[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Thereat once more he moved about, and clombEven to the highest he could climb, and saw,Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,Down that long water opening on the deep72Ibid., p.1755.73Ibid., p.1756.74Markley, Stateliest Measures, p.8.75Ibid., p.8; Vance, Victorians and Ancient Rome, p.152.76Vance, Victorians and Ancient Rome, p.149. 04 Chapter 1684.qxd 19/3/09 10:43 Page 104104 Phiroze VasuniaSomewhere far off, pass on and on, and goFrom less to less and vanish into light.And the new sun rose bringing the new year.77When Bedivere throws Excalibur into the waters, on the king s instruc-tions, he signals the end of the Arthurian era, and we hear the last echoborn of a great cry that recalls the king as if he were a warrior returninghome from the war.But the speck of Arthur receding into the distance isbalanced by the new sun that rises bringing the new year.From his van-tage point, Bedivere observes a beginning as well as an end, and the poemholds out the possibility of historical succession.78Like many Victorian contemporaries who placed much value in theconcept of progress, Tennyson was trusting to the future, and specificallyto the imperial future, for deliverance from the present.It was in thistime to come, guided by the principles of a true English Christianity,that Tennyson found a haven from the turmoil of the present and fromthe crass materialism of his own people.The seeds of this prospectivemoment were being sown in his own time by the Knights of the RoundTable, now reborn as the administrators of empire, so that the Residencyat Lucknow stood, and would stand, like Horace s Rome , even thoughArthur s world was lost forever.79 A similar vision of coming events is alsooffered to Percival earlier, in the poem entitled The Holy Grail , after hemistakenly believes that he has found the Grail.In counterpoint to theruined city of Camelot, Percival sees a vision of the heavenly city, thespiritual city and all her spires/ And gateways in a glory like one pearl.80Nor is this impression of a divinely supported anticipation far removedfrom On a Mourner , written by Tennyson to mourn the early death ofhis friend Arthur Henry Hallam, where the poet recalls Faith and Virtue,like a household god/ promising empire; such as those/ Once heard atdead of night to greet/ Troy s wandering prince.81Not all critics read the Idylls as a straightforward expression of hopefor a better destiny, or at least not all found an exact correspondence withthe Aeneid on this point.In his essay of 1876, Aeneas: A Vergilian Study ,John Richard Green accepted that the Aeneid was throughout a song of77Poems of Tennyson, p.1754.78Vance, Victorians and Ancient Rome, p.150.79Kiernan, Tennyson, King Arthur, and Imperialism , p.145.80 The Holy Grail , ll.524 32 in Poems of Tennyson, pp.1676 7; see Vance, Victorians andAncient Rome, p.151.81Poems of Tennyson, p.559. 04 Chapter 1684.qxd 19/3/09 10:43 Page 105VIRGIL AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE, 1760 1880 105Rome and read it as a song of the future rather than of the present orpast, a song not of pride but of duty.82 Green directed his readers to thetemporal situation of the hero when he remarked that Aeneas is thereflection of a time out of joint , by which he meant that good Romansof the Augustan era found it hard to reconcile their own sense of moral-ity and rightness with the violent experiences of the civil wars andOctavian s rise to power.83 No doubt because of Tennyson s success withhis own poem, the author notably also compared Aeneas with Arthur, forhe declared that Aeneas is the Arthur of the Vergilian epic.84 But forGreen the two poems offered different dreams of the future:We close it [i.e.the Aeneid] as we close the Idylls with the King s mournful cryin our ears.But the Roman stoicism is of harder and manlier stuff than thechivalrous spiritualism of Arthur.The ideal of the old world is of nobler,sterner tone than the ideal of the new.Even with death and ruin around him,and the mystery of the world darkening his soul, man remains man and masterof his fate.The suffering and woe of the individual find amends in the greatnessand welfare of the race.We pity the wandering of Aeneas, but his wanderingsfound the city.The dream of Arthur vanishes as the dark boat dies into a dotupon the mere; the dream of Aeneas becomes Rome.85In Green s interpretation, the Aeneid recognises that its hero s dream willbe realised in due course, whereas Idylls of the King leaves the reader withno optimistic ending since Arthur s boat vanishes into the mist and light.Even if Green s reading leaves out important details from both poems, hisanalysis underlines the point that for many Victorians the Aeneid wasclearly a providential poem in which the fate of the city was proclaimedby the gods to Aeneas.Tennyson s inventive refashioning of Virgil in Idylls of the King iden-tified two important strains in the Victorian engagement with the Latinpoet: the first was religious, as signified by the quest for the Holy Grail,and the second, temporal, as signified by the last line of the Passing ofArthur.Both these features of the Virgilian reception were considered byFrederic William Henry Myers, the writer and psychical researcher.As ayoung man in Cambridge, Myers had submitted an entry for the Camdenmedal in which he included lines from prize-winning Latin compositionswritten by others in Oxford.Although he said he was only following82John Richard Green, Aeneas: A Vergilian Study , in Stray Studies from England and Italy(London, 1876), pp.257 86, at pp.260, 261.83Ibid., p.284.84Ibid., p.265.85Ibid., p.286. 04 Chapter 1684.qxd 19/3/09 10:43 Page 106106 Phiroze VasuniaVirgil s practice, and even quoted the passage in Donatus Life whereVirgil proclaims, I am collecting gold from Ennius dung (aurum colligoe stercore Ennii), he got into trouble over the copied lines and had toresign the prize.86 However, the early scandal did not prevent him fromwriting what the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica wouldrefer to as the most famous English essay on Virgil
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]