Some months ago, I found myself making a study of Idylls of the King, a long poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson which was published between 1859 and 1885, and which Tennyson considered his most important work. A long blank verse running to thousands of lines, it chronicles the decline of Camelot over many interlinked stories, and Tennyson used it not only to comment on the human condition but on the Victorian England in which he lived.
The poem was of interest to me for several reasons. The main reason was that I had long admired its sublime climax, “The Passing of Arthur”, which was in fact the earliest part of the poem to be written. Many of its lines would be widely recognized. The line “authority forgets a dying King” is quoted in the movie JFK, and the exchange from which it is taken—between the wounded Arthur and the last of his knights—supplies some more oft-quoted lines:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of.
The whole poem is an argument for the spiritual in the face of the material and utilitarian, although that is simplifying its theme considerably.
I was also attracted to the poem because it is rather neglected. Back in its day, it was a popular favourite, selling (hard to believe now) tens of thousands of copies. Today, in a time when long poetry is rarely read—and I find it a trudge, as much as anybody else does—the Idylls are a masterpiece more known about than known. The brave souls who embark upon long poetry for its own sake might tackle Paradise Lost or The Faerie Queen, but not Idylls. The road not taken has its own appeal.
I also wanted to know what commentators had said about the poem. Luckily, my library job gives me access to the archives of most literary journals, so I printed off about a dozen essays on the poem, ranging from the early twentieth century to today.
Reading them, I found myself falling into a rather strange and pleasant mood. It reminded me of how I used to feel as a teenager, when I would read a bundle of recent newspapers, enjoyably insulated from the immediacy of their controversies.
Nearly all of the articles mentioned the critical vicissitudes of the poem over time, very consciously relating it to the intellectual and scholarly preoccupations that had succeeded one another since its publication. Victorian critics had admired the idealism of the poem; critics in the interwar and post-war eras preferred the darker, more pessimistic undertones (after all, the whole poem is about the fall of Camelot, and the inability of King Arthur’s knights to live up to his angelic ideals); when post-modernism became the fashion, critics began to pay more attention to the poem’s intricate narrative structure, with its nested tales within tales and its unreliable narrators.
Here’s a funny thing, I found myself thinking. Why do I find myself enjoying this bird’s eye view of Idylls of the Kings’s critical history, admiring how each period had its own relationship to the text, when I am so scornful of academic fashions in general? I remembered my brief foray into studying English at university level, and the disdain I felt for the feminist, post-modernist, and post-colonial approaches they took to the various texts. Literature, I thought, should be timeless, universal, addressed to the depths of the human condition that are beyond the catch-cries of the day. Now, however, as I savoured the critical history of Idylls of the King, I felt like a party pooper.
And it confronted me with a question which I’d never contemplated before. That is, why did conservatives (like) myself have such a deep appreciation of character and atmosphere when it came to place, but a rather disdainful attitude towards character and atmosphere when it came to time? Why was I delighted to learn that a country or a region or a village had its own distinctive ways and manners, but so hostile towards any notion of a zeitgeist, or contemporary sensibilities? Why was I so warm towards provincialism in space, but so hard on provincialism in time?
It’s certainly the case that conservatives should defend eternal truths of the human condition, and indeed the supernatural order, over ideologies of the moment. But is there perhaps, a danger that we are too intolerant of the flavour of our particular niche in time? As pilgrims on this earth, shouldn’t we be as eager to enjoy the distinctiveness of the time we pass through as travellers in a foreign country?
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