[This paper appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ a quarter of a century ago,
in reply to one that had been published in the same periodical in the
previous month.]
In the days of Chivalry, whose spirit, I trust, still lingers with us,
though its forms may have passed away, the prelude to a peaceful
tournament, or _joute de plaisance_, was the salutation of each other by
the combatants. In the pages which follow an effort will be made in some
degree to dislodge Mr. Swinburne from that seat of critical judgment which
he occupies with such gallant confidence, with such waving of plume and
such clashing of shield. But before the lists are opened, let me salute,
with something more than ceremonial courtesy, the exquisite lyrical genius
of the poet, and the solid accomplishments of the scholar. That premised,
I will, without further preliminary, betake me to my task.
In the latest number of one of the ablest of monthly reviews, Mr.
Swinburne, enlarging on a passage, rather cursory and incidental than
definitive or judicial, inserted by M. Taine at the close of his brilliant
survey of English poetry, institutes a comparison between Mr. Tennyson and
Alfred de Musset. With Mr. Swinburne's opening remark every one must
agree. It is distinctive of this age, he says, that the greatest of the
great writers who were born about the opening of the century, are still
working with splendid persistence. It was affirmed by Menander that those
the gods love die young. Is it because the gods themselves are dead, that
the heavenly favourites are nowadays permitted to exceed even the
scriptural span of life? Be this as it may, to Mr. Tennyson, with peculiar
aptness, may be addressed the lines of Wordsworth, inspired by a very
different personage:
Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee when gray hairs are nigh,
A melancholy slave;
But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
More appropriate still perhaps, for the moment, would be an excerpt from
Alfred de Musset himself, whom the gods loved not well enough either to
cut off in the flower of his youth, or to leave hanging till he had
achieved maturity. Mr. Swinburne, no doubt, knows the lines by heart:
Mais comment fais-tu donc, vieux maitre
Pour renaitre?
Car tes vers, en depit du temps,
Ont vingt ans.
Si jamais ta tete qui penche
Devient blanche,
Ce sera comme l'amandier,
Cher Nodier:
Ce qui le blanchit n'est pas l'age,
Ni l'orage;
C'est la fraiche rosee 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 reveur.
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.
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 _Oedipus_ 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 exces d'honneur ni cette indignite.
What is the full measure of "_cette indignite_" 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 "_passe par la_" 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_.
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 vallee_." 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,
AEolian 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 praeterea
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'etre 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.
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 poete mort jeune a qui l'homme survit,"
Tu l'as bien dit, ami, mais tu l'as trop bien dit.
Tu ne prenais pas garde, en tracant ta pensee
* * * * *
que tu blasphemais ...
... Je te rends a ta Muse offensee,
Et souviens-toi qu'en nous il existe souvent
Un poete 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 AEneas" 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'Angouleme 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 hait
les tyrans, on doit aimer les rois_"; that the first patron of the author
of _Odes et Poesies 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.
Against M. Victor Hugo as a man I have necessarily no word to utter. But
Mr. Swinburne compels one to say something about him as a poet. In this
paper upon Mr. Tennyson and De Musset alone, we come upon the following
phrases, all of them applied to M. Victor Hugo: "The mightiest master of
the nineteenth century"; "One far greater than Byron or Lamartine"; "The
greatest living poet"; "The godlike hand of Victor Hugo"; "Only Victor
Hugo himself can make words thunder and lighten like these." There is
more, I think, of the same kind; but it perhaps suffices to mention these,
for previous experience has made us familiar with the assumption that
underlies them.
It would be as presumptuous in me to make the world a present of my
opinion as to who is the greatest of modern poets, as I conceive it is in
Mr. Swinburne to be perpetually pursuing that course. I will therefore
content myself with saying that to attribute that distinction to M. Hugo
seems to me simply ludicrous, unless clatter be the same thing as fame,
and confident copiousness is to be accepted as a conclusive credential of
superiority; that in the opinion of Sainte-Beuve, De Musset was far more
of a poet than M. Victor Hugo; and that, with the exception of Mr.
Swinburne himself, all English critics, with whom I am acquainted,
entertain no sort of doubt that Mr. Tennyson is a more considerable poet
than both De Musset and M. Victor Hugo put together with a large margin to
spare. In any case, does Mr. Swinburne think that, by "damnable iteration"
about the "great master," he will alter the fact, or convert any human
being to a creed in the propagation of which he seems unaccountably
zealous? If he does, I recommend to his perusal the following brief
observation of Sainte-Beuve, which he will find in a "Causerie" upon
George Sand:
Ceux qui cherchent a imposer aux autres une foi qu'ils ne sont pas
bien surs d'avoir eux-memes, s'echauffent en parlant, affirment sur
tous les tons, et se font prophetes afin de tacher d'etre croyants.
I have said that the zeal of Mr. Swinburne in perpetually asseverating the
unapproachable superiority of M. Victor Hugo is unaccountable. Perhaps,
however, it is to be accounted for by reading between the lines of the
following passage:
"As lyric poet and as republican leader, the master poet of the world
has equally deserved to attain this obloquy, to incur this tribute
from a journal"--the reference, I believe, is to the _Figaro_ of
Paris--"to which the principles of republican faith, a writer to whom
the pretensions of lyric poetry are naturally and equally abhorrent
and contemptible: nor could any law of nature or any result of chance
be more equitably satisfactory than one which should gratify the
wish--or the three wishes--that all who do not love the one should
hate the other: that all such men should be even as M. Zola: and that
all such writers as M. Zola, should be haters and scorners alike of
republican principles and of lyric song."
With every desire not to be intolerant, and to inform oneself of what is
going on in this world, I think one may be pardoned for being unable to
read M. Zola. I should as soon think of doing things I will not even name,
as of reading _L'Assommoir_; and I fancy most Englishmen, whether
Monarchists or Republicans, whether lyrists or the most prosaic folk in
the world, entertain the same repugnance. But what, in the name of all
that is fair, and manly, and magnanimous, have political opinions got to
do with literary merit? Politics and literature are distinct, and though,
as abundant experience has shown, one and the same man may make his mark
in both, they are separate spheres of the same brain, and a man may be a
good poet and a bad politician, or a bad poet and a good politician, or
either good or bad in each capacity alike. Once you care one straw what
are the political opinions of a poet, there is an end of you as a critic.
Royalist, Republican, Communist, Deist, Pantheist,--what care I which of
these a poet is, so he is a poet? As a fact, I fancy the greater sort of
poets usually wear their creeds rather loosely; and if we find a poet, in
his character of poet, a perpetually passionate advocate, misgivings as to
his permanent fame may reasonably be entertained. Still no absolute rule
can be applied to these irregular planets. One likes a poet to love his
country, on the same principle which Cicero says made Ulysses love Ithaca,
"not because it was broad, but because it was his own." Mr. Tennyson loves
his country warmly, and for this Mr. Swinburne rebukes him with indulging
in the "beardless bluster of the Tory member, not of a provincial deputy,
but of a provincial schoolboy." This is perhaps the most inapt of all the
inapt observations in his amazing piece of criticism.
I might say more, but I feel I have said enough, I hope, not too much of a
paper which, it seems to me, would be not unjustly described, in Mr.
Swinburne's own words, as "pseudo-poetic rhapsody in hermaphroditic
prose," and concerning which a person whose authority all would recognise
were I to mention him, observed to me, "This is the _Carmagnole_ of
criticism." But, before concluding, I should like, if Mr. Swinburne will
not think me presuming, to remind him, in all friendliness, that he, no
more than I, is any longer in the consulship of Plancus; that some of us
would have been thankful to have had our youthful follies treated as
leniently as his have been; and that the least return he can make for the
indulgence that has been extended to him in consideration of his genius,
is to remember the lines of the really "great master,"--not M. Victor
Hugo, but Shakespeare:
... Reverence,
That angel of the world, doth make distinction
Of place 'tween high and low.