But now shalt thou go and thy fellows. . . . All that ye
did," said Sir Darras, "was by force of knighthood, and that was the
cause I would not put you to death" (Book IX. chap. xl.)
Tennyson is accused of "emasculating the fierce lusty epic into a
moral lesson, as if it were to be performed in a drawing-room by an
academy of young ladies"--presided over, I daresay, by "Anglican
clergymen." I know not how any one who has read the Morte d'Arthur
can blame Tennyson in the matter. Let Malory and his sources be
blamed, if to be moral is to be culpable. A few passages apart,
there is no coarseness in Malory; that there are conscience,
courtesy, "sweet lives," "keeping down the base in man," "amiable
words," and all that Tennyson gives, and, in Mr Harrison's theory,
gives without authority in the romance, my quotations from Malory
demonstrate. They are chosen at a casual opening of his book. That
there "had not arisen in the world" "the idea of reverencing
conscience" before the close of the fifteenth century A.D. is an
extraordinary statement for a critic of history to offer.
Mr Harrison makes his protest because "in the conspiracy of silence
into which Tennyson's just fame has hypnotised the critics, it is
bare honesty to admit defects." I think I am not hypnotised, and I
do not regard the Idylls as the crown of Tennyson's work. But it is
not his "defect" to have introduced generosity, gentleness,
conscience, and chastity where no such things occur in his sources.
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