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Updated: June 10, 2025
That summer had worn away, like a monster which turns and gives hot gasps when you think it has expired. It took the Arkansan just a month, under Virginia's care, to become well enough to be sent to a Northern prison He was not precisely a Southern gentleman, and he went to sleep over the "Idylls of the King."
Aunt Varina had, for the time, her undisputed way with the family; her niece reclined upon the veranda in true Southern lady fashion, and was read aloud to from books of indisputable respectability. I remember Aunt Varina selected the "Idylls of the King," and they two were in a mood to shed tears over these solemn, sorrowful tales.
There are very few good tragedies; some are idylls in dialogue, well written and well rhymed, others political reasonings which lull to sleep, or amplifications which repel; others demoniac dreams in barbarous style, interrupted in sequence, with long apostrophes to the gods, because they do not know how to speak to men, with false maxims, with bombastic commonplaces!"
Until that troublous night, these young people had lived through one of those innocent idylls that blossom among the toiling masses, those outcasts and folks of simple mind amidst whom one may yet occasionally find amours as primitive as those of the ancient Greek romances. Miette had been scarcely nine years old at the time when her father was sent to the galleys for shooting a gendarme.
"And the new sun rose, bringing the new year." The splendid and sombre procession has passed, leaving us to muse as to how far the poet has fulfilled his own ideal. There could be no new epic: he gave a chain of heroic Idylls.
Although there is much that is fine and beautiful in him, as he is portrayed in the older legends, although, when pierced with many wounds, he fought on valiantly, because he was "so full of knighthood that knightly he endured the pain," it is Tennyson who has exalted him into "the blameless king," "the highest creature here," and if it had only been for what he has given us in King Arthur, the Idylls would have been worth writing.
Now no prospector on the banks of the Yukon has a keener eye for nuggets than Tennyson had for poetic ore, and besides ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and ‘Launcelot and Guinevere,’ he had already printed the grandest of all his poems—the ‘Morte d’Arthur.’ It needed only the ‘Idylls of the King,’ where episode after episode of the Arthurian cycle was rendered in poems which could be understood by all—it needed only this for all England to be set reading and re-reading all his poems, some of them more precious than any of these ‘Idylls’—poems whose familiar beauties shone out now with a new light.
Mercifully Tennyson never actually allegorised Arthur in that fashion. Later he thought of a musical masque of Arthur, and sketched a scenario. Finally Tennyson dropped both the allegory of Liberal principles and the musical masque in favour of the series of heroic idylls. There was only a "parabolic drift" in the intention.
The mixture of popularity and perfection in the Idylls and the Enoch Arden volume the title poem and Aylmer's Field for some, The Voyage and Tithonus and In the Valley of Cauterets for others had put Tennyson's place "Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men."
The Arthurian story which produced only middling moralizing in the Idylls, gave us as well the supremely written Homeric episode of the Morte d'Arthur, and the sharp and defined beauty of Sir Galahad and the Lady of Shallott. Tennyson had a touch of the pre-Raphaelite faculty of minute painting in words, and the writing of these poems is as clear and naïve as in the best things of Rossetti.
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