From Tennyson Among the Poets, edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry, pp. 95–114. Published by Oxford University Press. Copyright © 2009 by the various contributors.
his writing (whatsoever he penn’d) he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand”’). Yet Sir Edward has hold of something true. Tennyson and Browning divide the age, and Tennyson is always ‘the first named’. Browning resented Tennyson’s priority, and friends of Tennyson, in turn, resented Browning’s pretensions. Browning wrote to Isabella Blagden in 1865, following the success of Dramatis Personae: ‘There were always a few people who had a certain opinion of my poems, but nobody cared to speak what he thought . . . but at last a new set of men arrive who don’t mind the conventionalities of ignoring one and seeing everything in another’.2 It is obvious who ‘another’ is. Edward FitzGerald, on the other hand, viewed Browning’s rising reputation in the 1860s and ’70s as evidence of the decline of civilization and common sense. He said so to Tennyson himself whom he called, by way of mock-depreciation, the ‘paltry Poet’:
to compare [Browning] with my own paltry Poet is to compare an old Jew’s Curiosity Shop with the Phidian Marbles. Th ey talk of Browning’s metaphysical Depth and Subtlety: pray is there none in Th e Palace of Art, Th e Vision of Sin (which last touches on the limits of Disgust without ever falling in)[,] Locksley Hall also, with some little Passion, I think—only that all these being clear to the bottom, as well as beautiful, do not seem to Cockney eyes so deep as Browning’s muddy Waters.3
FitzGerald’s ‘an old Jew’s Curiosity Shop’ links Browning’s vulgarity with that of Dickens, and also helps to explain the rumours which circulated later in the century that Browning had Jewish ancestry. It may overstep our ‘limits of disgust’ but it, too, has a tang of truth. Lovers of Browning rel- ish what nauseates FitzGerald, and lovers of Tennyson have continued to protest at the charge that there is nothing to him but surface. The charge of anti-intellectualism has stuck, most memorably in Carlyle’s mordant sum- mation: ‘Browning has far more ideas than Tennyson, but is not so truthful. Tennyson means what he says, poor fellow!’ 4 Tennyson’s status as a gentle-
man, which gave him so clear an advantage over Browning in FitzGerald’s eyes, has probably, in the long run, done him more harm than good.
I propose to revisit the Tennyson–Browning pairing, but not with the aim of confi rming or reversing such judgements. Instead, I shall juxtapose their ‘parleyings’ (to use Browning’s term) with Virgil, because each illumi- nates and subtilizes the other’s. I shall concentrate on two poems: Tennyson’s ‘To Virgil’ (R 394) and Browning’s ‘Pan and Luna’.5 Th ese are both late works that triumphantly resist belatedness, though they do this by radically diff erent
means. I wish Browning’s poem had been written after Tennyson’s: it could so clearly be read as a reply to it. Even so, the juxtaposition suggests the revi- sionary impulse which, in their relation, came almost always from Browning’s side.
Virgil marks a faultline in Victorian aesthetics, not between high and low culture but between two kinds of high culture, the polished and the rough. Th ere are many ways of framing this division—Classic and Gothic, music and speech, soul and body (or soul and mind)—and the division itself is linked to other oppositions, notably those of religion and class. It may be unjust, but it is undeniable, that Virgil has been read as a poet of the ruling class, and of the ruling class of poets: Poet Laureate to Augustus, a favourite of England’s fi rst Poet Laureate, Dryden, and, before him, two other court poets, Spenser and Chaucer. Tennyson’s love of Virgil was not the product of his having been born a gentleman, baptized into the Church of England, educated at Cambridge, and awarded the laureateship by favour of Prince Albert, but it is not separable from those contexts, just as Browning’s upbringing in sub- urban Dissenting Camberwell ensured that his classical learning would be a personal choice, not a social given. Browning’s account of this process, in one of his last poems, ‘Development’, begins ‘My father was a scholar, and knew Greek.’6 Knowledge and love begin in the family circle, but even in this poem, written in the last year of his life when his fame was secure, there is also a touch of prickliness, of one-upmanship. Latin was still ubiquitous in the education of boys, and Virgil, together with Horace, ruled the kingdom; but Greek was a much rarer accomplishment, and had the prestige of being both harder in itself and anterior to Latin. ‘Development’ is about Homer, who takes precedence over Virgil, and who is greater because both grander and more primitive. Tennyson crowns ‘To Virgil’ with a declaration of love: ‘I that loved thee since my day began’ (l. 19). He cannot mean ‘since birth’—even as a hyperbole that would be absurd—and must mean something like ‘ever since I knew anything about poetry’, with the further implication ‘ever since the dawn of my own creative life’. Browning could not have said the same. He did not love Virgil; ‘Development’ is typical of Browning’s ‘classical’ poems, all of which (with the exception of ‘Pan and Luna’) are on Greek subjects and refer to, or translate, Greek authors.7
Virgil is mellifl uous even (or especially) in his moments of greatest seri- ousness and pathos, and the unresolved confl icts in what he says about love, or empire, or mortality are easy to miss, or gloss over; he is a gifted phrase- maker, and left an involuntary legacy of cliché for the support of impover- ished orators. An early draft of ‘To Virgil’ acknowledges that he is ‘Quoted in the halls of Council, | speaking yet in every schoolboy’s home’ (R 394: ll. 15–16 n.). Tennyson wisely cut this two-edged compliment. Browning, as we
shall see, heartlessly tagged Virgil as a fount of condescension (though not in ‘Pan and Luna’; that is what makes the poem so interesting), but it would be quite wrong to imply that ‘To Virgil’ is ‘Virgilian’ in this sense. Th e case is exactly the opposite: Tennyson’s poem is Virgilian because its poise, its ‘fi nish’, are threatened by forces it barely holds in check.
‘To Virgil’
The subtitle of ‘To Virgil’—‘Written at the Request of the Mantuans for the Nineteenth Centenary of Virgil’s Death’—marks its origin as a public and occasional poem. It invites a stock response to the later Tennyson as the author of too many such poems, composed out of a sometimes weary sense of obligation. The poem’s multiple allusions to Virgil’s poetry may then work against it: they amount, after all, to the expected homage, and demonstrate no more than Tennyson’s professional sense of what was proper. Moreover they remind us that Virgil was public and private property in the nineteenth century. It will hardly repay us to look too deeply into what ‘every schoolboy’ knows. A. A. Markley, whose book Stateliest Measures takes its title from ‘To Virgil’, is perfunctory about the poem itself:
While the rhythm of the poem approximates the rhythm of Virgil’s hexameters, the allusions in the poem move through Virgil’s works, from the Aeneid in the fi rst couplet to the Georgics in the following two, to the Eclogues in couplets 4 and 5, and back to the Aeneid in 6 and 7. Tennyson concludes this tour through Virgil’s opera with a salute in the fi nal three couplets to Virgil’s poetry generally, which lives on despite the fall of Rome itself.8
‘Moves through’, ‘back to the Aeneid’, and ‘this tour through Virgil’s opera’ do not exactly suggest impassioned engagement on either Tennyson’s part or his critic’s; but it is wrong of Markley to suggest that the conclusion to the poem is of a piece with the rest, and that the whole constitutes a smoothly functioning mechanism. Another kind of stock response would reflect the perceived affinity between Tennyson and Virgil. Anyone who knew Ten- nyson personally would recognize that his declaration of love for Virgil at the end of the poem was unaffected and truthful. He carried Virgil with him on journeys and walks, read his poetry aloud to friends and family, and recited lines to his children. His ‘voicing’ of Virgil especially moved others, and himself. ‘I had no idea Virgil could ever sound so fine as it does in his reading,’ wrote Savile Morton in 1844; Edward FitzGerald wrote that he had only once seen tears in Tennyson’s eyes, ‘when reading Virgil—“dear old Virgil” as he called him—together’.9 Tennyson’s private feeling for Virgil
was, so to speak, ‘outed’ by critics who mapped the modern poet onto his classical precursor and traced the Virgilian contours of Tennyson’s genres, themes, sentiments, and style. The parallel appears early (in John Sterling’s praise of the ‘English Idyls’ in his review of the 1842 Poems, for example), and ‘To Virgil’ helped its deployment as a summative judgement: J. M. Rob- ertson, in an essay published in 1889, borrows from the climax of the poem to ‘salute that singer of our youth who is the Virgil of our time’.10
If we read ‘To Virgil’ with the notion that Tennyson himself was con- scious of his status as the ‘English Virgil’, we risk making the poem sound smug and opportunistic. Does Tennyson really intend his readers to think of him as a ‘lord of language’ because he, like Virgil, was a ‘landscape-lover’ (l. 3) in his ‘English Idyls’, and was ‘majestic in [his] sadness’ (l. 12) in In Memo- riam, and had a position at the imperial court?11 And then the parallel itself
is double-edged. To John Churton Collins, writing (perhaps vindictively) in 1891, Tennyson and Virgil were indeed alike in being secondary, imitative writers, whose ‘material is derived not from the world of Nature, but from the world of Art’.12 Moreover, the ‘English Virgil’ is doubly secondary: in
a Platonic series, Tennyson’s art is the imitation of an imitation. To think of Tennyson as Virgil also invites the thought of Virgil as Tennyson, an invita- tion taken up by Browning’s admirer Ezra Pound: ‘Virgil is a second-rater, a Tennysonianized version of Homer’.13 Perhaps, by the 1880s, Tennyson’s
regard for Virgil could not be wholly free from self-regard. But as we have seen, he speaks in the poem not of his likeness to Virgil but of his love of him, and this love is complex and (in the best sense) critical.
To return to the subtitle: it looks plain enough, but it is a little disin- genuous. ‘Written at the Request of the Mantuans’ is grand, popular, vague; actually the request came from a learned society, the Vergilian Academy of Mantua, and the poem was inserted (with an Italian translation) in their com- memorative ‘Vergilian Album’. Nevertheless, the request had a political edge. Luigi Carnevali, the representative of the Academy who solicited Tennyson’s contribution, put it in these terms: ‘What better honour will the singer of Eneas be able to receive than that which would be tributed to him by the venerable poet of free England?’ (L III. 231 n.). Normally the payment of tribute is not a sign of freedom, but in this case the tribute is one of ‘honour’, and viewed from nineteenth-century Italy England fi gures not as a reincar- nation of imperial Rome but as a modern nation, the kind that Italy aspires to become; it is as though ‘the singer of Eneas’ could be deemed, with Ten- nyson’s endorsement, to have seen beyond the foundation of imperial Rome to a more progressive destiny.
Tennyson took the request more seriously than he had done in the case of Virgil’s admirer Dante, for whom he dashed off six lines in 1865 which
he then ‘entirely forgot’ until he included them in Ballads and Other Poems in 1880. But the contrast is instructive for other reasons. ‘To Dante’ (R 345) is subtitled ‘Written at Request of the Florentines’ (a claim as dubious as that of ‘To Virgil’) and begins by identifying Dante as a ‘King’ who has ‘reigned six hundred years’; Florence, ‘now the crown of Italy’ (referring to the fact that it had just replaced Turin as capital of the new kingdom), has ‘sought the tribute of a verse’ from Tennyson, who, ‘wearing but the garland of a day | Cast[s] at thy feet one fl ower that fades away’ (ll. 1, 4, 5, 6–7). Th e modesty topos allows Tennyson to get off lightly, and it implies that as Poet Laureate he was bound to make an eff ort only for British royalty. Th e appeal of ‘the Mantuans’ was more subtle, and more stimulating. It exacted from Tennyson a ‘tribute’ he could pay with interest—in part by remembering Dante, too.
‘To Virgil’ is a poem of ten stanzas, each containing two long lines in a trochaic metre designed to recall, but not replicate, the Virgilian hexameter.14 As for the proliferation of Virgilian allusions, Tennyson took a rare opportunity to be deliberate here. He railed against mechanical source-hunting by critics such as Collins, ‘men of great memories and no imagination, who impute them- selves to the poet, and so believe that he, too, has no imagination, but is for ever poking his nose between the pages of some old volume in order to see what he can appropriate’ (Mem. i. 258); but in this instance he practically bookmarked the pages of the ‘old volume’, since one of the poem’s intentions is to manifest the imprint of Virgil on the fabric of English poetic imagery and diction. Yet a list of the passages that Tennyson ‘quotes’, though it tells us of the poet’s skill in incorporating allusions to every one of Virgil’s major works (Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid ), does not tell us much about the nature of this infl uence on Tennyson himself, or about the poem’s more inward and refl ective design.
Th e poem is one long sentence, whose basic syntactical structure is extremely simple. Th e main clause arches from the fi rst to the fi nal stanza: ‘Virgil . . . I salute thee’. Th e apostrophized subject, ‘Virgil’, is qualifi ed in a number of ways. To begin with, in the opening words of the poem, he is ‘Roman Virgil’. Th en he is decorated with an elaborate set of parallel sub- clauses, some beginning with ‘thou’ (‘thou that singest Ilion’s lofty temples robed in fi re’: l. 1), others beginning with an attribute (‘Landscape-lover, lord of language’: l. 3). Th is surge of epithets concludes at l. 14 with an ominous allusion to ‘kings and realms that pass to rise no more’; what follows is a dif- ferent kind of qualifi cation, one that describes not Virgil but the double time of history—the time in which he wrote, and the time in which he is now being addressed:
Now thy Forum roars no longer, fallen every purple Caesar’s dome—
Th ough thine ocean-roll of rhythm sound for ever of Imperial Rome— Now the Rome of slaves hath perished, and the Rome of freemen holds her place, I, from out the Northern Island
sundered once from all the human race, I salute thee . . .
‘Now’ in line 15 looks as though it marks the present indicative, but at line 17 we realize that it is a form of conditional, ‘Now that’: ‘now that the con- ditions in which (and of which) you once wrote have disappeared, I am able truly to acknowledge your greatness’. The closing lines of the poem intro- duce two further qualifications, one relating to Virgil, the other to the poet:
I salute thee, Mantovano,
I that loved thee since my day began, Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.
‘Roman Virgil’ has become ‘Mantovano’, Mantuan: grandeur gives way to familiarity, and the imperial metropolis to the provincial birthplace.15 The
change lies on the far shore, so to speak, of the changed historical condi- tions which have replaced ‘the Rome of slaves’ with ‘the Rome of freemen’. ‘Mantovano’ comes from Dante’s Purgatorio, canto vi, and, as Ricks puts it, ‘allows T[ennyson] to join Dante in venerating Virgil’. But the matter is more complicated. Dante, after all, was not a Mantuan, and the apostrophe to Virgil’s fellow countryman is made not by him but by the troubadour Sor- dello (Browning’s Sordello). Dante and Virgil encounter Sordello standing aloof among the crowd of the Late-Repentant, and Virgil inquires the way to the Valley of Negligent Rulers:
e quella non rispose al suo domando; ma di nostro paese e della vita
c’inchiese. E il dolce duca incominciava: ‘Mantova’, . . . e l’ombra, tutta in sè romita, surse ver lui del loco ove pria stava,
dicendo: ‘O Mantovano, io son Sordello della tua terra.’ E l’un l’altro abbracciava.16
(It answer to his question none returned; But of our country and our kind of life Demanded. When my courteous guide began, ‘Mantua,’ the shadow, in itself absorb’d,
Rose toward us from the place in which it stood And cried, ‘Mantuan! I am thy countryman, Sordello.’ Each the other then embraced.)17
Sordello ‘salutes’ Virgil not as a fellow poet but as his ‘countryman’; Tenny- son cannot claim this affinity, and indeed reverses it, emphasizing his own origin in the ‘Northern Island’ that was ‘once’ on the margins of Empire, and is now its centre.18 Yet though Britain’s imperial destiny is latent in ‘once’, Tennyson does not point the moral; rather, he qualifies himself as one ‘that loved thee since my day began’: and the ground of this love is poetry, and specifically metre. Perhaps it does not quite amount to a disclaimer, but it suggests some resistance on Tennyson’s part to being cast as Virgil to Victoria’s Augustus.
A further complication arises from the fact that Tennyson is juxtaposing his own attitude to Virgil with two passages from Dante, not one. Sordello’s greeting markedly contrasts with Dante’s own apostrophe to Virgil when he meets him at the outset of the poem (Inferno I. 79–87). In this passage (much more famous than the one involving Sordello, and the template both for the acknowledgment of poetic infl uence and the claim to supersession) Dante is completely preoccu- pied with Virgil’s status as a poet, and especially with his language:
‘Or se’ tu quel Virgilio, e quella fonte che spande di parlar sì largo fi ume?’ risposi lui con vergognosa fronte. ‘O degli altri poeti onore e lume
vagliami il lungo studio e il grande amore che m’ ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume. Tu se’ lo mio maestro e il mio autore; tu se’ solo colui da cui io tolsi lo bello stile che m’ ha fatto onore.
(‘And art thou then that Virgil, that well-spring, From which such copious fl oods of eloquence Have issued?’ I with front abash’d replied. ‘Glory and light of all the tuneful train!
May it avail me that I long with zeal