SOURCE: "The Moral Paradox of the Hero in Idylls of the King," in ELH, Vol. 30, No. 1, March, 1963, pp. 53-69.

[In the following essay, the critic describes the Idylls as a pessimistic picture of the self's moral relationship with the world.]

For Tennyson, as for other modern thinkers, the starting-point of all philosophy lies in the reality of self. As C. F. G. Masterman, in his much neglected book on Tennyson's religious thought, has shown, the self for Tennyson "is the one and only thing of which by direct conviction we can assert reality."¹ Yet, the question remains, how is the self to be apprehended? This problem of identity is, I believe, central in Tennyson's poetry, and indeed it may justly be said that the great body of his poetry is directed towards answering the question. In this essay I should like to suggest, by first briefly examining some of Tennyson's earlier verse, that the problem of self and its relation to objects in terms of moral experience is vital to an understanding of the Idylls of the King.

According to Tennyson, the child has no sense of identity, "Has never thought that 'this is I'"; but gradually he learns that he is distinct from other forms of life, "learns the use of T and 'Me,'" and with this knowledge of "a separate mind" "His isolation grows refined" (In Memoriam, XLV),² Thus through cognition the self is first apprehended. But this awareness of self is only partial, since the self in isolation cannot know its relationship to the objects outside self which constitute the phenomenal world. Tennyson insists that one never knows himself through introspection, a position maintained, for example, in The Palace of Art. The problem then is to bring the world which seems to be independent of the self into the experience of the self. But how is this to be effected?

In "The Lady of Shalott" Tennyson traces allegorically the means by which the question may be answered. "The new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world from which she has been so long secluded," Tennyson said in reference to the poem, "takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities."³ Through love, then, the self awakens to consciousness of its own personality by bringing the not-self into its experience. The identifying power of love becomes a constant theme in Tennyson's early poetry: it is specifically the subject of The Princess, in which the Prince is saved from his "weird seizures" by the love of Princess Ida; of In Memoriam, wherein the "I " is redeemed from despair through love for his dead friend; and of Maud, in which the hero is saved from psychic disintegration through his love for the "glorified" Maud.⁴

The problem of identity had not, however, been fully explored. There was still another way in which the self must be apprehended and which Tennyson had not carefully examined. This was the power of will, which is also an essential part of the self. Reading in German metaphysics had evidently reinforced Tennyson's conception that the not-self world of external objects exists only to the extent that one organizes it for one's actions, that things take on meaning in proportion as one uses them as means. According to this view, only when the individual has built up the world as a field of action does he realize himself as the individual who carried out that action. One thus attains knowledge of self by attacking, overcoming, and assimilating the notself. This, of course, involves the concept of the self as willing, as choosing and imposing means; this is the part of man which is the moral agent.

In his early poetry Tennyson had treated peripherally the problem of will. In his feminine portraits he had been concerned with two types of female: the willful femme fatale and the violated suffering maiden whose will had been subdued.⁵A Dream of Fair Women, for example, consciously contrasts these two types of female: Helen and Cleopatra, who bent the wills of men, and Iphegenia and Jephtha's daughter, who submitted to masculine wills. Only with In Memoriam, however, did Tennyson begin to undertake a philosophical consideration of volition.

In his elegy Tennyson demonstrates how in the act of volition the self strives to realize itself in the external world. In denying a mechanical conception of the universe, he enunciates that not through a deterministic scheme but through a direct certitude of our power of choice do we prove ourselves. "Free will and its relation to the meaning of human life and to circumstance," Hallam Tennyson reports of his father, "was latterly one of his most common subjects of conversation . . . 'Take away the sense of individual responsibility and men sink into pessimism and madness'" (Memoir, I, 316-17).

In Memoriam is not, however, primarily about realization of self through the power of will. To be sure, the poet does speak of the "living Will that shalt endure" (CXXXI) and of the fact that "Our wills are ours" (Prologue), but he does not attempt to explain how the power of choice is exemplified in man's life. Rather, In Memoriam, in common with Tennyson's earlier verse, treats essentially the reality of self as it is affirmed through love—through love of the dead Hallam who is enshrined as an ideal type of humanity.

As an ideal man Hallam, who is closely identified with Christ, becomes the heroic redeemer, "the noble type," who, through furthering moral development, will save mankind from extinction. "Appearing ere the times were ripe" (Epilogue), Hallam is that "herald of a higher race" (CXVIII) who will lead mankind to a perfect state of existence.

When he had completed the poem, Tennyson found that it was far more optimistic about the fate of the human race than he himself was. "It's too hopeful, this poem, more than I am myself," he told James Knowles. "I think of adding another to it, a speculative one, bringing out the thought of the 'Higher Pantheism,' and showing that all the arguments are about as good on one side as the other, and thus throw man back more on the primitive impulses and feelings."⁶

It is partly to this concern that he devoted the Idylls of the King. Let us see, Tennyson seems to have said, let us see what would happen if another Arthur, "the flower of kings," were to set about redeeming the world. Would he succeed, would he be able to rid man of the beast in his nature? The answer which the completed Idylls gives is a pessimistic no. For here Tennyson takes up the paradox of reality—namely, how can the redeemer work his will without violating the will of others. The hero fails, Tennyson shows, not because he does not have access to value—Arthur comes from the spiritual deep—but because the value-laden will, encountering the impregnable amorality of nature, can only destroy the very values of love and freedom which it has created.

I have previously mentioned how in Tennyson's philosophy of the self things take on meaning in proportion as one uses them as means and how the objects of the world become implements. At this point I should also mention that to Tennyson there is a greater, an Absolute Self, of which our selves are but finite expressions; for, according to Tennyson, the self cannot posit itself as a finite self without simultaneously positing an infinite self. It is this experience of realizing one's self as a finite self that involves the assurance of the self in the Absolute.

In "De Profundis" Tennyson speaks of the finite self as part of an infinite creative power and how as such the finite self is always engaged in the process of creation. For Tennyson this creation is moral, the choosing between "the grain and husk," since by the very act of choice man builds up the world for himself in terms of his duties. The "main miracle," he addresses his infant son, is "that thou art thou, / With power on thine act and on the world." Hallam Tennyson tells us that his father "held that there was an intimate connexion between the human and divine, and that each individual will had a spiritual and eternal significance with relation to other individual wills as well as the Supreme and Eternal Will" (Memoir, I, 319). The greater the task the individual undertakes, the larger, more effective self he becomes. Thus the great man assimilates as many objects and individuals as he possibly can, taking them over into himself. This assimilation, however, presents its own moral problem; for in attacking and overcoming the not-self, man violates the freedom of those individuals assimilated into his experience. It is this moral paradox that Tennyson turns his attention to in the Idylls of the King.

Arthur appears as "Ideal manhood closed in real man" and the "stainless gentleman." He comes from the realm of pure value to impart these values to the world, to rid the land of beast and pagan and to establish an ideal kingdom on earth. But at first his authority is not generally recognized: men debate whether he is really the rightful heir to the throne:

No king of ours! a son of Gorlois he,
Or else the child of Anton, and no king,
Or else baseborn.

("The Coming of Arthur," 11. 231-33)

Arthur must, therefore, impose his authority by force: in battle he subdues his enemies, but more insidiously, he binds his knights to his will with "so straight vows to himself that they are as "dazed, as one who wakes / Half-blinded at the coming of a light" ("The Coming of Arthur," 11. 261-65). In accepting his will they deny their own; in attempting to take on the personality of the King they annihilate their own personalities. During the early days of the Round Table, Bellicent relates, when Arthur spoke,

I beheld
From eye to eye thro' all their Order flash
A momentary likeness of the King.

("The Coming of Arthur," 11. 268-70)

As a kind of New Jerusalem Arthur has Merlin, the great artificer, build the glorious city of Camelot, which did "spire to heaven" ("Gareth and Lynette," 11. 296-302). This is, says Merlin, a city built to music, symbol of the harmony obtaining between Arthur and his knights when their wills are one. Camelot is, therefore, the objective embodiment of Arthur's will, a city always in the process of creation, "seeing the city is built / To music, therefore never built at all" ("Gareth and Lynette," 11. 272-73).⁷ Merlin alone, however, understands this phenomenon; indeed, he alone foresees the outcome of Arthur's undertaking. "A young man will be wiser by and by," he says in his riddling triplets ("The Coming of Arthur," 1. 403), apparently meaning that Arthur will eventually learn that he cannot make the world the ideal realm which he envisions. Merlin knows, even so early as "Gareth and Lynette," that disintegration of personality has already set in among the inhabitants of Arthur's city: "For there is nothing in it as it seems / Saving the King" (11. 260-61). By imposing his will on the inhabitants of Camelot, Arthur has caused his people to accept the delusion that they are other than they are. Go not into the city, Merlin tells Gareth, for if you do you will become

A thrall to his enchantments, for the King
Will bind thee by such vows as is a shame
A man should not be bound by, yet the which
No man can keep.

(11. 265-68)

By enjoining upon his knights these impossible vows Arthur creates the condition which causes guilt and madness throughout his order. As Tennyson said, "Take away the sense of individual responsibility and men sink into pessimism and madness." "My knights," says Arthur,

are sworn to vows
Of utter hardihood, utter gentleness,
And, loving, utter faithfulness in love,
And uttermost obedience to the King.

("Gareth and Lynette," 11. 541-44)

In other words, Arthur would have his followers become ideals.

The traditional interpretation of the Idylls is that Arthur's kingdom falls because of the adulterous relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere. Against such an interpretation I would argue that decay has already set in before there is any mention of their guilt. Sir Kay is as boorish as, perhaps more so than, any of the antagonists to Arthur's cause. He fails in gentleness, courtesy, and obedience to the King; he is but the first we meet who does not live up to his vows. For we see as the Idylls progresses that by volitional violation Arthur creates the necessity for emotional dependency: being not themselves but pale facsimiles of the King, his knights must depend more and more on someone or something for emotional satisfaction.

Lancelot's and Guinevere's sin is thus, I believe, not the cause but the symptom of what is wrong in Camelot. Arthur has attempted to take Guinevere completely unto himself, to refashion her according to his conceptions, to make her will his, to set her up as the feminine ideal; and he forces this view of her—that is, Guinevere as the feminine counterpart to the ideal man—on his order. Guinevere is not, however, made of the same metal as the King. A real woman and not an abstract ideal presence, she has all the passion and longing for life of a normal woman. In this world of illusions where, says Merlin, all is "Confusion, and illusion, and relation, / Elusion, and occasion, and evasion" ("Gareth and Lynette," 11. 281-82), Guinevere suffers the same delusions as everybody else. This is made manifestly the case when in "The Coming of Arthur" Guinevere mistakes Lancelot for the King. It is not surprising, therefore, that even the rumor of an illicit sexual relationship on the part of the Queen is enough to disenchant the knights of the Round Table. They have been forced to believe in an ideal; and when they see that their ideal is merely human after all and subject to the same delusions and faults as real people, they immediately are led to suspect that nothing is true—neither the idea of the Round Table nor their loved ones.

This is first brought out in "The Marriage of Geraint," wherein Geraint is led to suspect Enid of unfaithfulness because of the rumor concerning the unfaithfulness of the Queen. In one of the few passages in the Idylls in which the author speaks in his own voice, Tennyson says that we as men "forge a lifelong trouble for ourselves, / By taking true for false, or false for true" ("Geraint and Enid," 11. 3-4).

The theme of emotional dependency is strikingly brought out in "Balin and Balan." Because Arthur has demanded so much of his knights, Balin feels that he can never hope to attain the refinement, the gentleness and courtesy required of the Round Table: "These be gifts," wails Balin, "Born with the blood, not learnable, divine, / Beyond my reach" (11. 170-72). Feeling strongly a sense of inadequacy, Balin has to have an emotional prop in order to remain sane. He is, like the other knights of the Round Table except perhaps Gareth, morbidly dependent on others. Balan is at first his means of balance, and when Balan leaves he is emotionally lost. He looks around and sees Lancelot as the likeliest ideal to imitate, but he despairs of ever achieving the perfection of courtesy that is Lancelot's. Moreover, he perceives that Lancelot is emotionally dependent on the Queen. So Balan likewise turns to Guinevere: "Her likewise would I worship an I might" (1. 180). He requests her emblem for his shield, and the crown royal is granted him. This symbol of the Queen becomes his emotional prop:

So Balin, bare the crown, and all the knights
Approved him, and the Queen; and all the world
Made music, and he felt his being move
In music with his Order and the King.

(11. 205-08)

Supported by this prop he is able to go on. When he sees Guinevere and Lancelot in the garden, he undergoes a catastrophic shock: his prop begins to fail him and in distress he runs to the woods, away from Arthur's civilization.

By the time he reaches Pellam's castle, however, Balin has completely suppressed his doubts about the Queen. When Garlon insults his emotional prop, he is outraged, mainly because he himself is insecure on this point, and kills Garlon on the spot. For the murder he feels guilty and unworthy of the quite unrealistic idea he has of the Queen. He therefore hangs his shield on a tree, determined to carry it no more. Significantly though, he does not ride off and leave the shield behind; instead, he casts himself on the ground under it and mopes. He cannot leave the shield because even though he feels unworthy of it, he has to have a prop of some sort. To leave it behind would make him defenseless not only physically but emotionally as well. Furthermore, he cannot return to Camelot for fear of what he might discover about the Queen. He has already learned too much for his own comfort and has suppressed what he has found out; any more discoveries would be fatal. This is why his reaction to Vivien, who tells him what he most feared of finding out, is so violent. Balin, consequently, goes out of his mind. Turning against the thing on which he is most dependent, he stamps the shield to ruin.

In the idylls immediately following "Balin and Balan" reference is frequently made to the impossible constraints which Arthur has placed on his knights. Merlin laments:

O selfless man and stainless gentleman,
Who wouldst against thine own eye-witness fain
Have all men true and leal, all women pure.

("Merlin and Vivien," 11. 790-92)

And Guinevere speaks of Arthur as the unsatisfactory husband because he is so

Rapt in this fancy of his Table Round,
And swearing men to vows impossible,
To make them like himself.

("Lancelot and Elaine," 11. 129-31)

Guinevere is, after Merlin, the first to see the fault in Arthur; she perceives that it is the King's very fault to be faultless and to wish the world like himself. Arthur, she sees, is a monomaniac, a blameless man who seeks to eradicate all blame from the world, a heroic redeemer who would impose his values on the universe. "No keener hunter after glory breathes," the Queen tells Lancelot. "He loves it in his knights more than himself; / They prove to him his work" ("Lancelot and Elaine," 11. 155-57). In other words, Arthur realizes himself by seeing his values projected onto his knights. The men of the Round Table become, therefore, objects as means, not objects as ends; they are valuable in that they provide the proving ground of the values of the king.

The knights having been emotionally exploited, the way is prepared for the outstanding example of emotional dependency in the Idylls—namely, the Grail quest in "The Holy Grail." As I pointed out in the case of Balin, the characters in the Idylls, their sense of identity having been violated, are dependent on some kind of prop for emotional stability. This is provided in this idyll by the vision of the Holy Grail, which becomes a kind of compensation for each of the knights who goes on the quest. Lancelot seeks the Grail as a compensation for his dependency on Guinevere; he attempts, in other words, to replace one prop with another. Yet when he is deprived of the presence of Guinevere he completely loses all sense of identity:

And forth I went, and while I yearn'd and strove
To tear the twain [the wholesome and the poisonous]

asunder in my heart,
My madness came upon me as of old. . . .

(11. 782-84)

Bors, totally dependent on his cousin Lancelot, apparently quests for the Grail because Lancelot does so; in fact, he would have gladly foregone his vision of the Cup:

He well had been content
Not to have seen, so Lancelot might have been
The Holy Cup of healing.

(11. 650-52)

Percivale undertakes the quest presumably because he is dissatisfied with the life at Camelot; he was tired of

all vainglories, rivalries,
And earthly heats that spring and sparkle out
Among us in the jousts, while women watch
Who wins, who falls, and waste the spiritual strength
Wtihin us, better offer'd up to heaven.

(11. 31-35)

Indeed, the alacrity with which the knights jump at the chance to go on the Grail quest suggests the hollowness of their lives and their dissatisfaction with the life they are leading. But Percivale's dependency on Camelot and on Arthur is evidenced by the fact that in his isolation on the quest he, like the others, goes to pieces; his sense of personal identity must be confirmed by others. As soon as he leaves Camelot he enters into a sort of surrealistic hell of the imagination, and it is only through the instrumentation of Galahad that he is allowed to see the Grail even in the distance. Gawain's motivation for undertaking the quest is simply that the other knights do so.

The most interesting case of the Grail knights is Galahad's. He goes on the quest because he has lost himself by sitting in the Siege Perilous and taken on the identity of the nun, Percivale's sister. In his semi-dramatic monologue Percivale, without any clear understanding of what he is relating, informs us of this fact. When Galahad first heard of the nun's vision, "His eyes became so like her own," Percivale reports, "they seem'd / Hers, and himself her brother more than I" (11. 141-42). The nun makes a sword-belt of her hair and binds this on Galahad, saying:

My knight, my love, my knight of heaven,
O thou, my love, whose love is one with mine,
I, maiden, round thee, maiden, bind my belt.
Go forth, for thou shalt see what I have seen. . . .

And, Percivale relates,

as she spoke
She sent the deathless passion in her eyes
Thro' him, and made him hers, and laid her mind
On him, and he believed in her belief.

(11. 157-65)

The Grail quest seems to stem, then, from emotional frustration, resulting in the loss of identity, and from the desire to find a support to stabilize a new identity. Ultimately the quest is a manifestation of the knights' attempt to exchange the vows to the King for the vows to a vision. This is, of course, a form of escapism, as is Balin's mad flight away from Camelot. Guinevere is right when she shrieks, "This madness has come on us for our sins" (1. 157); and Gawain too is right when he says to Percivale, "Thy holy nun and thou have driven men mad, / Yea, made our mightiest madder than our least" (11. 859-60). As Tennyson said, I repeat, "Take away the sense of individual responsibility and men sink into pessimism and madness."

The loss to Arthur resulting from the Grail quest is symbolized by the semi-destruction of Camelot which the knights find upon their return. The city built to music, the objective embodiment of Arthur's will, is no longer of one piece: the harmony of his will and that of his order has now become cacophany. The vows to the Grail, to something other than himself, have taken precedence over the vows to the King, and dissonance is becoming more and more the dominant pattern. The loss to Arthur's identity is indicated by the partial destruction of the statue of the King which had been fashioned by Merlin.

In "Pelleas and Ettare" we have another example of madness resulting from the ideals forced on his knights by Arthur. Pelleas surrenders his will first to Arthur and then to Ettare, becoming totally dependent on the lady. When he finds her false, and, worse, Gawain false also, he completely foreswears the high ideals enjoined upon him. The King, he wails, "Hath made us fools and liars. O noble vows!" (1. 470); and to the hall of Arthur he groans, "Black nest of rats . . . , ye build too high" (1. 544).

At the end of "Pelleas and Ettare" Modred says, "The time is hard at hand"; and indeed the time for the dissolution of Arthur's ideals has come. For in "The Last Tournament" we see that the order no longer moves to music, no longer harmonizes with the King's will. The Red Knight, who is undoubtedly Pelleas, establishes a kingdom in the north which is founded on principles exactly the opposite of Arthur's: the members of this northern Round Table have no ideals imposed upon them and "profess / To be none other than themselves" (11. 82-83). Tristram, little Dagonet says, has broken the King's music, and, Dagonet implies, the fault is at least partly the King's. Arthur is "the king of fools" because he

Conceits himself as God that he can make
Figs out of thistles, silk from bristles, milk
From burning spurge, honey from hornet-combs,
And men from beasts.

(11. 354-58)

Here we are reminded of Merlin's words that Arthur's vows are impossible to keep but that it is a shame a man should not be able to do so. In half praise and dispraise Dagonet cries, "Long live the king of fools."

"The Last Tournament" ends with a long passage devoted to Tristrams's consideration of the vows which the King has imposed upon him. "The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself," he says; and "being snapt—/ We run more counter to the soul thereof / Than had we never sworn" (11. 652-55). Further he says:

The vows!
O ay—the wholesome madness of an hour—
They served their use, their time; for every knight
Believed himself a greater than himself,
And every follower eyed him as a God;
Till he, being lifted up beyond himself,
Did mightier deeds than elsewise he had done,
And so the realm was made. But then their vows—
First mainly thro' that sullying of our  Queen—
Began to gall the knighthood, asking whence
Had Arthur right to bind them to himself?
Dropt down from heaven? wash'd up from out the deep?
They fail'd to trace him thro' the flesh and blood
Of our old kings. Whence then? a doubtful lord
To bind them by inviolable vows,
Which flesh and blood perforce would violate;
For feel this arm of mine—the tide within
Red with free chase and heather-scented air,
Pulsing full man. Can Arthur make me pure
As any maiden child? lock up my tongue
From uttering freely what I freely hear?
Bind me to one? The wide world laughs at it.
And worldling of the world am I, and know
The ptarmigan that whitens ere his hour
Woos his own end; we are not angels here
Nor shall be.

(11. 669-94)

All this may sound like pure rationalization, Tristram's excuse for having broken the vows of purity. But we are struck by the appositeness of his analysis when we remember that Guinevere and Pelleas, inter alia, had made the same analysis. Moreover, we see that the violation of Tristram's will has made him entirely dependent on Isolt: as the shield is to Balin and the Holy Cup to the Grail knights, so Isolt is to Tristram.

"Guinevere" is, I think, in part a defense of the Queen. In a trancelike reminiscence she recalls how she had first felt about the King after Lancelot had brought her to Camelot: she "thought him cold, / High, self-contain'd, and passionless, not like him, / 'Not like my Lancelot'" (11. 401-03). And then the King enters. Critics have objected that Arthur here speaks like a prig, and so indeed he does. For Arthur is the redeemer, the hero from the realm of pure value who is more messiah than man; he is exactly what Tennyson said he is: an ideal man—and the ideal man simply does not talk like the usual cuckolded spouse. Arthur is, in fact, less the wronged husband than the wronged ideal ruler. He berates Guinevere not for having broken up a happy home but for frustrating his ideals: "For thou hast spoilt the purpose of my life" (1. 450). Here we are finally forced to realize that Guinevere has all along been but a means and not an end to Arthur. Without her he would have been unable to

will my will nor work my work
Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm
Victor and lord.

("The Coming of Arthur," 11. 87-89)

He had taken Guinevere as wife in order to serve as example. Arthur had forced his knights

To reverence the King, as if he were
Their conscience, and their conscience as their  King;

and he had enjoined them
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds,
Until they won her: for indeed I knew
Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words
And courtliness, and desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.

(11. 465-66, 472-80)

His marriage thus was to serve as a model, and its failure gave license for sin in others. Arthur has, therefore, failed to attain all his heart desired: "And all through thee!" he exclaims to Guinevere.

But Arthur is the ideal man—not the ideal husband—and so out of his "vast pity" he forgives the Queen:

Lo, I forgive thee, as Eternal God
Forgives!

(11. 541-52)

It has frequently been pointed out that no man has the right or power to forgive as God forgives. Arthur is not, though, as as I have mentioned, a man: he is an ideal man, a Christlike human who comes to human form with the authority of God. Perhaps, says Arthur, he and Guinevere will meet hereafter in heaven (11. 557-61), and at this point we realize that this, not earth, is the proper sphere for Arthur's actions.

Among the many charges of inconsistency in the Idylls one of the chief is that in the final idyll Arthur seems to forget that adultery and the irresponsible quest for the Holy Grail have been primarily the causes for the decay of his kingdom. The answer to this is, I think, that Arthur does not forget: seeing adulterous sin and the Grail quest as but symptoms of the decay of his ideals, Arthur finally half realizes that he himself has been responsible for the failure of his ideals. "I perish by this people which I made," he states. He has destroyed the very social order which he had created. His knights and their glorious deeds have proved to him his work, and in their failure he fails. By his power "That bow'd the will" ("The Passing of Arthur," 11. 290-91), he had sought to know himself and to prove himself in his people. With their denial of his authority he no longer is sure of his identity:

on my heart hath fallen
Confusion, till I know not what I am,
Nor whence I am, nor whether I be king;
Behold, I seem but king among the dead.

(11. 143-46)

If my interpretation of the Idylls of the King be allowed, these lines, which most commentators have found central to the main theme of the poem but seemingly inexplicable, take on new meaning. Arthur's failure results from the frustration of self, a final inability to project fully his will on his people. Seeing his knights as but the projection of himself, the instruments by which the self and the self's values are known, he realizes that with the failure of these agents of his will he too must fail.

At the end Arthur learns that the world is impregnable to morality. As the agent of God, the Absolute Self, he had come to redeem the world: "For I being simple, thought to work His will" (1. 22); but the world is irredeemable, and so "all my realm / Reels back into the beast, and is no more" (11. 25-26). Like the Arthur of In Memoriam, he appeared ere the times were ripe; the earth is not yet ready to receive her saints.

The ultimate meaning of Tennyson's Idylls lies, I believe, in the paradox of Arthur. He set out to found a society based on freedom, but to his sorrow he learned that he could not create a free man. His will simultaneously desired social freedom and social slavery. For a while Arthur is content with self-deception, but in the end he can no longer avoid recognizing his deceptions and the unresolvable paradox of reality. For the imposition of his heroic authority, his will, upon reality meant the denial to others of their own moral responsibility. Arthur stands, finally, in moral terms, as both the hero and the villain of the Idylls of the King.

In his study of Greek tragedy Nietzsche discovered that the tragic hero is always justified, because he issues forth from a realm outside the world of moral values. The hero, the mask of God, takes on individuality in order to manifest the values of his heavenly domain through moral action. But, says Nietzsche, the action always ends in crime, for the values of the hero present themselves as evil since they clash with conventional moral categories:

We may express the Janus face, at once Dionysiac and Apollonian, of the Aeschylean Prometheus in the following formula: "Whatever exists is both just and unjust, and equally justified in both."⁸

The paradox is finally resolved by the destruction of the hero, which is his fate in the moral world, and his return to the realm of pure value where he is justified.

What Nietzsche found true of Greek tragedy is, I think, likewise true of the Idylls of the King. In terms of moral considerations Arthur must meet with destruction; he is guilty of violation of the freedom of others, and like any perpetrator of violence he must pay for his misdeed. This is the "Apollonian" judgment upon him. Yet in terms of the "Dionysiac" point of view he is to be applauded as the highest manifestation of the eternal will, the will of the Absolute Self. "God fulfills himself in many ways," Arthur tells Bedivere, "Lest one good custom should corrupt the world" (11. 409-10). This is, Tennyson implies, the paradox of reality.

In the Idylls Tennyson retreats, as I have said, from the optimistic view of life adumbrated in In Memoriam. He returns, I believe, to something closely approximating the pessimistic view enunciated in "The Lady of Shalott." In that early poem, it will be remembered, the self is called from its isolation in the tower by the love of something in the world of reality. Yet in this very advance from shadows to realities the self is destroyed: the Lady is transformed and dies when she comes into contact with the outside world. In the Idylls Tennyson, in a larger context, implies once again that the antagonism between the tower of self and the city of society is too great and cannot be overcome. On earth there is but constant war between good and evil:

Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good,
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.

("Locksley Hall Sixty Years After")

Arthur does not redeem the world because the world is irredeemable. Only the savior is saved. Arthur is allowed entry into the paradise of Avilion because he has brought forth from the innermost recesses of self an affirmation of value and realized its insufficiency vis à vis external reality. In knowing that the world cannot be saved and in facing its terrors the self has its victory.

In closing I should like to suggest how the interpretation of the Idylls which I have set forth helps to explain something about the structure of the individual idylls. In the beginning, in the first of the idylls of "The Round Table," the technique is that of straight-forward narration. "Gareth and Lynette" begins with Gareth's leaving home, establishing himself at Camelot, and going on the quest with Lynette; all of this is presented in chronological sequence. In "The Marriage of Geraint" we find the flash-back technique, a frame enclosing the main story of the idyll. "Geraint and Enid" picks up with the frame and proceeds once again in normal time sequence. "Balin and Balan" is more complex in form: we begin with the refusal of Pellam to send his tribute before we are introduced to the Balin story. "Merlin and Vivien" is more complex still: the idyll opens with Merlin and Vivien at Broceliande, then switches to Vivien at Mark's court, continues with an account of Vivien at Camelot—all this before we get to the story proper. The next five idylls, beginning with "Lancelot and Elaine" and ending with "Guinevere," are structurally very complicated. In these there is little continuous narrative flow; rather, there is constant backing and filling, a disruption of chronological narration.

The reason for the increasing complication in form of the ten idylls constituting "The Round Table" is, I believe, that this complexity symbolizes the frustration of Arthur in working his will and fulfilling his ideals. What we find, especially in "The Holy Grail" and "The Last Tournament," is the decay of the King's order indicated by the "broken music" of the narrative flow. The tensions emanating from the guilt, emotional dependency, and failure of the principal actors in these idylls are thus embodied in the very structure of the poem.

Notes

¹ C. F. G. Masterman, Tennyson as a Religious Teacher (Boston, 1900), p. 61.

² Citations to Tennyson's works are to the Cambridge edition, The Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson, ed. W. J. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass., 1898).

³ Quoted in Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London, 1897), I, 117. Hereafter this work will be cited as Memoir.

⁴ See my essays "The 'Weird Seizures' in The Princess," Texas Studies in Literature and Language IV (1962), 268-75; "The Heavenly Friend'; The 'New Mythus' of In Memoriam," The Personalist, XLIII (1962), 383-402; and "Tennyson's Maud," Connotation, I (1962), 12-32.

⁵ See Lionel Stevenson, "The 'High-Born Maiden' Symbol in Tennyson," PMLA, LXIII (1948), 234-244, and my essay "The 'Fatal Woman' Symbol in Tennyson," PMLA, LXXIV (1959), 438-443.

⁶ James Knowles, "A Personal Reminiscence of Tennyson," Nineteenth Century, XXXIII (1893), 182.

⁷ It is interesting to note that Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Idea, Bk, III, defined music as "the copy of the will itself whose objectivity the Ideas are" (The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, ed. Irwin Edman, New York, 1928, p. 201).

⁸The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y., 1956), p. 65.