Victorian Poetry

THAIS E. MORGAN

the androgynous Sir Galahad can see the Grail that repulses the virile
warriors. The Red Knight in "The Last Tournament" (1871) mocks Arthur:
"art thou not that eunuch-hearted King /... The woman-worshipper?"
(444, 446). Tennyson's exploration of contradictory masculinities in Idylls
has ambiguous implications for the political order of Queen Victoria's
Britain: Can a "female king" serve as the national icon of manhood? 9
The effeminacy of King Arthur is one of Swinburne's targets in Under the
Microscope (1871) where he refers to Idylls of the King as "the Morte
d'Albert": "by the very exaltation of his hero as something more than man
he has left him in the end something less." 10 Swinburne finds that Tennyson
has "lowered and degraded" the "moral tone" of the Arthurian legend by
portraying the main characters of its central love triangle too closely in
relation to the death of Victoria's beloved consort. "The story is rather a
case for the divorce-court than for poetry," a sordid and effeminizing piece
of gossip rather than a noble and manly narrative, Swinburne charges (57).
King Arthur is "a wittol" (57), emasculated by cuckoldry and his failure to
take action against it; although Vivien is a "base and repulsive... harlot"
(59-60), Swinburne agrees with her remark that "such a man as this king is

... hardly 'man at all'" (58). He also objects to Tennyson's representation
of Merlin. Instead of a magical masculinity, Merlin displays "the erotic
fluctuations and vacillations of a dotard under the moral and physical
manipulation of a prostitute" (60) - in other words, the triumph of a
woman over a man and the upsetting of the proper prerogatives of the
masculine. Quoting Alfred Austin's protest that Tennyson's "verse is
devoted to the worship of 'woman, woman, woman, woman'" (61), 11
Swinburne scorns the domestication of Victorian poetry and calls for a
remasculinization of verse through classical tragedy: "Adultery must be
tragic and exceptional to afford stuff for art" (57).

Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) is Swinburne's version of heroic masculinity
in the medievalizing mode. In the "Prelude: Tristram and Iseult," the
narrator praises love for its ability to transcend physical passion, "the life
of tears and fire," to achieve "The body spiritual of fire and light" (ACS IV,
6, 5). Not God but "Love," "One fiery raiment with all lives inwrought," is
the origin of the universe, superseding the polarity of heaven/hell
("Prelude," IV, 5). In contrast to the "fool passion" in Arnold's "Tristram
and Iseult" and especially to the prioritization of moral law over individual
desire in Tennyson's Idylls, Swinburne's narrator celebrates the suffering
and death of the lovers, Tristram and Iseult of Ireland, as a means to the
end of eternal life. Not a moralistic domestic idyll "fit for the sole diet of
girls," Tristram of Lyonesse is a sublime tragedy "fit for the sole sustenance
of men." 12

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