My hand--belike the lance hath dript upon it -No blood of mine, I trow; but O chief knight, Right arm of Arthur in the battlefield, Great brother, thou nor I have made the world;Be happy in thy fair Queen as I in mine.'
And Tristram round the gallery made his horse Caracole; then bow'd his homage, bluntly saying, 'Fair damsels, each to him who worships each Sole Queen of Beauty and of love, behold This day my Queen of Beauty is not here.'
And most of these were mute, some anger'd, one Murmuring, 'All courtesy is dead,' and one, 'The glory of our Round Table is no more.'
Then fell thick rain, plume droopt and mantle clung, And pettish cries awoke, and the wan day Went glooming down in wet and weariness:
But under her black brows a swarthy one Laugh'd shrilly, crying, 'Praise the patient saints, Our one white day of Innocence hath past, Tho' somewhat draggled at the skirt. So be it.
The snowdrop only, flowering thro' the year, Would make the world as blank as Winter-tide.
Come--let us gladden their sad eyes, our Queen's And Lancelot's, at this night's solemnity With all the kindlier colours of the field.'"Arthur's last victory over a robber knight is ingloriously squalid:-"He ended: Arthur knew the voice; the face Wellnigh was helmet-hidden, and the name Went wandering somewhere darkling in his mind.
And Arthur deign'd not use of word or sword, But let the drunkard, as he stretch'd from horse To strike him, overbalancing his bulk, Down from the causeway heavily to the swamp Fall, as the crest of some slow-arching wave, Heard in dead night along that table-shore, Drops flat, and after the great waters break Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves, Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud, From less and less to nothing; thus he fell Head-heavy; then the knights, who watch'd him, roar'd And shouted and leapt down upon the fall'n;There trampled out his face from being known, And sank his head in mire, and slimed themselves:
Nor heard the King for their own cries, but sprang Thro' open doors, and swording right and left Men, women, on their sodden faces, hurl'd The tables over and the wines, and slew Till all the rafters rang with woman-yells, And all the pavement stream'd with massacre:
Then, echoing yell with yell, they fired the tower, Which half that autumn night, like the live North, Red-pulsing up thro' Alioth and Alcor, Made all above it, and a hundred meres About it, as the water Moab saw Come round by the East, and out beyond them flush'd The long low dune, and lazy-plunging sea."Guinevere is one of the greatest of the Idylls. Malory makes Lancelot more sympathetic; his fight, unarmed, in Guinevere's chamber, against the felon knights, is one of his most spirited scenes. Tennyson omits this, and omits all the unpardonable behaviour of Arthur as narrated in Malory. Critics have usually condemned the last parting of Guinevere and Arthur, because the King doth preach too much to an unhappy woman who has no reply. The position of Arthur is not easily redeemable: it is difficult to conceive that a noble nature could be, or should be, blind so long.
He does rehabilitate his Queen in her own self-respect, perhaps, by assuring her that he loves her still:-"Let no man dream but that I love thee still."Had he said that one line and no more, we might have loved him better. In the Idylls we have not Malory's last meeting of Lancelot and Guinevere, one of the scenes in which the wandering composite romance ends as nobly as the Iliad.
The Passing of Arthur, except for a new introductory passage of great beauty and appropriateness, is the Morte d'Arthur, first published in 1842:-"So all day long the noise of battle roll'd Among the mountains by the winter sea."The year has run its course, spring, summer, gloomy autumn, and dies in the mist of Arthur's last wintry battle in the west -"And the new sun rose, bringing the new year."The splendid and sombre procession has passed, leaving us to muse as to how far the poet has fulfilled his own ideal. There could be no new epic: he gave a chain of heroic Idylls. An epic there could not be, for the Iliad and Odyssey have each a unity of theme, a narrative compressed into a few days in the former, in the latter into forty days of time. The tragedy of Arthur's reign could not so be condensed; and Tennyson chose the only feasible plan. He has left a work, not absolutely perfect, indeed, but such as he conceived, after many tentative essays, and such as he desired to achieve. His fame may not rest chiefly on the Idylls, but they form one of the fairest jewels in the crown that shines with unnumbered gems, each with its own glory.