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 power
Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit
By 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.