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THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.* "I HAVE been asked to add three or four new Idylls to the Idylls of the King and to connect the earlier one, Morte d'Arthur, with the rest ; this I have done in words of to-day, but after a design now many years old." This brief informal sentence, reproduced in facsimile at the beginning of the notes in the new annotated edition of the Idylls just issued, is in some ways the most interesting of all the many interesting and illuminating autographs which the editor has extracted from his father's manuscripts. It was written, no doubt, when the second instalment of the Idylls was given to the world, containing the " Coming " and the "Passing" of Arthur, "The Holy Grail," and " Pelleas and Ettarre." This was in 1869, ten years after the publication of the memorable first volume, which included "Enid," " Vivien," "Elaine," and "Guinevere." In 1871 and 1872 two more Idylls, "The Last Tournament" and "Gareth and Lynette," were put out ; but it was not till 1885, when the poet was approaching eighty years of age, and more than half-a-century after be bad published his first Arthurian piece, "The Lady of Shalott," that the Poem in Twelve Books, described in the introduction to "Norte d'Arthur"—" his epic, his Xing Arthur," it is there called—was complete.

The present generation will perhaps be content to ask one question : Why is it, after all, not strictly an epic, 1110113 especially if it was so originally planned ? Those who remember its history and read it as just stated will add : Why, too, was it given to the world in this intermittent, piece- meal manner ? The answer is to be found for the first time fully and authoritatively in this volume, and forms a notable chapter in literary history.

The fortunes and fates of the epic poets and their poems have been very various. Virgil when a shy and youthful singer in the fields, tuning his pastoral pipe and meditating his rustic Muse, dreamed of an epic, probably in the style of Homer.

• The Works of Tennyson. Annotated by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Edited by

Hallam, Lord Tennison. Vol. " The idyue of the Hies." London; Macmillan and Co. [4e. net.]

Like Tennyson's, it was to contain twelve books, half the Homeric number. But he found the difficulties of composition great. Apollo twitched his ear and bade him cling to pastoral ditties, and leave the heroic style to other lips. Then, after he had written the Georgics, Augustus urged him to attempt the epics again, and at the age of forty-one he did so. He worked at it as the humour led, taking up now one portion, now another, and bringing apparently some books to com- pletion earlier than the others. Before he had finally satisfied his own fastidious taste he was, as every one knows, cut off by premature death, and wanted on his deathbed to burn the whole. Lncan, on the other band, dashed off his .Pharsalia in a couple of years. He had finished the bulk of it by the age of twenty-two, and could exclaim : "Now. I have the rest of my life for my minor works." Milton's story, to pass to a later and English instance, is different again. He, too, as a young man in his wandering years in Italy, was eager to write a national poem. At first he, also, was attracted by the story of Arthur, and

"Of faery damsels met in forests wide By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, Lancelot or Pelleas or Pellenore."

On Milton'a dream the storm of war, the dust of affairs, deecended. When at last, at the age of fifty, leisure, the leisure of the defeated and the half-prisoner, came to him, he no longer felt drawn to chivalry, a second name for the Cavaliers. He turned to another of the subjects he had early pondered, the eternal battle of Light and Darkness, the story of Sin and Redemption, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. It seems, too, that he had wavered as to the forni of his poem. At one time be thought of a drama.

Tennyson's story has points, of resemblance with both that of Virgil and that of Milton. It has been a commonplace of criticism to say that Tennyson could not "construct," that be "was constitutionally deficient in what the Greeks called architektonike, combination and disposition on, a large scale." This seems unlikely, if we consider his variety and versatility and his consummate sense of symmetry and form. His own account of the matter is very different. He lighted, be tells us, when little more than a boy, upon that wonderful book, the inspiration of so much of the art of the last century, Sir Thomas Iklalmy's Mole d' Arthur. Like a golden nebula, the stream of poetic atom-dust floated and circled in his brain, grouping itself now into lesser asteroids like "The Lady of Shalott " or "Lancelot and Guinevere," now into larger masses like the first "Morte d'Arthur." How came the creative process to be arrested ? The causes seem to have been partly internal, but mainly external. Like Milton, be had some doubts himself apparently about the form of the poem, and as to whether a dramatic shape would not be better; for his son gives us the " first rough draft of a scenario, with five acts, of the Arthur legend," He published, as we all know, the old " Morte d'Arthur " fragment in the 1842 volume. Than came a determining factor from outside. It is strange to read that it was John Sterling who, as the poet told his KM, with his review in the Quarterly prevented Tennyson from completing his Arthur epic in twelve books. "I had it all in my head," he says," could have done it without any trouble. But then I thought that a small vessel built on fine lines is likely to float further down the stream of Time than a big raft." Anyhow, lie paused. But the subject—" the greatest of all poetical subjects "—remained, working in his brain. He read Welsh, he studied the Arthur story anew, he travelled in Wales and Cornwall. He made, in his head, after his manner, the story of Lancelot's Quest of the Grail and forgot it again. At last he hit upon the intermediate form, neither short nor long, the discontinuous epic, the Idylls, and in this form perfected a,nd published the first four poems already mentioned. Their popularity was instant and great; but even so, he was slow to finish and produce the others. Much gratitude is due to the encouragement, the importunity, the "improbity," of the late Sir James Knowles, who would take no denial, and half pestered, half persuaded Tennyson to finish. "I had given it all up long ago," was his own account, "and then this beast said, 'Do it,' and I did it." Such is the outer story of the Idylls. But their inner story contains yet more of, the secret of their evolution.

Tennyson was never content that his verse should have one nature alone, a body without a soul or a soul without a body. Herein lies the secret of all his poetry, of its combination of charm and depth, of popularity and philosophy. The old theme, if he was to handle it, must live again. This was

so with his classic pieces, with " Ulysses " or " Tithonus." It was so with "King Arthur." A new meaning, which is in- adequately described by being called "allegorical," a pervading idealism, gives the old tales a new colour, and the separate idylls an epic unity. Edmund Lushington, Greek scholar as he was, wanted to call them "Epylls,"—little epics woven into an epics' unity. Tennyson's own Recount is the best :— "My meaning," he said on his eightieth birthday, "in the Idylls of the King was spiritual. I took the legendary stories of the Bound Table as illustrations. I intended Arthur to represent the Ideal Soul of Man coming into contact with the warring elements of the flesh. Yet all the same it was a tale, the tale of Arthur, no merely mystic, symbolic adumbration. It was

new-old and shadowing Sense at war with Soul, but it was also Ideal manhood closed in real man."

The Idylls in consequence are, like so many of Tennyson's creations, in reality, a new form of poesy. Spenser and

Milton exhibit a formal outward unity and continuity. But

few readers really follow this. They read discontinuously and make their own selection. In the Idylls the, selection is made

already. Time alone can pronounce whether suolin form is, a

thorough], successful one, or one which can be imitated by other poets dealing with other themes. But as Tennyson's

work, it is seen more than ever, in the light of the notes now given, to be not an epic Inanqu, but the outcome of a life's effort, and of a poetic instinct seeking amid difficulties and hindrances, cross-influences and rival ideals, an adequate, an apt, and an acceptable expression.

The graphic vividness of the Idylls, their pictorial beauty. their play and clash of character, their range and sweep from earth to heaven and from heaven to bell; the, happy loyalties of " Enid," the lovely seduces of "Elaine," the, magic a "Merlin and Vivien," the spiritual intensity and elevation.. "The " The Holy Grail," the awful mysterious conclusions, and reconciliations of " Guinevere " and "The Passing," each iu turn, still more all taken together, show that the effort awl the instinct have succeeded.

For the rest, the notes to this volume, as to the others illustrate and bring home the richness of Tennyson's fancy, the carefulness of his observation and his scholarahip, and the deliberate and perfected value of his metrification and his music.