Book Description:
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: bilities of this material when forming a judgment as to whether or no the ' Idylls of the King' is the adequate treatment and the final form of this rich store of Dichterstoff, of poetic material handed down in the imagination of man from generation to generation through the centuries. 4. The Necessity for finding Tennyson's Sources, and the Method. As a knowledge of the nature and possibilities of the subject matter, this raw material of great poetry, is thus necessary for an informed judgment as to whether or no the ' Idylls of the King' is the adequate and final treatment of this subject matter, this stream of national, nay, of international poetry, so it is also necessary, in discussing more in detail the influence of particular sources upon the poet's treatment of his theme, to know which of the many available versions of the legend were in reality the sources drawn upon. For while the poet cannot treat legendary matter capriciously, yet there is large variety of treatment in the legends themselves, and therefore some criticisms which have been passed upon Lord Tennyson's ideal king, that ' this is not the Arthur whom we knew' (through Malory), may perhaps be based upon an overestimate of Malory as representing Arthurian legend or of Tennyson's obligations to Malory as a source. Malory's book, ' incomparable' though it be in some respects, Andrew Lang in Sommer's ' Malory.' is yet a compilation, and not always a happy one, since, the delineations of the chief characters being taken from versions which developed differently, there are attributed to a single individual radically in v compatible traits. There are, in reality, two Arthurs ' in Malory. Furthermore, Malory sometimes follows a poor version of a legend, and is not thus in every case happy in showing th...
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