The “fragment” is thus put forward tentatively and with apologies—­apologies which were little needed; for the “Morte d’Arthur,” afterwards embedded in “The Passing of Arthur,” remains probably the best, and certainly the most Homeric passage in the “Idylls.”  Tennyson’s own quality was more Vergilian than Homeric, but the models which he here remodels were the Homeric epics.  He chose for his measure not the Spenserian stanza, nor the ottava rima of Tasso, nor the octosyllables of Scott and the chivalry romances, but the heroic blank verse which Milton had fixed as the vehicle of English classical epic.  He adopts Homer’s narrative practices:  the formulated repetitions of phrase, the pictorial comparisons, the conventional epithets (in moderation), and his gnomic habit—­

  “O purblind race of miserable men,” etc.

The original four idylls were published in 1859.[29] Thenceforth the series grew by successive additions and rearrangements up to the completed “Idylls” of 1888, twelve in number—­besides prologue and epilogue—­according to the plan foreshadowed in “The Epic.”  The story of Arthur had thus occupied Tennyson for over a half century.  Though modestly entitled “Idylls,” by reason of the episodic treatment, the poem when finished was, in fact, an epic; but an epic that lacked the formal unity of the “Aeneid” and the “Paradise Lost,” or even of the “Iliad.”  It resembled the Homeric heroic poems more than the literary epics of Vergil and Milton, in being not the result of a single act of construction, but a growth from the gradual fitting together of materials selected from a vast body of legend.  This legendary matter he reduced to an epic unity.  The adventures in Malory’s romance are of very uneven value, and it abounds in inconsistencies and repetitions.  He also redistributed the ethical balance.  Lancelot is the real hero of the old “Morte Darthur,” and Guinivere—­the Helen of romance—­goes almost uncensured.  Malory’s Arthur is by no means “the blameless king” of Tennyson, who makes of him a nineteenth-century ideal of royal knighthood, and finally an allegorical type of Soul at war with Sense.  The downfall of the Round Table, that order of spiritual knight-errantry through which the king hopes to regenerate society, happens through the failure of his knights to rise to his own high level of character; in a degree, also, because the emprise is diverted from attainable practical aims to the fantastic quest of the Holy Grail.  The sin of Lancelot and the Queen, drawing after it the treachery of Modred, brings on the tragic catastrophe.  This conception is latent in Malory, but it is central in Tennyson; and everywhere he subtilises, refines, elevates, and, in short, modernises the Motivirung in the old story.  Does he thereby also weaken it?  Censure and praise have been freely bestowed upon Tennyson’s dealings with Malory.  Thus it is complained that his Arthur is a prig, a