The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

by Alfred Austin

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 souvent
Un 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!”

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.

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. There is a 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; and less 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 a demos as 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 written civilly 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 of Odes et Poésies Diverses was 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.