The Beast with the Broken Lance: Humanism and Posthumanism in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King

In “The Epic,” the poem that frames Tennyson’s 1842 “Morte d’Arthur,” the fictional poet Everard Hall justifies burning his twelve-book Arthurian epic by invoking another extinct, prehistoric creature:

Why take the style of those heroic times?For nature brings not back the Mastodon,Nor we those times; and why should any manRemodel models?

(ll. 35–38).¹

The poet is, of course, an avatar for Tennyson himself, and the analogy he makes between “those heroic times” and “the Mastodon” tells us a few important things about Idylls of the King, the twelve-book opus that would evolve out of “Morte d’Arthur” over the course of several decades. It tells us first that Tennyson was worried about genre, about the anachronism of writing an Arthurian epic for a Victorian public—an anxiety that still plagued him in 1858, when he wrote a letter urging his publishers to “disabuse your own minds and those of others, as far as you can, of the fancy that I am about an Epic of King Arthur. I should be crazed to attempt such a thing in the heart of the 19th century.”² But it also tells us, more compellingly, that he was worried about the Mastodon, and what it represents metonymically—about the potential futility of writing in a genre that asserts an anthropocentric cosmology when paleontology, evolutionary theory, and other scientific discourses were busy revealing just how far the universe extended beyond the scope of the human. Arthurian legend assumes a Christian time-scale, beginning with Creation and ending with the Last Day; man is always present, and prehistory—with which Idylls begins—is simply the chaotic time before Arthur’s reign. As John D. Rosenberg points out, however, Idylls “was written during a period when . . . geology and then evolution pushed back the origins of things from the imagined instant of Creation to unimaginably remote beginnings; and the imminent Last Day opened out upon eonian cycles of days without end.”³ The Mastodon reference suggests that Tennyson was less anxious about the anachronism of the poem’s style than about the obsolescence of its worldview. Why should he “remodel” an “old model” of the universe when a new model looms so monstrously large? The interlineal juxtaposition between capital-M “Mastodon” and lower-case “man” implies an even more pointed and destabilizing question: Why write in a form that celebrates human achievement when discoveries like the Mastodon have rendered the human so seemingly insignificant?

And yet, Tennyson did not end up burning his twelve-book epic; he completed it, and completed it with a capstone, moreover, that suggests that this tension between cosmological “models”—and by extension, models of Man—was something that dynamized his poetic project rather than endangering it. In 1891, half a dozen years after Idylls was published in its final, twelve-book form, the poet added one last line to the epilogue that recalls—without quite resolving—the “man” vs. “Mastodon” conflict he expressed in 1842. Feeling, as his son reports, “that perhaps he had not made the real humanity of the King sufficiently clear,”⁴ Tennyson inserted a new formulation to describe Arthur once and for all: “Ideal manhood closed in real man” (“To the Queen,” l. 38). What is “ideal manhood,” what is “real man,” and how might the relationship between the two of them constitute a “clear” picture of the King’s humanity—or humanity in general? The rest of the poem furnishes several possible answers: in a moral sense, Arthur is the figure of “ideal manhood” because he is the one man of unyielding principle surrounded by so many figures—both within and outside the Round Table—of criminality and corruption; in a more dualistic sense, the poem suggests that the “enclosure” is happening within Arthur, with the “ideal manhood” of his immortal soul trapped within the “real man” of his body. And yet, the appeal that occurs right before Tennyson’s final addition juxtaposes “Soul” not with body, but with “Sense”: “Accept this old imperfect tale,” the poet...