At any rate, Tennyson frankly confesses that what he presents in his ‘Idylls’ is a “tale New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul”; and the new element in it is a didactic purpose suited to the moral and sentimental temper of the Victorian era, and embodying what a severe critic calls “the ethics of the rectory parlour.”[131] Tennyson himself is responsible for revealing the “particular intention” which equates the Arthur of the ‘Idylls’ with the Prince Consort; for he dedicates the poems to his memory, “since he held them dear, Perchance as finding there unconsciously Some image of himself.” It is hardly likely, however, that Tennyson, when he first thought of the Arthurian stories as a poetic theme, had any very definite idea of putting them into the form of an allegory such as most of his interpreters now discover in them; but that he, from the first, intended a “modern meaning” is plain from the lines appended to the _Morte D’Arthur_ at the time of its original publication,-- “To me, methought, who waited in a crowd, There came a bark that, blowing forward, bore King Arthur, like a modern gentleman Of stateliest port; and all the people cried ‘Arthur is come again: he cannot die.’” That the ‘Idylls,’ when finally completed and put into their present order, had “an allegorical or perhaps a parabolic drift,” in them, is certain, for the words quoted are Tennyson’s own.[132] Tennyson, however, complains that critics had “taken his hobby and ridden it too hard, and have explained some things too allegorically.” “The general drift of the ‘Idylls,’” he continues, “is clear enough. ‘The whole ... is the dream of man coming into practical life and ruined by one sin. Birth is a mystery and death is a mystery, and in the midst lies the tableland of life.’” Modern though this “drift” may be, it is perennial and universal enough in its appeal to save the ‘Idylls’--notwithstanding the references to the “modern gentleman” and the Prince Consort--from being a merely Victorian poem, or series of poems. They do not, together, constitute an Arthuriad: they are not meant to represent “the epic, some twelve books” with “faint Homeric echoes” which Tennyson may have been meditating in his earlier years when he published his _Morte D’Arthur_. “He produced no epic, only a series of epic idyllia. He had a spiritual conception, ‘an allegory in the distance,’ an allegory not to be insisted upon, though its presence was to be felt. No longer, as in youth, did Tennyson intend Merlin to symbolise ‘the sceptical understanding,’ or poor Guinevere to stand for the Blessed Reformation, or the Table Round for Liberal Institutions. Mercifully Tennyson never actually allegorised Arthur in that fashion.”[133]