The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

by Alfred Austin

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.