Tennyson's leonine head realises the ideal of a great poet. And he reigned nearly as long as his royal mistress. The longevity and unimpaired freshness of the great Victorians has no parallel in history, except in ancient Greece. The great Attic tragedians lived as long as Tennyson and Browning; the Greek philosophers reached as great ages as Victorian theologians; but if you look at the dates in other flowering times of literature you will find that the life of a man of genius is usually short, and his period of production very short indeed. Tennyson is now depreciated for several reasons. His technique as a writer of verse was quite perfect; our newest poets prefer to write verses which will not even scan. He wrote beautifully about beautiful things, and among beautiful things he included beautiful conduct. He thought it an ugly and disgraceful thing for a wife to be unfaithful to her husband, and condemned Guinevere and Lancelot as any sound moralist would condemn them. A generation which will not buy a novel unless it contains some scabrous story of adultery, and revels in the 'realism' of the man with a muck-rake, naturally 'has no use for' the _Idylls of the King_, and calls Arthur the blameless prig. The reaction against Tennyson has culminated in abuse of the Idylls, in which the present generation finds all that it most dislikes in the Victorian mind. Modern research has unburied the unsavoury story that Modred was the illegitimate son of Arthur by his own half-sister, and blames Tennyson for not treating the whole story as an Oedipus-legend. In reality, Malory does not so treat it. He admits the story, but depicts Arthur as the flower of kinghood, 'Rex quondam rexque futurus.' Tennyson, however, was not bound to follow Malory. He has followed other and still greater models, Spenser and Milton. He has given us an allegorical epic, as he explains in his Epilogue to the Queen: Accept this old imperfect tale, New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul, Ideal manhood closed in real man Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost, Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak, And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him Of Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's. The whole poem is an allegory. Camelot is Never built at all, And therefore built for ever. 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.