SOURCE: "Eros and Agape," in From the Great Deep: Essays on Idylls of the King, Ohio University Press, 1967, pp. 113-45.

In the following essay, de L. Ryals examines Arthur as a mediator between divine and human love, and as the hope for redeeming the world.

If the hero with a divine mission cannot redeem the world, how then may the world be saved? This is the question implicitly confronting the actors in the Idyllsof the King when they doubt the authority of the King. Years earlier in the nineteenth century when it became impossible for the thinking man to accept unquestioningly an inherited world view, the same question had been posed and tentatively answered: redemption comes only through love. "By love subsists / All lasting grandeur, by pervading love; / That gone, we are as dust,"

Wordsworth had written in The Prelude (Bk. XIV); Goethe's Faust had been able...