In so marvellous a treasure of precious things as the volumes of 1842, perhaps none is more splendid, perfect, and perdurable than the Morte d'Arthur. It had been written seven years earlier, and pronounced by the poet "not bad." Tennyson was never, perhaps, a very deep Arthurian student. A little cheap copy of Malory was his companion. He does not appear to have gone deeply into the French and German "literature of the subject." Malory's compilation (1485) from French and English sources, with the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest, sufficed for him as materials. The whole poem, enshrined in the memory of all lovers of verse, is richly studded, as the hilt of Excalibur, with classical memories. "A faint Homeric echo" it is not, nor a Virgilian echo, but the absolute voice of old romance, a thing that might have been chanted by "The lonely maiden of the Lake"when "Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps, Upon the hidden bases of the hills."Perhaps the most exquisite adaptation of all are the lines from the Odyssey -"Where falls not hail nor rain, nor any snow.""Softly through the flutes of the Grecians" came first these Elysian numbers, then through Lucretius, then through Tennyson's own Lucretius, then in Mr Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon:-"Lands indiscoverable in the unheard-of west Round which the strong stream of a sacred sea Rolls without wind for ever, and the snow There shows not her white wings and windy feet, Nor thunder nor swift rain saith anything, Nor the sun burns, but all things rest and thrive."So fortunate in their transmission through poets have been the lines of "the Ionian father of the rest," the greatest of them all.
In the variety of excellences which marks Tennyson, the new English idylls of 1842 hold their prominent place. Nothing can be more exquisite and more English than the picture of "the garden that Ilove." Theocritus cannot be surpassed; but the idyll matches to the seventh of his, where it is most closely followed, and possesses such a picture of a girl as the Sicilian never tried to paint.
Dora is another idyll, resembling the work of a Wordsworth in a clime softer than that of the Fells. The lays of Edwin Morris and Edward Bull are not among the more enduring of even the playful poems. The St Simeon Stylites appears "made to the hand" of the author of Men and Women rather than of Tennyson. The grotesque vanity of the anchorite is so remote from us, that we can scarcely judge of the truth of the picture, though the East has still her parallels to St Simeon. From the almost, perhaps quite, incredible ascetic the poet lightly turns to "society verse" lifted up into the air of poetry, in the charm of The Talking Oak, and the happy flitting sketches of actual history; and thence to the strength and passion of Love and Duty. Shall "Sin itself be found The cloudy porch oft opening on the Sun?"That this is the province of sin is a pretty popular modern moral.
But Honour is the better part, and here was a poet who had the courage to say so; though, to be sure, the words ring strange in an age when highly respectable matrons assure us that "passion," like charity, covers a multitude of sins. Love and Duty, we must admit, is "early Victorian."The Ulysses is almost a rival to the Morte d'Arthur. It is of an early date, after Arthur Hallam's death, and Thackeray speaks of the poet chanting his "Great Achilles whom we knew,"as if he thought that this was in Cambridge days. But it is later than these. Tennyson said, "Ulysses was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life, perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam." Assuredly the expression is more simple, and more noble, and the personal emotion more dignified for the classic veil.