There is no need, in taking a summary view of Tennyson’s “Idylls,” to go into the question of sources, or to inquire whether Arthur was a historical chief of North Wales, or whether he signified the Great Bear (Arcturus) in Celtic mythology, and his Round Table the circle described by that constellation about the pole star.[28] Tennyson went no farther back for his authority than Sir Thomas Malory’s “Morte Darthur,” printed by Caxton in 1485, a compilation principally from old French Round Table romances.  This was the final mediaeval shape of the story in English.  It is somewhat wandering and prolix as to method, but written in delightful prose.  The story of “Enid,” however (under its various titles and arrangements in successive editions), he took from Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Welsh “Mabinogion” (1838-49).

Before deciding upon the heroic blank verse and a loosely epic form, as most fitting for his purpose, Tennyson had retold passages of Arthurian romance in the ballad manner and in various shapes of riming stanza.  The first of these was “The Lady of Shalott” (1832), identical in subject with the later idyll of “Lancelot and Elaine,” but fanciful and even allegorical in treatment.  Shalott is from Ascalot, a variant of Astolat, in the old metrical romance—­not Malory’s—­of the “Morte Arthur.”  The fairy lady, who sees all passing sights in her mirror and weaves them into her magic web, has been interpreted as a symbol of art, which has to do properly only with the reflection of life.  When the figure of Lancelot is cast upon the glass, a personal emotion is brought into her life which is fatal to her art.  She is “sick of shadows,” and looks through her window at the substance.  Then her mirror cracks from side to side and the curse is come upon her.  Other experiments of the same kind were “Sir Galahad” and “Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinivere” (both in 1842).  The beauty of all these ballad beginnings is such that one is hardly reconciled to the loss of so much romantic music, even by the noble blank verse and the ampler narrative method which the poet finally adopted.  They stand related to the “Idylls” very much as Morris’ “Defence of Guenevere” stands to his “Earthly Paradise.”

Thoroughly romantic in content, the “Idylls of the King” are classical in form.  They may be compared to Tasso’s “Gierusalemme Liberata,” in which the imperfectly classical manner of the Renaissance is applied to a Gothic subject, the history of the Crusades.  The first specimen given was the “Morte d’Arthur” of 1842, set in a framework entitled “The Epic,” in which “the poet, Everard Hall,” reads to his friends a fragment from his epic, “King Arthur,” in twelve books.  All the rest he has burned.  For—­

  “Why take the style of those heroic times? 
  For nature brings not back the Mastodon,
  Nor we those times; and why should any man
  Remodel models? these twelve books of mine
  Were faint Homeric echoes.”