Tit, meet tat

[larryhammer]

Those who liked the earlier comments on Tennyson may enjoy this -- a contemporary slagging off by Edward Bulwer Lytton (yes, that Bulwer Lytton) in The New Timon (1846):

Not mine, not mine, (O Muse forbid!) the boon
Of borrowed notes, the mock-bird's modish tune,
The jingling medley of purloin'd conceits,
Outbaying Wordsworth, and outglittering Keats,
Where all the airs of patchwork-pastoral chime
To drowsy ears in Tennysonian rhyme!
 ... [obligatory praise of Pope and Dryden omitted]
Let School-Miss Alfred vent her chaste delight
On 'darling little rooms so warm and bright!'
Chaunt, 'I'm aweary,' in infectious strain,
And catch her 'blue fly singing i' the pane.' ...
Rather, be thou, my poor Pierian Maid,
Decent at least, in Hayley's weeds array'd,
Than patch with frippery every tinsel line,
And flaunt, admired, the Rag Fair of the Nine!

What strikes me the most, I confess, is how surprisingly competent the verse is -- not graceful, but brisk and unstrained, with less teeth-grinding than usual for Victorian satire. It's not that I didn't know Bulwer Lytton could write, but I didn't know he could write this.

Tennyson, btw, responded with a direct attack -- a poem he suppressed from his collected works -- in which he points out that a man who made his reputation through dandyism has no business talking about others' tinsel, roasts again the old "critics are failed writers" chestnut:

And once you tried the Muses too;
   You fail'd, Sir: therefore now you turn,
You fall on those who are to you,
   As Captain is to Subaltern.

... and concludes that Bulwer Lytton doesn't deserve to live up to Timon's name, which in any case he doesn't. The interested can find both poems in The Penguin Book of Satirical Verse ed. Edward Lucie-Smith (1967).

There ain't nothin' like a literary spat. Makes me want to write a dedication to Robert Bly modeled on Byron's to Robert Southey.

---L.