Page:Tennyson - Walter Irving (1873).djvu/8

 Round has come to us. It has the true ring of the age in which it was produced,—the age of love and wine; the age when as many amorous ditties were written as business letters now-a-days. History was not respected; truth was not sought after; chivalry was esteemed virtue; and a scarred face was the witness to the honour and probity of its owner. Yet the wassailers of these days were refined compared with the barbarians of Arthur's time. Civilization had changed the form and features of the more modern race. But poor Guenivere lived too near to the outskirts of savagedom to be as beautiful as a houri, as lovely and enchanting as Heloise. The wand of the enchanter has never been more needed than in the case of Arthur's savage consort.

Before taking up with the monkish rubbish of Geoffrey of Monmouth, which exhibits an admixture of human and supernatural events, only equalled by the mythology of Greece and Rome, or the religious mysticism of the systems of Buddha and Mani, Mr Tennyson ought to have had a good assurance of his powers, for no one less gifted than Shakespeare or Scott could have brought life and form out of such a mass of incredibilities, The mind of an ordinary human being rejects them with disdain, But the eccentric-minded, the superstitious, and the lovers of what is marvellous, see in them the reflection of their own wisdom. They satisfy the cravings of their crazed imaginations by giving substance and form to their day dreams, no matter how inconsistent with probability they may be, or contrary to natural and fixed laws. Washerwomen and old nurses delight in them, and side by side with their visions of a better land, are placed the caricatures produced by an enfeebled mind, ignorant of its own history, struggling to realize, according to its light, the sense of a higher state of being. They live