[41]
The charming novelettes in which the allegory is forgotten need no more justification than the adventures in The Faerie Queene, or the parliamentary debates in Paradise Lost. The Idylls fall into line with two of the greatest poems in the English language; and when Tennyson writes of Arthur, 'From the great deep to the great deep he goes,' he is telling his own deepest conviction of what our brief life on earth means—the conviction which inspires his last words of poetry, Crossing the Bar.
Tennyson knew materialism and revolution, and whither they tend.
Red ruin, and the breaking up of laws.
And
By noble needs at one with noble vows,
From flat confusion and brute violence
Reel back into the beast and be no more.
We are told that he is shallow, an echo of the thoughts of educated men at the time, and that, like the Victorians in general, he never probes anything to the bottom. It is true that he reflects his
