“All in an oriel on the summer side,
Vine-clad, of Arthur’s palace toward the stream,
They met, and Lancelot kneeling utter’d, ‘Queen,
Lady, my liege, in whom I have my joy,
Take, what I had not won except for you,
These jewels, and make me happy, making them
An armlet for the roundest arm on earth,
Or necklace for a neck to which the swan’s
Is tawnier than her cygnet’s: these are words:
Your beauty is your beauty, and I sin
In speaking, yet O grant my worship of it
Words, as we grant grief tears. Such sin in words,
Perchance, we both can pardon: but, my Queen,
I hear of rumours flying thro’ your court.
Our bond, as not the bond of man and wife,
Should have in it an absoluter trust
To make up that defect: let rumours be:
When did not rumours fly? these, as I trust
That you trust me in your own nobleness,
I may not well believe that you believe.’
While thus he spoke, half turn’d away, the Queen
Brake from the vast oriel-embowering vine
Leaf after leaf, and tore, and cast them off,
Till all the place whereon she stood was green;
Then, when he ceased, in one cold passive hand
Received at once and laid aside the gems
There on a table near her, and replied:
‘It may be, I am quicker of belief
Than you believe me, Lancelot of the Lake.
Our bond is not the bond of man and wife.
This good is in it, whatsoe’er of ill,
It can be broken easier. I for you
This many a year have done despite and wrong
To one whom ever in my heart of hearts
I did acknowledge nobler. What are these?
Diamonds for me! they had been thrice their worth
Being your gift, had you not lost your own.
To loyal hearts the value of all gifts
Must vary as the giver’s. Not for me!
For her! for your new fancy. Only this
Grant me, I pray you: have your joys apart.
I doubt not that however changed, you keep
So much of what is graceful: and myself
Would shun to break those bounds of courtesy
In which as Arthur’s Queen I move and rule:
So cannot speak my mind. An end to this!
A strange one! yet I take it with Amen.
So pray you, add my diamonds to her pearls;
Deck her with these; tell her, she shines me down:
An armlet for an arm to which the Queen’s
Is haggard, or a necklace for a neck
O as much fairer—as a faith once fair
Was richer than these diamonds—hers not mine—
Nay, by the mother of our Lord himself,
Or hers or mine, mine now to work my will—
She shall not have them.’
Saying which she seized,
And, thro’ the casement standing wide for heat,
Flung them, and down they flash’d, and smote the stream.
Then from the smitten surface flash’d, as it were,
Diamonds to meet them, and they past away.
Then while Sir Lancelot leant, in half disdain
At love, life, all things, on the window ledge,
Close underneath his eyes, and right across
Where these had fallen, slowly past the barge
Whereon the lily maid of Astolat
Lay smiling, like a star in blackest night.”
This affair of the diamonds is the chief addition to the old tale, in
which we already see the curse of lawless love, fallen upon the jealous
Queen and the long-enduring Lancelot. “This is not the first time,” said
Sir Lancelot, “that ye have been displeased with me causeless, but,
madame, ever I must suffer you, but what sorrow I endure I take no force”
(that is, “I disregard”).
The romance, and the poet, in his own despite, cannot but make Lancelot
the man we love, not Arthur or another. Human nature perversely sides
with Guinevere against the Blameless King:—
“She broke into a little scornful laugh:
‘Arthur, my lord, Arthur, the faultless King,
That passionate perfection, my good lord—
But who can gaze upon the Sun in heaven?
He never spake word of reproach to me,
He never had a glimpse of mine untruth,
He cares not for me: only here to-day
There gleam’d a vague suspicion in his eyes:
Some meddling rogue has tamper’d with him—else
Rapt in this fancy of his Table Round,
And swearing men to vows impossible,
To make them like himself: but, friend, to me
He is all fault who hath no fault at all:
For who loves me must have a touch of earth;
The low sun makes the colour: I am yours,
Not Arthur’s, as ye know, save by the bond.”
It is not the beautiful Queen who wins us, our hearts are with “the
innocence of love” in Elaine. But Lancelot has the charm that captivated
Lavaine; and Tennyson’s Arthur remains
“The moral child without the craft to rule,
Else had he not lost me.”
Indeed the romance of Malory makes Arthur deserve “the pretty popular
name such manhood earns” by his conduct as regards Guinevere when she is
accused by her enemies in the later chapters. Yet Malory does not
finally condone the sin which baffles Lancelot’s quest of the Holy Grail.
Tennyson at first was in doubt as to writing on the Grail, for certain
respects of reverence. When he did approach the theme it was in a method
of extreme condensation. The romances on the Grail outrun the length
even of mediæval poetry and prose. They are exceedingly confused, as was
natural, if that hypothesis which regards the story as a Christianised
form of obscure Celtic myth be correct. Sir Percivale’s sister, in the
Idyll, has the first vision of the Grail:—
“Sweet brother, I have seen the Holy Grail:
For, waked at dead of night, I heard a sound
As of a silver horn from o’er the hills
Blown, and I thought, ‘It is not Arthur’s use
To hunt by moonlight’; and the slender sound
As from a distance beyond distance grew
Coming upon me—O never harp nor horn,
Nor aught we blow with breath, or touch with hand,
Was like that music as it came; and then
Stream’d thro’ my cell a cold and silver beam,
And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail,
Rose-red with beatings in it, as if alive,
Till all the white walls of my cell were dyed
With rosy colours leaping on the wall;
And then the music faded, and the Grail
Past, and the beam decay’d, and from the walls
The rosy quiverings died into the night.
So now the Holy Thing is here again
Among us, brother, fast thou too and pray,
And tell thy brother knights to fast and pray,
That so perchance the vision may be seen
By thee and those, and all the world be heal’d.”
Galahad, son of Lancelot and the first Elaine (who became Lancelot’s
mistress by art magic), then vows himself to the Quest, and, after the
vision in hall at Camelot, the knights, except Arthur, follow his
example, to Arthur’s grief. “Ye follow wandering fires!” Probably, or
perhaps, the poet indicates dislike of hasty spiritual enthusiasms, of
“seeking for a sign,” and of the mysticism which betokens want of faith.
The Middle Ages, more than many readers know, were ages of doubt. Men
desired the witness of the senses to the truth of what the Church taught,
they wished to see that naked child of the romance “smite himself into”
the wafer of the Sacrament. The author of the _Imitatio Christi_
discourages such vain and too curious inquiries as helped to rend the
Church, and divided Christendom into hostile camps. The Quest of the
actual Grail was a knightly form of theological research into the
unsearchable; undertaken, often in a secular spirit of adventure, by
sinful men. The poet’s heart is rather with human things:—
“‘O brother,’ ask’d Ambrosius,—‘for in sooth
These ancient books—and they would win thee—teem,
Only I find not there this Holy Grail,
With miracles and marvels like to these,
Not all unlike; which oftentime I read,
Who read but on my breviary with ease,
Till my head swims; and then go forth and pass
Down to the little thorpe that lies so close,
And almost plaster’d like a martin’s nest
To these old walls—and mingle with our folk;
And knowing every honest face of theirs
As well as ever shepherd knew his sheep,
And every homely secret in their hearts,
Delight myself with gossip and old wives,
And ills and aches, and teethings, lyings-in,
And mirthful sayings, children of the place,
That have no meaning half a league away:
Or lulling random squabbles when they rise,
Chafferings and chatterings at the market-cross,
Rejoice, small man, in this small world of mine,
Yea, even in their hens and in their eggs.”’
This appears to be Tennyson’s original reading of the Quest of the Grail.
His own mysticism, which did not strive, or cry, or seek after marvels,
though marvels might come unsought, is expressed in Arthur’s words:—
“‘“And spake I not too truly, O my knights?
Was I too dark a prophet when I said
To those who went upon the Holy Quest,
That most of them would follow wandering fires,
Lost in the quagmire?—lost to me and gone,
And left me gazing at a barren board,
And a lean Order—scarce return’d a tithe—
And out of those to whom the vision came
My greatest hardly will believe he saw;
Another hath beheld it afar off,
And leaving human wrongs to right themselves,
Cares but to pass into the silent life.
And one hath had the vision face to face,
And now his chair desires him here in vain,
However they may crown him otherwhere.
‘“And some among you held, that if the King
Had seen the sight he would have sworn the vow:
Not easily, seeing that the King must guard
That which he rules, and is but as the hind
To whom a space of land is given to plow
Who may not wander from the allotted field
Before his work be done; but, being done,
Let visions of the night or of the day
Come, as they will; and many a time they come,
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light,
This air that smites his forehead is not air
But vision—yea, his very hand and foot—
In moments when he feels he cannot die,
And knows himself no vision to himself,
Nor the high God a vision, nor that One
Who rose again: ye have seen what ye have seen.”
‘So spake the King: I knew not all he meant.’”
The closing lines declare, as far as the poet could declare them, these
subjective experiences of his which, in a manner rarely parallelled,
coloured and formed his thought on the highest things. He introduces
them even into this poem on a topic which, because of its sacred
associations, he for long did not venture to touch.
In _Pelleas and Ettarre_—which deals with the sorrows of one of the young
knights who fill up the gaps left at the Round Table by the mischances of
the Quest—it would be difficult to trace a Celtic original. For Malory,
not Celtic legend, supplied Tennyson with the germinal idea of a poem
which, in the romance, has no bearing on the final catastrophe. Pelleas,
a King of the Isles, loves the beautiful Ettarre, “a great lady,” and for
her wins at a tourney the prize of the golden circlet. But she hates and
despises him, and Sir Gawain is a spectator when, as in the poem, the
felon knights of Ettarre bind and insult their conqueror, Pelleas.
Gawain promises to win the love of Ettarre for Pelleas, and, as in the
poem, borrows his arms and horse, and pretends to have slain him. But in
place of turning Ettarre’s heart towards Pelleas, Gawain becomes her
lover, and Pelleas, detecting them asleep, lays his naked sword on their
necks. He then rides home to die; but Nimue (Vivien), the Lady of the
Lake, restores him to health and sanity. His fever gone, he scorns
Ettarre, who, by Nimue’s enchantment, now loves him as much as she had
hated him. Pelleas weds Nimue, and Ettarre dies of a broken heart.
Tennyson, of course, could not make Nimue (his Vivien) do anything
benevolent. He therefore closes his poem by a repetition of the effect
in the case of Balin. Pelleas is driven desperate by the treachery of
Gawain, the reported infidelity of Guinevere, and the general corruption
of the ideal. A shadow falls on Lancelot and Guinevere, and Modred sees
that his hour is drawing nigh. In spite of beautiful passages this is
not one of the finest of the Idylls, save for the study of the fierce,
hateful, and beautiful _grande dame_, Ettarre. The narrative does little
to advance the general plot. In the original of Malory it has no
connection with the Lancelot cycle, except as far as it reveals the
treachery of Gawain, the gay and fair-spoken “light of love,” brother of
the traitor Modred. A simpler treatment of the theme may be read in Mr
Swinburne’s beautiful poem, _The Tale of Balen_.
It is in _The Last Tournament_ that Modred finds the beginning of his
opportunity. The brief life of the Ideal has burned itself out, as the
year, in its vernal beauty when Arthur came, is burning out in autumn.
The poem is purposely autumnal, with the autumn, not of mellow
fruitfulness, but of the “flying gold of the ruined woodlands” and the
dank odours of decay. In that miserable season is held the Tourney of
the Dead Innocence, with the blood-red prize of rubies. With a wise
touch Tennyson has represented the Court as fallen not into vice only and
crime, but into positive vulgarity and bad taste. The Tournament is a
carnival of the “smart” and the third-rate. Courtesy is dead, even
Tristram is brutal, and in Iseult hatred of her husband is as powerful as
love of her lover. The satire strikes at England, where the world has
never been corrupt with a good grace. It is a passage of arms neither
gentle nor joyous that Lancelot presides over:—
“The sudden trumpet sounded as in a dream
To ears but half-awaked, then one low roll
Of Autumn thunder, and the jousts began:
And ever the wind blew, and yellowing leaf
And gloom and gleam, and shower and shorn plume
Went down it. Sighing weariedly, as one
Who sits and gazes on a faded fire,
When all the goodlier guests are past away,
Sat their great umpire, looking o’er the lists.
He saw the laws that ruled the tournament
Broken, but spake not; once, a knight cast down
Before his throne of arbitration cursed
The dead babe and the follies of the King;
And once the laces of a helmet crack’d,
And show’d him, like a vermin in its hole,
Modred, a narrow face: anon he heard
The voice that billow’d round the barriers roar
An ocean-sounding welcome to one knight,
But newly-enter’d, taller than the rest,
And armour’d all in forest green, whereon
There tript a hundred tiny silver deer,
And wearing but a holly-spray for crest,
With ever-scattering berries, and on shield
A spear, a harp, a bugle—Tristram—late
From overseas in Brittany return’d,
And marriage with a princess of that realm,
Isolt the White—Sir Tristram of the Woods—
Whom Lancelot knew, had held sometime with pain
His own against him, and now yearn’d to shake
The burthen off his heart in one full shock
With Tristram ev’n to death: his strong hands gript
And dinted the gilt dragons right and left,
Until he groan’d for wrath—so many of those,
That ware their ladies’ colours on the casque,
Drew from before Sir Tristram to the bounds,
And there with gibes and flickering mockeries
Stood, while he mutter’d, ‘Craven crests! O shame!
What faith have these in whom they sware to love?
The glory of our Round Table is no more.’
So Tristram won, and Lancelot gave, the gems,
Not speaking other word than ‘Hast thou won?
Art thou the purest, brother? See, the hand
Wherewith thou takest this, is red!’ to whom
Tristram, half plagued by Lancelot’s languorous mood,
Made answer, ‘Ay, but wherefore toss me this
Like a dry bone cast to some hungry hound?
Let be thy fair Queen’s fantasy. Strength of heart
And might of limb, but mainly use and skill,
Are winners in this pastime of our King.
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.’”