It is the first and the last verses quoted that count; and I think much might be learned from a careful comparison of them with the passage from The Princess. Tennyson has made a catalog, in the manner of prose, of the sorrows of women; his mind traveling with passion, but with a certain artistic, conscious discrimination, from China, India, Arabia, to the hustings of Victorian England (for it is that, in reality). The style of prose we say; well, the style of rhetoric: picture by picture has been chosen with a view to make the case strong, to impress who should hear it. "Ida's answer ... Oration-like," says Tennyson, knowing well what he was writing. Swinburne, in the supreme manner of poetry, has burned upon our vision that solemn, terrible picture, bare, unornate, unforgetable, of the women at the wayside crucifix; "slaves of men" beating "bosoms too lean to suckle sons": and with the picture there is that impression of augustness, that sense as of the presence of a great avenging angel, or perhaps, of the majesty of the Law. The attitude of the Princess Ida towards the evils that she condemns, is one of personal protest; she dwells on the same plane as they do, albeit in the brighter regions of it; she is a human personality, and speaks with a human and quite personal voice. But the anger of Swinburne here, the condemnation that he deals out, is not personal: the words are such as might be spoken by a god from his throne. They come from a loftier place than the thing condemned occupies, as though they were a sentence passed from the tribunal against whose decrees there is no appeal. So they are indeed. For this is Poetry, which is the voice of the Soul; and the Soul is deific, sovereign, aloof; and it does look down and pass sentence on the things of this world—a sentence damnatory or compassionate, but based on the evidence of direct vision and certitude, never on argument and the weighing up of pros and cons.
Look at those last lines again; with what sure intensity the whole tragedy is revealed! Compassion, in her own manner loftily disdainful, we might almost say, is suddenly focused; nine-tenths of the story are left untold, but the one-tenth that remains has the whole cry, the whole tragedy in it of a world blighted by lies: it is "dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn," and, mirabile dictu, with the "love of love," or compassion, in a breath.
We get that same strange glorious blending of compassion and scorn—pride or scorn, one does not know what to call it; it is neither of those things in reality, but rather the native accent of divinity in the voice of the soul—we hear that same majestic blending of compassion and haughtiness pre-eminently in a line from the Purgatorio which Arnold justly gives as one of the most perfect examples of the Grand Manner of poetry, the highest style than can be impressed on written or chanted words; the line: Che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti, "Which straightens you whom the world made crooked." We see here, I think, as in the passage from Swinburne, the same impatience of words and details; the same godlike aloofness; the same pity too compressed, too burning and intense, to reveal itself fully or tenderly: the feeling has passed beyond the limits of the power of tenderness, we might say, to be tender: it is such a super-passional passion of tenderness, suppressed, governed, boiling, that it must be stern, swift, momentary—or nothing. Is it not the very naked voice of the august divinity hidden within us?—the greatest fashion that can be burned and infused into the brute stuff of language; because ringing with the dominance of that hidden Master? It bears the mark of compassion, because compassion is the inevitable attitude of the soul outward from itself; and it bears the stamp of sublime titanism—that thing that would be scorn, were it bitter and hostile, and that would be mere majesty, might it remain passive and in repose—because the soul is a god, and knows itself to be a god, and breathes out the atmosphere of godhood. Here it is in Milton, again:
His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined:
and of course, it is Milton and Dante who are the supreme masters in modern literature of the Grand Manner; as poets, the greatest of the poets.
