Perhaps no reader of the world's literature would deny that letters and
life had been indefinitely enriched by Alfred Tennyson.
How ideas affect life when once they have become participants therein
is the bar at which all ideas must stand for judgment. Carbonic-acid
gas enters the lungs, fills them, and blows out the lamp of life.
Common air enters the lungs, crimsons the blood, exhilarates the
spirit, gives elasticity to step and thought and pulse; is health, and
pours oil into the lamp of life whereby the flame burns higher, like
watch-fires on evening hills. One air brought death; one air brought
more abundant life. What do ideas effect, and how do they affect him
who entertains them is the final question and the final test. Now, our
earth is always trying to grow men. Not harvests nor flowers nor
forests, but man, is what the earth is proudest of. On transparent
June days, standing upon the cliffs of the Isle of Man, I have seen the
golden wheatfields on the hills of Wales; but heaven, looking earth's
way, is oblivious to our tossing plumes of corn or tawny billows of the
fields of wheat. Heaven's concern is in our crop of manhood; and ships
that ply between the shores of earth and shores of heaven are never
laden with gold or silver ingots, as Spanish galleons were, nor with
glancing silks nor burning gems, but are forever freighted with elect
spirits. Men and women are the commodity earth grows that heaven wants.
What helps the growth of man is good; what hurts the growth of man is
bad. When one has become a shadow, lost to human eyes, test him with
this acid. Did he do good? If he did evil, let his name perish; if he
did good, let his name blaze in the galaxy among the inextinguishable
stars. If he has made the growth of manhood easier and its method more
apparent; if he has opened eyes to see the best, and spurred men to
attempt the best they saw; if he has enamored them of virtue as
aforetime they were enamored of vice,--trust me, that man was good. He
will endure, and be passed from age to age, like rare traditions
through centuries, till time shall die. Submit Alfred Tennyson to this
test. Is virtue more apparent, more lovely, and of more luxuriant
growth, like tropic forests, because of him? But one answer is
possible, and that answer is, "King Arthur." To our moral riches,
Victor Hugo added "Jean Valjean;" Dickens, "Sidney Carton;" Thackeray,
"Colonel Newcome;" Browning, "Caponsacchi;" Tennyson, "King Arthur,"
who stands and will stand as Tennyson's vision of manhood at its prime.
The theme of this paper, then, is "King Arthur," being a philosophy of
manhood as outlined by Alfred Tennyson; and the purpose of this essay
is to bring into vital relation to King Arthur the totality of argument
for manhood which Tennyson has constructed in his cycle of poems, thus
taking into our field of vision, not simply "The Idyls of the King,"
adequate as they may be, but, in addition, "Enoch Arden," "Ulysses,"
"The Vision of Sin," "The Palace of Art," "Maud," "Columbus," "Locksley
Hall," "The Lotos-Eaters," and "In Memoriam," and all poems which, by
negation or affirmation, may suggest or enforce a thought regarding the
furnishing of the soul.
In those idyls clustering about King Arthur, Tennyson has patently
purposed painting the figure of a perfect man. How well he has
executed his design depends on himself much, on the beholder much.
Onlookers differ in opinion. Painters have their clientage. Poets are
not omniscient; neither are we, a thing we are prone to forget. For
myself, I confess not to see with those who deride the king, nor yet
with those who think him statuesque, as if shaped, not out of flesh,
but out of marble. He is not incredible, nor is he a shadow, stalking
gaunt and battle-clad across the crags that fringe the Cornish sea.
Not a few among us approximate perfection in character as blameless as
Arthur's. I myself profess to have seen a King Arthur, and to have
held high converse with him through many years. Whiteness of life is
not an episode foreign to biography. There are many lives running
white toward heaven as I have seen a path across the moonlit sea. Not
to be credulous is well; not to be incredulous is better, when heavenly
visions and heavenly incarnations are the theme. This is affirmed,
that King Arthur is not more unreal than others Tennyson delineates.
His art lacks the power to flood his people's veins with blood to
plethora, with such bounding vitality as marks Shakespeare's creations.
They lack, sometimes, color on the cheek and lip and sunlight in the
eyes. His characters are as if seen in mist. Our failing is, we give
credence to fleshly instinct and lust and failure in ideal more readily
than to wise manliness and stalwart and heroic worth. But Enoch Arden
is no dream. Arthur is no myth. I know a man whose heart is as pure,
whose conduct as above reproach, and whose words are as big with
charity, and thoughts as foreign to hypocrisy, as Arthur's were; for
Arthur is not dead. They did not dream who said, "Arthur returns." He
hides his name, lest he become spectacular, a raree-show, for mobs to
follow and shout hoarse about; but he is here. I met him yesterday;
and to-morrow I shall walk with him by the river, where the stream
makes music, and the trees sing in minors, and the shadows darken on
the grass.
What, then, is this Arthur's character? Looking at him as he sits
astride his steed, yonder at Camelot, with his visor up, he is seen
manhood at its prime. A ruddy face, with beard of gold, holding the
sun as harvests do. Tourneys done, the king is turned battleward,
where he is to die; and a man's picture comes to have special value at
his death. When the wounded king is borne by Bedivere across the
echoing crags toward the black funeral barge, we see him again, full in
the face, and remember him always.
King Arthur was a self-made man. His birth was held to be uncertain.
"Is he Uther's son?" was on many a lip. So men yet sometimes hold to
some poor question of ancestry when worth, evident as light, fronts
them. Some there are who live in so narrow a mood as to ask always
"Where?" and never "What?" when the latter is God's unvarying method of
estimation. This quest for ancestry for Arthur is of service to us as
showing he had not empire ready to his hand. His kingdom did not make
him; he made his kingdom; or, to give the entire history, he made
himself and his kingdom. And this is oft-repeated history. When a man
makes a kingdom, he first made himself. He does two things. Might
goes not single, loves not solitude, but makes itself company. Milton
made himself before he made the Bible epic of the world. He wrought
himself and his complex history into his Iliad of heavenly battle.
Souls have, in a true sense, a beaten path to tread. There is a
highway worn to ruts and dust by travel of the great men's feet. And
Arthur had much company, if he knew it not. Such men seem alone,
though if they saw all their companionships they would know they walked
on in a goodly company and great. Greatness has many fellowships, as
stars have; and stars have fellowship of mountains and woods, and
kindred stars, and waters where star-shadows lie, and oceans where
galaxies tumble like defeated angels. All greatness is self-made.
Names are bequeathed us, so much is borrowed. Character and value are
self-made. Gold has intrinsic worth. Man has not, but makes his worth
by the day's labor of his hands.
This provision is God's excellent antidote to dissatisfaction with
one's estate. If worth could be handed down, like name or fortune, one
might as well be a pasture-field, to pass from hand to hand as chattel,
instead of man. Far otherwise God's plan. Each spirit works out, and
must work out, his own destiny. Destinies are not ready-made but
hand-made. King Arthur's fame is not dependent on his ancestry, but on
himself. Ancestry we can not control; self we can. Tennyson, though
part of a hereditary system, sees with perfect clearness how ancestry
accounts for no man, and how every man must make his own room in the
world; how nobility depends, not on a family's past, but on the
individual's present; how wealth and service are the credentials of
character society will accept, and the only credentials. This view is
scarcely English, but is fully American. And Tennyson was not
sympathetic with America. Democracies possessed not the flavor of the
fruit he loved. When, however, the biography of greatness is to be
written, who writes the story, if he write it truly, must tell a story
of democracy. Tennyson is unconscious democrat when he writes Arthur's
biography, because as poet he saw. His intuitions led him. He spoke,
not as a lover of a certain social and political system, but as a
discerner of spirits. The poet is not his best as a planned
philosophizer; for in that role he becomes self-conscious; but is at
his best when the wheel of his burning spirit, revolving as the planets
do, throws off sparks or streams of fire. To the accuracy of this
observation witness both Browning and Tennyson. When they were
"possessed," as the Delphic oracle would say, they marched toward truth
like an invincible troop. Truth seemed the missing half of their own
sphere, toward which, by a subtle and lordly gravitation, they swung.
When Tennyson's instincts speak, he is democrat; when his reason and
his prejudice (for he was surcharged with both) speak, he is hot
aristocrat. When he is biographer for royal Arthur, his instinct
speaks, and his conviction holds that character and deeds do and shall
count for more than blood; and this is no isolated idea advanced
touching Arthur, but is prevalent throughout his verse. In "Lady Clara
Vere de Vere," his heart speaks, full of eagerness, saying:
"Howe'er it be, it seems to me,
'T is only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood."
Nor is the Laureate's subsequent acceptance of the peerage a retraction
of these earlier sentiments; for he did but accept the ribbon of an
order which was part of the political system of his native land.
Himself was self-made. Who were the Tennysons? Who are the Tennysons?
He made a house. And in the list of lords, does any one think there is
a name whose device one would rather wear than that of Lord Tennyson?
Holland has this bit of verse, whose application is apparent:
"Heaven is not reached at a single bound;
But we build the ladder by which we rise
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies,
And mount to its summit round by round."
Genius does the same. The stairs each generation climbed are rotten at
its death, so that no foot's weight can be borne upon them afterward.
Man builds his own stairway greatnessward. In the Idyl of the King,
entitled "Gareth and Lynette," is application of this thought of
manhood above title or name or blood. Worth, the main thing, is the
theme of the idyl.
Hear Gareth call, like voice of trumpets,
"Let be my name; until I make my name
My deeds will speak."
He seemed, and was not, a kitchen knave. He seemed not, and he was, a
knight of valor and of purity and might, of purpose and of succor.
Silly Lynette might rain her superficial insults on him like a winter's
sleet--this hindered not his service. He knew to wait, and dare, and
do. His fame was in him. A great life bears not its honors on its
back, as mountains do their pines, but in his heart, as women do their
love. In Tennyson's concept of manhood, worth counts, not rank. To
this argument, words from "In Memoriam" are a contribution:
"As some divinely-gifted man,
Whose life in low estate began
And on a simple village green;
Who breaks his birth's invidious bar,
And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
And breasts the blows of circumstance,
And grapples with his evil star;
Who makes by force his merit known,
And lives to clutch the golden keys,
To mold a mighty State's decrees,
And shape the whisper of the throne;
And moving on from high to higher,
Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope
The pillar of a people's hope,
The center of a world's desire."
Such words seem as if fallen from the lips of Lincoln in a dream.
"Aylmer's Field" is a protest, written in grief and tears and blood
against the iniquity of ancestry as divorced from the pure course of
nobler love. God made of one blood all kindreds of the earth, and
means to mix this blood till time shall die. Hearts give scant heed to
heraldry. Life is wider than a baron's field. Arthur Hallam, whose
epitaph is the sweetest ever written, and bears title of "In
Memoriam,"--Arthur Hallam, so greatly loved and missed, was never
nobleman in genealogy, but was full prince in youth and ideality and
purity and genius and promise, worth more than all the ancestries of
buried kings. More: Tennyson was as much self-made as King Arthur. He
made a house which rose to the sound of poet's lute, rehearsing, in our
days, the story of Orpheus in the remote yesterdays. So myths come to
be history. And who would not rather be author of "The Lotos-Eaters,"
and "Oenone," and "Ulysses," and "Enoch Arden," and "In Memoriam" than
to have been possessed, with Sir Aylmer Aylmer, of
"Spacious hall,
Hung with a hundred shields, the family tree
Sprung from the midriff of a prostrate king?"
King Arthur's knights were _novi viri_. Whence came Lancelot and
Geraint and Sir Percivale? And how came they, save as
"Rising on their dead selves
To higher things?"
Arthur, at whose back march all the legions of Tennyson's poetry
celebrative of manhood,--Arthur asserts the nobleness of manhood,
irrespective of the accidents of wealth or birth. Many scenes in
Tennyson are taken from the cottage. "The May Queen," "The Gardener's
Daughter," "The Grandmother," "Rizpah," and, above all, "Enoch Arden,"
are poems showing how poetry dwells in the hearts of common folks. The
verse of books they may not know; the verse of sentiment they are at
home with. Birth is not a term in the proportion of worth; and I hold
Arthur one of the strongest voices of our century assertive of the
sufficiency of manhood. Self-made and greatly made was this king at
Camelot.
King Arthur was optimist. He expected good in men, was not suspicious.
"Interpreting others by his own pure heart," you interject, "He was
duped." The harlot Vivien called him fool, and despised him; but she
was fallen, shameful, treacherous, and, what was worse, so fallen as
not to see the beauty in untarnished manhood, which is the last sign of
turpitude. Many bad men have still left an honest admiration for a
goodness themselves are alien to. Vivien was so lost as that goodness,
manhood, knightliness, sweet and tall as mountain pines, made no appeal
to her. Filth is dearer to some than mountain air. She was such. A
fallen woman, given over to her fall, is horrible in depravity. Merlin
saw that her estimate of Arthur was the measure of herself. Beatrix
Esmond did not appreciate Henry Esmond; for the Pretender was her
measure of soul. Though to her praise be it said that, in her old age,
Esmond dead, she thought of him as women think of Christ. Arthur
believed in men, supposing them to be transcripts of himself; and in so
doing in details, he erred. His philosophy of goodness was erroneous;
for he held to the theory of goodness by environment, fencing knights
and ladies about with his own fine honor and chastity, supposing pure
environment would make them pure, forgetting how God's kingdom is
always within. Environment is not gifted to make men good. Arthur
believed men pure, nor was he wholly wrong. The men about him gave the
lie to his expectation; but these moral ragamuffins did not invalidate
the king's faith. The road taken was not the world. Lancelot and
Guinevere and Gawain and Modred, false? False! Pelleas, seeing
Ettarre lustful and untrue, digging rowels into his steed and crying,
"False! false!" was not wise as Arthur. The optimist is right. Some
were false, 't is true; but others were true as crystal streams, that
all night long give back the heavens star for star. There were and are
true men and women. Our neighborhood, if so be it is foul, is not the
earth. Enid, and Elaine, and Sir Galahad, and Sir Percivale, and
Gareth, and others not designated, were pure. Snows on city streets
are stained with soot and earth; snows on the mountains are as white as
woven of the beams of noon. King Arthur, expecting the better of the
world, in so doing followed the example of his Savior, Christ, who was
most surely optimist. King Arthur, in his midnight hour, when knight
and wife and Lancelot deserted him, when his "vast pity almost made him
die," still kept the lamp of hope aflame and sheltered from the wind,
lest it flame, flare, and die. His fool still loved him and clasped
his feet; and bold Sir Bedivere staid with him through the thunder
shock of that last battle in the west. Not all were false. Some
friends abide. Though his application was not always wise, his
attitude was justified. Having done his part, he had not been
betrayed; for he was still victor. Lancelot and Guinevere were
defeated, ruined, as were Gawain and Ettarre, who, as they wake, find
across their naked throats the bare sword of Pelleas; then Ettarre knew
what knight was knightly. Goodness wins in the long battle, though
supposed defeated in the petty frays, Tennyson makes his ideal man an
optimist. "Maud" is a study in pessimism. The lover's blood is
tainted with insanity. He raves, is suspicious, is at war with all
things and all men; rails at the social system, not from any broad
sympathy with better things, but from a strident selfishness, rasping
and self-proclamatory, lacking elevation, save as his love puts wings
beneath him for a moment and lifts him, as eagles billow up their
young; is weak, and tries to cover weakness up by ranting. We pity,
then despise him, then pity him once more, and in sheer charity think
him raving mad. Stand Maud's lover alongside King Arthur, and how
splendid does King Arthur look! The lover was pessimist and wrong;
Arthur was optimist and, in his temper, right. Though hacked at by the
careless or vicious swords of cumulating hatreds, underestimations,
selfishness, and lewdness of lesser and cruder souls, knowing, as he
did, how God is on goodness' side, knew, therefore, who is on God's
side keeps hope in good, believing better things. Those who, thinking
themselves shrewd, and are perennially suspicious, do really lack in
shrewdness, lacking depth. The far view is the serene view. Pelleas,
too, is a study in lost faith. He was near-sighted in his moral life,
and so, in losing faith in Ettarre, lost faith in womanhood, a
conclusion not justified from the premises; and you hear him in the
wild night, crying as beasts of the desert cry, and what he hisses as
you pass is, "I have no sword." Arthur kept his sword till time came
to give it back to the "arm clothed in white samite." He threw not his
sword away until his hand could hold it no longer. Hands and swords
must keep company while life and strength remain, and who breaks or
throws sword away from sheer despair has lost sight of duty, in so far
that our business is to do battle valiantly and constantly for
righteousness, and keep the sword at play in spite of dubious
circumstances. Battles are often on the point of being won when they
look on the point of being lost, as was the case with Pelleas, whose
hope died just at the hour when hope ought to have begun shouts
befitting triumph; for that night when he lay his naked sword across
Ettarre's naked neck, she, waking and finding whose sword was lying,
like a mad menace, on her breast, recovered her womanhood, loved the
knight, who came and went, and slew her not, as his right was, and
loved him to her death; while he, the cause of her reformation, swung
through the gloomy night with faith and courage lost. He should have
held his faith, however his trust in one had been shamed and sunk.
Faith in one snuffed out is not in logic to lose faith; for all are
more than one. Trust Arthur; he was right. Pessimism is no sane mood.
All history conspires to justify his attitude. Himself inspires
optimism in us, and the three queens wait for him, and the black
funeral barge that bears him, not to his funeral, but to some fair city
where there seems one voice, and that a voice of welcome to this king;
and besides all this, his name lights our nights till now, as if he
were some sun, pre-empting night as well as day. Has not his optimism
been justified a hundred-fold? Do those who view the present only,
think to see all the landscape where deeds reap victories? Time is so
essential in the propagandism of good. Time is the foe of evil, but
sworn ally of good. God owns the future.
King Arthur considered life a chance for service. Life is no
abstraction, no theoretical science; rather concrete, experimental.
Magician Merlin's motto, too. We may think _or_ act, though this of
conduct. We may think or act, though this disjunctive is wrong, wholly
wrong. [Transcriber's note: Something seems to have gone wrong with
the typesetting of the previous three sentences. The first sentence
makes no sense, and the second two both start with the same seven
words.] There is no separation between act and thought in a wise
estimate. They are not enemies, but friends. We are to think _and_
act. We are, in a word, not to dream or do, but dream and do, the
dreaming being prelude to the doing. Who dreams not is metallic.
Dreams redeem deeds from being stereotyped, and make motions sinuous
and graceful as a bird's flight across the sky; and when they
impregnate conduct, deed becomes instinct with a melody thrilling and
sweet as a wood-thrush note. Arthur was no mystic. He did not dwell
apart from men; he was a part of men. "The Mystic" is an admirable
conception of the soul, living remote from society and action, seeing
our world as through a smoke. Mysticism has its truth and power. Many
of us bluster and do, and do not stand apart and dwell enough with the
unseen.
"Always there stood before him, night and day,
The imperishable presences serene,
One mighty countenance of perfect calm,"