SOURCE: "A. C. Swinburne on the Idylls," in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, edited by John D. Jump, Routledge and Kegan Paul, and Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1967, pp. 318-21.

In the excerpt that follows, which was originally published in Under the Microscope in 1872, Swinburne contends that Tennyson extirpates the tragic interest of Arthurian legend by portraying the characters in base moral terms.

. . . The enemies of Tennyson .. . are the men who find in his collection of Arthurian idyls,—the Morte d'Albert as it might perhaps be more properly called, after the princely type to which (as he tells us with just pride) the poet has been fortunate enough to make his central figure so successfully conform,—an epic poem of profound and exalted morality. Upon this moral question I shall take leave to intercalate a few words. . . . It seems to me that the moral tone of the Arthurian story has...