grows up, generally from shapeless and unformed elements, to its destined perfection. So it is with animals, trees, plants. Some have a quicker growth, some a slower; but all grow. So grows the human soul in habits, in intellectual strength, in knowledge of every kind. Nothing is in its beginning complete. It is the same in the supernatural order. On the very day of the great fall, God revealed His decree of mercy to save the world by one to be born of the woman's seed; but the fulness of time did not arrive for more than four thousand years. From Adam to Abraham there is no record of any new revelation, save that of the coming flood made to Noah. For all this long period men were left to the light of natural religion, and such twinkles of the Eden light as the ever-deepening gloom had not utterly quenched. Heaven came nearer to earth in Abraham and the other patriarchs, nearer still in Moses. Then came, but long after, the Psalmist and the Prophets and other inspired men; and the gleams of the still far-off dawn became brighter and broader, until at last burst out the effulgence of perfect day. There is the same law of growth in the supernatural life of the individual man. It is by degrees men are converted from error and sin: it is by degrees the just man advances to that point of holiness, which, in the foreknowledge of God, is to be his highest.*

In the second place, we see that, in the same ordinary providence, God works out His ultimate designs, not immediately, but through the intervention of secondary causes. The fullgrown oak is His, and His hands made it, not by an immediate act of omnipotence, but through the operation of created agencies. He sends as His ministers, the four elements of fire, air, earth, and water to work on that small acorn seed; and it takes them a hundred years to rear it up into the "kingly forest tree." So it is with all living things on earth. Man, in his maturity the most perfect of them all, if left to himself in his early years, would be the most helpless and miserable of them all. It is the same, again, in the supernatural order. Faith comes through hearing grace has its many channels, through which it flows into the souls of men: there are sacraments, preachers, pastors. But it is needless to illustrate further a truth so very evident.

May not, then, this hard shell of earth have had, in like manner, its early age and long periods of growth? And may not the sister elements of fire and air and water have been used by God as His agents in bringing it to its present consistency and form?

* See our number for April, 1869, p. 426.

ART. VI.-MR. TENNYSON'S ARTHURIAN POEMS.

The Holy Grail and Other Poems. By ALFRED TENNYSON, D.C.L., Poet Laureate. London: Strahan & Co. 1869.

THE

HE laurels of the Laureate are oppressively abundant. For his share of glory, though he is not yet very old, he may well say Vixi satis. The press is never weary of producing new editions of his poems, none of them very cheap: the mere hummings (so to speak) of his Muse are valued at an incredible price; if he retaliates on the spiteful attacks of a jealous rival, his rejoinder is not only welcomed, but well paid for. The greatest speeches of the greatest orators are not perfect without a line or two quoted from him. The pencil of perhaps the most variously gifted artist of our time is never more happily employed than in bringing before the bodily eye of multitudes that which the mind's eye of the poet has first seen. If this be not fame, what is? It is not equal to Tasso's, perhaps, whose verses were familiar to the gondoliers of Venice. Princes appreciate Mr. Tennyson, and statesmen quote him; but, as to popularity in the largest sense, all that can be said is that our London cabmen (an unmusical race, it must be owned), have not yet got into the habit of singing, "Come into the garden, Maud," though it is an indispensable feature of all miscellaneous concerts.

A substantial part of Mr. Tennyson's fame rests, and will rest, upon the series of poems of which the fabulous King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are the heroes. They form a consistent, though not a complete whole. They can hardly be said to make up what could be called an Arthuriad; because their general structure is not epical, though they are full of epical passages. Generally speaking, indeed, they are not referable to any definite standard, or capable of being classified distinctly under any one of the recognized orders of poetical composition. Even the "Idylls of the King" are not idyllic, in the previously received sense of the word. The whole series can be best described as forming a sort of metrical romance; though even that description would be inappropriate, as far as it would seem to indicate any parallel with the poems of Scott or Southey, or any others of a similar character. The treatment of such a subject (though the result shows that Mr. Tennyson did well to choose it) is beset with difficulties. In the first place, King Arthur is

an anachronism. Whether a sovereign of the name ever ruled in Britain, or any part of it, we are not concerned to question; but it is needless to remark that a real personage of the time at which his reign is fixed would be almost as unlike the Arthur of fabulous romance as Queen Boadicea would be to Queen Victoria. It is probably to the novels of Fenimore Cooper that we should have to look for the nearest imaginable approximation to a series of characters belonging to a period when Britons had not entirely ceased to be (as the name implies) painted men. To surround the wigwams of the only possible Camelot with accessories borrowed from feudal ages and chivalric associations, is nearly, if not quite, as absurd as if the body of Elaine were to be described as borne to its rest by special train on the Astolat and Camelot Junction Railway. The Round Table (if the real Arthur had any such piece of furniture) was as little in a position to find itself the centre of a circle of Lancelots and Geraints and Bediveres, as it was to be the subject of Mr. Douglas Home's manipulations.

But this is not Mr. Tennyson's fault. Three courses (as a matter of course) were open to him. Having chosen King Arthur as his hero, he might have tried to come as nearly as possible to reality in his delineation of the character, with the aid of various correct historical and archæological details. But he would, perhaps, in that case have produced a figure as stiff and ungraceful as those mediæval representations of saints which the late Mr. Pugin strove so hard to popularize amongst us. Again, he might have given us a pure creation of his own fancy, in which case he would have been exposed to the imputation of having given the creature of his brain a name to which it had no right. What he did was to adopt the Arthur of romance, substantially in the form which rhymers and fabulists of the middle ages had given him, but perfected by the poet's own conceptions of what best befitted the kingly and the knightly character, and adorned by the poet's picturesque imagination with all that could best set off such a character, and make it act consistently in the manifold variety of circumstances in which it should be placed. All the incongruous machinery, natural and supernatural, with which he found himself hampered, the fortuitous association of saints. and fairies, angels and hobgoblins, Druids and monks, was not in reality of his own choosing. Let us suppose an actor of genius thrown by the force of circumstances into a company of which Mr. Vincent Crummles is the manager. He has to perform the part of Othello, and it is a law of the Crummlesian stage that, in that character, his face must be as black as that of a Christy Minstrel. Useless for him to plead

that a Moor is not necessarily a negro: useless to appeal to the authentic presence of the Moorish embassy that was in London some years ago (at the time, as we remember, of the first Volunteer Review in Hyde Park), whose garb, indeed, was outlandish though not unbecoming, but whose faces were as white and, for the matter of that, as Cockney as any faces in the crowd they gazed upon. What of all that? Shakespeare made Othello a black; Crummles follows that ruling, with corollaries as to costume deduced by himself: and there is nothing more to be said. Such a case seems to us to present something of a parallel to the difficulties of Mr. Tennyson's position.

This volume fills up the order and sequence of the Arthurian poems. The "Coming of Arthur," with which it begins, is the natural prelude. Then come the "Idylls of the King," published several years ago, with which the new poem of "Pelleas and Ettarre" must be grouped. The "Passing of Arthur," incorporating the well-known "Morte d'Arthur," completes the series. A French writer has observed that a book without a preface would be something like a man going out without his hat. There is a good deal of truth in the comparison. A preface is not a matter of much consequence. It is the last thing the author writes, and the last thing any one thinks of reading. It is a purely conventional thing, not required at all for the completeness of the work which it introduces, and it may be in any style. It cannot be said that the "Coming of Arthur" is a mere preface in this sense, but it is certainly very inferior to the other poems. "Leodogran, the King of Cameliard," has an only child, a daughter, for whom he wishes to find a suitable husband. Arthur, who had delivered his territory from the ravages of wild beasts and savage men, offers himself as a suitor. But a mystery hangs over the hero's birth. His mother had been forced to marry her second husband so soon after the death of her first that it was problematical to which of them he belonged; and scandal, with her usual officiousness, suggested that possibly he was the child of neither. On the other hand, the sentiment of hero-worship assigned to him a mysterious and supernatural origin; and Leodogran is determined by a dream to favour this view of the case, and disposes of his daughter accordingly. It is needless to say that all this is told in a number of graceful lines. Mr. Tennyson never writes any other, except for a purpose. But we find in them few traces of power. There is great force and vividness in some of the opening lines, describing the desolate state of Cameliard before its deliverance by Arthur :

And thus the land of Cameliard was waste,
Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein,
And none or few to scare or chase the beast;
So that wild dog and wolf and bear, and boar
Came night and day, and rooted in the fields,
And wallow'd in the gardens of the king.
And ever and anon the wolf would steal
The children and devour, but now and then,
Her own brood lost or dead, lent her fierce teat
To human sucklings; and the children, housed
In her foul den, there at their meat would growl,
And mock their foster-mother on four feet,
Till, straighten'd, they grew up to wolf-like men,
Worse than the wolves. And King Leodogran
Groan'd for the Roman legions here again,

And Cæsar's eagle: then his brother king,
Rience, assail'd him: last a heathen horde,

Reddening the sun with smoke and earth with blood,
And on the spike that split the mother's heart
Spitting the child, brake on him till, amazed,

He knew not whither he should turn for aid.

Nor must we omit to commend to the notice of Irish consolidators the lines :

And so there grew great tracts of wilderness
Wherein the beast was ever more and more,
But man was less and less.

But the general course of the narrative is monotonously level. It serves, however, fairly enough as a preface to the "Idylls." To us the interest of those fine poems centres around the figures of the pure and heroic Arthur and the guilty and remorseful Guinevere. Not that we are unmoved by the invincible constancy of Enid and the sad destiny of Elaine. A diction of unsurpassed felicity and beauty gives to the simplest incidents in these touching tales a charm that fascinates the fancy and haunts the memory. What, for instance, can be more exquisite in expression than these lines?

Then rose Elaine and glided through the fields,

And past beneath the wildly-sculptured gates

Far

up the dim rich city to her kin;

There bode the night: but woke with dawn, and past

Down through the dim rich city to the fields,

Thence to the cave: so day by day she past

In either twilight ghost-like to and fro