and introduced into his own Bridal of Triermaine a story of King Arthur's love for a fairy princess. In 1838 Lady Charlotte Guest published The Mabinogion, a translation into English of the Welsh legends contained in "the red book of Hergerst," which is in the library of Jesus College, Oxford. From the Mabinogion Tennyson has taken the story of his Idyll of Geraint and Enid. In 1848 Bulwer-Lytton produced an epic, in sixlined stanzas, entitled King Arthur. The Arthurian very Cycle in We Tennyson's On Tennyson the Arthurian Romance began, early in his life, to exercise a strong fascination. are told that, when quite a boy, he chanced upon a copy of Malory's book, and often with his brothers held mimic tournaments after the fashion of knights of the Round Table. So early as 1832 he published The Lady of Shalott, the incidents of which afterwards formed the framework of the Idyll of Elaine. Ten years later his Morte d'Arthur appeared; an introduction to this poem represented it as a fragment of a long epic, all the rest of which, as being "faint Homeric echoes, nothing worth," the author had thrown into the fire. Five years previously to this publication Walter Savage Landor, who had heard the Morte d'Arthur read aloud from manuscript, wrote: "It is more Homeric than any poem of our time, and rivals some of the noblest poetry in the Odyssea." Two shorter Arthurian poems, Sir Galahad and Lancelot and Guinevere, were contained in the same volume with Morte d'Arthur. The first issue of Idylls of the King, comprising only four Idylls—Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere-appeared in 1859. The remaining Idylls were published at intervals between 186 and 1872, with the exception of Balin and Balan, Poems. The title "Idylls." 'an introduction to Merlin and Vivien,' contained with other poems in a volume given to the world in 1885. The original fragment, Morte d'Arthur, now forms part of the last Idyll, The Passing of Arthur. In the selection of the term 'Idylls' for these poems on King Arthur and the Round Table, Tennyson seems to have had in view the original use of the word in Greek literature. Idyll' is derived from eîdos, eidúλλɩov, a little picture,' and the Idylls of Theocritus the Sicilian (B.C. 280) are mostly short picturesque poems, describing common incidents in the lives of simple folk --the loves and jealousies of shepherds, the toils of fishermen, sight-seeings in a great city-with the admixture of a few longer poems of more heroic tone and subject. Later imitators of Theocritus (Vergil, for example) took country life almost exclusively as the scenery of their Idylls: hence 'idyllic' is now generally understood as implying an idealized rusticity, the simplicity of the country without its coarseness. Tennyson calls the shepherd love-song, quoted by Ida in The Princess, "a small sweet idyl,"* and has given the title of "English Idyls" to poems like his Dora, The Gardener's Daughter, and Sea Dreams. The Idylls of the King are of a loftier and nobler strain and a more serious purpose. The title may be taken to imply that these poems form a connected series grouped round one central figure, and almost aim at the unity of subject, the more continuous treatment, the broader So *The old spelling was 'idyl,' with one 7. The double is perhaps adopted to give a fuller sound and prevent mispro nunciation, and to recall the Greek original; also to different ate his Epic of Arthur from idyls like the Theocritean Idyls. effects, proper to an epic. The Idylls are highlywrought, each complete in itself as dealing with one set of incidents and characters, and illustrating one main sentiment, although each at the same time filling its place in a series which would be incomplete without it. significance of the Idylls of the King. The spiritual significance which is seen to be so The spiritual "deeply interfused" through this great poem, now that it can be studied as a completed work of art, was naturally not so evident in the detached instalments first published. They were regarded as "rich pictorial fancies taken, certainly not at random, but without any really coherent design, out of a great magazine of romantic story" (Hutton, Literary Essays), and were read with delight for their "exquisite magnificence of style,” as Swinburne calls it, the elaborate melody of rhythm, the richness and truth of illustration, and the grandeur of tone that marked them. And, indeed, apart from any secondary significance which they are meant to contain, the lover of poetry and romance will always feel the intrinsic charm both in the form and in the substance of these tales of "wonder and woe, of amorous devotion and fierce conflict and celestial vision." for the story and the style that each Idyll should first be read; their 'moral' is best reserved for separate, subsequent consideration. Accordingly, the reader of this volume has in the Notes been referred to this Introduction for explanation of any significance deeper than that which is evident on the surface of the poems. This significance is never obtruded by the poet, and it is only in his epilogue To the Queen that he tells us of the grand moral purpose which is now recognised as clearly с It is and consistently running through the whole set of Idylls. He there describes the work as an old imperfect tale, New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul, Of Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's, one The King Arthur of the Idylls is something more than selves are not devoid of definite, outspoken testimony to their own inner meaning. In Guinevere Arthur himself recounts how on founding the Order of the Round Table he made his knights swear "To reverence the king, as if he were Their conscience, and their conscience as their king," and later in the same Idyll the repentant queen, recognizing at last the height of Arthur's purity, cries "Ah, great and gentle lord Who wast, as is the conscience of a saint a mere Yet the poem is not a mere allegory. Arthur and his The Idylls not knights and the ladies of his court are not abstractions allegory. of ideal qualities: they are real men and women, with human feelings and trials and conflicts: they do repre sent and embody certain virtues and vices, but these qualities work and live in their work and their lives. Some purely allegorical figures are, indeed, introduced, as that of the Lady of the Lake personifying Religion; and in the visions of Percival in The Holy Grail there is more of symbolism than reality. But these figures and visions are clearly distinct from the human persona of the stories. Arthur, then, is a man in whom the higher instincts of his nature dominate the lower, and whose whole life is governed by the law within. He is, as Guinevere too late acknowledges, "the highest and most human too." The kingdom which "for a space" he establishes, and which in spite of downfall he will come to establish again, is the rule of conscience; and in his coming, his |