adowy and elevated performance called the _Mort d'
Arthur_--will probably be always thought the best. Tennyson, when
he wrote it, was just trying the peculiarities of his style: he was
testing the quality of his cadences, the ring of his long sententious
lines repeated continually as refrains, and the trustworthiness of his
artful, much-sacrificing simplicity. He put as it were a spot or two
of pigment on the end of his painting-knife, and held it up into the
air of the vaporous traditions of the Round Table. It stood the test,
it had the color; but the artist, uncertain of his style, his public
and his own liking, made a number of other tentatives before he
could decide to go on in the manner he commenced with. He tried the
_Guinevere_, laughing and galloping in its ballad-movement; he tried
the _Shallot_, with a triple rhyme and a short positive refrain, like
a bell rung in an incantation, and brought up every minute by a finger
pressed upon the edge. Either of these three--although the metre of
the first was the only one endurable by the ear in the case of a long
series of poems--either of these had, it may be positively said, a
general tone more suitable to the ancient feeling, and more consistent
with the duty of a modern poet arranging for new ears the legends
collected by Sir Thomas Malory, than the general tone of the present
Idyls. Those first experiments, charged like a full sponge with the
essence and volume of primitive legend, went to their purpose without
retrospection or vacillation: each short tale, whether it laughed or
moaned, promulgated itself like an oracle. The teller seemed to have
been listening to the voice of Fate, and whether, Guinevere swayed the
bridle-rein, or Elaine's web flew out and floated wide, or Lancelot
sang tirra-lirra by the river, it was asserted with the positiveness
of a Hebrew chronicle, which we do not question because it is history.
But we hardly have such an illusion in reading the late Idyls. We
seem to be in the presence of a constructor who arranges things, of a
moralist turning ancient stories with a latent purpose of decorum, of
an official Englishman looking about for old confirmations of modern
sociology, of a salaried laureate inventing a prototype of Prince
Albert. The singleness of a story-teller who has convinced himself
that he tells a true story is gone. That this diversion into the
region of didactics is accompanied, on our poet's part, with every
ingenuity of