me frankly detestable. Edgar, the wicked prig round whom the plot turns, is at once intolerable and incredible. That a man should seduce a girl is not unheard of; that a man should hold opinions which lead him to regard morality as a convention is not unheard of; but the two are very seldom related as cause and effect. If a man seduces a girl, he does so in obedience to aboriginal instincts which have very little to say to reasoning, and the most vicious prig that ever was created probably never justified such an action to himself on such grounds as Edgar produces. And then to suggest that a man, having seduced a girl and driven her from her home, should return after a few years and propose, by way of reparation, to marry her sister, trusting in a change of name and the growth of a beard to prevent recognition in a neighbourhood where he had been perfectly well known, passes the limits even of stage possibility. Edgar is a piece of pasteboard, so is the plot. A popular dramatist, according to Lord Tennyson, said, that if he had had the play for twenty minutes he would have made it the success of the season. Very likely. For starting with the prestige of Tennyson's name, he had only slightly to embellish Farmer Dobson, Dora's lover, fling Dora into his ready arms in the last act, and send Edgar off repentant and rejected; then you would at once have had a drama such as the British public delights in. But Tennyson was at heart too much of an artist for this; he did not paint his rustics in rose-water, he made them smell of the manure-heap. The adroit dramatist, to match his conventional villain, would have vamped up conventional rustics; he would have put a rose in Dobson's button-hole, and the farmer's lumpish utterance would have given place ten minutes before the curtain to a torrent of homely and moving eloquence. Tennyson handicapped himself at the start with a didactic purpose, and was led into the artistic untruth of representing as the outcome of a certain way of thought sins which spring from very different causes; the result was that when the artist in him reasserted itself and reached after nature, there was a tumble between two stools. The Cup stands on a very different level from the pieces I have spoken of. To begin with, it contains a very fine dramatic situation. The first act is improbable and unreasonable enough; there is the old convention of a man making remarks aside, as Sinnatus does, apparently in order that the suspected listener may overhear them; there is also the conventional foolish woman, who goes to a rendezvous with a man whom she has every reason to mistrust. The whole structure, in short, is slight and superficial, but it is beautifully ornamented; Camma's speech in defence of hopeless rebellions is a triumph of eloquence: Sir, if a state submit At once, she may be blotted out at once From century to century, and at last May lead them on to victory--I hope so- And upon this structure is built a really noble and impressive second act, where Camma in the Temple of Artemis gives her consent to wed Synorix her husband's slayer, and in the high solemnity before the shrine of the Goddess, pledges him from his own gift, the cup, in a draught of poison. As a stage effect it is finely conceived, and every speech of Camma's tells as it should, whether she speaks, after the old Greek fashion, in a riddling utterance of double meanings, or rises into a stately strain of verse, like a prophetess inspired by the coming doom. Rouse the dead altar-flame, fling in the spices, As in the midmost heart of Paradise. Lay down the Lydian carpets for the king. |