The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

by Alfred Austin

Mais comment fais-tu donc, vieux maître
Pour renaître?
Car tes vers, en dépit du temps,
Ont vingt ans.
Si jamais ta tête qui penche
Devient 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 pleurs
Dans 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.