314 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



be represented, probably because a great action in this instance 

 necessitated a great passion, and of depicting the latter Arnold was 

 by his temperament palpably incapable. What we have here are only 

 the burnt out ashes of an abandoned passion, which glows again with 

 pitiful feebleness in the disordered memories that haunt the pillow 

 of the dying knight. The image of the sleeping children has been 

 often praised for its tenderness and unquestionable charm, but is not 

 this precisely one of those carefully-wrought passages which Arnold 

 himself felt to be intrusive in work that should exhibit an even flow 

 of power ? 



The inconsequence, too, of the conclusion is not easily defended, 

 and a letter which Sir Herbert Warren has recently made public in 

 "The Times" informs us that Arnold's own fastidious judgment was 

 dubious of its success. It will be remembered that the virtuous 

 second Iseult, in the holly wood so charmingly described by the poet, 

 beguiles her children with tales of old Brittany, with the result that the 

 most moving love story of Arthurian romance thus fades away into futile 

 memories of the wiles of Vivian and the tender dotage of the misguided 

 sage, her paramour. Writing to his friend, the Rev. Herbert Hill, Arnold 

 says: "I am still much too near my own poems (Nov. 5, 1852), to 

 decide impartially on the justice of the particular exceptions you 

 take to them; with regard to the conclusion of Tristram and Iseult, 

 the story of Merlin, of which I am particularly fond, was brought in 

 on purpose to relieve the poem, which would else, I thought, have 

 ended too sadly; but perhaps the new element introduced is too much. 

 I read the story of Tristram and Iseult some years ago at Thun in an 

 article in a French review on the romance literature; I had never met 

 with it before, and it fastened upon me; when I got back to England I 

 looked at the 'Morte d'Arthur' and took what I could, but the poem 

 was already in the main formed, and I could not well disturb it. 

 [This sets the poem back to an unexpectedly early date.] If I had 

 read the story first in the 'Morte d'Arthur' I should have managed 

 it differently. I am by no means satisfied with Tristram in the second 

 part myself." 



We are not happy in our medievalising poets. Scott gives us 

 something in his poems of the outward circumstances of the time; 

 but it is in his novels that he garners the ripest results of his anti- 

 quarian studies, and even there the true inwardness of the age is 

 perhaps to seek. Keats gives us a few revealing intuitive flashes in 

 his "Belle Dame Sans Merci," and in the delightful unfinished "Eve 

 of St. Mark" where we get what we are willing to accept as the shadow 

 at least of the reality. No one now regards "Idylls of the King" as 

 anything but a moralized and at times highly poetical modern vision 



