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Peter G. Epps19
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-C Arthurian Long Verse (Independent Study)Critical EssayDr. James Barcus5/14/07
Beyond the Ideal:Arthur’s Recuperative Moment in “The Passing of Arthur” 406-432
 Arthur has had, by any account, a very bad few weeks by the end of Tennyson’s
 Idylls of the King
. In some senses, all of 
 Idylls
has been about Arthur’s “passing” fromthe beginning; the poem begins when Arthur’s knights have already won him thekingship, and his first action is to send away for a Queen to legitimize his rule; thatlegitimacy, however, is suspect on the very grounds it seeks in ways that a frank appeal tothe beneficence of his use of force—an acknowledged economy of violence—might nothave been. Arthur arrives at his “Passing,” therefore, reft of legitimacy and power alike;having based his claim to legitimacy on they symbolism of his marriage and the idealismof knightly vows which only gods could keep, he has spent the capital of consensus andviolence alike, and is subject to the depradations of infamy, infidelity, and nakedaggression. Arthur attempts to vindicate himself in many ways, but his infidelity byvirtue of having vowed and demanded what is not really possible leaves him bereft and“clouded with a doubt” (426) about even the most basic elements of his
mythos
; only inone passage, in a clear break with his own idealism, does Arthur manage to suggest toBedivere—the only protagonist to survive the poem—a way to move beyond the failureof Arthur’s authority.The context of the passage is familiar; Arthur has been mortally wounded inslaying Modred in his last battle, and lies waiting while Bedivere disposes of Excalibur
 
EPPS -- 2and reports the approach of the mystical maidens from Avilion, who may or may not befulfilling the prophecy Merlin may or may not have truthfully intended as describingArthur’s immortality. Arthur begins his last speech with words first spoken to the oldLords from Rome at his wedding: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new” (408).While this figures very similarly to the cyclical progressivism of Tennyson’s
 In Memoriam A. H. H.
, it is perhaps less fully-formed than that, even as it also echoes verysimilarly themed material in Keats’
The Fall of Hyperion
.Within “The Passing of Arthur,” in fact, this language is part of a defective anduncertain eschatology: Arthur suggests earlier that all seems to himAs if some lesser god had made the world,But had not force to shape it as he would,Till the High God behold it from beyond,And enter it, and make it beautiful?Or else as if the world were wholly fair,But that these eyes of men are dense and dim,And have not power to see it as it is:Perchance, because we see not to the close (14-21)Arthur is, in fact, announcing something very similar to Nietzsche’s desire for a NewMan to replace the Last Men of modernity; and still more similar to Heidegger’sconception of humanity, particularly poets, as waiting for a God to arrive, living (in latemodernity) in the “default of God.” Of course, for Arthur all of this is couched in acomplaint—yet the frustration of all such eschatological visions by mortality is profferedas a live possibility, drawing together both possible explanations for the “Sense at war
 
EPPS -- 3with Soul” that Arthur so personally experiences, as Tennyson’s “shadow” figure. In theIndian thought Tennyson studied, of course, the incompatibility of these two explanationswould be no problem; their arriving at the same point (the invalidation of all humanperceptions by the fact of mortality) would be sufficient evidence of their “truth.” For theVictorian Englishman Tennyson, as for the Christian king Arthur, however, such mutualexclusivity cannot be untroubling. If “High God” were the eschatological worker of thegood that “some lesser god,” Plato’s Demiurge, had failed to form, then in Arthur’s time(as in Tennyson’s, or the reader’s) it could not yet be the case that “the world [is] whollyfair.” Similarly, if the world is, in fact, wholly fair, then the problem is not that “we seenot to the close,” that is, not that humanity fails to understand the end; rather, the problemmust already be inherent in perception of past and present.Arthur’s defective eschatology is, in large part, the cause of his dubietyapproaching death. The language “God fulfills himself in many ways, / Lest one goodcustom should corrupt the world” (409-10) sounds more resolved on a brief reading thanclose attention can sustain. In the context of the defeat of his ideal goals, his dreams of perfection, it is challenging to see what alternative Arthur acknowledges by “manyways”; if he includes Modred’s evil and the infidelity of Lancelot and Guinevere, then headmits his lack of authority in condemning them; if he does not, it is unclear what “ways”he might have in view. Again, it is only by invoking the difference between “good” and“perfect” that it is possible to see how a “good custom” could “corrupt the world”; byadmitting that his good was not the perfect he set it forth as, though—that it was a realgood, but not ideal goodness—Arthur confesses the invalidity of the pretensions whichhave led from “The Coming of Arthur” to “The Passing of Arthur.”
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