The hero is morbid, his social satire peevish, and a story which could have been completely redeemed by the ending (the death of the hero), which artistic fitness demands, is of value for us now through its three amazing songs, in which the lyric genius of Tennyson reached its finest flower.  It cannot be denied, either, that he failed—­though magnificently—­in the Idylls of the King.  The odds were heavily against him in the choice of a subject.  Arthur is at once too legendary and too shadowy for an epic hero, and nothing but the treatment that Milton gave to Satan (i.e. flat substitution of the legendary person by a newly created character) could fit him for the place.  Even if Arthur had been more promising than he is, Tennyson’s sympathies were fundamentally alien from the moral and religious atmosphere of Arthurian romance.  His robust Protestantism left no room for mysticism; he could neither appreciate nor render the mystical fervour and exultation which is in the old history of the Holy Grail.  Nor could he comprehend the morality of a society where courage, sympathy for the oppressed, loyalty and courtesy were the only essential virtues, and love took the way of freedom and the heart rather than the way of law.  In his heart Tennyson’s attitude to the ideals of chivalry and the old stories in which they are embodied differed probably very little from that of Roger Ascham, or of any other Protestant Englishman; when he endeavoured to make an epic of them and to fasten to it an allegory in which Arthur should typify the war of soul against sense, what happened was only what might have been expected.  The heroic enterprise failed, and left us with a series of mid-Victorian novels in verse in which the knights figure as heroes of the generic mid-Victorian type.

But if he failed in his larger poems, he had a genius little short of perfect in his handling of shorter forms.  The Arthurian story which produced only middling moralizing in the Idylls, gave us as well the supremely written Homeric episode of the Morte d’Arthur, and the sharp and defined beauty of Sir Galahad and the Lady of Shallott.  Tennyson had a touch of the pre-Raphaelite faculty of minute painting in words, and the writing of these poems is as clear and naive as in the best things of Rossetti.  He had also what neither Rossetti nor any of his contemporaries in verse, except Browning, had, a fine gift of understanding humanity.  The peasants of his English idylls are conceived with as much breadth of sympathy and richness of humour, as purely and as surely, as the peasants of Chaucer or Burns.  A note of passionate humanity is indeed in all his work.  It makes vivid and intense his scholarly handling of Greek myth; always the unchanging human aspect of it attracts him most, in Oenone’s grief, in the indomitableness of Ulysses, the weariness and disillusionment in Tithonus.  It has been the cause of the comfort he has brought to sorrow; none of his generation takes such a human attitude to death.  Shelley could yearn for the infinite, Browning treat it as the last and greatest adventure, Arnold meet it clear eyed and resigned.  To Wordsworth it is the mere return of man the transient to Nature the eternal.