No. 6

thur of Tennyson's creation without regard for known critical comment, he appeals to us as a character true to nature, a character in which cause and effect and develop ment are given due consideration, a character with a past, a present, and a future, the latter two growing out of and being the natural result of what has preceded.

King Arthur's ideals were high; he believed fully that every human life should result in a circle beginning and ending in God, divinity its source, perfection its destiny, but he made mistakes at times as every natural character must.

In the first poem we find him a youth, believing strongly in the good both in himself and in his fellows, and daring to bind his knights with him by vows high and holy, dedicating

them with himself to a work of worth. There is indeed a touch of self-sufficiency in this, but the attitude is a

• Begun in January.

how Hypatia in her girlhood cries out at the low ambitions of humankind,-"Why, why are men content to grovel and be men when they might rise to the rank of gods?" You remember Moore's young hero who held

"Proud views of human kind,

Of men to gods exalted and refined," and, coming nearer home, is there one of us who has missed that precious hour of youth when he believed in everything and most of all in himself? That hour often falls far short of the allotted sixty minutes, but *thur,

while it lasts 't is sweet, a who was to face the agon of bitterest failure, needed much the exhilaration of its wine.

Van Dyke and Swinburne, who declare Tennyson's Arthur insincere and weak, must count out many passages of the Idyls that reveal quite an opposite nature. You remember the brother who says of Arthur's knights

"For good ye are and bad, and like to coins,

Some true, some light, but every one of

you

Stamp'd with the image of the King." You remember, too, Bellicent's story of the founding of the Round Table,

"Then the King in low deep tones, And simple words of great authority, Bound them by so strait vows to his own self,

That when they rose, knighted from kneeling, some

Were pale as at the passing of a ghost, Some flush'd, and others dazed, as one who wakes

Half-blinded at the coming of a light.

"But when he spake and cheer'd his Table Round

With large divine and comfortable words

Beyond my tongue to tell thee-I beheld From eye to eye thro' all their Order flash

A momentary likeness of the King."

You will also recall the passage in the poem Gareth and Lynette, how,— "in all the listening eyes Of those tall knights, that ranged about

the throne,

Clear honor shining like the dewy star Of dawn, and faith in their great King,

with pure

Affection, and the light of victory,
And glory gain'd, and ever more to gain."

You have read the record of Edyrn

"waiting to be treated like a wolf, Because I knew my deeds were known, I

found,

Instead of scornful pity or pure scorn,
Such fine reserve and noble reticence,
Manners so kind, yet stately, such a grace
Of tenderest courtesy, that I began
To glance behind me at my former life,

And find that it had been the wolf's indeed."

None but a manly man could have so strongly impressed his personality and ideals upon those about him, and, surely, than this there can be no greater power, to love another into righteousness. None but a sincere man could have held in friendship to the very last the man whose every natural impulse must have been to break the bond between himself and the King, and, most surely, none but a man sincere and strong could have, at the last moment, reclaimed the Queen.

Van Dyke implies that Arthur shows no scars of contest, no sense of personal imperfection, that he manifests little feeling of compassion and comprehension for others in temptation. Perhaps he is right, but Arthur's patience with Geraint, his tenderness with Balin, his tactfulness with Edyrn, his interest in Gareth's ambitions, all seem the evidences of a broad, sympathetic nature, tutored in a school of personal experience and effort. He does not, indeed, in his strivings to help the wrong-doer, waste himself in drivelings of sickly sentimentality and personal reminiscence of moral struggle, but who would have it so?

Does the skilled physician who has suffered from the disease that is sapping his patient's strength make his daily call in order to record a memorial of his own former weakness? Indeed, no, he gives commiseration and sympathy, but these tender humanities are evidenced in pills and potions and strengthening draughts.