THAIS E. MORGANTristram is not weakened but strengthened by love, so that his body
becomes splendidly perfect, as seen when he swims before battle: "each
glad limb became / A note of rapture in the tune of life" (IV, 128). The sun
outlines his body in a halo not of sanctity but of health and male vigor: he
"felt the might / In all his limbs rejoice for strength" (IV, 128-29). Even in
death, Swinburne's Tristram retains a heroic masculinity: in Book IX, "The
Sailing of the Swan," he dies due equally to love for Iseult of Ireland and his
war wounds. Again emphasizing the hero's virility and eschewing moraliza-
tion, Swinburne's later contribution to Victorian versions of Arthurian
legend, "The Tale of Balen" (1896), counters Tennyson's "Balin and Balan"
(1885) by placing the knight's "wrath" and "pride" in the ennobling frame
of tragedy, where they can be read as hamartia and hubris rather than
deadly sins. Swinburne's elevation of Tristram and Iseult's illicit passion
and Balen's character flaws through the genre of tragedy offers a revi-
sionary portrayal of these heroes which corrects what he sees as Arnold's
and Tennyson's inartistic because effeminate representations.
A recurrent topos in Victorian criticism is the need for the reinvigoration
of poetry. Charles Kingsley calls for "martial song" about "the heroic past"
that would convey "manful teaching" to counteract "the emasculating
tendencies" of the nineteenth century. 13 Besides idealizing chivalric knights,
Victorian men sought models for masculinity in the heroes of classical
antiquity. More saliently virile in their exploits than the gentle courtly
lovers of the medievalizing imagination, the heroes of classical Greek myth
were especially appealing because they acted in a securely patriarchal
world where women were relegated to the sidelines as mothers or nubile
objects of exchange. Tennyson's, Arnold's, and Swinburne's different
figures of male heroism reveal both how central the classical tradition is to
Victorian culture and how contested and constructed the notion of mascu-
linity is for these three poets.
Tennyson chooses Ulysses, but his rendition of an episode from Homer's
epic in "The Lotos-Eaters" (1832) puts classical virility into question rather
than simply confirming it. On the island of this "mild-eyed melancholy"
(AT 27) people where the "languid air did swoon" (5), Ulysses's mariners
are effeminized by pleasure and "half-dream" (101). Instead of "great
deeds" (123), they embrace inertia: " 'We have had enough of action, and of
motion we'" (150). They abandon the Victorian standard of ascetic
manhood with its duties to "wedded lives" (114) and the nation: "'Is there
confusion in the little isle? / Let what is broken so remain'" (124-25).
Contemporary critics took this poem as a sign of Tennyson's lack of "manly
courage"; one warned that Tennyson "must not... eat of the lotos ... in
which we hear he takes more delight than becomes a man." 14 By way of
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