THE ARTHURIAN EVOLUTION.* THE Australian Professor's contribution to the Arthurian

literature, which promises to become quite a collection in itself, and waits only for Mr. Irving's promised poetical play on the subject of the Round Table to give its dramatic imprimatur to the whole, is mainly a kind of evolution of Tennyson out of his many predecessors, at home and abroad, and illustrated out of his contemporaries. King Arthur tempted all sorts and conditions of bards and fabulists before Tennyson made him, to a certain extent, his own by right of his carefully planned, and yet more carefully executed, Idylls. His, perhaps, was hardly the original and masterful power to annex a subject so completely and irresistibly as Goethe monopolised Faust ; but there is

• Tennyson's Idylls of the King and Arthurian Story from the Sixteenth Cen- tury. By M. W. Maecallum, MA., Professor of Modern Literature in tha.IIni- versity of Sydney. Glasgow : Maelehose and Sons. 1894.

no doubt that at the present moment, in spite of com- petition, Tennyson is as much the laureate of Arthur's Court as of Victoria's, and in either character his succession remains open. A rather remarkable comparison at this point occurs to us, illustrative of the power wielded by music as a medium for poetry. Owning frankly his inability to criticise

the much-vexed Wagner as a composer, Professor Maccallum -discusses him as his own librettist only, and from that point -of view speaks in the highest terms of the simple directness and power with which he handles the legend of the Holy Grail. "With one sweep he brushes away, as indeed the nature of his task required, all of the story that is subordinate or beside the point. It is reduced to its most elemental form, and no frippery of ornament is suffered to distract the eye from the bare and solemn lines of the central tragedy." The present writer has derived a similar pleasure from Bifdto's -opera of Mefistofele. There, too, the composer was his own poet, and it seems to us much to be regretted that he has been since contented to confine himself to writing the poems for

Verdi. No man has brought forward the legend of Faust in form so simple or so striking. That it is from no narrow point of view that the Professor deals with the Arthurian story, is

clear at once from his introduction. "Having its first source in remote Celtic tradition, it worked a channel to medimval France, where, fed by tributary streams, it rose and swelled till it spread into Britain and the Empire, and even more distant lands. Then, no doubt, it dwindled, and almost dis- appeared; but, in the present century, it flows once more, somewhat scantily, indeed, in its old French bed, but all the more freely in Germany and England." Then he goes on to ompare, as we have done, the similar development of the medimval vision of a future state, or the Reformation legend of Dr. Faustus, or the typical embodiments in sculpture of the various .Greek divinities, all of which, he says, "were -similarly dear to generations of men and passed through a

development in which many successive minds co-operated." And he points out that Chaucer and Shakespeare, "chief -among our poets for broad and realistic humanity, pass King Arthur by without thought of him, except for casual and humorous allusions ; while Milton and Dryden only touch the subject to let it fall."

Of Tennyson.'s treatment he remarks that the poet cannot lay claim to that supreme order of genius which belongs to a

Dante or a Goethe, but that his very merits and defects, and the limitation of his power, correspond so closely with those of the Arthurian story, as to make him perhaps its unique interpreter at this predestined day. So, too, it may fairly be said that Tennyson is not passionately human to the stirring of the pulses as such poets are. Nor are the legends of Arthur, at any time. Tales of chivalry are not, and cannot he. Graceful and fanciful, they border on the region of the grotesque on the one side, and on that of fairyland on the -other. The memorable work of Cervantes is but the expression

of that universal feeling. Shakespeare, who made the world his province, does not deal seriously with chivalry. He plays

with it in Love's Labour's Lost, and suggests it in Much Ado, in As You Like It, or in Twelfth Night. But that is all. And not the least attractive pages of the Professor's book are those which recall to us Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies ; or, the Life and Death of Tom. Thumb the Great, — that burlesque of burlesques which dealt a blow at the high-flown drama of the day, as severe in its way as the effect of She Stoops to Conquer upon sentimental comedy. We secretly rather anticipate a similar catastrophe for Ibsenism, should it obtain a hold sufficient for the attack. Tom Thumb is introduced by Fielding as the glory of King Arthur's court. Dollalolla, the burlesque Guinevere, adores Tom Thumb instead of Launcelot, when at the opening of the play he returns from a campaign against the giants. The King exclaims :— "Let nothing but the face of joy appear;

The man that frowns this day shall lose his head, That he may have no face to frown withal."

And it is the ghost of Tom's father who announces to Arthur that his subjects are arming :— " I'll run thee thro' the body, tho' thou'st none ! " says the King ; to be answered with— "Arthur, beware ! I must this moment hence,

Not frightened by your voice, but by the cock's,"

When Tom, according to Merlin's prophecy, is devoured by the "expanded jaws of a red cow," it is thus announced by Noodle :— " Oh monstrous ! dreadful! terrible ! Oh! Oh!

Deaf be my ears ! for ever blind, my eyes !

Dumb be my tongue ! Feet lame ! all senses lost !

Howl wolves, grunt bears, hiss snakes, shriek all ye ghosts !"

Either our ear betrayed us, or we have heard blank verse very like this in the last stage-edition of the Faust legend, a recent play called The Tempter.

Having called the reader's attention to the purpose of Pro- fessor Maccallum's pages, we need not dwell at any length on his treatment of the Idylls, more especially as the Press is so full at present of Tennysonian criticism and Tennysonian records. He takes the publication of Lady Charlotte Guest's collection of Welsh tales, the Mabinogion (1837-49), not long since republished, and reviewed in these columns, as a date for what may be called an Arthurian revival, and dwells on the extreme primitiveness of the stories as illustrative of Celtic poetry, referring in confirmation to an interesting article of Renan's, and to an essay of Matthew Arnold's a dozen years later. The latter describes the medimval story-teller as "pillaging an antiquity of which he does

not fully possess the secret, like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus," — building with the materials of an older architecture, "greater, cunninger,

more majestical." Thoroughly to possess the secrets of antiquity seems indeed an achievement beyond the most earnest of inquirers. And it is with more of wonder than of faith that we can follow the comments upon Professor

Rhys's lectures, which connect " Meremius Artaius " with an Aryan root meaning "to plough," and thence " Arthur " itself with the Latin " arator," the more because he is found under that name as an agriculturist in Welsh

story, which suggests his identification with the Gallic Mercury. It is perhaps more interesting to find the name Guinevere in an old Irish story, interpreted as "the white shadow" under the form of Gwenhwyvar, and carried off from her husband by Medrawd, the Welsh for Mordred. In the Life of Gildas, she is carried away by Melwas to the place whence no traveller returns, like, as the Professor puts it, one of the goddesses of the dusk or dawn, now on the side

of light and now of darkness. His book is full of speculations and myths of this attractive kind, till Arthur becomes to us the hero of a kind of mythological poem, rather than of the misnamed epic of the Idylls, and makes us feel that his more fitting singer will come forward some day in a more Virgilian.

guise.

"The mightiest chiefs of British song Scorned not such legend to prolong," says Scott in "Marmion ;" and we confess to giving a far higher place than our author does to the "Bridal of Thermain," where the " Shirra," not content with editing Sir Tristrem, went to Arthurian legends for his poetical romance. Published anonymously, after his favourite method of mystification, it was not at first recognised as his ; but it has always appeared

to us full of the ringing and chivalric beauty which marks him at his best. Sir Walter, passed hero of the "Celtic fringe," was the man of men to take these stories to his

heart. And though Thackeray, with the approval of Pro- fessor Maccallum, talks of his tales of chivalry as "good- humoured pageant" when contrasted with his pictures of Scottish life, we confess that their masterful and martial swing places them for us in a higher rank than that. One seems to us as true a side of Scott as the other, and it was the combination which produced The Bride of Lammermoor. Ivanhoe will have its admirers as long as The Antiquary,—

perhaps longer.

"When, the wild witchery to close, Within three lances' length arose The valley of St. John,"

Arthurian legend assumed for us one of its most attractive forms. Professor Maccallum dismisses Scott with far too scant a courtesy ; but there is a gulf fixed between the Scott- lover and his opposite which no criticism will ever bridge over. Shakespeare's treatment of Arthur was very charac- teristic. "This prophecy," says the fool in Lear, "shall Merlin make, for I live before his time." And Dame Quickly feels sure that Falstaff is "in Arthur's bosom." To chivalry, Shakespeare was nothing if not Oervantic. Swinburne and Southey—Tennyson's predecessors and Tennyson's contem- poraries—all pass under review in an interesting summary,

with plenty of quotation of much and varied interest. It is amusing to renew acquaintance with the forgotten Blackmore and his overpowering epics of the Montgomery school; and what the bad specimens may be, we leave our readers to infer from one which is put forward as an example of "some swing or dignity." Of the navies of England, he says :—

"Her bellowing oaks with louder thunder roar

Than what annoyed them on their bills before, Shaking the Gallic and the Belgian shore."

We should like to reproduce some of Swinburne's marvellous music by way of antidote, but refrain. Enough has been said to show the purpose of the book, and the evolution of the Idylls as an attractive, if not very profitable, study.