First published, with the epilogue as here printed, in 1842. The _Morte
d'Arthur_ was subsequently taken out of the present setting, and with
substantial expansion appeared as the final poem of the _Idylls of the
King_, with the new title, _The Passing of Arthur_.
Walter Savage Landor doubtless refers to the _Morte d'Arthur_ as early as
1837, when writing to a friend, as follows:--"Yesterday a Mr. Moreton, a
young man of rare judgment, read to me a manuscript by Mr. Tennyson,
being different in style from his printed poems. The subject is the
Death of Arthur. It is more Homeric than any poem of our time, and
rivals some of the noblest parts of the Odyssea." A still earlier
composition is assured by the correspondence of Edward Fitzgerald who
writes that, in 1835, while staying at the Speddings in the Lake Country,
he met Tennyson and heard the poet read the _Morte d'Arthur_ and other
poems of the 1842 volume. They were read out of a MS., "in a little red
book to him and Spedding of a night 'when all the house was mute.'"
In _The Epic_ we have specific reference to the Homeric influence in
these lines:
"Nay, nay," said Hall,
"Why take the style of those heroic times?
For nature brings not back the Mastodon,
Nor we those times; and why should any man
Remodel models? these twelve books of mine
Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth," . . .
Critics have agreed for the most part in considering the _Morte d'Arthur_
as the most Homeric of Tennyson's poems. Bayne writes: "Not only in the
language is it Homeric, but in the design and manner of treatment. The
concentration of interest on the hero, the absence of all modernism in
the way of love, story or passion painting, the martial clearness,
terseness, brevity of the narrative, with definite specification, at the
same time, are exquisitely true to the Homeric pattern." Brimley notes,
with probably greater precision, that: "They are rather Virgilian than
Homeric echoes; elaborate and stately, not naive and eager to tell their
story; rich in pictorial detail; carefully studied; conscious of their
own art; more anxious for beauty of workmanship than interest of action."
It has frequently been pointed out in this book how prone Tennyson is to
regard all his subjects from the modern point of view:
a truth
Looks freshest in the fashion of the day.
The Epic and the epilogue strongly emphasize this modernity in the varied
modern types of character which they represent, with their diverse
opinions upon contemporary topics. "As to the epilogue," writes Mr.
Brooke (p. 130), "it illustrates all I have been saying about Tennyson's
method with subjects drawn from Greek or romantic times. He filled and
sustained those subjects with thoughts which were as modern as they were
ancient. While he placed his readers in Camelot, Ithaca, or Ida, he made
them feel also that they were standing in London, Oxford, or an English
woodland. When the _Morte d'Arthur_ is finished, the hearer of it sits
rapt. There were 'modern touches here and there,' he says, and when he
sleeps he dreams of
"King Arthur, like a modern gentleman
Of stateliest port; and all the people cried,
'Arthur is come again, he cannot die.'
Then those that stood upon the hills behind
Repeated--'Come again, and thrice as fair:'
And, further inland, voices echoed--'Come
With all good things and war shall be no more.
"The old tale, thus modernised in an epilogue, does not lose its dignity,
for now the recoming of Arthur is the recoming of Christ in a wider and
fairer Christianity. We feel here how the new movement of religion and
theology had sent its full and exciting wave into Tennyson. Arthur's
death in the battle and the mist is the death of a form of Christianity
which, exhausted, died in doubt and darkness. His advent as a modern
gentleman is the coming of a brighter and more loving Christ into the
hearts of men. For so ends the epilogue. When the voices cry, 'Come
again, with all good things,'
"At this a hundred bells began to peal,
That with the sound I woke, and heard indeed,
The clear church-bells ring in the Christmas-morn."
THE ALLEGORICAL ELEMENT.--The statement is made on p. xxxv of this book
that in _The Idylls of the King_ "the effort is made to reconcile the
human story with the allegory, and in consequence the issues are
confusedly presented to our mind." It is characteristic of the _Morte
d'Arthur_ fragment that it is apparently free from all allegorical
intention. It is merely a moving human story with a fascinating element
of mystery inspired by the original Celtic legend. An element of
allegory lies in the epilogue, and _The Passing of Arthur_ still further
enforces the allegorical purpose. But here, as Mr. Brooke again writes
(p. 371), "we are close throughout to the ancient tale. No allegory, no
ethics, no rational soul, no preaching symbolism, enter here, to dim,
confuse, or spoil the story. Nothing is added which does not justly
exalt the tale, and what is added is chiefly a greater fulness and
breadth of humanity, a more lovely and supreme Nature, arranged at every
point to enhance into keener life the human feelings of Arthur and his
knight, to lift the ultimate hour of sorrow and of death into nobility.
Arthur is borne to a chapel nigh the field--
"A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land;
On one side lay the Ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.
"What a noble framework--and with what noble consciousness it is drawn! .
. . . All the landscape--than which nothing better has been invented by
any English poet--lives from point to point as if Nature herself had
created it; but even more alive than the landscape are the two human
figures in it--Sir Bedivere standing by the great water, and Arthur lying
wounded near the chapel, waiting for his knight. Take one passage, which
to hear is to see the thing:
"So saying, from the ruin'd shrine he stept,
And in the moon athwart the place of tombs,
Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men,
Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang
Shrill, chill with flakes of foam. He, stepping down
By zigzag paths, and juts of pointed rock,
Came on the shining levels of the lake.
"Twice he hides the sword, and when Arthur asks: 'What hast thou seen,
what heard?' Bedivere answers:
"'I heard the ripple washing in the reeds,
And the wild water lapping on the crag,'
"--lines so steeped in the loneliness of mountain tarns that I never stand
in solitude beside their waters but I hear the verses in my heart. At
the last he throws it.
"The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch,
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
By night, with noises of the northern sea.
"'So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur,' and never yet in poetry did
any sword, flung in the air, flash so superbly.
"The rest of the natural description is equally alive, and the passage
where the sound echoes the sense, and Bedivere, carrying Arthur, clangs
as he moves among the icy rocks, is as clear a piece of ringing, smiting,
clashing sound as any to be found in Tennyson:
"Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rung
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels.
"We hear all the changes on the vowel _a_--every sound of it used to give
the impression--and then, in a moment, the verse runs into breadth,
smoothness and vastness: for Bedivere comes to the shore and sees the
great water;
"And on a sudden lo! the level lake,
And the long glories of the winter moon,
"in which the vowel _o_, in its changes is used, as the vowel _a_ has been
used before.
"The questions and replies of Arthur and Bedivere, the reproaches of the
King, the excuses of the Knight, the sorrow and the final wrath of
Arthur, are worthy of the landscape, as they ought to be; and the
dominance of the human element in the scene is a piece of noble
artist-work. Arthur is royal to the close, and when he passes away with
the weeping Queens across the mere, unlike the star of the tournament he
was of old, he is still the King. Sir Bedivere, left alone on the
freezing shore, hears the King give his last message to the world. It is
a modern Christian who speaks, but the phrases do not sound out of
harmony with that which might be in Romance. Moreover, the end of the
saying is of Avilion or Avalon--of the old heathen Celtic place where the
wounded are healed and the old made young."
In the final analysis, therefore, the significance of the _Morte
d'Arthur_ is a significance of beauty rather than moralistic purpose. It
has been said that the reading of Milton's _Lycidas_ is the surest test
of one's powers of poetical appreciation. I fear that the test is too
severe for many readers who can still enjoy a simpler style of poetry.
But any person who can read the _Morte d'Arthur_, and fail to be
impressed by its splendid pictures, and subdued to admiration by the
dignity of its language, need scarcely hope for pleasure from any poetry.