He wanted poems
on "the living present," a theme not selected by Homer, Shakespeare,
Spenser, Milton, Virgil, or the Greek dramatists, except (among
surviving plays) in the Persae of AEschylus. The poet who can
transfigure the hot present is fortunate, but most, and the greatest,
have visited the cool quiet purlieus of the past.
CHAPTER VII.--THE IDYLLS OF THE KING.
The Idylls may probably be best considered in their final shape:
they are not an epic, but a series of heroic idyllia of the same
genre as the heroic idyllia of Theocritus. He wrote long after the
natural age of national epic, the age of Homer. He saw the later
literary epic rise in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, a poem
with many beauties, if rather an archaistic and elaborate revival as
a whole. The time for long narrative poems, Theocritus appears to
have thought, was past, and he only ventured on the heroic idyllia of
Heracles, and certain adventures of the Argonauts. Tennyson, too,
from the first believed that his pieces ought to be short.
Therefore, though he had a conception of his work as a whole, a
conception long mused on, and sketched in various lights, he produced
no epic, only a series of epic idyllia. He had a spiritual
conception, "an allegory in the distance," an allegory not to be
insisted upon, though its presence was to be felt. No longer, as in
youth, did Tennyson intend Merlin to symbolise "the sceptical
understanding" (as if one were to "break into blank the gospel of"
Herr Kant), or poor Guinevere to stand for the Blessed Reformation,
or the Table Round for Liberal Institutions.
Pages:
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116