[This paper appeared inMacmillan’s Magazinea quarter of a century ago, in reply to one that had been published in the same periodical in the previous month.]
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, orjoute 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. Itwas 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 ofLucknow, and most of allRizpah, show that, even as in the days ofLocksley 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 inRizpahMr. 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.
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.
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 humblestorder 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’sRizpah”; 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, admireRizpahvastly, 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 panegyricatsomebody who is not beingpanegyrised; 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, “thatRizpah, 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 asRizpahundoubtedly 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 ofRizpah, and it was the author ofRizpahhimself. 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 calledwhere 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.
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 calledwhere 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 ofRizpah, “never since the beginning of all poetry were the twin passions of terrorand 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 placeRizpahquite in the same category withŒdipusorLear. 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 ofRizpah, 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 beseen 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 fromThe 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, theflentes 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 passbeyond 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 ofLes Nuitsto the author of theIdylls.
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 areductio 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 ofParadise 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 becomevox 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 meaninglessfioritureof 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 isenough 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.
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 neverhave 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, andfemme 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 anotherreductio ad absurdum? I confess I never knew them ask any one to readVivien. They preferElaine, andGuinevere. YetVivienis 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 theblameless 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,areIdylls of the King, and not an epic poem, nor indeedonepoem 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 toRizpahas a trifle uncritical. The other point of agreement they would have with Mr. Swinburne is that King Arthur, in theIdylls, 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 inParadise Lost, human, divine, or infernal. FromChilde 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!”
I think Mr. Swinburne will perceive that, though my lights may be less than his, I am sincerely anxious to get at the truth, and that my object is neither to provoke nor to propitiate, neither to extol nor to decry.But what can I or any one say, in sufficient moderation, respecting the following passage?—
“But,” says the Laureate, “it is not Malory’s King Arthur, nor yet Geoffrey’s King Arthur, that I have desired to reproduce: on the contrary, it is ‘scarcely other than’ Prince Albert” ... who, if neither a wholly gigantic nor altogether a divine personage, was, at least, one would imagine, a human figure.... This fact, it would seem, was revealed to Mr. Tennyson himself, of all men on earth, by some freak of the same humorous or malicious fairy who disclosed to him the not less amusing truth, and induced him to publish it, with a face of unmoved gravity, to the nation and the world, that whenever he said King Arthur he meant Prince Albert. No satirist could have ventured on either stroke of sarcasm.... Not as yet had the blameless Albert, at the bidding of his Merlin Palmerston, led forth—we will not say his Guinevere—to clasp the thievish hand of a then uncrowned assassin.
“But,” says the Laureate, “it is not Malory’s King Arthur, nor yet Geoffrey’s King Arthur, that I have desired to reproduce: on the contrary, it is ‘scarcely other than’ Prince Albert” ... who, if neither a wholly gigantic nor altogether a divine personage, was, at least, one would imagine, a human figure.... This fact, it would seem, was revealed to Mr. Tennyson himself, of all men on earth, by some freak of the same humorous or malicious fairy who disclosed to him the not less amusing truth, and induced him to publish it, with a face of unmoved gravity, to the nation and the world, that whenever he said King Arthur he meant Prince Albert. No satirist could have ventured on either stroke of sarcasm.... Not as yet had the blameless Albert, at the bidding of his Merlin Palmerston, led forth—we will not say his Guinevere—to clasp the thievish hand of a then uncrowned assassin.
I said, a little while back, that I would not accuse Mr. Swinburne of intentional want of generosity. Yet I am compelled to aver that a more ungenerous passage than the above I never read; and it would seem still more ungenerous were it to be quoted from more freely. Mr. Swinburne has not the excuse that might be pleaded by a critic who was stupid. He is a poet, and he knows what fine, delicate, subtle analogies are as well as any one. Thereisa striking resemblance between the nobler qualities of Mr. Tennyson’s “ideal knight” and those of the late Prince Consort, and it was a true and fresh stroke of poetry to associate them as Mr. Tennyson has done. But is it true, or fair, or “manly,” to assert that the poet wished the one to be entirely identified with the other, much more that when he mentions the one he means the other? I fear some people will conclude that the above unmagnanimous passage was dictated by Mr. Swinburne’s hatred of princes; andless indulgent persons will add, by his want of love for Mr. Tennyson.
Now, to my thinking, the most loathsome of all characters is a sycophant. Perhaps I am more comprehensive in my contempt for that tribe even than Mr. Swinburne himself; for I hold in equal disdain the flatterers of princes and the flatterers of the people. The folly, the feebleness, and the fury of kings is to be matched only by the feebleness, the folly, and the fury of crowds. Sensible men entertain a careful distrust of each, and devise and maintain every possible barrier against the selfish vagaries of both alike. It is the rare distinction of Prince Albert that he imposed upon himself those checks which most men require to have imposed upon them by others, and against which, whether proceeding from within or from without, princes usually rebel. When we are shown ademosas wise, as patriotic, as conscientious, and as capable of self-abnegation, as Prince Albert, the time will have come for an honest man to chant its virtues, and we shall be able to look forward to the future of our race with more hopeful feelings than are at present possible to a sane philanthropy.
Sycophants, therefore, can dance attendance on the Many as easily and as mischievously as on the One; and of all the unmeasured adulators of the multitude I know no one to compare with the poet before whom Mr. Swinburne is perpetually prostrating himself, and before whom he bows and bobs and genuflects an almost countless number of times in the course of the paper on which I am commenting—to wit, M. Victor Hugo.
I have no wish to assail any man of letters, be his foibles what they may. But when Mr. Swinburne girds at both De Musset and Mr. Tennyson for having writtencivilly of princes, and observes that “poeticules love princelings as naturally as poets abhor tyrants,” it is perhaps pertinent to ask him if he is aware that the first verses of M. Victor Hugo were passionately Royalist; that the refrain of one of his early poems is “Vive le Roi! Vive la France!” that he celebrated the Duc d’Angoulême as “the greatest of warriors”; that he mourned the death of Louis XVIII. with loyal pathos; that he wrote a tragedy whose last line was “Quand on haït les tyrans, on doit aimer les rois”; that the first patron of the author ofOdes et Poésies Diverseswas a king, who gave M. Victor Hugo a pension of a thousand francs out of his privy purse, which was afterwards doubled, and which I believe was not resigned till the year 1832, or when M. Victor Hugo was thirty years of age; and that though he for a time seemed disposed to declare himself a Republican, he sought for and obtained a seat in the House of Peers from Louis Philippe as recently as 1845. Far be it from me to attempt to turn these facts against the reputation of M. Victor Hugo. I entertain no doubt they are capable of a perfectly satisfactory explanation. But let us not have two weights and two measures; and before Mr. Swinburne takes to throwing stones against those who incur his displeasure, let him look carefully round to see if some of those who excite his admiration are not living in a house with a good many glass windows.
Against M. Victor Hugo as a man I have necessarily no word to utter. But Mr. Swinburne compels one to say something about him as a poet. In this paper upon Mr. Tennyson and De Musset alone, we come upon the following phrases, all of them applied to M. Victor Hugo: “The mightiest master of the nineteenth century”; “One far greater than Byron or Lamartine”;“The greatest living poet”; “The godlike hand of Victor Hugo”; “Only Victor Hugo himself can make words thunder and lighten like these.” There is more, I think, of the same kind; but it perhaps suffices to mention these, for previous experience has made us familiar with the assumption that underlies them.
It would be as presumptuous in me to make the world a present of my opinion as to who is the greatest of modern poets, as I conceive it is in Mr. Swinburne to be perpetually pursuing that course. I will therefore content myself with saying that to attribute that distinction to M. Hugo seems to me simply ludicrous, unless clatter be the same thing as fame, and confident copiousness is to be accepted as a conclusive credential of superiority; that in the opinion of Sainte-Beuve, De Musset was far more of a poet than M. Victor Hugo; and that, with the exception of Mr. Swinburne himself, all English critics, with whom I am acquainted, entertain no sort of doubt that Mr. Tennyson is a more considerable poet than both De Musset and M. Victor Hugo put together with a large margin to spare. In any case, does Mr. Swinburne think that, by “damnable iteration” about the “great master,” he will alter the fact, or convert any human being to a creed in the propagation of which he seems unaccountably zealous? If he does, I recommend to his perusal the following brief observation of Sainte-Beuve, which he will find in a “Causerie” upon George Sand:
Ceux qui cherchent à imposer aux autres une foi qu’ils ne sont pas bien sûrs d’avoir eux-mêmes, s’échauffent en parlant, affirment sur tous les tons, et se font prophètes afin de tâcher d’être croyants.
Ceux qui cherchent à imposer aux autres une foi qu’ils ne sont pas bien sûrs d’avoir eux-mêmes, s’échauffent en parlant, affirment sur tous les tons, et se font prophètes afin de tâcher d’être croyants.
I have said that the zeal of Mr. Swinburne in perpetually asseverating the unapproachable superiority ofM. Victor Hugo is unaccountable. Perhaps, however, it is to be accounted for by reading between the lines of the following passage:
“As lyric poet and as republican leader, the master poet of the world has equally deserved to attain this obloquy, to incur this tribute from a journal”—the reference, I believe, is to theFigaroof Paris—“to which the principles of republican faith, a writer to whom the pretensions of lyric poetry are naturally and equally abhorrent and contemptible: nor could any law of nature or any result of chance be more equitably satisfactory than one which should gratify the wish—or the three wishes—that all who do not love the one should hate the other: that all such men should be even as M. Zola: and that all such writers as M. Zola, should be haters and scorners alike of republican principles and of lyric song.”
“As lyric poet and as republican leader, the master poet of the world has equally deserved to attain this obloquy, to incur this tribute from a journal”—the reference, I believe, is to theFigaroof Paris—“to which the principles of republican faith, a writer to whom the pretensions of lyric poetry are naturally and equally abhorrent and contemptible: nor could any law of nature or any result of chance be more equitably satisfactory than one which should gratify the wish—or the three wishes—that all who do not love the one should hate the other: that all such men should be even as M. Zola: and that all such writers as M. Zola, should be haters and scorners alike of republican principles and of lyric song.”
With every desire not to be intolerant, and to inform oneself of what is going on in this world, I think one may be pardoned for being unable to read M. Zola. I should as soon think of doing things I will not even name, as of readingL’Assommoir; and I fancy most Englishmen, whether Monarchists or Republicans, whether lyrists or the most prosaic folk in the world, entertain the same repugnance. But what, in the name of all that is fair, and manly, and magnanimous, have political opinions got to do with literary merit? Politics and literature are distinct, and though, as abundant experience has shown, one and the same man may make his mark in both, they are separate spheres of the same brain, and a man may be a good poet and a bad politician, or a bad poet and a good politician, or either good or bad in each capacity alike. Once you care one straw what are the political opinions of a poet, there is an end of you as a critic. Royalist, Republican, Communist, Deist, Pantheist,—what care I which of these a poet is, so he is a poet? As a fact, I fancy thegreater sort of poets usually wear their creeds rather loosely; and if we find a poet, in his character of poet, a perpetually passionate advocate, misgivings as to his permanent fame may reasonably be entertained. Still no absolute rule can be applied to these irregular planets. One likes a poet to love his country, on the same principle which Cicero says made Ulysses love Ithaca, “not because it was broad, but because it was his own.” Mr. Tennyson loves his country warmly, and for this Mr. Swinburne rebukes him with indulging in the “beardless bluster of the Tory member, not of a provincial deputy, but of a provincial schoolboy.” This is perhaps the most inapt of all the inapt observations in his amazing piece of criticism.
I might say more, but I feel I have said enough, I hope, not too much of a paper which, it seems to me, would be not unjustly described, in Mr. Swinburne’s own words, as “pseudo-poetic rhapsody in hermaphroditic prose,” and concerning which a person whose authority all would recognise were I to mention him, observed to me, “This is theCarmagnoleof criticism.” But, before concluding, I should like, if Mr. Swinburne will not think me presuming, to remind him, in all friendliness, that he, no more than I, is any longer in the consulship of Plancus; that some of us would have been thankful to have had our youthful follies treated as leniently as his have been; and that the least return he can make for the indulgence that has been extended to him in consideration of his genius, is to remember the lines of the really “great master,”—not M. Victor Hugo, but Shakespeare:
... Reverence,That angel of the world, doth make distinctionOf place ’tween high and low.
It occasionally happens to men of letters, at political gatherings, to be asked to respond to the toast of Literature; so one may fairly conclude that, in the opinion of many persons, there is between literature and politics a close and familiar relation. I have long believed that there is; and observation of the opinions of others has led me to inquire whether the relation be one of amity or of antagonism. I propose to endeavour, even though it be by reflections that may appear deliberative rather than dogmatic, to elucidate a question that is not devoid of interest.
Mr. Trevelyan has recorded a saying of Macaulay to this effect, that a man who, endowed with equal capacity for achieving distinction in literature and in politics, selects a political career, gives proof of insanity. Most men of letters, I fancy, would endorse that sentiment. But the decisions which men have to make in this world are not, as a rule, presented to them with the definiteness that gives artistic charm, as well as moral meaning, to a well-known masterpiece in the Palazzo Borghese. Between Sacred and Profane Love, between the love of literature and the pursuit of politics, the line is not, in practice, drawn so hard and fast as in the beautiful apologue immortalised by Titian. Loves that are altogether sacred and in no degreeprofane, are not, I imagine, frequently offered to any one; and though loves wholly profane and in no measure sacred, are, perhaps, not so uncommon, they are not likely in that absolutely coarse form to exercise enduring attraction over the finer spirits. It is the curious and inextricable amalgam of the two that constitutes the embarrassment. Literature entirely divorced from politics is a thing by no means so easily attained, or so disinterestedly sought after, as it is sometimes assumed to be; and though, with much Parliamentary and extra-Parliamentary oratory before our minds, we should hesitate to affirm that politics are not occasionally cultivated with a fine disregard for literature, yet the literary flavour that is still present in the speeches of some Party Politicians, suffices to show that literature and politics are in practice not so much distinct territories as border-lands whose boundaries are not easily defined, but that continually run into, overlap, and are frequently confounded with, each other.
But is it to be desired, even should it appear to be possible, to restrict literature and politics each to its own particular sphere, and forbid either to trespass upon the territory of the other? Would they be gainers by this absolute severance? I am disposed to think that both would be losers; and the loss, I fancy, would fall more heavily upon literature even than upon politics. Dickens is said to have expressed his regret that, as he worded it, a man like Disraeli should have thrown himself away by becoming a politician. The observation, perhaps, smacks a little of the too narrow estimate of life with which that man of genius may not unjustly be reproached. But few people, if any, would think of denying that Lord Beaconsfield might have won more enduring distinction in the Republic of Letters than canbe accurately placed to his account, had he dedicated himself with less ardour—or, perhaps it would be more correct to say, with less tenacity—to party politics. Like most persons of a contemplative disposition, he read sparingly, and found in the pages of others not so much what they themselves put there, as a provocation and stimulus to fresh thoughts of his own. “See what my gracious Sovereign sent me as a present at Christmas,” he said to me one day. It was a copy of the edition de luxe ofRomola; and in it was written, in the beautiful flowing hand of the Queen, “To the Earl of Beaconsfield, K.G., from his affectionate and grateful friend, Victoria.” “But,” he added, “I cannot read it.” I ventured to recommend him not to make that confession to everybody, for it would not raise their estimate of his literary acumen. “Well,” he said, “it’s no use. I can’t.” No doubtRomolanot unoften smells overmuch of the lamp, and in all probability will not permanently occupy the position assigned to it with characteristic over-confidence by contemporaneous enthusiasm. But, if a man can read novels at all, and if he demands from the novelist something more than the mere craft of the story-teller, surelyRomolaought to give him pleasure; and I suspect it would have pleased him, had he permitted his taste as a man of letters the same amount of expansion he afforded to his tendencies as a practical politician. At the same time, I could well understand a person arguing, though I could hardly agree with him, that he was not designed by nature to be a more complete and finished man of letters than he actually became, and that his keen interest in politics, and the knowledge of political and social life he in consequence acquired, contribute to his written works theirprincipal charm and their most valuable ingredients. I suspect the truth to be, that he was compounded in such equal proportions of the man of meditation and the man of action, that under no circumstances would he have been content to be merely a man of letters, or merely a politician, and that he fulfilled his nature by being alternately one and the other. That a man should attain to supreme eminence in literature by pursuing such a course, is out of the question. The wonder is that, having achieved even such literary distinction as he did, he should have attained to such supreme eminence as a statesman.
If, therefore, Lord Beaconsfield might have been a more distinguished man of letters, had he not been so keen a politician, the proper conclusion would seem to be that literature in his case suffered hurt, not from politics, but from an excess of politics. It would not be easy to name a character more utterly unlike his than Wordsworth—a man of letters pure and simple, if we are ever to find one. True it is that Wordsworth in extreme youth wrote some political verse, that he loved his country with ardour, and that the word England had for him great and stimulating associations; but, as a rule, he lived remote from human ken, divorced from human business, amid the silence of the starry sky and the sleep of the everlasting hills. What was the result? I admire the best and highest poetry of Wordsworth with a fervour and an enthusiasm not exceeded by those who will, perhaps, forgive me for calling them his more fanatical worshippers. But I must continue to think that Wordsworth would have given himself the chance of being a yet greater poet than he was, had he—I do not say quitted his lakes, and hills, and streams; heaven forbid!—but had heconsorted at times more freely and fully with his fellow-men, had he been not a poet only, but something in addition to a poet; had he led a rather more mixed life; had he done, in fact, what we know was done by the great Athenian dramatists, by Virgil, by Dante, by Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and even by Shelley. Politics do not necessarily mean party politics, though in this country, at this moment, the one runs dangerously near to implying the other. Politics mean, or ought to mean, the practical concerns of the many, of the state, of the Empire, or of mankind at large, as contradistinguished from the mere personal or class interests. But with those wider concerns Wordsworth would have little or nothing to do, except in the most abstract way; and the consequence is that his poetry is the poetry of the individual, and nearly always of the same individual, and is lacking in the element of variety, especially in the greatest element of all, viz. action, in which is necessarily included the portrayal of passion and character.
Would not the proper conclusion, therefore—a conclusion not overstrained and if not stated with excessive dogmatism—seem to be, that literature, though demanding precedence in the affections, and exacting the chief attention of one who professes really to love it, is not a jealous mistress, but, on the contrary, is only too well pleased to see even its most attached votaries combine with their one supreme passion a number of minor interests and even minor affections. A very sagacious person has said, “Action may not bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.” I am not sure that that is quite true, for Epictetus, and even Epicurus, would have something to say on the other side. But I entertain little doubtthat it is strictly true to affirm that the highest literary eminence is not attainable by persons who stand aloof, and have always stood aloof, from the field of action; that mere contemplation, no matter how lofty, how profound, or how persistent, will not make a man a supreme poet or a supreme artist of any kind; and that the doctrine of “art for art’s sake,” if applied in a perverse signification, must end by narrowing and finally debasing what it is intended to elevate. Action helps thought, and thought helps action. By action thought is rendered more masculine, attains to greater breadth, and acquires a certain nobleness and dignity. Thanks to thought, action may become more definite, more precise, more fruitful. But that is on the assumption that each exerts itself in due times and seasons, and leaves to the other abundant opportunities and ample latitude. When we are bidden to observe that
the native hue of resolutionIs sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
we well understand that thought has been excessive, that action has not had fair play, and that the brain has paralysed the hand.
No one can read theIliadwithout feeling that the writer, or writers, of the stirring debates with which it is thronged had consorted with, and was intimately familiar with public life. Many years ago, addressing an assembling of Cambridge undergraduates at a political meeting, and seeking to justify the toast of literature they had given me as a text, I ventured, with a certain levity congenial to my young but classical audience, to ask if theIliadis not a political poem, for is it not full of discussions as animated as any of our own Parliamentary ones, in which Agamemnon, Nestor,Ulysses, to say nothing of Thersites, successively take part; and are not these succeeded, as in our own case, by deliberations in an Upper House, where Juno, Venus, Vulcan, and even Jove himself, participate in the oratorical debate? The first and last note of theÆneid, indeed the one text of the great poem of Virgil, isRomanam condere gentem, to show how was established, and to intimate how might be extended, the Empire of Rome. Virgil, the most tender, the most finished, the most literary of poets, took the warmest interest in the politics of his country, or he would never have got much beyond the range of his Pastorals and Bucolics. The first word in the first ode of Horace is the name of an Augustan minister, quickly to be followed by the ode,Jam satis terris, with its patriotic allusions to national pride and military honour. Most people, I imagine, associate Dante with the period of his exile, forgetting why he was exiled. He had to thank the interest he displayed in the politics of his native city for that prolonged banishment; and so keen a politician was this great contemplative bard, that in the same poem in which Beatrice reproves him in heaven, Dante represents his political enemies as gnashing their teeth in hell. That was when he had become the man of letters pure and simple. But, in the hey-day of his fortunes, and long after he had first seen and become enamoured of Beatrice, and had written theVita Nuova, he had taken so active a part and become so influential a personage in the public affairs of Florence, that, when invited to go on a difficult embassy, he exclaimed, “If I go, who will stay? Yet, if I stay, who will go?” It was no backsliding, therefore, no hesitation, that made Dante a public character for a moment, quickly to repent his infidelity to the Muse. To the last, it isabundantly evident that he would fain have combined in his career the poet and the politician. Yet the first words addressed by Virgil to Dante, when they metnel gran diserto, and Dante asked him whether he wasombra od uomo certo, seem almost to imply that Virgil meant to reprove the intruder upon theselva oscurawith condescending to mix in the turmoil of public life, instead of confining himself to literature and philosophy. These are the words, which students of theDivina Commediawill scarcely require to have cited for them: