The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

In the days of Chivalry, whose spirit, I trust, still lingers with us, though its forms may have passed away, the prelude to a peaceful tournament, or joute de plaisance, was the salutation of each other by the combatants. In the pages which follow an effort will be made in some degree to dislodge Mr. Swinburne from that seat of critical judgment which he occupies with such gallant confidence, with such waving of plume and such clashing of shield. But before the lists are opened, let me salute, with something more than ceremonial courtesy, the exquisite lyrical genius of the poet, and the solid accomplishments of the scholar. That premised, I will, without further preliminary, betake me to my task.

In the latest number of one of the ablest of monthly reviews, Mr. Swinburne, enlarging on a passage, rather cursory and incidental than definitive or judicial, inserted by M. Taine at the close of his brilliant survey of English poetry, institutes a comparison between Mr. Tennyson and Alfred de Musset. With Mr. Swinburne’s opening remark every one must agree. It is distinctive of this age, he says, that the greatest of the great writers who were born about the opening of the century, are still working with splendid persistence. It was affirmed by Menander that those the gods love die young. Is it because the gods themselves are dead, that the heavenly favourites are nowadays permitted to exceed even the scriptural span of life? Be this as it may, to Mr. Tennyson, with peculiar aptness, may be addressed the lines of Wordsworth, inspired by a very different personage:

Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,Nor leave thee when gray hairs are nigh,A melancholy slave;But an old age serene and bright,And lovely as a Lapland night,Shall lead thee to thy grave.

More appropriate still perhaps, for the moment, would be an excerpt from Alfred de Musset himself, whom the gods loved not well enough either to cut off in the flower of his youth, or to leave hanging till he had achieved maturity. Mr. Swinburne, no doubt, knows the lines by heart:

Mais comment fais-tu donc, vieux maîtrePour renaître?Car tes vers, en dépit du temps,Ont vingt ans.Si jamais ta tête qui pencheDevient blanche,Ce sera comme l’amandier,Cher Nodier:Ce qui le blanchit n’est pas l’âge,Ni l’orage;C’est la fraîche rosée en pleursDans les fleurs.

To this survival of power in Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne pays homage after his fashion. Who could possibly withhold it? The “Revenge,” The Battle of Lucknow, and most of all Rizpah, show that, even as in the days of Locksley Hall, ancient founts of inspiration well through Mr. Tennyson’s fancy yet; serving to remind us that Nature rejoices in the occasional violation of her own laws, that roses are not altogether unknown in November, and that even when the snowdrop whitens the ground, the lark will sometimes carol up to heaven.

To the wedded strength and sadness in Rizpah Mr. Swinburne offers ample testimony, and this is how he does it:

Nothing more piteous, more passionate, more adorable for intensity of beauty, was ever before this wrought by human cunning into the likeness of such words, as words are powerless to praise. Any possible commentary on a poem of this rank must needs be as weak and worthless as the priceless thing which evoked it is beautiful and strong.

I confess I am disposed to feel that this is so. But Mr. Swinburne, disregarding his candid avowal of what is worthless, proceeds with the commentary:

But one which should attempt by selection or indication to underline, as it were, and to denote the chiefest among its manifold beauties and glories, would be also as long and as wordy as the poem is short and reticent. Once or twice in reading it a man may feel, and may know himself to be none the unmanlier for feeling, as though the very heart in him cried out for agony of pity, and hardly the flesh could endure the burden and the strain of it, the burning bitterness of so keen and divine a draught. A woman might weep it away and be “all right” again – but a man born of woman can hardly be expected to bear the pity of it.

There is more to the same effect; indeed two whole pages, in the course of which we are assured that “never assuredly has any poor penman of the humblest order been more inwardly conscious of such impotence in words to sustain the weight of their intention than am I at this moment of my inability to cast into any shape of articulate speech, the impression and the emotion produced by the first reading of Tennyson’s Rizpah”; that “the poet never lived on earth whose glory would not be heightened by the attribution of this poem to his hand”; that any one who hesitated to affirm as much must be “either cancerous with malevolence or paralytic with stupidity”; that now at least “there must be an end for ever on all hands to the once debatable question whether the author can properly be called in the strictest sense a great poet”; and, finally, that “there must be an end for ever, and a day beyond at least, of a question which once was even more hotly debatable than this, the long-contested question of poetic precedence between Alfred Tennyson and Alfred de Musset.”

To all who, like myself, admire Rizpah vastly, and who never doubted that Mr. Tennyson was a larger poet than Alfred de Musset, the above is, in a sense, consolatory. But I confess that, even when first perusing it, and not having yet reached what follows, the note of panegyric struck me as strained, not to say forced, and I had an uncomfortable sort of feeling that somebody would have to pay the expense of this prodigal eulogium. To borrow a line Mr. Swinburne himself quotes:

Cette promotion me laisse un peu rêveur.

Even when Mr. Swinburne praises, and no one praises more liberally, I do not know how it strikes other people, but he always gives me the idea that he is directing his panegyric at somebody who is not being panegyrised; in other words, that he is, to say the least, as much bent upon scarifying some one who is not mentioned, as on complimenting the person who is. Even in the passage just reproduced, with the chant over the glories of Mr. Tennyson, is mingled a gibe at “wandering apes” and “casual mules.” This, I say, put me upon my guard. “Is it conceivable,” I said to myself, “that Rizpah, fine, forcible, and effective as it is, should cause all this difference in a man’s estimate of Mr. Tennyson as a poet? Is it possible that any Englishman at least, should have had to wait till this time of day to discover that ‘any comparison of claims between the two men must be unprofitable in itself, as well as unfair to the memory of the lesser poet’?” Finally, and to speak my whole mind with perfect candour, it struck me that, splendid of its kind as Rizpah undoubtedly is, there is surely some exaggeration in saying, “If this be not great work, no great work was ever, or will ever be done in verse by any human hand”; and that Mr. Tennyson himself has not unfrequently done work fully as good as it, and, me judice, even better.

One had not to read much farther to discern that these misgivings were well founded. Somebody indeed had to pay for all the lavish praise of Rizpah, and it was the author of Rizpah himself. I felt sure I should come to the other side of the shield, the obverse hollows of all this embossed, and, if I may be permitted to say so, somewhat turgid appreciation; and come to it I did.

There are whole poems of Mr. Tennyson’s first period which are no more properly to be called metrical than the more shapeless and monstrous parts of Walt Whitman, which are lineally derived as to their form – if form that can be called where form is none – from the vilest example set by Cowley, when English verse was first infected and convulsed by the detestable duncery of sham Pindarics. At times, of course, his song was then as sweet as ever it has sounded since; but he never could make sure of singing right for more than a few minutes or stanzas. The strenuous drill through which since then he has felt it necessary to put himself, has done all that hard labour can do to rectify this congenital complaint: by dint of stocks and backboard he has taught himself a more graceful carriage… It may be the highest imaginable sign of poetic power or native inspiration that a man should be able to grind a beauty out of a deformity or carve a defect into a perfection; but whatever may be the comparative worth of this peculiar faculty, no poet surely ever had it in a higher degree or cultivated it with more patient and strenuous industry than Mr. Tennyson. Idler men, or men less qualified, and disposed to expend such length of time and energy of patience on the composition and modification, the rearrangement and recision and re-issue, of a single verse or copy of verses, can only look on at such a course of labour with amused or admiring astonishment, and a certain doubt whether the linnets, to whose method of singing Mr. Tennyson compares his own, do really go through the training of such a musical gymnasium before they come forth qualified to sing.

Everybody has heard of the operation described by Pope as “damning with faint praise.” But damning with exaggerated praise is a new invention, and it is employed in Mr. Swinburne’s paper, doubtless unintentionally, but with striking effect. As we shall see directly, it is not only on what Mr. Swinburne calls “the crowning question of metre,” that Mr. Tennyson is assigned a comparatively inferior place, but he is arraigned for his low estimate of women, for his sympathy with princes, and for various other crimes and misdemeanours. To say of Rizpah, “never since the beginning of all poetry were the twin passions of terror and pity more divinely done into deathless words, or set to more perfect and profound magnificence of music,” seems a poor set-off to the reproaches just cited, and still more to those that have yet to be set forth. There is no fear that any one – and Mr. Tennyson himself, I should think, least of all – will place Rizpah quite in the same category with Œdipus or Lear. But there is perhaps some little danger lest the inadvertent should believe, on Mr. Swinburne’s authority, that Mr. Tennyson hits and maintains the right note only after the same sad drudgery and pain by dint of which we are told – with about equal accuracy – poor Malibran was taught to sing. It is said that women of not very generous temperament will go out of their way to insist that a beautiful slattern dresses admirably, in order to be in a position plausibly to challenge her beauty. I am sure Mr. Swinburne is not purposely ungenerous; but in first extolling Mr. Tennyson to the skies for his poem of Rizpah, and then decrying him almost below the ground for his defective ear, for his base estimate of women, and for his adulation of princes, he reminds me of the fable of the eagle who bore the tortoise aloft into heaven, and then let it fall to earth, in the hope of smashing its shell, and dining off the contents. If I remember rightly, the shell did not break after all, and the bird had to flap away as hungry as ever. In any case, after reading first the extravagant laudation, and then the yet more extreme obloquy contained in Mr. Swinburne’s paper, I think everybody will agree that, to quote a line with which doubtless he is familiar, Mr. Tennyson deserved:

Ni cet excès d’honneur ni cette indignité.

What is the full measure of “cette indignité” will be seen by and by. But before passing to the other reproaches addressed by Mr. Swinburne to the Laureate, I should like to be allowed to say something about this question of singing, of ear, of what Mr. Swinburne calls “the crowning question of metre.” It is not the first time Mr. Swinburne has assumed that he possesses infallible authority upon this point. Now he must forgive me for remarking that though musicalness is unquestionably the most noticeable mark, and the most delightful quality, of his own verse, it is, for the most part, music of a particular kind. It is of the florid order, rather than of the stately; it is lyrical and Lydian, well calculated to soothe or to carry along, and sometimes enjoying the Lethean faculty of making those who read it forget to ask what it means, or indeed if it means anything very substantial. I will not say that Mr. Swinburne has adopted the principle, “Take care of the sound, and the sense will take care of itself.” But he not unfrequently reminds one of this facile theory, and some of his imitators have adopted it without reserve. I cannot say whether the story is accurate; but I remember being told that, on hearing a poem of Mr. Swinburne’s read aloud, Mr. Tennyson quietly quoted a line of his own from The Lotos-Eaters:

Like a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.

I should be as unfair to Mr. Swinburne as Mr. Swinburne is to Mr. Tennyson, if I hinted that he has not done much work to which the above verse is altogether inapplicable. But he is at once the poet, the prophet, and the critic of what I may call, par excellence, the Lyrical School; and his idea of singing, his standard of ear, his touchstone of “the crowning question of metre,” is associated with the great triumphs of lyricism pure and simple.

Now I trust I am not insensible to the exquisite melody, the delicious dactyls of Shelley, of De Musset, and, I will add, of Mr. Swinburne himself. But the Lyricists pure and simple – and certainly, as far as verse is concerned, De Musset never became anything else – are, after all, the flentes in limine primo. They are children, or at most they are boys. Every poet, no doubt, should pass through that preliminary stage; but he should not stay there. There should come a time when the puerile voice changes, and henceforward is recognised as masculine. It should acquire a passionate composure, and like the spirit that informs it, should be, not only spacious as the air, not only soaring and circumambient as the sky, but deep and sonorous as the sea. De Musset, as Mr. Swinburne half allows, never underwent this solemn transformation; and it is perhaps, on that very account, that all of us find him, within limits, so irresistibly attractive. He is the poet of the transitional period between boyhood and manhood.

Mes premiers vers sont d’un enfant,Les seconds, d’un adolescent.

He never got beyond the sweet sick springtime of the soul, when it searches for what it is never to find, when it strains towards what it never can clutch, when the “flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of the birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell,” and the whole want and utterance of the heart is embodied in the cry, “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away!” He who has not “passé par là” will never be much of a poet; but he who does not pass beyond it, will never be a great one. Yet this season of the “Song of Songs” is the eternal quest of the young, the eternal regret of the old. Nothing can superannuate its charm, nothing can quench its fascination. At the climax of his strength and his fame, Byron could not help exclaiming, “The days of our youth are the days of our glory,” and M. Taine was doubtless under the spell of this periodically recurring sentiment, this irresistible return, ever and anon, to one’s first love, when, for a brief moment, flinging sober criticism and just judgment to the winds, he asked if it is not pardonable to prefer the author of Les Nuits to the author of the Idylls.

Just one word more about “singing.” Speaking of the earlier poems of De Musset, Mr. Swinburne observes: “Of all thin and shallow criticisms, none ever was shallower or thinner than that which would describe these firstlings of Musset’s genius as mere Byronic echoes.” True enough. But, he goes on to say, “in that case they would be tuneless as their original, whereas they are the notes of a singer who cannot but sing.”

This is not the first time we have been treated to this opinion. Once before Mr. Swinburne has spoken of Byron as a singer who could not sing. I ventured to reply, at the time, that he was a singer who could not or would not shriek. It is necessary to repeat the protest. No doubt Byron shows, as a rule, rather volume of voice than flexibility; and from a determination not to resemble excellent models, but to strike out a line for himself – a passion for pseudo-originality, from which lesser poets that could be named, since his time, have likewise suffered – his blank verse is generally detestable. But Shelley did not find out that Byron could not sing; neither did Scott, nor Goethe, nor Lamartine, nor Pushkin, nor Leopardi, nor De Musset himself. He speaks of the “chant” of Byron as that of “un cygne,” and compares the echo of his song to “le torrent dans la verte vallée.” Mr. Swinburne’s discovery is strictly his own, and I should advise him not to press it. Indeed it would not be difficult to dispose of it by the method of reasoning familiarly known as a reductio ad absurdum. Mr. Swinburne affirms that the question of metre is the crowning question, in other words, that the greatest poets are the most musical, and most people would be disposed to agree with the dictum, if the question what music is were first satisfactorily settled. But Mr. Swinburne will have it that Byron cannot sing, whereas it is quite certain that Mr. Swinburne can. Therefore Mr. Swinburne is a greater poet than Byron: which, everybody will allow, is absurd. Q.E.D.

I daresay larks do not find much music in the thunder. But they have the sense to be silent when they hear the roll of that untrembling diapason that makes all things tremble.

To speak the plain truth, we are threatened, just at present, with too much of what Mr. Swinburne means by “singing.” Does he not remember the following passage in the Fourth Book of Paradise Regained? —

There shalt thou hear and learn the secret powerOf harmony, in tones and numbers hitBy voice or hand, and various-measured verse,Æolian charms and Dorian lyric odes,And his who gave them birth, but higher sung,Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called.

Milton goes on to speak of “the lofty grave tragedians” who employed “chorus or iambic,”

High actions and high passions best describing.

Sheer lyricism just now is overmuch the mode. It is all very nice and pleasant in its way, and within bounds, but one can have too much of a good thing, and one does not want poetry to become vox et præterea nihil. It is a fashion, doubtless, that will pass. If it does not, I fear people will begin to say of poetry what some one said of operatic music, Ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d’être dit on le chante, and we shall require a Wagner in literature to denounce the meaningless fioriture of musical bards bent on recalling the most irrelevant flourishes of Donizetti. Mr. Tennyson never does, and has never done, that.

The assertion that Mr. Tennyson was born with an inaptitude for musical verse, though I conceive it to be very wide of the mark, I can at least understand. It is made intelligible by remembering the limits Mr. Swinburne assigns to music, and the characteristic preference he exhibits, in his own writings, for certain forms of it. But when we are told that “among all poems of serious pretensions in that line … this latest epic of King Arthur took the very lowest view of virtue, set up the very poorest and most pitiful standard of duty, or of heroism for woman or for man,” I own I feel as much perplexity as surprise. Perhaps the solution of the riddle might be got at by again resorting to the process just employed, and by inquiring what is Mr. Swinburne’s own standard of duty or heroism for woman or for man, and informing ourselves through a diligent reperusal of his poems, and of those writers whose productions he has the loudest extolled, what it is he and they consider men and women ought mainly to feel, and what it is they ought mainly to occupy themselves with. But such a course might be invidious. Happily, moreover, it is unnecessary. It is enough to bring Mr. Tennyson’s men and women into court, to let men and women be the jury, and to read over to them the following indictment:

I cannot say that Mr. Tennyson’s life-long tone about women and their shortcomings has ever commended itself to my poor mind as the note of a very pure or high one. There is always a latent, if not a patent propensity in many of his very lovers, to scold and whine after a fashion which makes even Alfred de Musset seem by comparison a model or a type of manliness. His Enids and Edith Aylmers are much below the ideal mark of Wordsworth, who has never, I believe, been considered a specially great master in that kind; but his “little Letties” were apparently made mean and thin of nature to match their pitifully poor-spirited suitors! It cannot respectfully be supposed that Mr. Tennyson is unaware of the paltry currishness and mean-spirited malice displayed in verse too dainty for such base uses by the plaintively spiteful manikins with the thinnest whey of sour milk in their poor fretful veins, whom he brings forward to vent upon some fickle or too discerning mistress the vain and languid venom of their contemptible contempt.

What does it mean? Several years ago I ventured to express the opinion that Mr. Tennyson’s was rather a feminine than a masculine Muse, borrowing, naturally enough, its idiosyncrasy from the period when it was most susceptible to surrounding influences. One or two persons of far higher critical authority than I can pretend to, told me I had struck a true note, and to the opinion then advanced, I am still disposed in substance to adhere. But I seize this opportunity to say that I have long perceived that the opinion was advanced with exaggeration, and somewhat unbecomingly; that the essay in which it appeared has for a considerable time been out of print, and will never with the author’s consent be republished; and finally that it would never have appeared at all but for a circumstance which it would be disagreeable, because egotistical, to explain explicitly, but which perhaps many will at once understand, if I quote the following lines of De Musset to Sainte-Beuve:

Ami, tu l’as bien dit: …······“Il existe, en un mot, chez les trois quarts des hommes,Un poëte mort jeune à qui l’homme survit,”Tu l’as bien dit, ami, mais tu l’as trop bien dit.Tu ne prenais pas garde, en traçant ta pensée······que tu blasphémais …… Je te rends à ta Muse offensée,Et souviens-toi qu’en nous il existe souventUn poète endormi toujours jeune et vivant.

But it is precisely because there is so much of the feminine quality in Mr. Tennyson’s Muse, that his Muse is beloved of women, and is attractive to all men to whom women are attractive. How often has it happened to one to ask “What shall I read?” and to get for answer “Tennyson.” And though one might be almost angry because neither Shakespeare, nor Milton, nor Byron, nor Wordsworth, could get a hearing, so it was, and femme le veut Dieu le veut. He is the poet of their predilection; and if it were true that his women are not “very pure or high,” it would seem to follow that the women in flesh and blood who love to read of them, are themselves not very high or pure. Is not that another reductio ad absurdum? I confess I never knew them ask any one to read Vivien. They prefer Elaine, and Guinevere. Yet Vivien is a masterpiece, and that “harlot,” as Mr. Tennyson very properly does not shrink from calling her, is the consummate poetic type of women with very little poetry about them. But the blameless love of Elaine, and the pardonable passion of Guinevere, are, to say the least of it, equally emblematic; and I confess I should find myself so different in blood, in language, in race, in instinct, in everything, from the man who told me that he found the one mean and low, or the other poor, pitiful and base, that, as I have declared, I should not understand him.

On two points, I imagine, most men, on consideration, would agree with Mr. Swinburne. The Idylls of the King, are Idylls of the King, and not an epic poem, nor indeed one poem of any kind. I am not aware that Mr. Tennyson has ever said or suggested the contrary; and no man is responsible for the extravagances of his less discreet or too generous admirers. I suspect Mr. Tennyson would consider the terms Mr. Swinburne himself applies to Rizpah as a trifle uncritical. The other point of agreement they would have with Mr. Swinburne is that King Arthur, in the Idylls, is not an adequate and satisfactory hero. But heroes from time immemorial have had a knack of breaking in the hands of their creator. The “pius Æneas” is not worthy of his vicissitudes, his mission, and his fate, or of the splendid verse in which his name is forever embalmed. Milton assuredly did not intend to make Lucifer his hero; but the ruined Archangel dwarfs into insignificance all other personages in Paradise Lost, human, divine, or infernal. From Childe Harold, Childe Harold all but disappears; and I suspect it is only by aid of the drama that a writer is able to say successfully, “Behold a man!”