curate, who preaches to his queen and lectures his court, and whose virtue is too conscious; that the harlot Vivien is a poor substitute for the damsel of the lake who puts Merlin to sleep under a great rock in the land of Benwick; that the gracious figure of Gawain suffers degradation from the application of an effeminate moral standard to his shining exploits in love and war, that modern convenances are imposed upon a society in which they do not belong and whose joyous, robust naivete is hurt by them.[30]

The allegorical method tried in “The Lady of Shalott,” but abandoned in the earlier “Idylls,” creeps in again in the later; particularly in “Gareth and Lynette” (1872), in the elaborate symbolism of the gates of Camelot, and in the guardians of the river passes, whom Gareth successively overcomes, and who seem to represent the temptations incident to the different ages of man.  The whole poem, indeed, has been interpreted in a parabolic sense, Merlin standing for the intellect, the Lady of the Lake for religion, etc.  Allegory was a favourite mediaeval mode, and the Grail legend contains an element of mysticism which invites an emblematic treatment.  But the attraction of this fashion for minds of a Platonic cast is dangerous to art:  the temptation to find a meaning in human life more esoteric than any afforded by the literal life itself.  A delicate balance must be kept between that presentation of the concrete which makes it significant by making it representative and typical, and that other presentation which dissolves the individual into the general, by making it a mere abstraction.  Were it not for Dante and Hawthorne and the second part of “Faust,” one would incline to say that no creative genius of the first order indulges in allegory.  Homer is never allegorical except in the episode of Circe; Shakspere never, with the doubtful exception of “The Tempest.”  The allegory in the “Idylls of the King” is not of the obvious kind employed in the “Faery Queene”; but Tennyson, no less than Spenser, appeared to feel that the simple retelling of an old chivalry tale, without imparting to it some deeper meaning, was no work for a modern poet.

Tennyson has made the Arthur Saga, as a whole, peculiarly his own.  But others of the Victorian poets have handled detached portions of it.  William Morris’ “Defence of Guenevere” (1858) anticipated the first group of “Idylls.”  Swinburne’s “Tristram of Lyonesse” (1882) dealt at full length, and in a very different spirit, with an epicyclic legend which Tennyson touched incidentally in “The Last Tournament.”  Matthew Arnold’s “Tristram and Iseult” was a third manipulation of the legend, partly in dramatic, partly in narrative form, and in changing metres.  It follows another version of Tristram’s death, and the story of Vivian and Merlin which Iseult of Brittany tells her children is quite distinct from the one in the “Idylls.”  Iseult of Brittany—­not Iseult of Cornwall—­is the heroine of Arnold’s poem.  Thomas Westwood’s “Quest of the Sancgreall” is still one more contribution to Arthurian poetry of which a mere mention must here suffice.