Alfred Tennyson, How to Know Him (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: their own hero, their hero of art and of the soul, a Celtic chieftain who may have fought with success against the West Saxons in the year 520, but whose cause was doomed to early defeat. In the second place, we must recall?what I have already suggested?that the story of Arthur took on something of the nature of an organism, a complex growing thing of life. One may sometimes see through the microscope mysterious elemental creatures, groups of protoplasmic cells, which draw others to themselves, unite with them to form one organism where before there were two or three, or again subdivide to form many where there was one. Like this, in a sense, is the history of the Arthurian saga. Once more, we must remember that the story was transmitted through a number of different agencies, going back to sources in both Welsh and continental regions, and exhibiting corresponding differences of detail. For Great Britain the most influential single source was the version made in Latin by old Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the first half of the twelfth century, which was later paraphrased in both French and English versions of wide-spread importance. At length Sir Thomas Malory, about the year 1470, made his new romance, called the Morte Arthur, which again brought together materials from many different origins, became a new store-house of romance for modern England, and is incomparably the finest piece of English writing of its age. These two writers, Geoffrey and Malory, Tennyson refers to in his Epilogue to the Queen,in which he speaks of their King Arthur as morally unsatisfying, compared with the ideal king that he has undertaken to depict. The Arthur "of Geoffrey's book" or "of Malleor's" was Touch'd by the adulterous finger of a time That hover'd between war and wantonness, And crownings an...