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the subject for several artistic narrative treatments, most famously by John William
Waterhouse in 1888. Although Tennyson’s poem proved to be the more popular of the
two, Landon’s ‘A Legend o f Tintagel Castle’ more obviously demonstrates the
element of domesticity that later writers (including Tennyson) would weave into the
medieval legend. Lancelot’s affair with Elaine was transformed by Landon into a
narrative that presented the masculine, warlike world as fundamentally at odds with
domestic happiness:
They might have been happy, if love could but learn
A lesson from some flowers, and like their leaves turn
Round into their own inward world, their own lone fragrant nest,
Content with its sweetness, content with its rest.
But the sound o f the trumpet was heard from afar.
And Sir Lancelot rode forth again to the war.
And the wood-nymph was left as aye woman will be,
Who trusts her whole being, oh false love, to thee.35
Female abandonment was a common feature of Landon’s verse (though rarely was the
deserter as illustrious a hero as Lancelot), but its inclusion here marked a turning point
in Arthurian literature. Post-medieval Arthurian writers had rarely written o f romantic
or sexual engagements with any degree of seriousness. Before the nineteenth century
they were usually a source o f ribald humour, as in Fielding’s Tom Thumb (1730),
where Arthur’s queen, Dollalolla, is described as ‘a woman entirely faultless saving
that she is a little given to Drink; a little too much a Virago towards her Husband. And
in love with Tom Thumb’.36
The nineteenth century took a sterner moral view. Walter Scott, in his ‘Bridal
of Triermain’ (1813), chastised Arthur for his dalliance with Guendolen, a fairy
temptress, which keeps the king from fulfilling his obligations to the land. Saxon
advances remain unchecked while ‘Calibum, the British pride, / Hangs useless by a
36
lovers’ side’. Such neglect o f an individual’s duty to his community was denounced
by Scott, as he declared: ‘How mirth can into folly glide, / And folly into sin!’37
Landon was similarly concerned with the correspondence between personal desire and
public duty, but, unlike Scott, Landon placed her moral emphasis upon the
individual’s responsibility to intimate, rather than societal, relationships. Essentially,
she elevated the domestic sphere above that of the political. In the Idylls, Tennyson
would synthesise the attitudes o f Landon and Scott in his attempt to establish a firmer
equilibrium between the domestic and political domains.
Written on a more ambitious scale was Reginald Heber’s ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’.
Although incomplete, this was the first attempt in the nineteenth century to retell the
whole Arthurian story. Heber was also the first English writer to realise the
importance of Malory in such an endeavour.* He adapted the story as a domestic
tragedy: at the time o f the poem’s beginning Arthur has already won his European
dominions, and the destiny o f the Round Table is firmly controlled by the scheming,
wily and doleful female characters, whose roles are greatly increased from those in
Malory. This was also a much more respectable version o f the medieval story; Heber
removed scenes o f bloodshed and altered what he thought unchaste: Arthur’s fatal sin,
for example, is transposed from the incestuous relationship with his half-sister to the
TR
slaying of Sir Paladore, who is here the lover o f Morgue and father of Mordred. Had
he not pursued his religious career so zealously (he became, in 1823, the first Bishop
of Calcutta, a diocese which included India, Ceylon and Australia), Heber’s ‘Le Morte
TO
d’Arthur’ could have been a major Arthuriad. As it was, Heber’s work still exercised
an influence on subsequent literature: the structure of the ‘Morte d ’Arthur’ - driven
by dialogue, retrospective accounts of earlier episodes not included in the central story
* Heber actually began his retelling o f Malory in 1810: six years before the Morte Darthur was
reprinted.
37
and introspective soliloquies - would be used by Tennyson in his own full-length
treatment of the myth.
These works presented a version of the Arthurian story which, through their
respectability and domesticity, suggested that the legend could be made pertinent to
contemporary middle-class readerships. Yet Tennyson himself was unconvinced of
the surest means of producing a great epic that could be made relevant to nineteenth-
century England. In 1842, along with a much-revised version of ‘The Lady of
Shalott’, he published three more Arthurian poems: the ‘Morte d’Arthur’, ‘Sir
Launcelot and Queen Guinevere’ and ‘Sir Galahad’. The first o f these was a poetic
vision o f Arthur’s removal to the Isle of Avalon, where he is to be healed o f his
‘grievous wound’.40 Although the poem found great success, particularly when it was
transformed, in 1869, into ‘The Passing of Arthur’, the conclusion to the Idylls o f the
King, initial praise was by no means unanimous. John Sterling commented in his
review that ‘the miraculous legend of “Excalibur” does not come very near to us, and
as reproduced by any modem writer must be a mere ingenious exercise of fancy’ and
Leigh Hunt seemed equally dubious on the appropriateness o f Tennyson’s treatment
of a medieval story.41 It was strictures such as these that had caused Tennyson to
insert his ‘Morte d’Arthur’ within the contemporary frame o f ‘The Epic’, and to
present the poem as the work o f a fictional undergraduate.
The forty-five line ‘Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere’ is in many ways an
expansion of Malory’s discourse on the ‘lusty moneth of May’, in which lovers, like
the trees and flowers that ‘burgenyth and florysshyth’, do ‘spryngith, burgenyth,
buddyth, and florysshyth in lusty dedis’.42 Tennyson’s poem is a lyrical description of
the lovers’ illicit affair. Its setting is harmonious, even collusive, with their romantic
designs: the misty mountains laugh, the birds sweetly sing and even the ‘drooping
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