ral life itself. A
delicate balance must be kept between that presentation of the concrete
which makes it significant by making it representative and typical, and
that other presentation which dissolves the individual into the general,
by making it a mere abstraction. Were it not for Dante and Hawthorne and
the second part of "Faust," one would incline to say that no creative
genius of the first order indulges in allegory. Homer is never
allegorical except in the episode of Circe; Shakspere never, with the
doubtful exception of "The Tempest." The allegory in the "Idylls of the
King" is not of the obvious kind employed in the "Faery Queene"; but
Tennyson, no less than Spenser, appeared to feel that the simple
retelling of an old chivalry tale, without imparting to it some deeper
meaning, was no work for a modern poet.

Tennyson has made the Arthur Saga, as a whole, peculiarly his own. But
others of the Victorian poets have handled detached portions of it.
William Morris' "Defence of Guenevere" (1858) anticipated the first group
of "Idylls." Swinburne's "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882) dealt at full
length, and in a very different spirit, with an epicyclic legend which
Tennyson touched incidentally in "The Last Tournament." Matthew Arnold's
"Tristram and Iseult" was a third manipulation of the legend, partly in
dramatic, partly in narrative form, and in changing metres. It follows
another version of Tristram's death, and the story of Vivian and Merlin
which Iseult of Brittany tells her children is quite distinct from the
one in the "Idylls." Iseult of Brittany--not Iseult of Cornwall--is the
heroine of Arnold's poem. Thomas Westwood's "Quest of the Sancgreall" is
still one more contribution to Arthurian poetry of which a mere mention
must here suffice.

For our review threatens to become a catalogue. To such a degree had
mediaevalism become the fashion, that nearly every Georgian and Victorian
poet of any pretensions tried his hand at it. Robert Browning was not
romantic in Scott's way, nor in Tennyson's. His business was with the
soul. The picturesqueness of the external conditions in which soul was
placed was a matter of indifference. To-day was as good as yesterday.
Now and then occurs a title with romantic implications--"Childe Roland to
the Dark Tower Came," _e.g._, borrowed from a ballad snatch sung by the
Fool in "Lear" (Roland is Roland of the "Chanson"). But the poem proves
to be a weird study in la