The Arthurian Legend

By Author: kobe
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Religious doubt thus emerges as a pervasive undertone, unsurprisingly given the scepticism which, according to Aidan Day, runs through his corpus: 'Tennyson could feel visceral dread at the thought of an alien universe. But close attention shows that many of his most important poems examine, with a powerful, almost pathological intensity, the ways in which his desire for a higher meaning to Thomas Sabo Bracelets life was constantly contradicted and sometimes blocked by a profound scepticism that there is any such meaning'. Doubt is, presumably, one of the inner monsters that Arthur, or indeed any soul in its struggle with the world, must try to conquer. In Memoriam deals very explicitly with Tennyson's crisis of faith, provoked not only by the death of Hallam but also by a bleak evolutionary vista:

Arthur's moment of despair is a direct descendant of this crisis: 'As if some lesser god had made the world, But had not force to shape it as he would...'Even more clearly echoing In Memorianfs nightmare, his kingdom 'Reels back into the beast' (Passing, line 26), ...
... verbally linking this collapse of civilisation with the nihilistic battle of nature red in tooth and claw. In that battle man, like every other species, does not advance to perfection but perishes and makes way for similarly transitory successors: And likewise the civilizations of the world are swept aside. Idylls of the King extend the evolutionary anxieties of In Memoriam to the realm of human history. In that earlier work Tennyson strove successfully to overcome his doubts. Evolution works, after all, towards a 'crowning race', in harmony with 'One God, one law, one element, and one far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves'. For those caught up within history, the larger perspective is Thomas Sabo Jewellery hard to see, but its cycles may progress upwards to a mature modern empire in which Celt, Saxon, Dane and Norman fulfill their civilizing destiny, if spiritual resolve holds firm. The Anglo-Saxon settlement is a necessary step in the process and as such it is crucial to the trajectory of Tennyson's idealism, worked out in the course of In Memoriam, to give it historical presence in the Idylls.

Whether his idealism or his doubt is the more convincing, or at least more poetically realized, aspect of his works is open to dispute. I wish here only to note in conclusion that the Anglo-Saxon dimension reaches back to a formative event in his life which permanently shaped his treatment of both doubt and idealism. Arthurian legend had a place at the heart of Tennyson's imagination: the premature death of Arthur Henry Hallam cemented it there, eliciting in 1833 the 'Morte d'Arthur' in which the process of mythologizing his friend began. He later incorporated 'Morte d'Arthur' in its entirety into The Passing of Arthur, and the Anglo-Saxon 'mere' was thus built into the work from its very inception. The brutal shock of Hallam's death hit Tennyson hard and deepened his visceral fears of a godless and unjust universe. The 'Morte d'Arthur' reaches for consolation, finding Christian hope in the mystical retreat to Avilion, but the hope is strangely undermined: But now farewell. I am going a long way with these thou see if indeed I go (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) To the island-valley of Avilion.