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Swinburne's Laus Veneris and the Tannhäuser Legend

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Clyde K. Hyder
Clyde K. Hyder*
Affiliation:
The University of Kansas
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Extract

Although suggestions have been made in regard to the possible means by which the Tannhäuser legend may have reached Swinburne's receptive mind, no one has offered a satisfactory explanation. It is my purpose to offer such an explanation, for the sake of the light it throws upon Laus Veneris as well as upon the development of the legend in English.

A preliminary consideration of possibilities is essential. First, there is Ludwig Tieck's Der getreue Eckart und der Tannenhäuser, which Carlyle translated as “The Trusty Eckart” in German Romance, published in 1827. Since Swinburne in his youth was an admirer of Carlyle, he may have known this translation. With some of its melodramatic absurdities omitted, the relevant portion of Tieck's story, part II, is briefly as follows: After a mysterious disappearance the noble Tannenhäuser returns to tell his friend Friedrich of his experiences. He believes that he has fallen in love with Emma and murdered a rival, causing both Emma and his own parents to die of grief. In darkest night he goes to a lofty hill, where he calls upon the Enemy of God; the latter teaches him a song, which in some strange way leads him to the Mountain of Venus. Passing the trusty Eckart, a superhuman figure who guards the entrance, he resigns himself to sensual pleasures in the company of Lady Venus and her train. From this “pomp of sin” he has now returned. Friedrich, who has been listening patiently to this recital of an apparent madman, assures him that Emma, recently married to Friedrich, is still alive. The Tannenhäuser does not believe this statement, supposing it a deception of Satan, and sets out to Rome to perform penance. Some months later he comes back, tattered and barefoot. Entering Friedrich's chamber, he kisses him, announces thatthe Holy Father cannot forgive, and departs. Friedrich discovers that Emma is murdered, apparently by the Tannenhäuser, and that the kiss draws him towards the mysterious mountain. The absence of any reference to the pope's staff and to the sending of messengers may be noted.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , December 1930 , pp. 1202 - 1213
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1930

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References

1 In Phantasus.

2 As Georges Lafourcade, La Jeunesse de Swinburne (1928), II, 443, suggests.

3 Cf., for example, Lafourcade, op. cit., II, 443. It may be of interest to observe that Wagner was indebted to Heine. See his rather caustic remark about “certains librettistes” in the introduction to the essay later cited.

4 Before the composition of Laus Veneris only the overture had been given in England, in 1855, and that had been severely criticized. See Henry T. Finck, Wagner and His Works (New York, 1898), I, 454–455. Note also my statement in connection with the reviews of the Lytton-Fane Tannhäuser.

5 Notes on Poems and Reviews (New York, 1866), p. 16.

6 Cf. Swinburne's statement in Notes on Poems and Reviews: “Once accept or admit the least admixture of pagan worship, or of modern thought, and the whole story collapses into froth and smoke.” It is needless to add that Heine's purpose was not Swinburne's.

7 Margaret Armour's translation is at least lively:

“At Frankfort I stopped a while at Schwabb's,
And the famous dumplings ate there;
For religion the folk are far renowned,
And the giblets are first-rate there.“

8 Samuel C. Chew, Swinburne (1929), p. 89; cf. W. B. D. Henderson, Swinburne and Landor (London, 1918), p. 103. Henderson suggests that the Lytton-Fane version is “precisely the sort of misconception that could be counted upon to drive the Pre-Raphaelites in the opposite direction,” and cites a passage in George Meredith's Letters, I, 53.

9 Cf. Lady Betty Balfour, Personal and Literary Letters of Robert First Earl of Lytton (London, 1906) I, 124-125. Reviews of the Temple-Trevor Tannhäuser in The Athenaeum for August 24, 1861, and The Saturday Review for June 15, 1861, call attention to the evident imitation of Tennyson. Yet they refer neither to Wagner nor to any other form of the story, a fact which shows that both Wagner and the medieval legend were unknown. After seeing the opera the two young men copied it faithfully. They spoke of their poem as only a literary feat begun in fun.

10 Op. cit., II, 443: “La question est de savoir si c'est Swinburne qui influença Morris, ou réciproquement.”

11 In The Best Hundred Books, Pall Mall Gazette “Extra,” No. 24, Morris names the Danish ballads in his list of favorites, and tells us that he did not know German and read old German with difficulty. Gaston Paris, Légendes du Moyen Age, p. 127, notes the development of the pope's repentance in the Danish and Low German versions of the old ballad.

The problem of Morris's sources is too complicated to settle here. Julius Riegel in Die Quellen von William Morris' Dichtung The Earthly Paradise merely notes the points of agreement with what he calls the “Sage,” as interpreted by Grässe. J. W. Mackail and Alfred Noyes name Tieck. But it is evident that Tieck alone is insufficient and that Morris utilized the medieval tradition.

12 Collected Works of William Morris, VI, xvi.

13 P. xvii. Miss Morris gives details about part of the early draft, which was certainly not drawn from Tieck alone. Heine in his magazine article has an account resembling this part of Morris's poem in some particulars. Morris was, of course, acquainted with such romances as the Middle English Sir Orfeo.

14 Tannhäuser “goes to Rome, confesses, is cursed by the Pope, and returns to the Hill” (op. cit., VI, xx).

15 Cf. the argument: “.... for his repentance was rejected of man, by whomsoever it was accepted.”

16 V, 210–212. For the German original see Ludwig Achim Von Arnin and Clemens Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, I, 97–101. The author of the Once a Week translation says that his version is literal. This is a correct statement, except that the stanza which in the German (as well as in Heine's French, post), stands fourth from the last is unaccountably placed seventh from the last.

17 Swinburne admitted the authorship of the old French (Signed “Maistre Antoine Gaget”) here as in the case of The Leper. See H. G. Fiedler's letter to The Times Literary Supplement, August 19, 1920, in which is incorporated a letter from the poet. Cf. also William Rossetti's Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (London, 1866), p. 31.

Swinburne's motive in introducing the archaic French has not been satisfactorily explained. Aside from his youthful love of mystification and the delight which he took (and of which he speaks in the letter to Fiedler) in composing pastiche, there are other considerations: The French helps to create a certain medieval atmosphere and prepares the mind of the scholarly reader to grasp the dramatic situation at once. I wonder, moreover, whether Swinburne did not wish to emphasize the. fact that he was dealing with an old legend, anticipating the terrific onslaught of his critics both against Laus Veneris and The Leper. In my study of Swinburne's reputation I am dealing more fully with such problems.

An anonymous correspondent, engaged in a controversy with Richard Henry Stoddard over the morality of Swinburne's poems, writes in the New York Evening Post (semi-weekly) for December 21, 1866: “How far Swinburne is under the domination of his subject may be known not only by his last published poems, but also by his citations from old French chronicles of love—the immoral spawn of the immoral ages.” The writer is of course referring to the supposititious extract from Gaget's Livre des Grandes Merveilles d'Amour, prefixed to Laus Veneris. On the other hand, the author of a notice in The Radical, III (January, 1868), 316–23, remarks that one should look for the beautiful in poems like Laus Veneris, which after all is based on a legend recorded in “Rabelesque French” (sic).

18 Cf. the powerful final stanza of Laus Veneris:

“I seal myself upon thee with my might,
Abiding alway out of all men's sight
Until God loosen over sea and land
The thunder of the trumpets of the night.“

19 Gosse and Wise, Letters (New York, 1919), I, 9.

20 See his letter to the London Times, April 15, 1909. S. M. Ellis, George Meredith, p. 129, indicates June, 1862, as the time of the visit described by Meredith, whose accounts varied somewhat. The precise date of Swinburne's discovery of FitzGerald, on whose translation the meter of Laus Veneris is modeled, seems doubtful; but Lady Burne-Jones writes that the discovery was made at the close of 1861 or the beginning of 1862 (Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, I, 234). Cf., however, Gosse and Wise, Letters, II, 244. Gosse, Nicolson, Chew, and Lafourcade assign the composition of the poem to the latter year. M. Lafourcade finds “l'accent dantesque des tierces rimes allongées,” besides “l'imitation apparente de FitzGerald” (op. cit., II, 97).

21 Revue des Deux Mondes (1853), II, 5-38. In this article Heine translates into French both his own Tannhäuser (with some omissions) and the old ballad, and refers to other stories connected with the legend, mentioning as his chief source of information the Mons Veneris of Kornmann. He includes “the ring of Venus” story, which the reader may know from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Mérimée's La Venus D'Ille, and Morris's The Ring Given to Venus.

I am making no attempt to consider all versions of the Tannhäuser legend or to discuss its folk-lore components, though obviously the story is related to the widespread class of narratives which depict a mortal dwelling with a supernatural being. For the fullest discussion and bibliography of the medieval development of the theme consult Philip Stephan Barto, Tannhäuser and the Venusberg (1913). Briefer treatments are to be found in Gaston Paris's Légendes du Moyen Age and J. G. Th. Grässe's Der Tannhäuser und Ewige Jude.

By this time the reader does not need to be warned against the reference to the fictitious book of Gaget cited by Swinburne, but it is amusing to observe the following passage from the preface to Charles G. Kendall's translation of Tannhäuser: Minnesinger and Knight Templar (Boston, 1911): “Wagner's grand opera is entirely based upon the supernatural element of the Tannhäuser myth familiar to all readers versed in medieval lore (vide Gaget's Grandes Merveilles d'Amour—an excerpt from which may be found prefixed to Swinburne's famed poem, Laus Veneris) as well as the grand clientele of opera-goers in both hemispheres.”

22 Richard Monckton Milnes, Poems, Legendary and Historical (London, 1844), pp. 24-28.

23 It may be noted, however, that Swinburne was a reader of the Revue des Deux Mondes as early as 1860 (see Lafourcade, I, 164).

I cannot resist appending a brief note on John Davidson's characteristic A Ballad of Tannhäuser, which begins in medias res with the knight's confessing to the pope his experiences in the cave of Venus. After the usual remark about the staff, Tannhäuser sees it burst into bloom, but departs and is sought for in vain by the pope's messengers:

“And so they wait, while empires sprung
Of hatred thunder past above,
Deep in the earth for ever young,
Tannhäuser and the Queen of Love.“

Davidson goes a step further than Morris and Swinburne and seems to imply that dwelling with Venus is no sin. Compare the solemn warning which the old ballad-maker addressed to priests inclined to be harsh. We have indeed traveled the full cycle from the medieval to the modern!

24 Notes on Poems and Reviews, p. 16.

25 Harold Nicolson, Swinburne, p. 109.

26 Both early and recent commentators have tended to overlook the fact that to a certain extent this conflict, just as the parallel one between Christianity and paganism in The Hymn to Proserpine, grows out of the dramatic situation. Thus Mr. Nicolson's statement that Swinburne's defense on this score was “sufficiently disingenuous to be really amusing” (op. cit., pp. 105f.) expresses only a half-truth.

It seems curious that the critics have failed to note the kinship of Laus Veneris and the Hymn to Proserpine. William Bell Scott (Autobiographical Notes, II, 69) relates that close upon Christmas of 1862 Swinburne declaimed both poems to him at the seaside.

27 Henderson, op. cit., p. 247. Lafourcade (II, 444) compares a passage in William Blake in which Swinburne calls attention to the most famous quotation from Aucassin and Nicollette. Cf. Laus Veneris, “There are the naked faces of great kings ....”

28 “Culpa rubet vultus meus” (see Lafourcade, II, 107). Swinburne had made a translation of the Dies Irae.

29 Sources is probably used with a regard for its linguistic associations. Cf “fierce reluctance of disastrous stars” (the italics are mine) in Anactoria.