hinks himself as God, that he can make

Honey from hornet-combs
And men from beasts.

In "Guinevere," unequaled elsewhere in the "Idylls" in pure poetry,
the blow falls; at length, in the concluding poem, Arthur passes to
the isle of Avilion, and once more

The old order changeth, yielding place to new.

Tennyson himself tells us that in this, his longest poem, he has
meant to shadow "sense at war with soul," the struggle in the
individual and in the race, between that body which links us with
the brute and the soul which makes us part of a spiritual order.
But the mastery of the higher over the lower is only obtained
through many seeming failures. Wounded and defeated, the King
exclaims:

For I, being simple, thought to work His will,
And have but stricken with the sword in vain;
And all whereon I lean'd, in wife and friend,
Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm
_Reels back into the beast_, and is no more.

But he also half perceives the truth which it is the poet's purpose
to suggest to us. It is short-sighted to expect the immediate
sanctification of the race; if we are disheartened, striving to
"work His will," it is because "we see not the close." It is
impossible that Arthur's work should end in failure--departing, he
declares, "I pass, but shall not die," and when his grievous wound
is healed, he will return. The _Idylls of the King_ is thus the
epic of evolution in application to the progress of human society.
In it the teachings of "In Memoriam" assume a narrative form.

Move upward, working out the beast,

may be taken as a brief statement of its theme: and we read in it
the belief in the tendency upward and an assurance of ultimate
triumph:

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet,
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void
When God hath made the pile complete.

--PANCOAST.[4]

[4] Reprinted by permission from Pancoast's _Introduction to English
Literature_. Copyright, 1907, by Henry Holt and Company.

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