Tennyson and the “Most Burlesque Barbarous Experiment”

Abstract

T E N N Y SO N AN D THE "M O S T BU R LESQ U E B A R B A R O U S E X P E R IM E N T " ROBERT G. LAIRD Carleton University T h e extensive and frequently acerbic controversy over the translation and transmetrification of Homer which took place in the English world of letters in the early 1860s is well known through the exchange between Matthew Arnold and F.W. Newman. What is not so well known, however, is that Alfred Tennyson was one of the many participants in this debate, his contribution being the "Attempts at Classic Metres in Quantity," which he published in the Cornhill Magazine in December 1863, two years after Arnold's "Last Words" on the subject. Tennyson's participation in the controversy was not motivated solely by an objective, academic consideration of the many problems facing a nineteenth-century translator of Homer, but rather by the numerous and trenchant criticisms which Arnold had made of the Laureate and his work during the Oxford lectures on Homer, particularly in the third lecture and in the "Last Words." The four poems included in the "Attempts" were never again published as a unit, and so critics, when they have discussed them at all, have considered them individually. This subsequent separation of the poems, as well as the fact that an enlightening short prose introduction to the fourth poem in the group was never reprinted in Tennyson's lifetime, make it appear that perhaps Tennyson had second thoughts about his reply to Arnold and so attempted to disguise the polemical nature of the series as it first appeared. Before looking more closely at Tennyson's poems, it is worthwhile to consider briefly the chronology and the nature of the important contributions to the Homer debate, most particularly those which have a specific bearing on the participation of Arnold and Tennyson in it. When Arnold first decided to undertake his lecture on Homer (a lecture which was to expand fourfold) he did so, as he says, "partly because I have long had in my mind something to say about Homer, partly because of the complaints that I did not enough lecture on poetry."1 Beyond these general motivations, how­ ever, Arnold chose to direct his attention to a specific recent translation of Homer, F.W. Newman's The Iliad of Homer Translated (1856). According to Newman, Homer was essentially a barbaric poet, and so he chose to translate the Iliad in a balladic metre, full of archaisms. In pointing out what he thought English Studies in Ca n ad a, ii, 4, Winter 1976 were the inherent weaknesses of Newman's rendering, Arnold was also able to emphasize what to him were the essential characteristics of Homer. The next event that led Arnold to develop his lectures in the way he did was, strangely enough, the publication in 1859 of the first installment of Tennyson's Idylls of the King. While most readers greeted this new volume of the Laureate with pleasant anticipation of the new treasures to be discovered, Arnold appa­ rently worried that Tennyson's immense prestige and popularity would lend weight on one side of three issues on which he took an opposing view. The first of these involved the fact that Tennyson, though he called the poems Idylls, seemed to be starting an epic-length work, and Arnold, in his emphasis on the need for a fitting translation of Homer, was implicitly stating his belief that a ''modern'' epic was an impossibility. Second, in writing his “ epic," Tennyson had chosen to employ blank verse, and one of the main theses of Arnold's lectures is that the modern translator of Homer ought to use hexameters, not the blank verse which had become the principal English form yet which Arnold was convinced could never give the true spirit of Homer. And, finally, Tenny­ son's cardinal sin was that he had chosen as the ostensible subject for his blank-verse epic something from the medieval period: "I have a strong sense of the irrationality of that period," Arnold wrote to his sister, "and of the...