^I( SWINBURNE AND LANDOR MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO SWINBURNE AND LANDOR A STUDY OF THEIR SPIRITUAL RELATIONSHIP AND ITS EFFECT ON SWINBURNE'S MORAL AND POETIC DEVELOPMENT BY W. BROOKS DRAYTON HENDERSON / . . . the Olympian sire, Whom I too loved and worshipped, seeing so great And found so gracious toward my long desire To bid that love in song before his gate Sound, and my lute be loyal to his lyre. Swinburne, Song for the Centenary of Walter Salvage Landor. ■J • • « J 3 J ■> 1 , > MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1918 COPYRIGHT » a • « « * « * - • « ^ • • V • t * C * P7? V9^ PREFACE The better part of this Essay, together with its Appendices, was submitted to the faculty of Princeton University in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philo- sophy in English Literature, in 1915. I am especially indebted to Professor Thomas Marc Parrott for much encouragement and advice in connection with its development, both up to that time and subsequently, and to Professor Duncan Spaeth. Acknowledgment is also due to INlr. William Heinemann, the owner of the Swinburne copyrights, by whose very kind permission the quotations from Swinburne's verse and prose are used. W. B. D. H. London, October 17, 1917- 463851 CONTENTS CHAPTER I Explanatory .... CHAPTER n Personalia — I. Landor .... II. Swinburne CHAPTER HI Swinburne's Landor CHAPTER IV First Evidences .... CHAPTER V "Too MUCH Love of Living" CHAPTER VI "Oppressive Heaven" PAGE I II 31 52 69 85 121 CHAPTER VII Transition . . . . , .143 vn viii SWINBURNE AND LANDOR CHAPTER VIII PAGE " Songs before Sunrise " and " Songs of Two Nations " 149 CHAPTER IX For Greece and Athens .... 206 CHAPTER X "Thalassius" . . . • . .214 CHAPTER XI De Amore . . . . . .225 CHAPTER XII Epilogue ....... 236 APPENDICES Appendices I. to VI. On the Chronology of- "Poems AND Ballads," First Series .... 243 Appendix VII. Swinburne and Baudelaire . .274 Appendix VIII. Swinburne and Matthew Arnold . 278 Appendix IX. Swinburne and George Meredith's "Modern Love" . . . . .281 Appendix X. Notes on Victor Hugo's Influence on Swinburne's Early Work .... 284 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . .287 NOTES ....... 289 INDEX ....... 302 CHAPTER I EXPLANATORY Swinburne has doubtless been more wildly Chapter praised and blamed than any other writer of his _!_ generation. And on this account, if on no other, the period of impressionistic comment upon him seems to have come to its logical end. What is now needed, says a reviewer of a recent essay on the poet, is a study of his development that shall keep a steady eye upon contemporaneous move- ments of thought and affairs in England and on the Continent. Accepting the programme as outlined by the reviewer, only with a great many limitations, this essay is an attempt to meet the need de- scribed. It proposes to study Swinburne's development in some relationship to those aspects of thought or artistic expression or political affairs that most attracted him ; but chiefly in connection with a great spiritual force which (if we may believe his own testimony) to a considerable degree stimulated his bearing, perhaps even determined his attitude toward these matters. This force was Walter Savage Landor. Swinburne knew him personally for a little 1 ^ B 2 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter while when Landor was a very old man. He L had come to know Landor's work when a mere child, and gave him a veneration compact of admiration for it and of that exquisite devotion to very old people of which he was so pre- eminently capable. He professes that Landor told him certain definite truths about life and a man's duty in it, and that these profoundly affected him. When Landor died, Swinburne made him the supreme hero of his Pantheon, and thereafter was constantly profuse in giving him praise for this counsel and companionship. I propose to accept these professions as true, and as the true external explanations of Swinburne's development ; and to show that the relationship they imply with Landor is confirmed both by Landor's writings and by his own. At the same time the matter is not entirely simple. He had two other great heroes, Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, besides many lesser ones, and so eulogises them at times that they and not Landor would seem to be his real masters. Furthermore all his expressions of allegiance or of indebtedness tend toward extravagance. Both of these facts need consideration. Of the two, the first is the simpler. Hugo and Mazzini were noble inspirations for him : but Mazzini's influence was chiefly restricted to politics, as will be shown later ; and Hugo's, political also, is almost indeterminate. Landor's is general. Swinburne had more points of con- tact with him, and was able to give him an intimate filial devotion that was more human and tender than his adoration of the other two EXPLANATORY 3 men. He says, speaking of his triple hero- Chapter worship almost at the end of his life, that he L knew all three of them, "the three living gods, I do not say of my idolatry, for idolatry is a. term inapplicable where the gods are real and true, but of my whole-souled and single-hearted worship. . . . When writing of Landor, of Mazzini, and of Hugo, I write of men who have honoured me with the assurance and the evidence of their cordial and affectionate regard. How- ever inadequate and unworthy may be my tribute to their glory when living and their memory when dead, it is that of one whose gratitude and devotion found unforgettable favour in their sight " (1). In this enumeration of them, consideration for time order gave Landor the first place : but not this alone. For in the same " Dedicatory Epistle " to the col- lected edition of his poems from which the passage is taken, he makes it plain that in matters of belief he was not in complete agree- ment with his two Continental masters : " You know that I never pretended to see eye to eye with my illustrious friends and masters, Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, in regard to the positive and passionate confidence of their sub- lime and purified theology " (2). In a poem, " To Victor Hugo " (Poems and Ballads, 1st Series), which marks almost as surely the begin- ning, as the prose passage does the climax of his thinking, tlie cry is from hopeless lips to eyes of hope, and he recognises almost bitterly the division between his thought and that of this master : 4 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Thou art lord and king ; but we !• Lift younger eyes and see Less of high hope, less light on wandering hours. He raises no such cry to Landor ; no word of dissent, except from Landor's mordant prejudice against France (distilled in Revolutionary fires). And even in that regard he unites with the older poet in hating all things named Napoleon. The cry he raises to him is that of serene sonship to an Olympian fatherhood, already quoted on the title-page in justification of such an attempt as this : . . . the Olympian sire Whom I too loved and worshipped, seeing so great And found so gracious toward my long desire. To bid that love in song before his gate Sound, and my lute be loyal to his lyre. He was in agreement with practically every tenet of Landor's philosophy, and even with some phases of Landor's temperament, being by birth and election and training Aristocrat and Republi- can and Hellenist, as Landor was before him. What he wrote of Landor might with complete accuracy be written of himself : that " his tender and ardent love for children, of animals, and of flowers make fragrant alike the pages of his writings and the records of his life " ; with little change that " his passionate compassion, his bitter and burning pity for all wrongs endured in the world found only their natural and inevit- able outlet in his lifelong defence and advocacy of tyrannicide " ; and again with complete justice, in so far as it concerns his considered literary criticism, that " praise and encouragement . . . EXPLANATORY 5 came yet more readily to his lips than challenge Chapter or defiance " (3). — L Then there are moral and political doctrines, to be discussed later on, that he holds in common with Landor. Some of these similarities are doubtless the result of Landor' s influence upon him. It is obvious, for example, that but for him Swinburne would never have made a lifelong | defence and advocacy of tyrannicide. But by far the more important of the resemblances are not so much created as only made evident by the discipleship Swinburne so voluntarily undertook. He was in some respects temperamentally like Landor, his approach to life determined by the same forces that determined Landor's, by nature he loved the same things. But perceiving this inherent spiritual relationship he deliberately fostered it, because he realised in Landor the ideal achievement of his own type. At least it is from this point of view that we intend to study the relationship between the two men — believing the electing love of the hero- worshipper to be at least as important in deter- mining the path of his development as the trend of the hero he elects to worship. It is then comradeship we would study, spiritual relationship. " Influence " might be the word, only that it has so often been used to imply subservience in matters of the spirit and copying in matters of style, and therefore does not suit this case. Swinburne was a proud individualist despite his genius for hero-worship, and but for his insistence that Landor affected him, probably no one would think of trying to 6 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter make such a study as this. The reason for it _L does not appear in those external details of their work in connection with which influence is provable, in these late days when ideas are more or less the common property of society and un- traceable to any individual as their originator unless they have his mark of style upon them. For the styles of the two men are thoroughly dissimilar. Landor's is of the utmost classical austerity, whereas Swinburne's is thoroughly and ardently " romantic." Landor's medium of expression was, besides, most naturally prose : " Poetry was always my amusement, prose my study and business " (4). And Swinburne's medium is so ostentatiously verse that no one can read more than a few of his critical pages without being made aware, by the plunge and flood of foaming dithyrambics, that larger space is needed, more equable and certain measures than those of prose, in order that his genius may realise its highest possibility of beauty and of effectiveness. This stylistic or artistic individu- ality is further suggested by their own confessions. When Landor says : I see the rainbow in the sky, The dew upon the grass. I see them and I ask not why They ghmmer or they pass, (viii. 71) not impertinently we may waive the circumstance that places this quatrain in his Miscellaneous Poems of 1846 (his seventy-first year), and accept at its face value this assurance of a certain equabihty, poise, and calm realisation of natural EXPLANATORY 7 beauty that prove him temperamentally a Chapter classicist. L Just so Swinburne in the presence of the sea proves himself " romantic " — poems in which he bears witness of " the matchless magic, the inevitable fascination of it " ; or " such as try to render the effect of inland or woodland solitude — the splendid oppression of nature at noon which found utterance of old in words of such singular and everlasting significance as panic and nympholepsy " (5). Between two such men obviously it is not possible to prove much interchange of thought. Occasionally seemingly unassailable indications of it may occur, moments when, as Swinburne might say, one may find borne to his stormy or quiescent coast some perfect shell from Landor's serene depths : perhaps, to an ear mindful of the sound of those waters, it may seem (in Landor's most remembered lines) that — It remembers its august abodes And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there. {Gebir, i. 165.) Veteres rcminiseitur aedes Oceanusque suus quo murnmre murmurat ilia. {Gebirus.) But such instances arc rare. " Influence," then, as ordinarily understood is unprovable in this case. Also, if we mean by it dictation of an active to a passive agent, it is unlikely. The nineteenth century echoes with just such ideas as find expression both in Landor's work and in Swinburne's, and with regard to a good many of their common interests one is 8 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter foiccd to concludc that Landor stimulated, but L did not mould his disciple. Love of Italy and hope for her future is a case in point. Landor did not create it in Swinburne. Apart from Chaucer, Milton, Shelley, and the strong literary tradition of such an interest, it so happens that his mother, Lady Jane Henrietta Ashburnham, had been educated in Florence, and then and later spent much of her life there ; so that love for "la citta dei fiori " and its land may well have been one of the poet's very early sentiments. To reinforce it there were later influences enough, the Brownings, Meredith, Mazzini among them, as well as Landor ; and one, the subtlest perhaps, because it sprang from the soil, felt in 1864, the year of Swinburne's visit to Italy and the so- called " pilgrimage to Landor." Of this influence the beauty and perfection of his Itylus, written in a garden in Fiesole with the whole air about him " vociferous with nightingales," is the choicest memorial. Much the same is true of his patriotism (which surely will be allowed to belong as birthright to a " Republican who was also an Englishman "), of his humanitarianism, and love of liberty, and anticlericalism. Shelley and Dickens and Hugo and Trelawny and countless others represent one or the other of these interests ; so there is no utility in trying to make Swinburne derive them from Landor. And also there must be considered the ever present stimulus of con- temporary political or social history. Yet Landor seems to have given an example to all these unsettled faiths or emotions. He helped to make them articulate in his disciple. EXPLANATORY 9 If, then, we turn to his opinions on these and Chapter other matters of his and of Swinburne's concern, _^ it is with the hope, not that they will furnish us with absolute sources, but that they will elucidate Swinburne's. For this they are fitted eminently, being more clearly stated than Swinburne's, and with the memorable beauty and strength which make Landor one of the foremost writers of English prose ; being representative also of that aristocratic republicanism to which Landor and Swinburne so ardently subscribed. And in addi- tion we must turn to the man himself. His heroic personality is the really important matter. Swinburne had met similar opinions elsewhere without inspiring his spirit. So first a portrayal of the two men must be attempted that shall reveal, from Landor's works and biography, something of the inexhaustible beauty and the noble (if sometimes perverse) energy that at- tracted Swinburne to him ; and reveal Swin- burne's eager genius and his capacity for loyalty to every trait of his master. But yet one more word of explanation. This essay is to be primarily a study of the master personal relationship of Swinburne's life. Such a relationship does not exist in a vacuum ; and its mastery is not proved by the word. It is in- volved with other relationships, with other men ; and its mastery is proved by showing its control over these. We are forced, therefore, to consider some otlicr relationships than the main one ; to show how, especially in his first period, Swinburne was led alien here and there by his feeling for his • lesser heroes. But we come back to Landor : 10 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter for Landorism, against all opposition, established —L. itself as his true North ; by it he was helped to mark out the course of his development. And as we see it now thwarting, now correcting, now supplementing other lodestars, we shall know something of its power. CHAPTER II PERSONALIA I. Landor Of Landor about the year 1807 Dr. Parr wrote Chapter II to Sou they : " He is impetuous, open-hearted, L magnanimous ; largely furnished with general knowledge ; well versed in the best classical writers ; a man of original genius, as appears in his compositions both in prose and verse ; a keen hater of oppression and corruption ; and a steady friend to civil and religious liberty " (6). Landor (1775-1864) was then definitely pursuing the path of development which from very early years had seemed to await him. Hatred of oppression was born with him. As a boy he had on one occasion shocked his mother by the pious wish " that the French would invade England and assist us in hanging George the Third between two such thieves as the Archbishops of Canterbury and York " (7). Defiance of authority brought about his " removal " from Rugby — " removal " being a kindly substitution for " expulsion " which bears witness of authority's appreciation of its refractory charge. This impetuosity resulted in his rustication from Trinity, Oxford, in his nine- 11 12 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter teenth year, after a year's residence. Impetuosity, L too, continued to be his bane to the end of his Ufe — no more leading him to fire guns at the windoAvs of obnoxious Tories (as had been the unhappy circumstance at college), but leading him to fire much more harmful words, Latin and Greek and English, lampoon and epigram, at the many who offended him. Impetuous patriotism led him, for instance, to such sharp use of his favourite weapon against an assailant of England — the Italian poet Monti — that subsequent events forced him from Como, where he was then staying (1818) ; and he retired with a fusillade of Latin verses against the Austrian Governor. Just so, some years before, he had been forced by a com- bination of troubles from his Welsh estate, Llanthony ; and so, many years later, he was forced from England to take a last refuge in Italy. Assuredly he w^as not a man who could walk easily where other men walked ; annoyances that many could have overlooked or avoided, he exaggerated into perpetual stumbling- blocks and opposed with continual disaster. Yet, disasters were hardly real to him : his realities were other men's dim visions ; his life is not that of quarrels and travels enforced, but of writing and thought (8). In reality it was lived on " Sunium's height " (9) in the midst of the great men and women of history — especially of classical history — whom he recorded in scores of " Imaginary Conversations." It was there that Swinburne found him. The contrast presented by this Landor to the Landor of much of the biography is quite as PERSONALIA 13 delightful as it is surprising, and it is this aspect Chapter of his genius we must take up first. The lover of L liberty is chastened and made perfect by the lover of beauty ; the praiser of heroes, by the lover of children ; the life troubled with littleness, by walk and constant communion with Nature and with the world's great. It seems a pity that he ever had to descend to mundane and transient affairs. But to consider him away from them is to consider him truly — and happy. " Think of me," he says, speaking audibly through Anaxa- goras in Pericles and Aspasia, " think me happy that I am away from Athens, I who always lose my composure in the presence of crime or calamity. If any one should note to you my singularities, remembering me a year hence . . . add to them, but not aloud, a singularity of felicity, ' He neither lived nor died with the multitude ' " (10). The idea as well as, on occasions, the practice of solitude was dear to him. Lo ! like a god, sole and inscrutable, He stands above our pity, (vii. 98) is the manner of his Count Julian. He himself also could be aloof ; but, ever quick to respond to beauty or need, to any sensuous or spiritual appeal, from the midst of the gods he would bend to bestow Olympian compassion or the most perfectly human regard of praise and pity. " Whoever is wronged," says his Diogenes to Plato, " is thereby my fellow-creature, although he were never so before. Scorn, contumely, chains unite us." And again, with a change of 14 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter eniphasis and illustrating the de haul en has L quality of his altruism : "I sympathise with the brave in their adversity and afflictions, because I feel in my own breast the flame that burns in theirs : and I do not sympathise with others, because with others my heart hath nothing of consanguinity " (11). The occasions of his solitude were the occasions of his work : his conversing and communing with the great who peopled his world ; so that, though solitude may not have been to him in the strict religious sense what it was to his Fulke Greville, " the audience chamber of God " (12), it was an audience chamber of many godlike spirits. And they did not keep him waiting. This was why he liked to be alone when he walked abroad : any other companionship was then alien and intrusive. Even natural beauty — an unexpected appeal and delight of it — seems at those times to have been an impediment. The senses were alert within, and too abrupt a summons from without would disturb the clarity of the just perceptible vision ; sometimes marring it beyond power of repair. " The wood-lark, the nightingale, and the ring- dove, have made me idle," he says, " for many [hours] even when I had gone into the fields to gather fresh materials for composition. . . . More than once, when I have taken out my pencil to fix an idea on paper, the smell of the cedar, held by me unconsciously against the nostrils, hath so absorbed the senses, that what I was about to write down has vanished, altogether and irre- coverably " (13). It is obvious that human demand, either pleasurable or irritating, would PERSONALIA 15 at such times have had an even more destructive Chapter effect. L Often then, he would walk alone ; and the truly conversational and un-logical character of his imaginary conversations would allow a de- velopment of the " few detached thoughts and images " (14) which he confesses always to have been the beginnings of his works. Nature, natural surroundings, were necessary in order that he might compose in this way ; but it was Nature unobtrusive, or under control. " I seldom write straight on end as the hunters say (he writes to his biographer Forster), or in the house, but generally while I am walking or riding, or sitting out in the air ; sometimes in a very small pocket-book, sometimes on a scrap of paper " (15). Preferably, it would seem, he com- posed while afoot — riding set his thoughts at too swift a gallop ; but walking, in the open air, in the sun, in Italy (this the acme) gave him clear perception of his women, made it possible " to elicit their thoughts and hear their voices to advantage " (16). Yet, on such occasions, which were frequent, " he was so . . . absorbed in his own reflections as to be unconscious of external objects, which indeed seldom much affected him " (17). "He would walk about Bath, as between Florence and Ficsolc, with his eyes fixed on the ground, taking no heed of the world around him." " In the daytime," he suppHcs, as index to his mental activity at such times, " in the day- time I laboured, and at night unburdened my mind " — committed his thoughts to paper — " shedding many tears " (18). 16 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Yet it must not be supposed that Nature was L not a subtly pervasive influence in his work. If the conversation itself was arranged out of doors, and between men of receptive minds, like Sidney and Lord Brooke, it might be allowed to suggest the turn of the discourse, " foliage, herbage, pebbles," in the words given to the Arcadian, putting in motion " the finer parts of the mind " (19). One type of natural intrusion would indeed seem to have escaped even from this regulation : beauty and youth combined in the person of woman created its own law. In the conversation with Southey which furnishes so many delightful revelations of his habit and character, Landor confesses as much (20) : he has rarely walked anywhere in company, except with ladies. And he gives to Southey the sly answer that no sign of disaffection for walking in company had been forthcoming, to his observa- tion, either at Llanthony or at Como. The maker of the Conversations, in this regard at least, is one with the Galileo he has made. Shut up by the Jesuits for too much bravery in the firmament, that astronomer gives this revelation of himself to his visitor, Milton : "I love the fields, and the country air, and the sunny sky, and the starry ; and I could keep my temper when, in the midst of my calculations, the girls brought me flowers from lonely places, and asked me their names, and puzzled me " (21). It must be noted, too, that unaffected by external nature as he may have seemed at some times of preoccupation, when his sensibilities were withdrawn for the imperious service of the PERSONALIA 17 " people of his brain," there are frequent passages Chapter in his work that prove a passionate animal delight L in its rich manifestations of colour and form and, as has been shown, sound. Without an attempt at philosophical interpretation, without a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, he gives as it were a rationale for the emotional experience. " I do believe that beauty, in its early innocence, has something of what, for want of a better and a more definite name, we call etherial ; something pure and rapid ; something that stands impassably between us and evil, and holds our little world from ruin and corruption." It is in this sense, unconscious, incalculable, that We are what suns and winds and waters make us. {Regeneration, vii. 461.) This satisfaction, however, is secondary, and though he further derives some comfort from observing the operation of natural law (22), as of increase and decay, it is the sense - delight of beauty that he first sought. " I love sweet odours," his Aspasia writes to her friend. " Surely my Cleone herself must have breathed her very soul into these ! Let me smell them again." Her desire is as the hart's for the water-brooks : " I want the poplars, the willows, the water- lilies, and the soft green herbage " (23). The gentle buffet and caress of " the curly wave of the warm sea " (24) was also pleasant to him ; and to him, as to his Dr. Glaston (the source of most of the highest delight in The Citation and Examination of Shakespeare), it must have seemed c 18 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter that " after a walk in Midsummer, the immersion II 1 of our hands into the cool and closing grass is surely not the least among our animal delights " (25). These expressions of fine sensuousness are occasional ; but they are so spontaneous as to be really characteristic. They represent a trait Landor holds in common with none of his early contemporaries except Keats ; less, certainly, with Shelley ; least with Wordsworth. His tender devotion to plants and flowers is likewise his own. Never, he says, did weak plant beaten by wind and rain want him, and he refuse aid. He was compelled to their service by mere gratitude, " for sweet scents are the vehicles of still sweeter thoughts " : I never pluck the rose ; the violet's head Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank And not reproached me ; the ever sacred cup Of the pure lily hath between my hands Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold. (viii. 41.) The world of course took some heed of him — in Bath, as he walked with his dearly loved Pomeranian, a twelve years' companion cele- brated in high verse on his decease : O Urna ! numquam sis tuo eruta hortulo. Cor intus est fidele, nam cor est canis. Vale, hortule, aeternumque, Pomero ! vale. Sed, si datur, nostri memor. (i. 472.) (26.) The world, too, took heed of the old man, a bit tattered in apparel, whom it met often on the hills about Fiesole, " repeating to himself the masterpieces that he loved " (27) ; testing and PERSONALIA 19 perfecting the rhythms of his splendid prose. Chapter And of him ("il vecchio con quel bel canino," L as he was known, for another Pomero shared his Italian days) they used to say : " Tutti gV Inglesi sono pazzi, ma questo poi ! " (28). Pazzo he indeed appeared, in its simpler sense, to others besides Italian peasants (to consider now the outward side of his nature), for he was often vehement, extravagant, lavish in praise and condemnation. " Wild irascibility " and " swift impatience " are characterisations that his biographer has to use often enough ; his con- versation is " dashed with will and over-positive- ness." Nothing else was to be expected — from the boy who refused to take part in any com- petition ; from, the man who declared with simple and unassuming conviction, " I strove with none, for none was worth my strife " ; who con- fidently asserted, " What I write is not written on slate ; and no finger, not of Time himself, who dips it in the cloud of years, can efface it " (29) ; who casually stated, " As a writer and as a man, I know my station. If I found in the world five equal to myself, I would walk out of it, not to be jostled " ; who among all of great station " who have made a noise in the world . . . never saw any in whose presence (he) felt inferiority, excepting Kosciusco" (30). Such a man had to be tempestuous. 'Jujnter fulgens showed himself ; Jupiter tonans followed — a laugh as of thunder reaching regions of sound undiscoverable by all but the Boanerges, startling poor Southey, as the two sat in the church of Sant' Abondio, so that he must often turn his head back " toward the open 20 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter door, fearing lest some pious passer-by, or some 1 more distant one in the wood above . . . should hear the roof echo with (the) laughter " (31). With it, and after, was fair weather — idyllic. " Then not only was his talk incomparably rich and full, it was delivered with such a courtly charm of manner and address, such a rotundity, mellowness, and old-world grace of utterance as were irresistible. His voice, especially in reading aloud, was as sympathetic as it was powerful ; . . . deep, rich, and like the noblest music " (32). His outbreaks must have been occasioned largely by political or social oppressions, for, as he says, in the presence of crime he always lost his composure ; and such crimes abounded during the ninety years of his life. His com- minations upon Napoleon III. are examples, or his denunciation of the government under which English asylum was denied Kossuth, or English aid withheld from struggling Italy. Readers of such dialogues as those between Leo XII. and his valet, Don Victor Saez and El Rey Netto, will not find it hard to imagine similar vituperation expressed in less formal speech. But he was violent about other matters than those concern- ing the Holy Alliance or the degenerate litter of Bourbon or other kings to whose villainy or in- competence he attributed the ills of the time of these two dialogues (1822-1828), and of others as well. A paltry personal offender at Fiesole was " so vile a sycophant that even the blast of Michael's trumpet could not rouse his abject soul " ; the mensurable carelessness of a publisher he fancied such an unparalleled enormity that PERSONALIA 21 he burned his uncompleted fourth volume because Chapter of it, solemnly warning his children not to pursue !. the literary career ; the illness of his children, reported to him on a journey, threw him into such a fit of anxiety that he hesitated between drown- ing himself and going back ; a black-edged letter from Rose Paynter (niece of the Rose Aylmer of his boyhood romance whom he has immortalised in the most consummately perfect, being the most perfectly compressed, elegy in the language) (33), put him in a terror unequalled out of Bedlam : " You know how suddenly the most irrational thoughts seize upon me, and how I live and have my being among impracticable and impossible things. ... It is true, a moment was quite sufficient to assure me that the writer was alive when it was written ; yet what a chaos was generated during that moment, in my uncalculat- ing and unreflecting head " (34). Yet even here is genius. These very errancies, considered apart from his intellectuality, have greatness ; and a conception of him based upon them alone is strangely appealing. Such a partial portrait of him is given by Dickens in the person of Mr. Boythorn in Bleak House, reveal- ing for instant admiration the essential heroic generosity of his spirit — "the inside of the man, the warm heart of the man, the passion of the man, the fresh blood of the man." He is " always in extremes, perpetually in the superlative degree." He had knocked out the teeth of Mr. Jarndyce's oppressor when Mr. Jarndycc was a low boy at school. " He was then the most impetuous boy in the world " (his expectant host announces), 22 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter " and he is ROW the most impetuous man. He _^ was then the loudest boy in the world, and he is now the loudest man. He was then the heartiest and sturdiest boy in the world, and he is now the heartiest and sturdiest man. He is a tremendous fellow " (35). Mr. Boythorn is expected for dinner, and an hour after the time he bursts in, protesting that he had been maliciously misdirected by the most intolerable scoundrel on the face of the earth ; declaring that, had Mr. Jarndyce been married, he would have banished himself to the remotest summit of the Himalaya Mountains rather than present himself at this unreasonable hour. But he is appeased in a flash, and the thunder of his laugh stirs the neighbourhood. A little later he is led to express himself on the Court of Chancery ; this too in the midst of the tenderest ministra- tions to a little canary, " the most astonishing bird in Europe," which perches serenely on his forehead while he consigns Chancery, from its son the accountant-general to its father the devil, to be blown to atoms with ten thousand hundred- weight of gunpowder. This same impetuous generosity is manifest in the management of his own person. In 1808, for instance, at a moment's notice he took him- self off to Spain, then in the midst of opposition to the encroachments of Napoleon — raised a volunteer troop, contributed 10,000 reals for the relief of burnt Venturada, quarrelled with the English envoy, and returned to England, by way of campaigning having served three launches with powder and muskets, and shouldered a PERSONALIA 23 child too heavy for its distressed mother for some Chapter five or six miles ! But this much he brought ' back — the conception of his titanic drama of perverted patriotism, Count Julian, and such lovely and imperishable pictures as those of the secluded scenes where Ebro springs And drives not from his fount the fallen leaf, So motionless and tranquil its repose. (vii. 61.) More than ten years later he was wishing he had another thousand pounds to spare that he might offer it to the revolting Neapolitans. The profits of his first book were to be devoted to supplying the needs of a distressed clergyman ; of his Latin poems, to aiding the poor of Leipzig ; of an Imaginary Conversation between Savonarola and the Prior of Florence, to bring relief to Garibaldi's wounded. The profits were imaginary — like the conversations ; but one unsuccess was long forgotten before another arrived. His last years in England (1836-1857) displayed his keen sym- pathy with the social reforms of Lord Shaftes- bury; the Hungarian war in 1848-49 roused him (as did the Polish struggle) to fever heat, and he and Lord Nugent " took unwearying delight in rendering service to such of the leaders of that gallant people as were in England after the struggle " (3G). His return to Italy (where the Savonarola conversation was written) saw him seeking to assist the release from Austrian bondage in yet other ways, even to the extremity of trying to pawn his watch for the benefit of Garibaldi's followers. His last volumes are a series of trumpet calls stirring the Risorgimento 24 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter in its later movements, both against Austrian L and against Papal tyranny. Socially, he was a leader in the movement of Romantic Humani- tarianism ; politically he was a life-long assaulter of the ancien regime. It is hardly necessary to speak again of his love for his children — of his love for children in general. The fervent anxiety displayed on the occasion of their illness is ample evidence ; even in its perfervid unreasonableness, it is not unusual. " This is the first time I ever was a whole day without seeing Arnold," he wrote in 1821 of his three -year -old son ; " he is of all living creatures the most engaging. . . . What a pity it is that such divine creatures should ever be men and subject to regrets and sorrows ! " (37). He conceived childhood, as he conceived many aspects of life, emotionally ; and if he reflects upon it, it is a reflection that takes account chiefly of the increase or decrease of the qualities that, to one mood, make it dear. Parenthood, or the affection of children (the conversation is between Walker and Hattaji, but the thoughts are not far away from Landor), " opens to thee in the deserts of life the two most exuberant and refreshing sources of earthly happiness, lave and piety" (38). And again : " In every child there are many children ; but coming forth year after year, each somewhat like and somewhat varying. When they are grown much older, the leaves (as it were) lose their pellucid green, the branches their graceful pliancy " (39). But he dwells upon the pliancy, and pays tribute to the green : Artemidora, mild and bashful, like a white \ PERSONALIA 25 blossom on a river ; Guidone and Lucia with Chapter their simple loves ; Tersitza prattling grave L beauties to Trelawny, on the relation between the good and the gracious, the exceeding white- ness of those great water-birds, and how they " look at it upon them ... as if it solaced and supported and refreshed them " (40) ; Cesarion, boyishly and imperially fronting the files of Octavius while Agrippa looks on and cries " Well done " at the crash of grounding arms that salute the child. It passes, but it is great ; it is a dream, but " without such dreams," as Landor's Boccaccio says to his Fiametta, " dull would be the sleep called life " (41). As a critic Landor gives important evidence of his traits of character and features of training ; in particular of a comprehensive and thorough classicism, and of Boythorn impetuosity of judg- ment. The reviver of some five hundred char- acters, the greater part of them men and women who had " made a noise in the world," he lived on intimate terms with heroes of Greek and Roman thought and culture. Homer and Laertes live again in his pages ; Solon and Pcisistratus, Pericles and Sophocles, Plato, Epicurus, Diogenes, soldiers and statesmen, orators and poets, tyrants, priests, kings, of all times and places. It is hard for him to forget these on any occasion, and he often makes no effort whatever to do so. Too ready a reference to them as standards of measure- ment is indeed one of his dangers. It is not particularly valuable to know, for instance, that no two minds were ever more dissimilar than Shakespeare's and Plato's, that Milton is as 26 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter eloqucnt as Demostlienes, or that " there are a L few passages in Lucretius, a few in Catullus, and very many in Vergil which it is delightful to read and repeat ; but our heroic measure is fuller and more varied." More needs to be shown in order that the judgment may pass beyond the currency of mere comment and become serviceable criticism. High comment it undoubtedly is, of an emotional kind ; and delivered in the heat of conversation to whose general value it was merely contributory, it must have been temporarily effective. It demonstrates himself, certainly, even where it fails to be convincing as judgment ; and often it does not fail. The second general type of his criticism is sectional comment : he runs through a work and V discusses line by line, or period by period, praising here, condemning and rejecting there. Such comment is often extremely stimulating ; it furnishes out and completes the other class of his criticism where that coexists ; it appraises so surely the details that it prepares judgment on the whole where that does not exist. But its range is limited to consideration of technical merits, felicities of movement and language, or the reverse — a very restricted range when it leads to condemnation of a good part of Milton (42) and to the decision that " at least sixteen parts in twenty of the Inferno and Purgatorio are detestable, both in poetry and principle " ; though he (or Petrarca who speaks for him) goes on to say that " the higher parts are excellent indeed " (43). It must also be noted, however, that even in »^ SL,-l...-^-'f^-^V i PERSONALIA 27 his analytic criticism little time is given to Chapter assailing defects in literature, much energy to L praising merits. Without any such limitation as is imposed by the doctrine that the function of criticism is to praise, in this service he discovers its most gracious use. Stricture upon faults is a dutv. " No criticism is less beneficial to an author or his reader than one tagged with favour and tricked with courtesy " (44). " To be useful to as . many as possible is the especial duty of a critic, and his utility can only be attained by rectitude and precision " (45). But, " whenever a man capable of performing great and glorious actions is emerging from obscurity, it is our duty to remove, if we can, all obstruction from before him ; to increase his scope and powers, to extol and amplify his virtues " (46). His four magic poets are Homer, Dante (de- spite the manifold fault), Shakespeare, and Milton — poets of sublime imagination and of exquisite though diverse harmony, possessed of what he calls the four requisites to constitute "might, majesty, and dominion in a poet : these are creativeness, constructiveness, the sublime, the pathetic " (47). Dante he does not seem to have personally affected — the mediaevalism is alien to him ; it mav be that the bitterness is not alien to art. For Shakespeare, glory ! especially for the tragedies (and of them Othello and Macbeth first) and the histories ; the comedies being allowed inferior ; the sonnets mediocre. " Glory to tliee in the highest, thou confidant of our Creator ! Avho alone hast taught us in every part of the mind how wonderfully and fearfully we II 28 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter are made " (48). More temperately, in the magnificent tribute to Browning, There is delight in singing, tho' none hear Beside the singer; and there is deUght In praising, tho' the praiser sit alone And see the prais'd far off him, far above. Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's, Therefore on him no speech ! and brief for thee. Browning ! since Chaucer was alive and hale No man hath walk't along our roads with step So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue So varied in discourse. / ••• , _„ v (vni. 152.) Spenser he found it delightful to read in ; tedious to read through, allegory being a low form of poetry, and Spenser somewhat prodigal of it. Ben Jonson he read for the purity of his English. But most of the Elizabethans he held to be " mushroom growths beneath the oak of Arden." Southey, his life-long friend, he over-estimated ; Keats and Scott he described as our Ariel and Prospero : " and yet this wonderful creature Keats, who in his felicities of expression comes very often near to Shakespeare, has defects which his admirers do not seem to understand " (49). " His style is opulent, sometimes it be- comes disorderly." Byron is the subject of a number of comments, before and after Misso- longhi, which had a marked effect upon Landor's attitude ; the sum or average of them is : Byron is not all Byron : one small part Bore the resemblance of a human heart. " He possesses the soul of poetry, energy ; but lacks ideal beauty " (50). Wordsworth is not to be ranked with Scott, Burns, and Cowper ; he is / PERSONALIA 29 inferior to Soutliey. But in one poem, Laodamia, Chapter Landor's Southey allows that Sophocles and L Euripides could have done no better. Milton — it was Milton that first withdrew Landor from his preoccupation with the Greeks. It was Milton the high republican that retained him, the exalted singer, the defender of domestic, civil, political, and religious liberty, and the voice as clear as that from the throats of the uplifted angel trumpets. " I had read the Iliad twice over before I had well studied Paradise Lost. Then the hexameter, even Homer's, fell upon my ear as a ring of fine bells after a full organ " (51) ; sounded " tinkling when I had recited aloud in my solitary walks on the seashore the haughty appeal of Satan, and the deep penitence of Eve " (52). The march and music of Milton obsessed him ; there was no more of books for him that day whenever he opened the Paradise Lost ; his ear refused to entertain any lower melody — and all else was below. He apostro- phises Milton in the chapters on Popery, written in the midst of the controversy before the passage of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill (1851), enlisting against the new " aggression " that voice which, " more potent or more pervading than any human voice before or since, inspired by those heavenly powers with whom we may believe he now exists in complete union, warned nations against . . . Popery " (58). It is a tribute also to his genius to note that he was unaffected by the eighteenth - century fictions that made Milton a Red Revolutionist, and Satan the hero of his Epic. He had not stopped short at the 30 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter end of the second book of Paradise Lost ; and 1 his aristocratic repubUcanism found support throughout, as well as in Milton's prose, and a kinship with the great aristocrat of the people whose principle certainly was no rude levelling, but a strict accounting of capacity for service, so that even fallen Satan is mindful enough of the laws of an ideal commonwealth (not neces- sarily the state from which he had taken his departure) to recall that orders and degrees Jar not with liberty, but well consist. Among Greek writers, Landor singles out Aeschylus for his most assured and complete devotion — the Aeschylus of Prometheus, and the titan revolt and brave agony beneath " the lord and oppressor of mankind " — to use Swinburne's phrase. Pindar is a sharer of some such respect, but to a lowlier degree. Aeschylus has enough of materials to supply a troop of rivals like Euri- pides, and a squadron like Sophocles : in him is " the loud clear challenge, the firm unstealthy step, of an erect, broad-breasted soldier " (54). Elsewhere the condemnation of Euripides is even heavier — he is more moralist than dramatist, and has more preachment than poetry (55). He debases Greek myth, and " a hero, permed up and purgatorised in this middle state, is fitted to become a monseigneur Men poudre among the mesdames and waiting-maids and patch-boxes of Racine " (56). Sappho excites the sympathies less even than Sophocles and Euripides ; Plato is a fop and a poseur ; Aristophanes is unrivalled as a comedian. But always Landor returns to PERSONALIA 31 his favourites. Constantly professing himself Chapter careless of public approval, and yet sure of fame, 1 he did not place himself near the four supreme. Perhaps he realised that popular regard is some- times the guarantee of the greatest poets, who represent, by the very fact of their greatness, a large portion of humanity. And he knew that his own genius was out of sympathy with popular thought and ordinary human need. So it is not with the highest that he allies himself, not with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. It is Pindar and Aeschylus who, at the end, will take him between them, and Milton (forsaking the greatest) who will say, " Commonwealth's man, we meet at last " (57). II. Swinburne Balliol College had its poet even in Landor's day. Sixty years after Landor went down from Trinity, Balliol again had honour of the laurel — this time worn by no Southey. Times no longer made it necessary or possible to flaunt one's republicanism by means of flowing locks, when the rest of the world wore wigs ; or by un- powdered hair, when the rest of the world was barbered and powdered. It is uncertain whether even a " Necessity of Atheism " would have been judged an unpardonable offence — thougli as late as 1864 it was still possible to deprive a Jowett of his salary because of religious heterodoxy. Yet there must have remained some mild ways of raising a standard of revolt. And, if we are to believe the rumour of old stories, such wavs as 32 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter there Were this poet used. He was Algernon L Charles Swinburne. Here is no place to give a full account of his life. It was comparatively uneventful, and is well enough known. But certain occasional notes may indicate something of his fine sensuousness, and his aristocracy, republicanism, love of liberty and love of literature — traits and interests that fitted and proved him to be Landor's disciple. The son of Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne and his wife, Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham, he was born in April 1838, and died in his birth month in 1909. His father's family was an old one, and numbered among its traditions that of a loyalty to the Stuarts which had led them, Swinburne says, to pour out " their blood like water and their lands like dust " for that house. He himself preserved the tradition to the best of his ability. Mary Stuart was one of his idols. And even Charles Edward had his allegiance — though for a strange reason. In this connection devotion to the Stuarts and devotion to the ideal of a Republic made common cause in Swinburne, and he would have welcomed a second Restoration because the proclamation of a Commonwealth in England would certainly have followed it within thirty vears. We could not have stood their rule for longer than that, and they would have been set packing again, a third time, for good and all, and the monarchal scheme with them ! So he argued it to Louis le Blanc in 1882, and confirmed that good Republican in as desirable a Jacobitism (58). His grandfather, Sir John, a grand old man PERSONALIA 33 whom he acclaims in a letter to Stedman, must Chapter have been a brilliant example of ultra-liberalism ]ll_ to the grandson who, as child, youth, and boy, " enjoyed his affectionate regard." Sir John had been brought up in France, where in the age of > Voltaire he was a personal friend of Mirabeau. Called to England on the falling in of the family estates, he threw himself into political Hfe, as one of the most extreme politicians of the time. " He used to tell us," Swinburne goes on, " that he and Lord Grey had by the law of the land re- peatedly made themselves liable to be impeached and executed for high treason, and certainly I have read a speech of his on the Prince of Wales, which, if delivered with reference to the present bearer of that title, would considerably astonish the existing House of Commons " (59). At all events, wide liberalism was part of Swinburne's heritage ; and when he went up to Oxford, admiration for Kossuth and Kosciusco, love of Mazzini and Hugo, and hatred of Napoleon seem to have gone with him. Apparently he was as successful with one of these as with the other in shocking some at least of his contemporaries. It is said, for example, that he used to go through a ritual of devotion, held to be blasphemous by the unco guid, before the portrait of Mazzini which hung conspicuously in his rooms. With equal temerity he poured out the vials of his wrath upon Napoleon " the little," or upon the clerical upholders of the French Empire. Some of these explosions found place among his contributions to Undergraduate Papers, and one took the form of a speech, to D 34 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter which we iiiust again refer, occasioned by Orsini's L attempt to assassinate Louis Napoleon, and described as " literally a shriek " on the Virtue of Tyrannicide (60). Not at all strangely, Swinburne's first poems of importance gave comparatively little evidence of his innate humanitarianism. The fusion of moral ideas with the first spontaneous poetic rapture must always be a process more or less slow, according to the fervour of the emotion and the abundance of material on which it feeds. In this case the emotional food was plentiful. The first volume contained two dramatic poems. The Queen Mother and Rosamond ; it was issued soon after he went down from Oxford in 1861, and received little or no notice. Several years of maturation followed, during which he wrote some of the Poems and Ballads that so dismayed the guardians of public morals in 1866, and the two diverse dramas, Chastelard, the first in order of execution though the second in order of publica- tion, and Atalanta in Calydon, whose melodies took the world by storm in 1865. Swinburne attained glory at a stride. Certain vague Bohemian years followed, through which the bibliography of his writings is, even now when Mr. Gosse's Life has appeared, the only sure guide ; and the writings themselves as they record the development or change of his ideas. For the years 1868-1880, the most important in his life, and extending a little before and a little after that date, the Life or Mr. Gosse's Personal Recollections give the readiest information (61). The earlier years are largely formative, and the PERSONALIA 35 later, devoted with strict loyalty to the chosen chapter dual career of critic-poet, are observable through L the open window of his published work. Mr. Gosse records that the extraordinary reputation of Swinburne in the later 'sixties took especial account of his riot of revolutionary opinions. He was among the first of that band (whose degeneracy still carps about us) who set themselves against certain conventions and con- finements of mid-Victorian aesthetics. Swin- burne had some right to complain : any artist has a right to complain and revolt against tradi- tions that hamper the production of work that he believes good. It was necessary to wake people up. " II faut rudoyer le genre humain," in Hugo's phrase. And Swinburne, against " this ghastly thin-faced time of ours," set himself to do it. It appears that he was different from other men : " he formed," as Cowley said of Pindar (Landor's Pindar !), "a vast species alone " — a great nervous and mental energy in a little frame, an almost immaterial body. Not power- less though — for did he not climb Culver Cliff, on the southern shore of Wight, unsealed before or since ? That was in his seventeenth year ; and he tells the story in a letter (quoted at length by his relative Mrs. Disney Leith (62) in her fascinating article on his boyhood). His ambition then was to be a soldier — the onlv ambition that ever clouded or displaced the supreme desire to be a poet ; and it was rigor- ously dispelled by his father. So, desperate, longing to do something, he climbed Culver, at the risk of his life certainly, coming out in 36 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter a hollow of the rock amid clouds of startled L sea-gulls, his brothers — for he was nicknamed "Sea-gull" then — and up beyond, where he fainted. He rode too, and no one has so captured the thrilling ardour of clean hard wind, the ripple and rapture of swift animal flight, as he. Other poets, of course, have tried, but the apparatus of a ride from somewhere to somewhere, or the " hey for boot and spur, lad," of lyric or pseudo- balladry are hardly of the order to be mentioned in distant procession even from his pure ecstasy. It must have been, in part, her daring and her horsemanship that captured his love for the jewel-bright Queen of Scots — that wild spurred ride of hers (for instance) from Jedburgh through twenty miles of seething border country to Hermitage Castle where her lover and future husband. Both well, lay wounded. It is through Mary, in Chastelard, that he speaks best of horses — and fittingly, for his own riding was richly in the North, within sight or sense of her moors, where one looks Out past the long firths to the cold, keen sea. The delight of it all seems his as well as hers when she describes a battle : yea, I saw the king's face helmed Red in the hot lit foreground of some fight, Hold the whole war as it were by the bit, a horse Fit for his knees' grip — the great rearing war That frothed with lips flung up and shook men's fives Off either flank of it like snow. {Chastelard, ii. 1.) He swam, and no poet has so caught the ecstasy of body commingled with assisting or PERSONALIA 37 opposing waves. Tristram's swimming is now Chapter almost as well known as the parados of Atalanta, — L " Off Shore " as " Ex Voto," and his sea- change and delight in all manifold moods and changes of his spirit's " mother " as is the name of Swinbm-ne itself. His equally fervent delight in other aspects of nature is not quite so much impressed : there is less of it. But its place is important in his work : it is the beautiful and necessary element, serving as foil or background to the studies of passion that characterised his early poetry, and, as in "A Nympholept," or "A Vision of Spring in Winter," is one of the delights among the poems of his maturity. From the midst of the burning air of Mount Horsel, for instance, in the early and celebrated " Laus Veneris," the cry goes up for the wind and cool grass : he " babbles of green fields." Yet would to God this flesh of mine might be Where air might wash and long leaves cover me ; Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers, And where the wind's feet shine along the sea. The situation is changed, and the mood, in Atalanta : yet there is the same desire, in the marvellous antiphonal over the almost lifeless body of Meleager, where the hero himself yearns for the scenes of his voyaging, sight and sense once more of seas irremeable, until the prow of the Argo broke through them. Would God you would hurry me Forth from all these : Heap sand and bury me By the Chersonese Where the thundering Bosphorus answers the thunder of Pontic seas. 463851 38 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Swinburne himsclf may have had moments —~ for such thoughts as the first of these ; and surely had, as " Ex Voto " proves, such thoughts as the second. Of the dim Bohemian period after Oxford this much is sure : it saw a contest between a restricted and, to his temperament, debihtating, artistic influence, and the wide genial influence of unrestricted nature and open life. It was the pre-Raphaelite studio opposed by the sea. Rossetti led to the one, Watts- Dunton and Landor's example to the other. In the end Swinburne left London and gave himself almost entirely (except, of course, for his constant interest in affairs) to the larger and better existence. But in London, to return to Mr. Gosse's article, " in the streets, he had the movements of a somnambulist ; and often I have seen him passing like a ghost across the traffic of Holborn, or threading the pressure of carts eastward in Gray's Inn Road, without glancing to the left or to the right, like something blown before a wind" — "Wind" from "the golden remote wild west," we are tempted to interject, remembering " Hesperia " : for surely, though not matching current criticism to the lips of Alcibiades or Lucian, he was dreeing his own weird in his own way, with Felise, or Dolores, or Faustine, as the hard weary feature of some face casually seen recalled the image of the ancient Empress on the Roman coin (though these were of a period before Mr. Gosse knew him), or with the goddess of Liberty, dispelling those dreams, before whom he came to do such supreme oblation. In later PERSONALIA 39 years, from 1878 to the end, he was certainly chapter abroad with the creatures of his mind, his ^^ characters or his metres, in those daily walks of his that ran through thirty years, rain or shine (unless he was at the sea), along Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common. On them, it is said, he would think out his poems to the last line, leaving nothing more to do than pour them out on paper at his return. Meredith styled him an improvisatore, or as nearly so as our unpliant English would permit ; and from the sound and speed of his poems many were "autochthonous," sprung from the soil. Some came to him as he played " mental traveller " in his college days, dreaming in class time, as he says in the Dedication to Poems and Ballads, or as he skirted the Northumbrian shore in vacation time at Capheaton, or the cliffs near Bonchurch in the Isle of Wight ; traced Tristram to Tintagel, or wandered with Watts-Dunton on the shores of Guernsey and Sark. Landor also, as we have seen, composed out of doors. Verse, however, was his avocation, he says, prose his serious study. Yet one little piece in Italian, which was easier for him than English, is headed " Composed in a Walk to Weston." He also had experiences and travel of the mind : I love to wander both in deed and thought Where Utile rills their earliest tunes are tau£fht. Swinburne merely exceeded him in both of these experiences. He was of a very different order of construc- tion from Landor ; nevertheless certain phases of 40 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter the conduct of the two are astonishingly ahke. L " The shghtest emotional excitement, of anger, or pleasure, or admiration, sent him into a state which could scarcely be called anything but con- vulsive. ... It gradually subsided into a grace- ful smiling calm. . . . Swinburne seemed to me to divide his hours between violent intellectual excitement and sheer immobility, mental and physical. He would sit for a long time together without stirring a limb, his eyes fixed in a sort of trance, and only his lips shifting and shivering a little, without a sound " (63). Perhaps his mind was more active than it seemed. With this compare Sir Sidney Colvin on Landor : " His mode of writing was peculiar ; he would sit absorbed in apparently vacant thought, but inwardly giving the finishing touches to the verses or the periods which he had last been maturing while he walked or lay awake at night ; when he was ready, he would seize suddenly on one of the many scraps of paper and one of the many stumps of swan's-quill that usually lay at hand, and would write down what was in his head hastily " (64). Anger or admiration moved him from his classic calm — and very slight occasions might arouse his anger. Fierce denun- ciation and boisterous indictment would ensue, followed quickly by the thunder of his laugh. These resemblances, real or fancied, may seem too general to be worth record, and as common enough among emotional people in general ; yet it happens that there is proof of the connection they imply between the two men. Mr. Gosse supplies the details : PERSONALIA 41 Swinburne's pleasure in fighting was a very marked chaptkb and a very amusing trait in his conversation. He Hked, ^^^ at brief intervals, to have something to worry between the teeth of his discourse. He would allow himself to be drawn off the scent by any red-herring of criticism. This mock irascibility as of a miniature Boythorn always struck me as having been deliberately modelled on the behaviour of Walter Savage Landor. This impression was confirmed in rather a startling way by a phrase of Swinburne's own. He had been reading to me the MS. of his George Chapman, and after the reading was over and we had passed to other things, Swinburne said : " Did you notice just now some pages of a rather Lan- dorian character ? Don't you think I was rather like the old lion, when he was using his teeth and claws, in my rending of the stage licensers and our crazy English censorial system ? " At another time Swinburne spoke of what a thorn in the flesh it was to him " to reflect that probably he had never written, nor should ever write, one single page that Landor would have deigned to sign." And here the only possible inference is that he set his own exuberant prose to learn of the better-governed, heavier- footed march of Landor's style : if so, the result was not happy (65). The stimulating effect of his conversation, even when he was heaping denunciation upon the heads of poetasters and criticules, rose direct from his intense feeling about literature, his " unflagging sense of the superhuman power and value of poetry." It hardly needs a reminiscence of his conversation to show this, for no reader of Atalanta in Calydon can have failed to heed the expression of the feeling that finds place there. 42 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Negatively, on the evil of speech, in the fourth ^^' chorus, the idea is innately Greek : \ (Swelling words of high-flown might Mightily the gods do smite.) (Soph. Antig.) But positively, as expressed in the second Episode, it is not so much Greek as a reflection by later times upon Greek custom (as exemplified by Tyrtaeus for example). Most especially it is Landorian — as must be shown later — to say as Althea says here : Speech too bears fruit, being worthy ; and air blows down Things poisonous, and high-seated violences, And with charmed words and songs have men put out Wild evil, and the fire of tyrannies. Examples in abundance of the first idea, the evil of speech, might be quoted from Euripides — and were doubtless suggested by him. But it is interesting to note that Euripides suffered at Swinburne's hands precisely as he had suffered at Landor's. Mr. Gosse writes : " I never clearly understood the reason of Swinburne's fanatical objection to Euripides, which has even puzzled Dr. Verrall." The Athenaeum descrip- tion of Erechtheus as a " translation of Euripides " infuriated him, and he poured out his indignation upon the purblind critic : " Translation from Euripides indeed ! Why, a fourth form boy could perceive that, as far as Erechtheus can be said to be formed after anybody, it is modelled through- out on the earlier style of Aeschylus, the simple three-parts epic style of 'The Suppliants,' 'The Persians,' and the ' Seven against Thebes,' the style most radically contrary to the ' droppings,' PERSONALIA 43 grrh ! the drojjpings (as our divine and dearest Chapter Mrs. Browning so aptly rather than delicately 1 puts it) of the scenic sophist that can be con- ceived." And, at another time : "I always have maintained, and always shall maintain, that it is infinitely easier to over-top Euripides by the head and shoulders than to come up to the waist of Sophocles or stretch up to touch the lance of Aeschylus." Many poets, of course, have spon- taneously scorned Euripides ; but this, in its very accent, is patently Landorism (see p. 30). During the year 1875, Swinburne's mind was bent on translating Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Villon, "all his peculiar foreign favourites." Some of this work was done ; ten translations from Villon appear in the second series of Poems and Ballads, 1878 ; but the rescript of Aristo- phanes was limited to the Grand Chorus of Birds, attempted in English after the original metre ; and Aeschylus seems never to have been attempted at all. Of his other favourites there is place or need for no more than a word : Shakespeare stands pre-eminent ; and though there are various groupings, planets that rule their particular mood, the fixed and enduring stars of his literary firma- ment were, besides Shakespeare and Aeschylus, Sappho, Marlowe, and Shelley. It is the words of Sappho, "the supreme head of song," that he " heard and recognised in the notes of the nightin- gales " ; the " glory of the presence " of Marlowe and Shelley that he " imagined in the presence of the glory of the sky, the lustre of their advent and their passage," that he " felt visible as in vision on the live and limpid floorwork of the cloudless 44 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter and sunset colourcd sea." " Marlowe and Shake- 1 speare, Aeschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty shelves of libraries " (66). He thought Dickens " the greatest Englishman of the generation," finding in him as keen and complete a delight as did Landor : in Scott also. His essay on Blake (superseded it is said by later criticism) is the most fragrant of his tributes, as well as the most restrained : "a more noble memory is hardly left us " is his nearest approach to Landor's exclamation at first discovery that " Blake is the greatest of poets." He can speak no more highly of Chaucer and Milton than Landor does ; but completely disregards Landor's opinion on the lesser Elizabethans. He con- fesses himself willing to share Landor's prejudice, " if it be prejudice," against Plato, and sym- pathises with his dislike of Dante's mediaevalism : there are tones in the " voice often silent centuries " that he does not care to hear ; he snaps his fingers at the ovens and cesspools of Maleboge — at least he says the soul would do so, if the soul has fingers (67). His critical work is strongly marked, nearly all of it, by his temperament ; and he is a great critic because he was greatly temperamented, succeeding by force of genius in a school that counts its ephemera by the thousand. He has the defects of an impressionist as well as those of a turbulent stylist. Chief of these is his desire to suggest the atmosphere of what he is reviewing, rather than to describe its form or content. This leads him to a too lavish use of reference. In his early essay on Morris's Jason^ for instance, he PERSONALIA 45 finds the pictures " sweet and lucid, as early Chapter Italian work " ; but, not content to rest with an 1 emotion in the bud, he must display his connois- seurship : " There are crowds and processions, battle - pieces and merry - makings, worthy of Benozzo or Carpaccio ; single figures or groups of lovers in flowery waterland worthy of Sandro or Fillippo. The sea-pieces are like the younger Lippi's " (68). (And here we cannot but notice the flowering of the affection for the earlier Florentine and Venetian painters planted long before by an erratic but sometimes fortunate art lover whose name was Landor (69).) Touch- ing the sea in the same paragraph he is set a- voyaging between Homer and Chaucer, Aeschylus and Shakespeare. Later (1891), finding himself in company with certain poets of the Restoration, he has occasion to describe something as " that famous effusion of pessimistic lechery which gives us in metrical form the moral quintessence of Calvin and Bacchus, of Priapus and Carlyle " (70). In the same essay (a review of Mr. Locker-Lampson's Anthology of Social Verse) he finds the crowning merit of the book under dis- cussion to be " the fair if not yet quite adequate prominence given now for the first time to the name of the great man whose lightest and slightest claim to immortality is his indisputable supremacy over all possible competitors as a writer of social or occasional verse more bright, more graceful, more true in tone, more tender in expression, more deep in suggestion, more delicate in touch, than any possible Greek or Latin or French or English rival's. Mclcagcr no less than Voltaire, and 46 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Prior no Icss than Catullus, must on this ground L give place to Landor " (71). To note this extravagance (not of praise — for no lover of Landor will wish to take much from it), this recklessness of manner, is but to call attention to the drifting into professional criticism of a wide-ranging, tempestuous conver- sational style : in its place justified, for it could there be met and forced to deliver value of its voyaging ; a style, not unlike what we are led to suppose was that of the poet-critic who is the recipient of this vast praise. But having called attention to this fundamental eccentricity, it is sufficient to say of his ability as a critic that he possesses absolute technical knowledge in the wide field of his criticism, and that, despite violences and extremes of emotion which lead to barren adulation, or pyrotechnic abuse, he is / gifted as no other English critic is gifted with the power of emotional exegesis. Wave after wave is lifted from the sea of literature to be glori- fied by his luminous intelligence, and crest after crest expands and dissolves into iridescence and gleaming spray beneath the wind of his rapture. With one more mood of Landor's he is in special sympathy — his love of children. It was no unusual trait in Landor certainly : yet it was one to which Swinburne could not but pay tribute in his range of literature from Homer to Hugo, and notice ol children from Astyanax to Mamillius and from " the Jitel clergeon " (whom he must have mentioned somewhere) to Gavroche and Cosette. Swinburne's published work is perfect witness PERSONALIA 47 of the manifold perfection of this mood — a mood Chapter of moral as well as aesthetic loveliness. Without '_ it (and without his faith in Liberty) there would be slight defence against the early criticism that he had not, what every poet must have to be worthy the name, faith : not religious faith necessarily, but " a principle underlying life and action, whether it be belief in duty, or Hberty, or virtue." This is a faith in life ; a nursling faith it might seem, considering Poems and Ballads, Chastelard, and Atalanta, and oppressed by promise of evil and assurance of sorrow, yet bright and positive and not to be obscured by no matter how thick clouds of surrounding darkness. In this early period Lust says " I am Love " often, and love, even when cleansed of lust by its own fire, is largely a bodily appetite, like hvmger or thirst, and so subject to regret and satiety. But the love between mother and child is above all this un- rest. The chorus in Atalanta addresses Althea, who is overwhelmed by conviction of Fate : This thing moves more than all things, even thy son That thou cleave to him, a creed expressed more beautifully but not more explicitly fifteen years later, in " By the North Sea " : Love more strong than death or all things fated Child's and mother's, lit by love and led. The Fates waited upon Meleager's birth, and he, then but a span long moaned With inarticulate mouth inseparate words but those grey Avomcn with bound hair Who fright the gods frighted not him : he laughed 48 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Seeing them, and pushed out hands to feel and haul II- Distaff and thread, intangible. And so this nursling faith, beset by death and derision, thrusts out at them, but not in- effectually. Althea's love is more memorable than her madness ; the burning of the brand and the arraignment of the gods and fate is less moving, less potent than the memory of her flower of three suns old, The small one thing that lying drew down my life To lie with thee and feed thee ; a child and weak, Mine, a delight to no man, sweet to me. But fair for me thou wert, O little life. Fruitless, the fruit of mine own flesh, and blind. More than much gold, ungrown, a foolish flower. For silver nor bright snow nor feather of foam Was whiter, and no gold yellower than thine hair, O child, my child. . . . A number of years were to elapse before Swinburne returned to this theme. Critical writing, eager interest in the progress of affairs in France and Italy, the advancement of the Mary Stuart trilogy — these occupied him. But in 1876, with the " Birth Song " he may be said to have returned to it — devotedly, as is shown by the many poems on children that from that time on find place in his work. Of these the richest collections, endowed with " The Salt of the Earth," "A Child's Pity," "A Child's Laughter," are Tristram of Lyonesse and other Poems (1882) and A Century of Roundels, where the grace and charm of the sentiment finds its counterpart in that of the verse form itself. This devotion to children, and his equal PERSONALIA 49 reverence for persons at the other extremity of chapter life, are closely related to his sympathy for all L suffering and his indignation against all oppres- sion. Landor's counterpart of this has been shown in so far as it relates to popular re- volutionary movements. But Landor was as sympathetic with private and individual need. Like Shelley at Marlow — though not with the fulness of that ministry — he gave away a large part of his income for relief of the poor. During his last years in England, he seldom left Bath for London, giving various excuses, and finally this last, that he often thought at night of what he had been seeing in the morning, " poor mothers, half-starved children, and girls habitually called unfortunate by people who drop the word as hghtly as if it had no meaning in it. Little do they think that they are speaking of the fallen angels. ... So many heart-aches always leave me one " (72). And here the difference between seventy-eight years and thirty-three rather than between mid-Victorianism and a revolt from it, shows itself. " No ruined angel or self-immolated sacrifice," Swinburne writes about Rossetti's Jenny, " there is no need to raise any mirage about her as of a fallen star, a glorious wreck." But he praises the " masculine tenderness " of the poem, its separation from the " shadow or suspicion of any facile or vulgar aim at pathetic effect" (73); and, two years later, in Under the ■ Microscope he gives a completer expression which brings him nearer to Landor's view. " The sins and sorrows of all that suffer wrong, the oppres- sions tliat are done under the sun, the dark days E 50 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter and shilling dccds of the poor whom society casts L out and crushes down, are assuredly material for poetry of a most high order, for the heroic passion of Victor Hugo's, for the angelic passion of Mrs. Browning's. Let another such arise to do such work as Les Pauvres Gens or The Cry of the Children, and there will be no lack of response to that singing " (74). And this was the poet who, critics said, had shown no human sympathy ! Truly, he did what pleased him, and did it when it pleased him without regard of public demand or taste. In this last Swinburne and Landor are again very near together : they are not, and never were or can be popular. Atalanta and Erechtheus are as far from common appreciation or affection as are the Imaginary Conversations : Landor cared nothing for fame. " Whatever works of imagination I have composed might have perished the next hour without a regret. My pleasure was in the conception and forma- tion " (75) ; and again : " I wrote chiefly to occupy the vacant hour, caring not a straw for popularity, and little more for fame " — being absolutely certain, it is necessary to add, that fame of the choicest and most enduring sort awaited him. " I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests few and select." Swinburne also, almost at the end of his life, wrote : " It is nothing to me that what I write should find immediate or general acceptance," confident in the worth of his art before the judg- ment of the vears. PERSONALIA 51 Individualists, then, each in his own way, Chapter these two men stand together — averse from the L popular, and yet defenders of popular liberty, as they understood it, lovers of little children and of great men, of Nature and of Art. CHAPTER III Swinburne's landor Chapter In the mid-spring of 1864 Swinburne first saw his 1 hero. Landor was then living in Florence, " in a little house under the wall of the city directly back of the Carmine, in a by-street called the Via Nunziatina " (76), its number 2671. Not far away is the Casa Guidi, which the name of Browning has made famous ; and it was Browning who had found this lodging for him. Swin- burne's announcement of his arrival in Florence was among the letters sent by Landor to his biographer, Forster, and the sum of it, not given as quoted verbatim, yet having every appearance of being approximately so, was that " he had travelled as far as Italy with the sole object and desire of seeing him. He carried to him a letter from an old friend (since Lord Houghton) ; from many others of his countrymen, who might never hope to see him, he was the bearer of infinite homage and thankfulness ; and for him- self he had the eager wish to lay at his feet, what he could never hope to put into adequate words, profound gratitude and lifelong reverence " (77). Writing to Edmund Clarence Stedman ten years later Swinburne adds something to the 52 SWINBURNE'S LANDOR 53 little that is recorded of the meeting that chapteu ensued : "^' I remember well how pleasant and how precious for all his high self-reliance and conscious avTapKua, the sincere tribute of genuine and studious admiration was even at the last to the old demigod with the head and the heart of a lion. I have often ardently wished I could have been born (say) but five years earlier, that my affection and reverence might have been of some use, and their expression found some echo while he was yet alive beyond the rooms in which he was to die (78). Landor's biographers also speak of the pleasure which this tribute brought. Landor was then eighty-nine years old, his hair snowy white, his grand head not unlike that of Michael Angel o's Moses, with a patriarchal beard (79) ; his grey eyes still keen and clear. He had never had such a tribute before, though his greatness had been acknowledged and reverenced by the great men of three generations. The two poets must have discussed many matters : Landor's work ; the many aspects and concerns of life that it considers from as many points of vantage — one of these concerns the immortality of the soul. Of this Swinburne says in the same letter to Stedman that he had received it at Landor's lips that he had no belief whatever on the subject, " but was sure of one thing : whatever was to come was best." Swinburne laid before him the first part (80) of the poem in Greek, which he extended after Landor's death and prefaced as Dedication to Atalanta, that though losing the pleasure he might not lose the honour of inscrib- ing in front of his work " the highest of contem- 54 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter porarv names." The first part of this poem has a 1 noble beauty ; and the second even more, reveaUng as it does yet a httle more of their conversation. Thou art gone. No more shall thou be, nor shall I ever sit by thee in awe, and touch thy hands with reverent hands. Now once more a bitter sweet reverence steals over me as I recall what such an one as I have gained from thee. No more, sire, shall I gladden my dear eyes by thine, nor, best beloved, grasp thy right hand " (81).' It is a scene far away from our modern world, from English inhibitions and reserves. Like his old philosophers with Alcibiades (82), who laid their hands caressingly on his " crisp glossy curls so delicate and umbrageous," Landor laid his hand on the " gold-haired head " (83) of this son of his spirit. He was the one in the world who could so consummate a lifelong benediction : the one living in Swinburne's experience of the " few poets (who) lay a hallowing hand upon the head " (84). Like Sandt in one of the " Conver- sations " the young poet must have counted it pleasant (85) and more; for in the memorial verses on the death which followed in a few months, the " supreme lament for Landor," he gave perfect expression to constrained grief, and recalled again the dear intimacies of this communion : By this white wandering waste of sea, Far north, I hear One face shall never turn to me As once this year : Shall never smile and turn and rest On mine as there. Nor one most sacred hand be prest Upon my hair. SWINBURNE'S LANDOR 55 Besides this poem and the Greek dedicatory chapter poem to Atalanta and a hitherto unpubhshed ^^ sonnet on Landor which now comes to Ught in Mr. Gosse's Life, Swinburne has left six important documents that emphasise again and again the sincerity of the grief and devotion for which the first two poems alone would be the most convincing evidence. These are the Prekide to Songs before Sunrise (1871) ; the Latin verses entitled " Ad Catullum " (1874), included in Poems and Ballads, Second Series ; the " Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor " in Studies in Song (1880) ; " Thalas- sius " in Songs of the Springtides (1880) ; the article on Landor (1880) in the Encyclo^icedia Britannica, which is also included in Miscellanies ; and, by allusion, the poem " On the Death of Mrs. Lynn Linton" (1898), in A Channel Passage and Other Poems. Besides these there are many occa- sional references to Landor scattered throughout the whole range of the critical work, the most important being in the " Notes on the Text of Shelley " (Essays and Studies) ; in the essay on Byron ; and in the review of the anthology of " Social Verse " {Studies in Prose and Poetry) to wliich reference has already been made. In the prose articles the classic grace of Landor's verse receives significant praise ; as do also his Republicanism and the largeness of his sympathy : " His passionate compassion, his bitter and burn- ing pity for all wrongs endured in all the world " (86) ; the devotion to the cause of popular Hberty which seals him, with Byron and Shelley, cliild of the eighteenth century political 56 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter OP social idea (87). In the poems personal debt 1 is more obviously accounted and discharged. Almost the most important of the poems on Landor, certainly the most precious of all Swinburne's expressions of love for him, is " Thalassius." Here, perfectly and definitely, he traces the biography of his spirit, from the time when Landor became a father to it until the time when it stood up in the strength^and brightness of the principles Landor taught. One word of warning only is necessary : Swinburne's acknowledgment of a debt to Landor does not annul his debt to other persons. He had other heroes, as has been shown, Hugo and Mazzini — and many other men influenced him at one time and another. Furthermore as we said at the beginning there is the danger of extravagance to which his expressions of gratitude or allegiance are always open, which was natural to one who set before himself as a desirable attainment the " noble pleasure of praising." One example will suffice. When Victor Hugo died, Swinburne wrote of the " all but incalculable debt " owed to him by " us, who from childhood upwards have fostered and fortified whatever of good was born in us — all capacity of spiritual work, all seed of human sympathy, all powers of hope and faith, all passions and aspirations found loyal to the service of duty and of love — with the bread of his deathless word and the wine of his immortal song" (88). Almost the same words describing the sustenance of his spirit, are used in " Thalas- sius " — a poem which refers explicitly to an old SWINBURNE'S LANDOR 57 man as the giver of this sustenance, venerable, Chapter himself born of man's highest and most heavenly \ birth, free, a warrior, grey with glories rather than years, though more years than man's normal lot had befallen him, a singer whose praise should fill all time : And at his knees his fosterling was fed Not with man's wine and bread, Nor mortal mother-milk of hopes and fears, But food of deep memorial days long sped ; For bread with wisdom and with song for wine. This last line so resembles the passage quoted on Hugo as to give pause before it be accepted as an expression which concerns any other person. But Hugo was only thirty-five years older than Swinburne himself, and even in a boy's imagina- tion that span would not give to its possessor patriarchal grandeur or poise. He was hardly capable, moreover, of contributing the concen- trated thought of past ages or of furnishing any- thing but mortal mother-milk of hope, fear, pity to a disciple (89). The foster father was Landor : to his high calm on Sunium, Hugo at best made few steps of approach. In " Thalassius " Swinburne pictures a child " born of Apollo and Cymothoe " as reared into manhood with the food of gods — a child found laid asleep between sea and land by the receding tide, who grew into love for the father who found him, and the high song he taught. He taught how what seems too weak for life may overcome life and death by the strong faith of lordliest love ; that to loye life overmuch is to die dis- graced ; that to count love for life little and hate 58 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter great for all wrong-doing that is done anywhere, "^' or at any time, beneath the sun, is to live in the semblance of eternity. And one fairer thing he showed him, stronger than change, higher than God, without which there could be no God. And that was Liberty, which man should gladly die to gain, and which having lost, he should gladlier lie dead (90), for he might not enter into the. inheritance of earth, nor of the sweet sea, nor of his own land unless he himself were free. The song lightened and spoke of love — love that turns God's heart manward, man's Godward, love that gives meaning and substance to life and death from the first breath to the final sus- piration. It is greater than body or soul, and should live, not wholly made nothing even if body and soul were dead, its elements perpetuating their separate selves in its large heat as such men, dying, perpetuate themselves in man. The song taught hate also — hate of everything that brings or holds in thraldom, either bodily or spiritual, man's holy body and sacred soul, which were free-born before God began. And it taught that hatred should be set there most inexorably wherever there was a curse, or a chain, or despotism, moulded out of the pain of poor men, until there should be no more the semblance of a king anywhere. And hope the high song taught him — the keen eyesight of the soul into things impenetrable, that discovers in man's future the birth of good, and the inevitable and infinite death of evil ; the stormy twilight of all gods and the sundawn of the spirit that was man. SWINBURNE'S LANDOR 59 The song taught fear also— fear to be unworthy chapter of the dear love of the wind and sea that had bred '. the boy fearless, and fear to be unworthy of the heaven he had when young life surged in his veins, like wine or music. So, clothed with love and perfect fear, and armed with hope and hate, he set foot on the ways of his life's glad spring. And there on a dim dawn one met him — . . . lovely, a god, powerful with his eyes, pitiful. No man untutored might know that he was Love. So they went down the ways together until April grew to May ; then Love looked at the youth, with hard eyes and hot, and grew great immeasurablv and said, " I am Lord of all the ways : fool, my name is Sorrow, is Death." And having said this, he was gone. Through man}^ weary nights and days the youth went on : but the earth and heaven were bitter, the sea sorrowful as he, the wind unavailing, till his heart grew numb. Then one bright evening before the end of summer, a tempest arose, vast, clangorous, full of lightning, and wild singing, and madness of Bassiridcs, at which his heart caught fire, blowing and made one with the tempest. So he set his lips against the brightest lips he met, that laughed for love, and bade him follow. Then he followed, and his blood grew again light as a sea-bird's, as he rode in the fierce light of his dread lady's eyes, his ears fulfilled of the music that makes mad. But heaven was without heart to bless, and earth lay distraught and unhclping. 60 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter For many a morning and evening and midnight 1 his mother sought him, the sea-bird that was her boy, bearing in her hands a sea crown, goodUer gift than all below the gods'. But he sat " panther-throned beside Erigone," revelling in the midst of " pale-mouthed passion's crownless crew," till one morning he set his eyes seaward, and passed from out the fierce ranks, back to grey dunes beside the sea, and there lying against a sea rock " fell after many sleepless dreams on sleep." And in his sleep the green dark light of the sea was shed upon him, and the memory of her glories, so that he woke on fire with yearning of old years and purged of pain ; and his mother looked laughing toward him from her mid-sea throne. Thenceforward the same great joy began in him that had made the child man, and he com- muned with his own heart, and had rest ; and the comfort of the earth and the sweet breath of the sea breathed life into him in room of death, and the grace of the old time returned. Then song grew within him, strong with sorrow and mirth, and he felt within him the soul within his senses throb responsive to deep sea pulses, charming him so from his own soul's separateness that strength was made sweet in him, sweetness strong. Being now no more a singer but a song. Then came a day, when the waves were full of godhead and the light that saves, and he felt the spirit of his immortal father upon him, and his father's hand upon his head, and the old great voice of the old good time, that said : SWINBURNE'S LANDOR 61 Because thou hast loved nought mortal more than me, Chapter Thy father, and thy mother-hearted sea ; ^^^• "r Because thou hast given thy flower and fire of youth To feed men's hearts with visions, truer than truth ; Because thou hast kept in those world-wandering eyes The light that makes me music of the skies ; Have therefore in thine heart and in thy mouth ■The sound of song that mingles north and south, The song of all the winds that sing of me. And in thy soul the sense of all the sea. The poem ends then as it began, in strict con- formity with the artistic definition indicated by the title " Thalassius." This definition is no- where construed narrowly or vaguely ; the poet does not attempt to trace the gradual process of his becoming what suns and winds and waters made him, or to extend the personally exerted influence of his divine parents. He has entrusted it to a human figure to represent the Lord of Light and the Freedom of the Sea : such a human beneficence as no mere invention could have fitted to the need, but whose dignity, no less than his service, attests the absolute veracity of the fundamental experiences that the poem records. Not only is the person of Landor clearly dis- tinguishable, but the period of his foster father- hood is in perfect harmony with the real father- hood of the god : he speaks as it were by con- tinuous mandate of Apollo, truths lovely as song, songs perfect as light. And it is in recollection of these that the youth, freed from Erigone, wakes "on fire with yearnings of old years"; and sets himself on that service whose consummation is the divine blessing and the laureateship of the sea. 62 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter" The Prcludc to Sougs before Sunrise (1871), "^' enumerated among the poems deaUng with Landor, is in a different case from all the rest : it does not name Landor as does the " Centenary Song," for instance, or " Ad Catullum " ; and it does not describe him completely nor allude to him in any such incontrovertible fashion as does " Thalassius." Furthermore it is one of a collection of poems dedicated to Joseph Mazzini and referred to in both " Dedication " and " Epilogue " as " of the seed " of Mazzini's sowing. Nevertheless the poem belongs where we have placed it, for it conforms to every known detail of the history of Swinburne's relationship with Landor. In fundamentals, it is an analogy of '"'' Thalassius " and (in part) an allegory of the Fiesole days described in the dedication of Atalanta, and in the supreme lament for Landor in Poems and Ballads. Especially is this obvious in the opening stanza which is a compressed rendering of the account of training at the hands of Landor recorded more fully in other poems : Between the green bud and the red Youth sat and sang by Time, and shed From eyes and tresses flowers and tears, From heart and spirit hopes and fears, Upon the hollow stream whose bed Is channelled by the foamless years . . . ; And with the white the gold-haired head Mixed running locks, and in Time's ears Youth's dreams hung singing, and Time's truth Was half not harsh in the ears of Youth. Surely no better metaphor than this of " Time" could be found for the " venerable and veritable SWINBURNE'S LANDOR 63 demigod " who had Kved the space of three genera- chapter tions, and had been the companion and interpreter [ of the great men of a hundred ; to whom Swin- burne came as the " youngest to the oldest singer that England bore." But the " youth " of the Prelude is not yet one with " Time " ; his own dreams and sorrows and burdens, real enough and melodious to be heeded by this white-haired Beneficence, not unmindful of his own immaturity, were under the enchant- ment of their own melody. Yet " Time's truth," yet Landor's beauty and wisdom of words, were " half not harsh " in the midst of them. " Between the bud and the blown flower " the youth changed his companionship, and talked awhile with sterile delight and suicidal pain : he knew the terrible riot of Bassirides following dim and fiery goddesses to the rush and beat of Asian music — the same tempest of passion described in "■ Thalassius " ; here, as there, ensuing upon the first free converse with " Time " or Landor. But after the storm ceased, he stood up and asserted his manhood, treading to dust fear and desire and dreams, walking with knowledge and patience of what must and may be, nourishing his soul on freedom. He took cheer with the light, hills, winds, and streams ; the actual earth's equalities : he scorned the fellowship of weak souls, and gloried in the power of souls sufficient unto themselves. For soul is man's one guide, and . . . only souU that keep their place By their own light, and watch things roll, And stand, have liglit for anv soul. 64 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter In Other words, he stood up in strength and i^ individuaUsm — such a proud strength as had always walked where it must breathe hard, and where such breathing was luxury ; such a haughty individualism as had made its plain requisition, for service or companionship, strength in those who would serve or accompany : " All are of the same rank and condition with me who have climbed as high, who have stood as firmly, who have never descended. Neglect of time, subserviency to fortune, compliance with power or passions, would thrust men far below me." He established himself in the principles of strength and individualism he had learned from Landor. The Latin poem " Ad Catullum " (1874) is little more than a wish to be guided by the poet of Sirmio across the Stygian water — Ut ora vatis optimi reviserem, Tui meique vatis ora. . . . that is — as the poem continues, that he might see Landor. The " Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor " (1880 — being five years later than a hundred after Landor's birth) is the most elaborate of Swinburne's expressions on this sub- ject; consisting as it does of fifty stanzas of six- teen lines each, and covering the whole range of Landor's work. The genus of the poem is novel : it actually reviews nearly seventy poems, plays, imaginary conversations, dedications, or epitaphs by Landor — sometimes, it must be admitted, walking on the edge of a sheer rhetoric rather than floating bird-like in the serenity of pure song. But the line that divides the two is hard SWINBURNE'S LANDOR 65 to trace, as is perhaps evidenced best by the sixth Chapter and seventh stanzas, the sixth pausing a Uttle — '. momentously on the grave of a song long dead — " the exquisite first stanzas extant from the hand of Landor," as the notes make plain — an in- offensive little bit of doggerel, written by a school- boy on the story of Godiva, and laughed out of countenance by an uproarious schoolfellow to whom it was confidently revealed. Yet Swin- burne finds in it presage of all Landor's " love and faith in life and death," and from this frail spray takes his flight into one of the lordliest passages in the whole poem, or in the whole poetry of praise : A song of soft presageful breath, Prefiguring all his love and faith in life and death. Who should love two things only and only praise — More than all else forever : even the glory Of goodly beauty in woman, whence all days Take light whereby death's self seems transitory ; And loftier love than loveliest eyes can raise, Love that wipes off the miry stains and gory From Time's worn feet, besmirched on blood-red ways. And lightens with his light the night of story. (§§ 6 and 7.) The poem takes up some of the strains heard earlier in the Prelude to Songs before Sunrise, and later in " Thalassius." Most explicitly it estab- lishes the connection between Landor and the doctrine of self-sufficiency which our earlier dis- cussion of the Prelude suggested tentatively. The fiery star of his youth was dual : Freedom, brighter than the Sun, and Song, whose fires are quenched when Freedom's are dead. No soul of any glorious time loved Freedom better than 66 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter he, and that scripturc of the sun was his that said — - upon the tomb of patriots : Gladly we should rest ever, had we won Freedom. We have lost and very gladly rest. Song was as a shadowy sword to him, wrought to put all evil things to flight. He struck dumb the lying and hungering lips of priests ; he scourged kings and living slaves with the fiery rod of his scorn ; he mocked and spat (91) upon the Lord their God, whom they had erected tyrant of the skies as they were tyrants and lords of earth ; and he would have it that, those being slain, the spirit alone should be Lord and God. His godlike head was reverted always from the temporal throng ; he lived with the living dead, and their splendours or shadows made bright and dark about his board and bed, life and vision. Thought gave him the width of time to roam in, and love opened to him the forgetful years ; Simonides smiled from his throne in heaven upon those songs of his upon the dead that hang like pearls in the ears of mourners ; in his hand, the staff that stayed through some Aetnean glen the steps of the mightiest and most awful-souled of singers, became, even as then, a prophet's rod, a lyre on fire with God even as it had become in the hands of Aeschylus. He saw and heard and sung all things of old time; through his Roman trumpet rang the pure music of Grecian flutes. The thunder fire of Cromwell, the ray of Phocion and Kosciusco met in the heaven of his bright thought, Milton's sovereign speech he made heard as from living lips; he brooded upon enthralled SWINBURNE'S LANDOR 67 Hellas until she rose and donned again the helm Chapter of Pallas, and the blast of his clarion was filled '_ with her breath as future souls are filled by past. Let Freedom and Song shine upon his grave, for neither England nor Greece ever beheld a brow more resplendent with their lambency, and his name is now written in heaven among man's most glorious names. No storm can now flaw or deform that torch that lightens us yet, as over his pyre, for no blast could ever make it dim. O poet hero, lord and father, we record that flam- ing epitaph and faith of thine with reverence and thanks in our hearts (may my lute be loyal to thy lyre). Poet whose loyalty of love abounded to all high poets ; strong and tender one ; fearless heart that yet all men's griefs might move ; pure soul and eyes clear of shame or fear, that only pity and glorious wrath could blind : Name set for love apart Held lifelong in my heart, Face like a father's toward my face inclined ; No gifts like thine are mine to give Who by thine own words only bid thee hail, and live. And yet one word more ; for to the last note Swinburne adds : " But who can enumerate all or half our obligations to the illimitable and in- exhaustible genius of the great man whose life and whose labour lasted even from the generation of our fathers' fathers to our own. Hardly any reader can feel, I think, so deeply as I feel, the^ inadequacy of my poor praise and too imperfect gratitude to the majestic subject of their at- tempted expression ; but ' such as I had have I given him.' " 68 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter His last published mention of Landor is part "^' of the poem, " On the Death of Mrs. Lynn Linton " {A Channel Passage and other Poems, 1904). She had been near and dear to Landor when he was ahve — as is explained in the Dedication of the " Centenary Song " ; and in death Swinburne sees her reunited with him : We see no more what here awhile Shed hght on men : Has Landor seen that brave bright smile Alive again ? The father-spirit, whence her soul Took strength and gave Back love, is perfect yet and whole As hope may crave. The sire and daughter, twain, and one In quest and goal. Stand face to face beyond the sun, And soul to soul. The poem thus treats of a relationship with Landor much like Swinburne's own (92). He had found in Landor a father to his spirit, one who summed up in himself those principles which " Thalassius " records he taught to his foster- son : the sublimity of Love, and the divinity of Freedom. From these supreme values certain duties devolve : the duty to praise what is noble, and the duty to hate and assail whatever holds in thrall the holy spirit of man. CHAPTER IV FIRST EVIDENCES In the three great poetical records of Landor's chapter influence upon him, Swinburne places its begin- ^^' ning at a very early date : in the figurative language of " Thalassius," at birth ; in the Prelude, " between the green bud and the red " ; in the " Centenary Song," early enough to create a "lifelong" experience. Practically all this is literally true : and being so is most convincing evidence of the precocity of his genius. His lifelong affection for Landor began when he was a child (93). Mr. Gosse, in the official bio- graphy, records that Swinburne told Landor, when they met in 1864, that "his poems had first given him inexplicable pleasure and a sort of blind relief when he was a small fellow of twelve. He added that his first recollection of them was of ' The Song of the Hours ' in Iphigenia.^'' There are other confirmations as well, chief of them being the presence among his college activities of certain ideas and impulses stamped unmistakablv with Landor's own seal. One of these came to light in the speech (94) already referred to, in praise of the " Virtue of Tyran- nicide," its occasion being the attempted assas- 69 70 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter sination of Napolcon III. by Felice Orsini (Jan. ill 14, 1858). It is almost self-evident that there was no one but Landor from whom such an idea could have been derived ; no one of standing in England of Swinburne's time who could have written as Landor wrote : Most dear of all the virtues to her Sire Is Justice, and most dear To Justice is Tyrannicide. (viii. 42.) If evidence for Swinburne's adoption or con- sideration of the doctrine were limited to the rumour of a speech delivered at a time of boyish excitement, it might be unjustifiable to do any- thing but pass it over. But the speech finds echo in a variety of expressions scattered throughout the poems, from the earliest to the latest, showing that he long entertained the idea. In 1890, for instance, to begin at the latest date, " Russia, An Ode " has this : Pity mad with passion, anguish mad with shame. Call aloud on justice by her darker name ; Love grows hate for love's sake ; life takes death for guide. Night hath none but one red star — Tyrannicide. In Studies in Song (1880) there appears a sonnet entitled " For a Portrait of Felice Orsini " . . . who thought to vanquish wrong with wrong, Erring, and made rage and redemption greet, Havoc and freedom. . . . • ••••« But all a hero lived and erred and died ; Looked thus upon the living world he left So bravely, that with pity less than pride Men hail him Patriot and Tyrannicide. The same volume contains the great " Song for FIRST EVIDENCES 71 the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor " ; and Chapter there it is recorded (stanza 45) : 1 His hand bade Justice guide Her child Tyrannicide. And in The Queen Mother (1860) something of a variant of the same idea is expressed : . . . that slow snake, Impotent patience of pernicious things, Endurance a blind sort of sleepy lie To confute God with. / -. ^ (V. 5.) Here it seems is evidence sufficient to support the rumoured speech, and definitely to determine the origin of its idea. Even the (1880) dis- approval of Orsini's act is prepared for by Landor. " Miserable Orsini ! " he wrote to his appointed biographer in January 1858, the day after the attempt : "he sat with me two years ago at the table on which I am now writing. Dreadful work ! horrible crime ! To inflict death on a hundred for the sin of one ! Such a blow can serve only to awaken tyranny, reverberating on the brass helmets of her satellites " (95). It is likely that Landor would have been almost as much shocked had the one been killed and the many spared. Yet his whole life long he preached the right of private punish- ment for the public oppressor. " Every virtuous man in the universe is a member of that grand Amphictyonic council, which should pass sentence on the too powerful and provide that it be duly executed " (96). In 1849 he was stirred by the efforts of Hungary to secure 72 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter freedom froixi Austria ; and his letter to the ^^' Examiner called down upon the Russian Czar, aiding in the suppression of the Hungarians, the vengeance of the oppressed : " Justice is immutable and divine ; but laws are human and mutable ; they are violated every day, changed and superseded perpetually, and some- times ejected from the judgment seat by military power. In such a case, what remains for nations ? History tells us. There springs up a virtue from the very bosom of Crime, venerably austere, Tyrannicide. . . . Can Russia have forgotten that awful vision, which hath reared its head so often over her imperial crown . . . ? " (97) In the same year (1849), fruited with the murder of the Roman Republic and the reinstitution of God's vicar by force of perfidy and arms, he wrote : " Is it credible, is it possible, that Rome, that Italy, that Europe, are to be long without an avenger ? If the laws are subverted, is there no danger to the sub- verter ? In a moral view is it criminal to strike him down ? " (98) This last is, of course, an open threat against Louis Napoleon ; and it shows that Swinburne was in no way misusing the doctrine of the " Virtue of Tyrannicide " when he appKed it in his " Old Mortahty " speech to the same personage, by that time dignified as Napoleon III. But it is only one of Landor's assaults upon him, just as the speech is a single instance of Swin- burne's. More instances of the same sort are needed from this same period to show that Swinburne tells the simple truth in " Thalassius " FIRST EVIDENCES 73 when he says that Landor taught him as a youth chapter to set his hate most inexorably against des- L potism. And such instances are forthcoming : from Landor, in all his work ; from Swinburne, in his drama The Queen Mother (1860), written during his college years — a work which up to now has been noticed, if at all, for its sensuous- ness or the promise of its technique. But it not only promised ; it gave and attained. Swin- burne in it boldly presented himself as a republican of the school of Landor. Landor's Last Fruit off an old Tree (1853) supplied Swinburne with the doctrine of Tyrannicide. It must also have brought to his attention such minor notes of Landor's trumpet blasts against the murderer of the Roman Republic as the following : Hast thou forgotten, thou more vile Than he who clung to Helen's isle Rather than fall among the brave ? • ••••• Twice traitor, ere a nation's trust Rais'd thee a third time from the dust For what ? . . to be a traitor still. (viii. 251.) Or (more specifically concerned with the Roman matter) : Made our God again, Pope Pius ! Worthy to be worshipt by us ! Come to Paris, and put on Thy true son Napoleon (Blest afresh) that glorious crown. Crushing crippled Europe down, • • • • • [Upon] one who far outwits Keenest-witted Jesuits, 74 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter And without a blush outUes IV. Thee and all thy perjuries. ' (viii. 253, 254.) Similar, but louder, blasts blow throughout Landor's public letters, where, for instance, one denunciation of the " half Napoleon " (99) describes him as being " without any first principles . . . swearing to republicanism before the people, abjuring it before the priesthood, undermining it at home, battering it down abroad" (100). A more interesting medium of such criticism of contemporary political affairs is Landor's dramatic work. The dramatic event may belong to remote centuries ; but the dramatic utter- ance often has a double value, not the least important part of which relates it to events of Landor's own time. Many such comments could not but have affected a young republican who came across them (as Swinburne must have done) during the last decade of Italian disunity : these, for example, from a single scene of Fra Rupert, which is a part of Landor's trilogy on Ippolita d'Este : Fire and ocean Shall lie together, and shall both pant gorged, Before the Church be satisfied, if Church Be that proud purple shapeless thing we see ; or, of political oppression, and here it must be remembered that the Austrian oppressors of Italy were regularly spoken of as " Germans " : When the whole nation cries in agony Against the sway of Germans, should I halt ? (vii. 212.) FIRST EVIDENCES 75 or again (from The Siege of Ancona) : Chapter Consul. What would your master with his perfidy ? Herald. My master is the emperor and king. Consul. The more perfidious. Binds him not his oath To succour Italy ? Is slavery succour ? (vii. 241.) But the political situation in Italy as it was in Swinburne's day needs a note, however brief, in order that it may be understood just how he might construe these, and many other passages like them, from Landor's dramas. Little Piedmont, aiming to free Italy from Austrian domination, had discovered in two unsuccessful campaigns, 1848 and 1849, how visionary was the hope that her unaided arm would accomplish this. Cavour's unflinching efforts seemed to have secured such aid as would turn hope to certainty when the momentous meeting at Plombieres occurred (1858) between the great Premier and the French Emperor. Napoleon is said to have spoken much like a real Italian Liberal. He had been deeply moved by the final appeal of ill-fated Orsini : " Deliver Italy, and the blessings of twenty-five millions of Italians will follow you" (101). Cavour had pressed the advantage. The Emperor promised to attack Austria in behalf of Italian liberty and he was held to it. Austria was diplomatically isolated in 1859, and war began, with all France except the Clerical party in full sympathy. Montebello and Magenta followed. The Em- peror's proclamation " seemed to sanction the highest aspirations of the Italians. ' My army,' he said, ' will be concerned only to fight your 76 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter enemies and maintain order at home ; it will 1 place no obstacle to the free manifestation of your legitimate wishes.' Italy took him at his word" (102). English lovers of Italy took him at his word : Mrs. Browning foremost among them. Swin- burne describes her mistake some ten years later in " The Halt before Rome " (Sorigs before Sunrise) : Erred once, in only a word, The sweet great song that we heard Poured upon Tuscany, erred, CalHng a crowned man royal That was no more than a king. Sea-eagle of English feather, A song-bird beautiful-souled. She knew not them that she sang. Landor took him at his word, relenting a little from his old denunciation, if we may trust the record of his somewhat earlier Epistle published in the poems of 1858, " To the Emperor " : Tell Justice to outspread her wings And cool the crazy heads of kings : Her balance may be now restored By throwing in the Gallic sword. Thy future glory let it be To serve the good and rule the free. Swinburne also took him at his word ; he who, as he says later, addressing Italy : ... when others played or slept Sat still under thy cross and wept. (" Siena," S. h. S.) And in the words which he gives to Denise, in his Queen Mother, trying to bend Charles IX. FIRST EVIDENCES 77 against the Jesuitical and Queen's party, to Chapter make of St. Bartholomew's a day sacred, not to L be abhorred, we may hear his own voice, as it were, pleading with the crusader of Italian liberty at this point of his crusade : And now God puts this hour of time to be A steel sword in your hand, and says withal, " Now give me token if there be a king Inside you, do me right who made you way, Drew you so high " ; I pray you for God's love Let none put thievish fingers on the time, Loosen your sword God girt so next your side. (iii. 1.) But Magenta was not the end. Solferino followed ; then " suddenly on the eve of triumph the Italians found the cup dashed from their lips. The Emperor had made peace." . . . " The news of the armistice was a bolt from the blue to the Italians " (103). Sober historians speak of it as " a betrayal." What sort of speak- ing was to be expected of a young poet who had perhaps deliberately put away memory of the destruction of the Roman Republic because the destroyer in the later years had given promise of a great compensating deed ? What sort of speaking but this ? He suits it in Landor's fashion to the persons of his drama. Sick with the spilt blood of Bartholomew, Charles is ex- hibiting a pale penitence to Catherine ; and she appeases him with the assurance that worse things may be : Who knows, sweet son, But here, and in this very Paris, where Our work now smells abhorred, some such may come To try more bloody issues, and break faith 78 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter More shamefully? Make truth deny its face, IV. Kill honour with his lips, stab shame to death, Unseat men's thoughts, envenom all belief. Yea, spit into the face and eyes of God His forsworn promise ? / • \ ^ (v. IX.) This of course refers to Louis Napoleon ; in the first instance to the cowp d^etat of December 2, 1851 (104) ; but, in the second instance perhaps, to the whole series of Napoleon's perjuries in Italy, of which the betrayal at Villafranca (July 1859) must have been the most recent in Swin- burne's memory (unless indeed it had not yet occurred) since his volume was published in 1860, and must have been in preparation during this period of Italian history. It refers to the coup d'etat by Swinburne's own admission ; for, some thirty years later, he makes it plain that the crime which Catherine prophesies is the " crime of December." He uses one term as metaphrase for the other — " the coup d'etat of August 24, 1572," and " the St. Bartholomew of December 2, 1851 " (105). But it refers to all the rest of Napoleon's perjuries in Italy, because Swinburne was passionately in- terested in the progress of the Risorgimento, as is shown in his fervid Ode to Mazzini (posthumously discovered), which internal evidence definitely dates in 1857 (106) ; as well as by the autobio- graphical record of such poems as " Siena " or " The Halt before Rome " previously quoted. And surely interest of that kind would express itself, voiding all bitterness aroused by all the crimes in the description of one ; especially if there was opportunity (as there was in this drama) to FIRST EVIDENCES 79 treat of one only. Important, then, in Swin- Chapter burne and Landor alike is this " dramatic " abuse L of Napoleon III. ; and, indeed, the general abuse it represents of all oppressive powers — in Swin- burne's phrase, the " great gaolers . . . that wear at waist the keys of the world." But more important in them both is the love that underlies all this hatred of tyrants — a simple, unreflecting, and intense love of freedom. Denise, in The Queen Mother^ expresses the passion : There's nothing in the world So worth as freedom ; pluck this freedom out, You leave the rag and residue of a man Like a bird's back displumed. That man that hath not The freedom of his name, and cannot make Such use as time and place would please him with, But has the clog of service at his heel, Forbidding the sound gait ; this is no man But a man's dog ; the pattern of a slave Is model for a beast. , _ . (v. 2.) In Landor, Scipio Africanus delivers an even more fervid apostrophe, as he looks at the signs of the frantic efforts of now burning Carthage : O Liberty ! what art thou to the valiant and brave, when thou art thus to the weak and timid ! dearer than life, stronger than death, higher than purest love. Never will I call upon thee where thy name can be profaned, and never shall my soul acknowledge a more exalted Power than thee. — (ii. 316.) Surely there had not been since Addison's Cato a more passionate outcry for unexplained and unsupported Freedom than this of Landor's. And there has not been since that apostrophe until now a purer counterpart of that than Swin- burne's. 80 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Of Other passagcs in The Queen Mother that L show sympathy with Landor, the most im- portant relate to reHgious abuses and occur in connection with Catherine. Such, for instance, is the high moral counsel and wise appeal that her speaking of them turns to rancid hypocrisy and patent Jesuitism ; the " screw of hers " that wrenches the king round to countenance the plan of massacre, her double good to blossom " upon a most small evil " ; her hand and mouth that are so swift and sure — To stab and lie and pray and poison with ; (i. 4) her empty beauty of words on God and the world, and man so cunningly fashioned ; her mask of duty over malice, feigning — . . . only this is sad, To be given up to change and the mere shame Of its abominable and obscure work With no good done, no clean thing in the soul To sweeten against resurrection-time This mire that made a body. /.. , v ^ (n. 1.) And this is the woman whose main policy, as Swinburne elsewhere describes it, was the corrup- tion of her own children, whose palace " it would be flattery to call a brothel or a slaughter- house " ! (107) He was assuredly following, as he says he was, Marlowe the teacher (108) and Webster the pupil of Shakespeare ; but even in full re- membrance of such anti-clericalism as is exhibited by Marlowe, and of corrupt Italian courts viewed through Webster's over-sombre Puritan eyes, it FIRST EVIDENCES 81 is difficult to account for Swinburne's vehemence Chaptkr without referring to similar or extremer expres- i^ sions of disgust at the continuation of church abuse, when these expressions were brought home to him by so many avenues of appeal as were Landor's. The nineteenth-century version was, to say the least, an intenser indictment of the church than even the wide limits of Eliza- bethan playcraft or conscience could furnish. Setting aside such imaginary conversations as those between Leo XII. and his valet Gigi, and Miguel and his Mother, which are sufficiently farcical to be described (in language Swinburne applies to traits of Shakespeare's third period) as " fetid fun and rancid ribaldry," there yet remains in Landor's work a vast deal of serious though libellous declamation against the church. An extract from the drama Ines de Castro will serve for example : Pedro. Ines, the Church is now a charnel house, Where all that is not rottenness is drowth. Men's bones and marrow its materials are, Men's groans inaugurated it, men's tears Sprinkle its floor, fires lighted up with men Arc censers for it ; Agony and Wrath Surround it night and day with sleepless eyes ; Dissimulation, Terror, Treachery, Denunciations of the child, the parent. The sister, brother, lover (mark me, Ines !) Are the peace-offerings God receives from it; (i. 3) or a passage from Fra Rupert illustrative of one important theme in the whole trilogy of which this drama is a part : G 82 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Maximin. Being taught to hate you. IV. God pardon me ! None but the frockt could teach So false a creed. /jjj^ 3 \ • ••••• Rupert. Fealty sworn, should I retract so soon ? I will live quiet ... no more crimes for me. . . . When this is fairly over . . . for a crime It surely is . . . albeit much holier men Have done much worse and died in odour after. (iii. 4.) Illustration from Landor's prose could only re- peat this invective in connection with particular events, such as the attack on the Roman Re- public by French troops, under constraint cer- tainly of the " Jesuitical and Papistical faction " (to use Landor's phrase) " in France." " Du- plicity, falsehood, violence, are asserted by the greater part of them to be allowable, and even laudable, if they promote the interests of the church " (109). The writer of this, it must be remembered, had ample provocation, none the less severe because only a few years before he had dedicated his Hellenics to Pius IX., on the occa- sion of that Holiness' brief and illusive apostacy from mediaevalism. " Never until now, most Holy Father," Landor wrote, " did I hope or desire to offer my homage to any potentate on earth ; and now I offer it only to the highest of them all." Subsequent events did not justify his optimism, nor, as has been shown, leave his faith in the papacy entirely serene, — nor the faith of his disciple. A word of warning is now pertinent. It must not be concluded too soon that the correspondence shown between Landor and Swinburne proves FIRST EVIDENCES 83 absolute " influence " of the older upon the Chapter younger writer. But for the dogma of the '_ Virtue of Tyrannicide which no one but Landor gave to Swinburne — not Cicero nor Milton nor Mariana — many of the ideas and sentiments he holds in common with Landor in the connections just described may well have come to him from a variety of sources. It could be shown, for instance, that his knowledge of the debauched religion of courts had directer information even than Landor's dramas and Conversations could furnish. Swinburne was exceptionally well read in the darker parts of social history. As a very young man he seems already familiar enough with the diary of Johannes Buchardus, Master of Ceremonies to Alexander VI., and with Bran- tome's biography of the Medicean Court, and Grammont's of the Court of Charles II. Further- more, he was a close observer of contemporary history and of the political usefulness to emperors and such like of clerical parties. It could be shown, too, that his hatred of this abuse, greater even than his knowledge of it, had the ample support of Hugo, whose Les Chdtiments, for instance, or L' Annie Terrible were stirring ex- amples to him. But to acknowledge both of these facts is only to emphasise the importance of his spiritual relationship with Landor. Swinburne was well informed as to social decadence in many periods : perhaps too well. He writes about it, at times, with much sympathy, as in sections of the early dramas. It seems also to be part of the burden of sorrow that weighs upon Poems and Ballads. 84 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter He WES doubtless instructed in anti-clericalism 1 and anti-imperialism by Hugo. Yet, in The Queen Mother, despite its artistic concern with the colourful depravity of courts, he finds occasion to be moralist, and he finds opportunity to be political liberalist. The accent of this liberalism is unmistakably Landor's. Its form and its spirit are after his example. Against opposition, then, the sturdier traits of Swinburne's genius, under Landor's patronage, were coming to the fore. This same condition obtains in the Poems and Ballads, to be discussed in the next chapter. It is complicated a little there by the incentive Landor's Hellenics seem to have been for the composition of some of these erotica ; a supple- mentary incentive, it must be said, which is hardly discernible, though it is important, in the Elizabethan and Pre-Raphaelite current which was sweeping the young poet on into sadness and inertia. From these moods of depression he recovers himself by the exercise of strength which, if " Thalassius " is a true record, was both stimu- lated and sustained by his hero-worship. CHAPTER V " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " Chapter {The Garden of Proserpine.) A lady clothed like summer with sweet hours. Her beauty, fervent as a fiery moon, Made my blood burn and swoon Like a flame rained upon. {Ballad of Life.) All things felt sweet were felt sweet overmuch, {The Two Dreams.) As one made drunk with living, whence he draws Drunken delight. . . . {Atalanta in Calydon.) How he that loves life overmuch shall die The dog's death utterly. (TJ ] ' \ In the foregoing chapter it has been shown that the first result of Swinburne's devotion to Landor is the passionate love of liberty and contempt of tyrants which is one characteristic of The Queen Mother, the more important of the two plays of Swinburne's first published volume. It is a high and moral result. Attention must now be given to the result of the relationship as it may have affected other characteristics of The Queen Mother and Rosa- mond (1860), together with Chastelard (1865), and the Poems and Ballads of 1866 — especially 86 V. 86 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter those dominating characteristics of supersensuous- L ness and of alleged sensuality which invite for the period of these poems the title Swinburne himself suggests for it, " Too much Love of Living." Long ago the criticism was made that Landor had encouraged just this development. It appeared in a Westminster Review article of April 1867, which, however, had under considera- tion not only Poems and Ballads and Chastelard, considered here, but Atalanta in Calydon as well. The remark is this : " Some personal influences of a noteworthy kind may be traced in these volumes. First, that of Walter Savage Landor, whom Mr. Swinburne with extravagant praise speaks of as the ' highest of contemporary names.' Landor's affection for the classical and even the pagan spirit, his erratic love of liberty, his lofty scorn of all conventions, and of the opinion of the many, have left a deep impress on the character of the young disciple." Now it is very likely that even this reviewer — as clear-eyed a critic as Swinburne has ever had, and far more kindly than most he had in that generation — was thinking principally of Atalanta in Calydon (whose dedication invokes Landor in the words he quotes) when he wrote of Landor's influence. Certainly the other two works under his notice {Poems and Ballads and Chastelard) are so different in colour from anything of Landor's, even from the few errancies that are chargeable against him, that, apart from the protestations of affection for Landor supplied by Swinburne himself, inspiration of them must have been re- " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 87 ferred to some other source. The classicism of Chapter the poems might surely be allowed direct descent, L pulsing as it does with the very throb and blood of Sappho, or in another case, " Phaedra," de- pendant upon Seneca. The love of liberty might have been traced rather to the long line of English lovers of the goddess, from Ben Jonson to Milton, and from Halifax to Shelley or Tennyson ; or best of all to Hugo (whose influence, indeed, the reviewer recognises as liberal and beneficent " so far as it goes " in these works), since the leit- motiv of political freedom is carried in Poems and Ballads by two songs, " In Time of Revolution " and " In Time of Order," and both of these derive from him (110). Then, too, both "liberty" and the classic might have escaped his attention under pressure of the more obvious burden of those poems to which he presumably refers in the debatable judgment he goes on to make : " Mr. Swinburne has learned much more from the existing school of French poets than from any modern English writers." And yet, be this as it may, with almost all the evidence in favour of the opinion that the re- viewer did not intend to discover a connection between Poems and Ballads and Landor, it may be well to give him the benefit of the doubt, and accept the criticism as implying that Landor's affection for the classical and even the pagan spirit, and his lofty scorn of all conventions were influences that helped to determine the course of Poems and Ballads as well as that of Atalanta. Such an assumption finds some support coming from Swinburne himself. For, in the Notes on 88 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Poems and Reviews (1866), he affirms the inde- L pendence of his pen, especially the pen that wrote Poems and Ballads, and reaffirms it with two quoted lines, the last two of this sextet : Wearers of rings and chains ! Pray do not take the pains To set me right. In vain my faults ye quote ; I write as others wrote On Sunium's height. , ••• ,-,. ^ *= (vm. 179.) And the sextet is Landor's. Swinburne then, let us say, did derive some encouragement from Landor for the composition of the poems and dramas under consideration here ; was somewhat led perhaps in his choice of his early subjects by Landor's use. But it is only one phase of Landor's work that influenced him in this way. Plainly it is not the phase he describes in " Thalassius," which taught that " he who loves life overmuch shall die the dog's death " ; and v/hich we must suppose Swinburne came to know a little later. Plainly, too, con- sidering its calm and his turbidity, its Greek ease and his romantic fever, even this first he did not understand. At the time he was being swayed by other forces that gave little opportunity for full allegiance to Landor. It is necessary to note this, for while admitting Landor's " influence," it is possible to show that every stage of Swinburne's progress through this period, with the notable exception of the last and emerging stage, definitely subscribes to some master other than Landor. This situation can be outlined briefly, for the " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 89 poems of " too much love of living " arrange Chapter themselves logically, and it would seem chrono- L logically (see Appendices) into certain partially or wholly distinct moods following this order : (1) The mood of eager sensuousness, when " all things felt sweet were felt sweet overmuch " ; represented by certain aspects of the early dramas, The Queen Mother and Rosamond ; and by such poems as " A Ballad of Life " and " A Ballad of Death " in Poems and Ballads. And this we shall show to be largely governed by the Elizabethan Marlowe, and by the Pre-Raphaelites generally. (2) The mood of " over-loving," evident in Rosamond, and also in such poems as " Laus Veneris " and " The Triumph of Time," which are concerned with a common character (in one case described as a knight, in the other as a lover) who is foiled and weary and beginning to demand the refuge of " violent delights." And this we shall show in the representative instance of " Laus Veneris " to derive from Morris. (3) The mood in which such a man — in Swin- burne's description " foiled in love and weary of loving " — seeks " refuge in those violent delights that have violent ends " ; represented by such a poem as " Dolores," the first member of the great trilogy which gives lasting and moral greatness to Poems and Ballads. And this we shall know to be reminiscent chiefly of Rossetti and of Baudelaire. (4) The ensuing mood of satiety and languor, of " hunger and thirst after the perfect sleep," explicit in " Rococo " and " The Garden of 90 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Proscrpine," and in the latter and more important — 1 instance clearly deriving in some not unimportant degree from Christina Rossetti. (5) The mood of emergence, aspiration, new and firm desire, evident in the supreme lament for Landor ; evident also in the third and last great member of the trilogy with its desire and search after " the goddess that redeems." And in this case, as in that of the memorial poem just mentioned, the mood is attributable to the spiritual comradeship, now more perfectly realised (for Swinburne must have made his pilgrimage about this time) with his hero. First, however, before the influences, comes the man, Swinburne. And he was endowed with at least two of the qualifications for poetry, which popular judgment has converted to its own good uses from Milton's comment that poetry is more simple, sensuous, and passionate than logic : he was sensuous and passionate. Writing of his ancestors, his father the admiral, his grandfather Sir John, and an ancestress who bore thirty children, he adds : " I think you will allow that when this race chose at last to produce a poet, it would have been at least remarkable if he had been content to write nothing but hymns and idylls for clergymen and young ladies to read out in chapels and drawing- rooms " (111). It is no wonder that a poet so constituted, coming when he did, should have turned to the masters that he sought. England, in the 'sixties, was as much under the influence of the " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 91 Wordsworthian school as of any other. For Chapter instance, it was complained of Swinburne that L " of enlarged meditation, the note of the highest poetry," there is no trace in him ! (This, after 1866.) Assuredly he possessed little of it. He had to see life and space and adventure. So he set himself upon the shores of the Elizabethans, and before leaving Eton " had plunged (he says) as deep as a boy could dive into the line of literature " (112) which was always his favourite. This interest in the Elizabethans increased during his Oxford days, and first showed itself in his contribution to Undergraduate PajJers, December 1857, on Marlowe and Webster, the first paper entering into praise of the gorgeous rhythms of Hero and Leander and its adequate treatment of the physical aspect of love. Landor's Hellenics It is perhaps at this time that Swinburne first came to appreciate Landor's poetry, or a section of it, thoroughly — a time when knowing it at all meant knowing what was practically the unique contemporary literary work in which the sexual force was not bowdlerised out of exist- ence, and in which human love was not carried on as a bodiless (and sometimes spiritless) spirituality. " His Ufelong attitude to Landor," writes Mr. Gosse, " was founded on a copy of the Hellenics'' (113). It had begun as early as 1853, and throughout its development remained true to this foundation. The effect upon him, as soon as he was old enough to understand more 92 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter than the Uteiary beauty of these poems, can L readily be imagined. The Hellenics is the most individual of Landor's works, the one whose face is most averse from the concerns of his time in art or morality or daily conversation, and most set in contemplation of the statuesque simplicity and clarity in Greek life. Here is a society where sex plays so easy and unreflecting a part that it almost loses social significance, impedi- ment to its free operation being purely a personal matter, sanction therefor being enjoined by oracle as for " the highest law of God." Life is seen clearly, and seen whole : now on the summit of august Ida where Achilles and Helena converse of happier days ; now in certain gardens, not above the base of Helicon, where Lysander, Alcanor, and Phanoe play under the shadow of the " dark garden god," garlanded season after season with leaves or flowers or fruit ; now in deep valleys where Dryope, tending her flocks one day, hears suddenly : Burst forth the sound of horn and pipe, and clash Of cymbal rattling from uplifted palms ; Dryad and Hamadryad, wild with joy, (vii. 429) and knows before nightfall the Apollonian serpent gleaming upon maiden limbs like a shower of Danaen gold. Here too Alciphron and Leucippe, Damoetas and Ida, or Laon and Dora prepare and consummate gentle loves, falling only a little short of the beauty of that perfect pastoral love of Daphnis and the Maiden which the grace of Theocritus has crowned. Here the minstrel of English birth has chanted to Sicilian pipes and " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 93 Sicilian lyres the story of " Pan ever-to-be-re- Ch^lpter membered and Pitys, and of the divine Hama- — - dryad whom a mortal loved " (114). He has chanted other things also ; higher, perhaps, and graver — of freedom and tyranny and the gods. The Queen Mother has already been shown (in a previous chapter) to bear witness of them or of their like in various other of Landor's works, so that they need not concern us again here. But these first arc the more important. Accepting the Hellenics Swinburne accepted them, and the theme of physical love in his early work derives in some small way from this source. The Landorism of the Hellenics becomes a tributary as it were to the Elizabethan current which was then sweeping him on. Elizabethan Influence It was his first if not his strongest ambition, he writes, "to do something worth doing, and not utterly unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the pupil of Shakespeare. . . . And my first book, written while yet under academic or tutorial authority, bore evidence of that ambition in every line " (115). Rosamond, the slighter if not the earlier of the two early dramas, may be set aside for the present. The Queen Mother is a fitter exposition of his ambition. The theme is Marlovian, in general circumstances at least, which is about as much comparison as the " patched and distorted " text of The Massacre at Paris (Marlowe's drama on the same theme) will allow. The conception 94 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter is also like Marlowe's in so far as the drama is — '- devoted to the exposition of one overwhelming character who has her will if not her way upon all who may serve or who do oppose her. The treatment is rather Websterian, not in effective- ness (for few write with hard glare of lightning on a field of night) but in intent : such an intent as at least the opening scene of The White Devil shows to be deliberate, to give the picture of a whole time in accordance with which certain characters act. Obvious sympathy with EHza- bethan use is also plain in a certain liberality in syntax shown in such combinations as : " funeral privacy of rite " ; " the shallowness of thin occasions " ; " make smooth my name in patient reputation of good men." Then, in addition to these, and more important for notice here, is the eager attention given to the physical aspect of love. This was natural in any picture of Catherine's Court that pretended to bear the least resemblance to the original. It was also to be expected from a young follower of Marlowe who, in Undergraduate Papers, had praised the " rapid rhythm and gorgeous luxuries of Hero and Leander,'' and the poet who " did justice once for all to that much misused and belied thing, the purely sensuous and out- ward side of love." It is detailed and realistic, and sometimes violent ; but it is clean. In particular it is innocent of that irremediable salete which infects even the air of the later Elizabethan drama. And it is mellowed by com- bination with every other delicate sensuous interest proper to a society that, after all, was V. " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 95 not without vestiges of culture. There is song, chapter touched with sadness, for L'amour passe et fait bien souffrir ; and there is scent of spice and orris root, soft fair skin, gracious curve of Up or eyeUd or nostril, long luxurious hair — but sensed for arfs sake, and not all for the mere pleasure of sensing, caught up and held as by a painter's instinct, awaiting the canvas ; as when Charles says to Denise : You have the eyes men choose to paint, you know ; And just that soft turn in the little throat And bluish colour in the lower Ud They make saints with. ^j. i\ Q;j^g\ It is here that the tone and interest of the work most obviously separate themselves from the Elizabethans, and declare for alliance with the group of artists with whom Swinburne was from this time on for a number of years a professional and personal associate. These were, of course, the Pre-Raphaelites. And to one of them, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Queen Mother and Rosamond is dedicated. Pre-Raphaelite Influence The Elizabethan sensuous delight is com- paratively simple ; not so the Pre-Raphaelite : it becomes a problem — the problem with which Denise and Rosamond find themselves con- fronted ; in the latter's phrase, " the secret riddle and pure sense of flesh." Denise answers it in her own way, finding 96 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter the flesh " the holy raiment of the soul," yet L it is only when she receives her death wound as she tries too late to warn the Huguenots of the plot against them that she feels herself " near the heart of quiet," and her spirit light and sweet and " evened with what it was " ; only in death that she finds recompense for the harsh exactions of the life of sense, and in martyrdom that the flesh is made evidence of things lasting as well as glad. The drama Rosamond exists almost wholly by right of its interpretation of this same dilemma of the flesh. Hardly a drama at all, it is chiefly the exposition of a sensuous mood. She that has " roses in her name " feels herself Part of the perfect witness for the world How good it is. . . . Giving herself over as mistress to King Henry, putting off honour and respect, unclothing the soul " of all soft raiment coloured custom weaves," she feels herself, and all like her, loved of God better than those " bitter fools whom ignorance makes clean." •■ Constance. It may be true, I know not ; only to stay maiden-souled Seems worthier to me. Rosamond. Doth it so ? Ah you That tie the spirit closer to the flesh To keep both sweet, it seems again to me You kill the gracious secret of it and mar The wholesome heaven with scent of ruined things That breed mere flies for issue. Ay, and love That makes the daily flesh an altar cup To carry tears, and rarest blood within, And touch pained lips with feast of sacrament — So sweet it is, God made it sweet . . . (117) '' TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 97 sweeter and bitterer than all things, greater than chapter fear or change. Yet hanging athirst between — '~ Love's hands, crying " sweet and so sweet," she finds her eyes " possessed with rigorous prophecy of tears." Poems and Ballads It is no step at all from this contemplation of the life of the senses, and this sob-choked avowal that physical love has inherent worth, to the earlier part of Poems and Ballads ; for the idea and conclusion of " Laus Veneris " is one and the same with this, and the situation and emotion of various other poems merely a variation of it. They know few simple delights, having too often " found or felt out (the) way to the debatable land where simple and tender pleasures become complex and cruel " (118), there to faint from long continuance asking, like the Leper's lover of his dead mistress, the secret of it all : I am grown blind with all these things ; It may be now she hath in sight Some better knowledge ; still there clings The old question : Will not God do right ? But before these poems can be really under- stood, it is necessary to know something of the conditions under which they were written, to realise something of the aims and interests of the self-styled Pre-Raphaelite artists in whose intimate association Swinburne remained during their composition. To use a now trite phrase, the Prc-Rapha elites aimed at bringing about a " renaissance of H 98 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter wonder." Certain facts in the world which were -Zl being observed too distantly or too meekly were to be brought close again. They should be shown to be not only facts, but subjective intimate facts. Such was beauty, and such was love. Beauty was to be brought physically close. The actual body was to be surrounded by it so that the two should be complementary. So, for instance, Morris has in his exquisite song from The Hill of Venus : The bee-beset ripe-seeded grass Through which thy fine Umbs first did pass ; The purple-dusted butterfly First blown against thy quivering thigh. The first red rose that touched thy side. Furthermore it was to be present very strongly in sense perception : as something not to be avoided or slighted ; imperious, a sovereign and a piercing delight. This again Morris illustrates, as in The Defence of Guenevere : I was half mad with beauty on that day, And went without my ladies all alone In a quiet garden walled round every way ; I was right joyful of that wall of stone That shut the flowers and trees up with the sky And trebled all the beauty. Both of these devices were plain for Swin- burne's notice ; and he imitated both of them. He too would concern himself much with the beautiful. And in the beginning he was able to do it joyfully. In such a poem as "At Eleusis " he holds good the visible aspect of things : " All fair women having rings of gold on " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 99 hand or hair," " deep smooth pitchers of pure Chapter brass " dipped L Under the bubbled wells, till each round lip Stooped with loose gurgle of waters incoming ; Spring, and the " shapes of grass and tender corn " ; the " bright body of fair Persephone " forced by Hades Out of pure grass, where she lying down, red flowers Made their sharp little shadows on her sides, Pale heat, pale colour on pale maiden flesh. All this is of course imitative, the last being the counterpart of the passage quoted from Morris and of others that might be quoted from his 1858 volume. Even the " brazen pitchers in the bubbled wells " are borrowed, as from that sonnet of Rossetti's on Giorgione's " Venetian Pastoral " which Swinburne described as " the most utterly delightful " to him of all Rossetti's poems on pictures : Water, for anguish of the solstice : — nay. But dip the vessel slowly, — nay, but lean And hark how at its verge the wave sighs in Reluctant. . . • On this sonnet he comments : "In the verse as on the canvas there is the breathless breath of overmuch delight, the passion of over-running pleasure which quivers and aches on the very edge of heavenly tears — ' tears of perfect moan,' for excess of unfathomable pleasure and burden of inexpressible things only to be borne by gods in heaven ; the sweet and sovereign oppression of absolute beauty and the nakedness of burning life" (119). 100 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Ch.\pter The comment on the sonnet is an indication ^' of his own mood, as that develops through the Poems and Ballads. He begins with simple joy in beauty, but soon he finds out his way to the " debatable land where simple and tender pleasures become complex and cruel." Beauty ceases to be merely imperious, as in Morris or Rossetti : the sovereign delight becomes the sovereign oppression. Again and again he com- plains passionately against the tyrannous demand it makes upon senses already called upon too often and too much : Alas thy beauty ! for thy mouth's sweet sake My soul is bitter to me. . . . ("Laus Veneris," 37.) The same protest is made in Rosamond and The Masque of Queen Bersabe and the " Ballad of Life." In this latter poem the technique deserves attention, as suggesting the source of some of the ideas : the ballad or ballata form, the elaborate personifying and making human of the ballad itself — Forth, ballad, and take roses in both arms, the strange use of abstracts — " soft raiment out of woven sighs " and the like. All of these find exact parallels in Pre-Raphaelite use, as in the Envoi to The Earthly Paradise, where the " Book " is sent to greet Chaucer ; or, the source of it all, the numerous ditties and ballatas of Rossetti's Early Italian Poets. But the sovereign oppres- siveness and cruelty of beauty is an idea and emotion developed far beyond their use. " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 101 Undoubtedly they stood sponsor at its birth, Chapter but its growth is far beyond them. _Xl The reason is not far to seek. Beauty for them was a medium of truth that brought spiritual satisfaetion. For him it was an end in itself. Even at this early date they stood for a principle of thought and feeling that was beyond him. We may be allowed to call it mysticism even though its manifestation in the various members of the school is too varied to be defined strictly. Rossetti, for instance, though he may not have been ready at this time to express the creed of " Heart's Compass," Sometimes thou seem'st not as thy self alone, But as the meaning of all things that arc, was even then making for himself that glass, as it were, of woman's form and feature, through which he came later so fixedly to view reality. But this vision was his alone. Swinburne did not share it — and the medium, the " glass darkly " he could share, left him distressed. This personalising of beauty was but one Pre-Raphaelite aim. The personalising of love was another. It meant emphasising its physical and outward aspect ; and naturally it found favour in the eyes of the young disciple of Marlowe. It found favour also in the eyes of his friend George Meredith, who may be allowed to describe the whole situation as he viewed it. In 1861 he saw Leighton's " Paolo and Fran- cesca " at the Academy (and Leighton, in this connection, may surely qualify as Pre-Raphaelite without contradiction), " painted just as the 102 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Ch^ter book has dropped, and they are in no state to -^ read more." He wrote to a friend about it : " I greatly admire it. I think it the sole English picture exhibiting passion that I have seen " (120). He was soon to see more of the same sort, and poems that were as distinct from the general mode of the day, for within a few months of the date of this letter he began a once-a-week occupancy of Rossetti's house in Chelsea where Swinburne was also lodging. The subject was one of Rossetti's favourites at the time : in 1855 he had painted the diptych " Paolo and Francesca " (121) (sold at once to Ruskin), the kissing lovers on one side, the embracing souls in hell on the other ; in 1861 he sold a copy of the first panel of an elabor- ated version, and completed this version itself in 1862. Influence of Burne-Jones and Morris Paolo and Francesca as a theme was but one sign of the renaissance of passion. Another is the Tannhauser legend, treated by Morris in The Hill of Venus (which first took form early in the 'sixties, though it was not completed until late in the decade) ; by Burne-Jones in his memorable painting " Laus Veneris " (1873- 1878) which had been anticipated even before 1866, seeing that in that year he added twenty designs for The Hill of Venus to the " Earthly Paradise " series ; and by Swinburne in his still more memorable poem of the same title. The subject must have been set astir among " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 103 them by echoes from Wagner's perversion of it Chapter in Tannhauser, coming, if not direct, certainly L through criticisms of the opera, Uke the luminous interpretation of it by Baudelaire that reached Swinburne just after he had completed his poem ; or through the poem "Tannhauser" (1861) by Neville Temple (Julian Fane) and Edward Trevor (Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton) which is, by confession, a Tennysonian idyll on Wagner's theme. The latter was precisely the sort of misconception that could be counted upon to drive thePre-Raphaelites in the opposite direction. Meredith here again happily expresses senti- ments that may be looked upon as a common possession of the school. Writing to a friend who upheld a contrary opinion, he says : " I don't agree with you that they have brought Venus sensibly to the reader at all, tho' it's fair to say that with Elizabeth it is less so than Venus. The former is a prim good miss, a shrew when in a passion ; she quite justifies (to me) Tannhauser's choice of the dear volujjtuous Goddess whom they call such naughty names, and who, I begin to think, is the favourite daughter of Mother Earth " (122). Swinburne, it is necessary to remark, was the only one of the group for whom she remained almost constantly terrible. For Burne- Jones she was a queen to love ; for Morris a queen to praise, and only upon second thought, as it were, to shun. Neither one of them attempts to picture the hopelessness of the days after the knight's return to Venusburg, This, says ^lorris in his poem, it passes the powers of man to describe. Swin- 104 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter bume alone pictured the tense agonies, sterile ^' joys, and stifling airs of Horsel. Yet, for all the difference between the Burne- Jones-Morris treatment of this subject and Swinburne's in " Laus Veneris," their occupation with the same theme must have been some incen- tive for him. And, when all is said, Morris knew how to develop passion to the heat almost of Horsel, to give it utterance almost in the delirious speech of Swinburne's knight, even though, in the poem completed after Swinburne's, he chose to avoid doing so. Indeed, it is no more than mild hyperbole to say that he dominates the first large mood of Swinburne's Poems and Ballads. There are numerous passages in his 1858 poems that had more than a suggestion for any follower, most of all for one who many years later was able to say, referring to the " King Arthur's Tomb " of this collection : " I have not read the poem for years, I have not the book at hand, and I cite from memory ; but I think it would be safe to swear to the accuracy of my citation. Such verses are not forgettable " (123). No more was the whole poem forgettable. Swinburne recalls it with a precision which is proof positive of the tremendous appeal it must have made to him at the time of his first know- ledge of it. The structure, he admits, is loose : " But where among other and older poets of his time and country is one comparable for perception and expression of tragic truth, of subtle and noble, terrible and piteous things ? Where a touch of passion at once so broad and so sure ? The " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 105 figures here given have the blood and breath, the chapter shape and step of hfe ; they can move and suffer ; '_ their repentance is as real as their desire ; their shame lies as deep as their love. They are at once remorseful for the sin and regretful of the pleasure that is past " (124). He recalls again how Guenevere maddens herself and Launcelot " with wild words of reproach and remorse, abhorrence and attraction, her sharp and sudden memory of old sights and sounds and splendid irrevocable days " of the " solitary sound of birds singing in her gardens, while in the lists the noise went on of spears and shouts telling which knight of them all rode here or there ; the crying of ladies' names as men and horses clashed one against another, names that bit like the steel they impelled to its mark." Now, obviously, " Laus Veneris " is a greater poem than this of Morris' ; more terribly con- ceived, better integrated in its parts, so that the whole form and body of it is as fair and perfect as that fairest of Christ's knights with the regret and defiance of whose apostasy it glows and subsides and is mad. But, in the description given of " King Arthur's Tomb," read for the name of Guenevere that of this Knight of Horsel, and the description will as perfectly suit the later and the greater poem as it does the earlier. Disregard the sex of the speakers in the two poems and the close parallelism of the two is patent. Swinburne has done vastly more than take over the passion and expression of Guenevere — but he has done this : and his knight speaks with her verv accent : 106 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Guenevere. Dost thou reck V- That I am beautiful, Lord, even as you And your dear mother ? Why did I forget You were so beautiful, and good and true, That you loved me so, Guenevere ? O yet If even I go to hell, I cannot choose But love you, Christ, yea, though I cannot keep From loving Launcelot ; . . . The latter part of this is the exact description of the situation in " Laus Veneris," for the knight cannot keep from loving Christ nor yet dethrone the memory of his straight keen days, even in the midst of the hell to which his love of Venus has taken him : Alas, Lord, surely thou art great and fair. But lo, her wonderfully woven hair ! She is right fair ; what hath she done to thee ? Nay, fair Lord Christ, lift up thine eyes and see ; Had now thy mother such a lip — like this ? Thou knowest how sweet a thing it is to me. Once and again he reverts to the virile joys of the old " clean great time of goodly fight," agleam with fair swords and " rows of beautiful mailed men," and recalls amidst the stifling heat of Horsel the open sweetness of fields and seas : Ah yet would God this flesh of mine might be Where airs might wash and long leaves cover me. Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers, Or where the wind's feet shine along the sea. This last is, perhaps, a reminiscence and per- fection of one of the few at all memorable details in the Fane-Bulwer-Lytton poem, where the victims of Venus are described as first revelling in sensual enjoyment, and then sickening until " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 107 . . . their lips, Chapter Spurning the reeky pasture, yearn for draughts V. Of rock rebounding rills, their eyes for sight ■ Of heaven, their limbs for length of dewy grass. Perhaps such an allusion is inherent. Morris at least uses the same device, though less strikingly (except in a cancelled fragment of " The Hill of Venus ") (125), as in the " Defence of Guenevere " or " Rapunzel," in addition to the use of " old sights and sounds and splendid irrevocable days " in " King Arthur's Tomb," which Swinburne describes, and whose fashion, if not whose manner, he follows even here. But it must be noticed that the need for it far exceeds the need in Morris, for the poet of " Laus Veneris " has pushed pas- sion even beyond the swooning borderland that Launcelot and Guenevere traverse, to the harsh extreme edge, washed round by perpetual tears. The mood in which " Laus Veneris " closes (and also another famous poem of this collection, written probably about the same time, " The Triumph of Time ") augured a certain not altogether enviable progression for the poet who was (even dramatically) possessed by it. Here was a conception of a man foiled of love and weary of loving who in the first case willed to persist in it until God's trumpets be loosened over land and sea ; and in the second, " The Triumph of Time," reached out to find some harsh and destroying sin as relief from it. The natural development was that he should be allowed to find this or something like it. And this is done in one of the wildest pieces in Poems and Ballads^ " Dolores." Fortunately 108 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Swinburne's own explanation of it is forthcoming. ^' " I have striven here," he says in his Notes on Poems and Reviews, 1866, " to express that transient state of spirit through which a man may be supposed to pass, foiled in love and weary of loving, but not yet in sight of rest, seeking refuge in those ' violent delights ' that have ' violent ends,' in frank and fierce sensualities that at least profess to be no more than they are." Influence of Rossetti and Baudelaire The harsh satisfactions, the " fugitive things not good to treasure " of the two earlier poems, he here deifies and worships. The dissolving and destroying sin which they reach out for, he visualises and embraces as Dolores, our Lady of Pain. The concept is perhaps awful enough to be sui generis. But sui generis it is not. Few of Swinburne's ideas are. And a glance at two of Rossetti's poems, which he chooses for especial panegyric in his essay on that poet, should dis- cover in part at least the secret of its derivation. These two are " The Burden of Nineveh " and " Jenny." " The Burden of Nineveh " Swinburne ranks as perhaps the greatest of Rossetti's poems. It is a meditation before the stone bulk of a Ninevehan bull, then newly arrived at a London museum ; and in it the poet, using the thing as a symbol, visualises pagan rites and civilisations over which it had held lordship. He then ex- plores the future, and imagines the advent in long ruined London of some antipodean explorer — " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 109 Who, finding in this desert place Chapter This form, shall hold us for some race That walked not in Christ's lowly ways. But bowed its pride and vowed its praise Unto the god of Nineveh. The smile rose first — anon drew nigh The thought. . . . Those heavy wings spread high So sure of flight, which do not fly ; . That set gaze never on the sky ; Those scriptured flanks it cannot see ; Its crown a brow-contracting load ; Its planted feet which trust the sod. . . . (So grew the image as I trod) — O Nineveh, was this thy God, — Thine also, mighty Nineveh ? " What more august and strenuous passion of thought," Swinburne asks, " was ever clothed in purple of more imperial speech than consummates this poem ? . . . the thinker comes to find in it in- deed the ' God of this world,' and no dead idol, but a living deity and ever present strength ; having wings, but not to fly with ; and eyes, but not to look up with . . . brow-bound with a royal sign, of oppression only and contraction " (126). The passages from the essay and the poem are given almost in full, that they may be compared, and that it may be apparent how Swinburne has hardened and overstated what is, taken with the foregoing stanza on the race — That walked not in Christ's lowly ways, most forceful and yet delicate criticism. From the midst of Rossetti's subtlety he reaches out after Blake's revolutionism, and identifies his own concept of the Ninevehan bull with Blake's " Urizen, the god of this world." 110 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter The next pocm, " Jenny," is something of — L a corollary of '* Nineveh." Jenny is made the medium through which the poet coldly, dispas- sionately, almost cruelly gazes at such " reality " as she may represent : You know not what a book you seem Half read by lightning in a dream ! Yet, Jenny, looking long at you, The woman almost fades from view. A cipher of man's changeless sum Of lust, past, present, and to come Is left. A riddle that one shrinks To challenge from the scornful sphinx. Like a toad within a stone Seated while time crumbles on ; Which sits there since the earth was cursed For man's transgression at the first ; Aye, and shall not be driven out Till that which shuts him round about Break at the very master's stroke. Even so within this world is Lust. And this Swinburne describes as the " mightier fancy so grandly cast in words, of lust, alone, aloof, immortal, immovable, outside of death in the darkness of things everlasting ; self secluded in absorption of its own desire, and walled up from love or light as a toad in its stone wrap- ping " (127). But he does more than describe it. With a display of the same opulent en- thusiasm which raises the passage just quoted so much above bare truth to Rossetti's, he embodies this conception of vice, with a change only of non- essentials, in his great poem " Dolores " which has already been described. " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 111 Admittedly " Dolores " is antipodal in mood Chapter to Rossetti's poem. " Jenny " is calm, without _^ any great sense of grief or of retribution. " Do- lores " is a panegyric and litany to Our Lady of Pain. Its mood is that of " the tragic lyrist," Baudelaire (128), as in the poem " Les Femmes Damnees," where (Swinburne records) " the side of their passion kept before us is an infinite per- verse refinement, an infinite reverse aspiration, the end of which things is death." But the fundamental concept is the same as Rossetti's, the all-but-immortality of lust ; and it is only in the tremendous development and importance given to this idea that " Dolores " in the first instance differentiates itself from the concept of the poet who was at least one of its inspirers. This violence demands a reaction. It is a passion too intense to last. And the reaction comes in the perfect second member of the trilogy of which "Dolores" is the first, "The Garden of Proserpine." The mood typified by this poem is " that brief total pause of passion and of thought when the spirit, without fear or hope of good things or evil, hungers and thirsts only after the perfect sleep." Inevitable as they arc in sequence from " Dolores," even this mood and poem have a literary ancestry. Influence of Christina Rossetti Now we turn to the second member of the trilogy. And, as for the preceding member of the trilogy it was possible to show Pre-Raphaelite 112 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter influence, descending through Rossetti ; as for ^- the preparatory member, if we may call " Laus Veneris," so, it was possible to show their influence coming through Morris and Burne- Jones ; so also here it is possible to show their influence, transmitted by " the sainted and secluded " author of such poems as " Looking Forward," " Rest," and " Dream Land," Christina Rossetti. It is a pause not only of the passion of love, but of all the severe and extreme life of the senses of which " Laus Veneris " and the poems it re- presents are so capable witnesses. That wild life has stormed itself out, and the old hard excite- ments are become a burden — the burden of fair women and sweet speeches and bright colours and much gladness, as they are told in "The Ballad of Burdens." And thereupon ensues a longing for death. With all of these modifications of the mood of satiety Christina Rossetti is in sympathy. She is at one with The Preacher in voicing the melancholy of youth. " The Whole Head is Sick and the Whole Heart is Faint " is the heavy title of one of her laments for its hopelessness. Woe for the young who say that Hfe is long, Who turn from the sunrising to the west, Who feel no pleasure and can find no rest, Who in the morning sigh for evening song. Their hearts, weary because of this world's wrong, Yearn with a thousand longings unexprest. They say, " The peace of heaven is placed too high And this earth changeth and is perishing." It is needless to say that this mood is character- istic of Christina Rossetti's poetry. The sonnet " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 113 quoted was written in December 1847 ; later work Chapter shows the same mood connected with all stages of ' life. It is not the only, but it is the dominant chord throughout her whole music ; and by means of it her song rises perhaps five or six times into complete beauty, and once into the absolute perfection of spiritual and technical maturity, the " great new year hymn " as Swinburne calls it, " Passing away, saith the world, passing away " (129). This sacred song is above Swinburne's accept- ance, being withdrawn into its own serene heaven. But such poems as her " Vanity of Vanities " (1847), or "Looking Forward " (1849), or " Beauty is Vain " (Jan. 1864), are much more in accord with his poetry, with " A Ballad of Burdens " for example ; and her little " Dream Land " (1849) is surely not so slight, being beauti- ful, as to have failed of influence on the expression of his world- weariness and satiety, " The Garden of Proserpine." (From " The Garden of Proserpine ") (From " Dream Land ") Here where the world is quiet, She left the rosy morn, Here where all trouble seems She left the fields of corn, Dead, winds and spent waves riot For twilight cold and lorn In doubtful dreams of dreams ; And water springs. I watch the green field growing, Through sleep, as through a veil. For reaping folk and sowing, She sees the sky look pale For harvest time and mowing. And hears the nightingale A slcei)y world of streams. That sadly sings. ... ..... Nor star nor sun shall waken, Rest, rest, a perfect rest Nor any change of light. Shed over brow and breast ; Nor sound of waters shaken Her face is towards the west. Nor any sound or sight ; The purple land. Nor wintry winds nor vernal, She cannot see the grain Nor days nor things diurnal ; Ripening on hill or plain ; Only the sJeej) eternal She cannot feel the rain In an eternal niglit. Upon her hand. I 114 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chaptek Here then, in this dreamless peace, the themes ^' of eager sensuousness that arose in The Queen Mother and Rosamond and sometimes rioted in Poems and Ballads find consummation. But with these, finding the same end and rest, are the moods of Chastelard, for this most beautiful member of the Mary Stuart trilogy is the natural development of the early dramas (Holyrood being the natural consequence of the Louvre, as Mary's character is of the training she had at the hands of the Queen Mother) and the counterpart of many of the shorter poems. Mary is Faustine, and looks at times " as though she stood and saw men slain to make her game and laughter " (Act IV. 1) ; she is Aholibah, and the type of all the beautiful luxurious queens of the Masque of Queen Bersabe, as though reminiscent of whose fate she answers Chastelard : Ah ! my sweet fool Think you, when God will ruin me for my sin My face of colour shall prevail me much With him, so soften the tooth'd iron's edge To save my throat a scar ? She is Venus Pandemos who holds her lover in his own despite in another Horsel ; from whom death only can liberate him : Ah ! fair love, Fair fearful Venus made of deadly foam, I shall escape you somehow with my death — Your splendid supple body and mouth on fire And Paphian breath that bites the lips like heat. But above and beyond all this, she is Mary — Queen ; a strange subtle unifying power that articulates into beauty many harsh and extreme "TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING" 115 things, and brings them beneath the sway of an Chapter ideal justiee also, for Holyrood looks forward to — '- Fotheringay, and Chastelard's death prepares Mary's own. Relationship with Landor It must be noted that even such an artistic solution of the erotic theme is not necessarily satisfying morally, being merely negative. That loving life overmuch brings death is a good thing to know, but as a plan for life's conduct it is fatally incomplete. Some positive element is needed, and cried for ; something worthier than the poppied peace of " The Garden of Pro- serpine," " that brief total pause of passion and of thought, when the spirit, without fear or hope of good things or evil, hungers and thirsts after the perfect sleep." The cry comes in " Hes- pcria," the concluding poem of the great trilogy : the goddess is half seen, but wholly desired. Swinburne himself thus describes the significance of the poem : Here between moonrise and sunset lives the love that is gentle and faithlul, neither giving too much — nor asking — a bride rather than a mistress, a sister rather than a bride. But not at once, or not for ever can the past be killed and buried ; hither also the huntress follows her flying prey, wounded and weakened, still fresh from the fangs of passion ; the cruel hands, the amorous eyes that glitter and allure. Qui a bu, boira ; the feet are drawn back toward the ancient ways. Only by lifelong flight side by side with the goddess that redeems shall her slave of old escape from the goddess 116 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter that consumes, if even thus one may be saved, even thus ^' distance the blood-hounds. Read as the idealised record of a divine passion for a woman, " a bride rather than a mistress, a sister rather than a bride," the poem is not with- out high significance. But, so read, it is without the highest. This can be realised only by accept- ing it as an appeal to a veritable " goddess of deliverance," in whom are gathered up all high hope, all noble memory, all sustaining and re- deeming power. These are, indeed, gathered and bound as glories around the brows of the real experience in the midst of the poem ; but they are more than she, and she is less than they. It is in a wind . . . that blows from the region of stories, Blows with a perfume of songs and of memories beloved from a boy, that he sees her : For thee, in the stream of the deep tide-wind blowing in with the water, Thee I behold as a bird borne in with the wind from the west. And yet a little while and he sees her no more, and cries for her return : From the beautiful infinite west, from the happy memorial places. Full of the stately repose and the lordly delight of the dead. Where the fortunate islands are lit with the light of ineffable faces, And the sound of a sea without wind is about them, and sunset is red. Come back to redeem and release me from love that recalls and represses. " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 117 With this should be compared a passage from Chapter Atalanta in Calydon, describing " the sweet wise — L death of old men honourable " who pass To the clear seat and remote throne of souls, Lands undiscoverable in the unheard-of west, Round which the strong stream of a sacred sea Rolls without wind forever ; and also a passage from a poem in the same volume as " Hesperia " : Not with disdain of days that were Look earthward now ; Let dreams revive the reverend hair. The imperial brow ; Come back in sleep, for in the life Where thou art not We find none like thee. Time and strife And the world's lot Move thee no more ; but love at least And reverent heart May move thee, royal and released Soul that thou art. This last is from the Lament " In Memory of Walter Savage Landor " ; the passage from Atalanta is part of a drama dedicated as a whole to Landor, and part of a section of the drama especially devoted to him (as the next chapter will make plain). The lines from " Hesperia " are probably synchronous with the other passages, and are certainly similar in appeal to those in the Lament. Perhaps it would be too much to say that this similarity is a matter of conscious in- tention. In all likelihood it is accidental, a matter of fulness of heart rather than of clearness of thinking. The " goddess that redeems " may 118 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter not actually be that divinity whose service Landor L professes through his Coretheus : I loved imprudently ; yet throughout life Those arts I cherished that lead youth aright And strengthen manhood and adorn old age, (vii. 435) for which service Swinburne loved him ; she may not be, deliberately, the Landorian goddess of Liberty, whom Swinburne had begun to serve in The Queen Mother, whom he was now beginning to serve again. But if they are not identical, the Hesperian surely gleams with borrowed or re- flected glory. About the time of the composition of both of these appeals Swinburne was under- going an emotional change. The erotic theme was palling. He was seeking an ideal that should redeem and release him from oppressive love. He found it in full a little later on, as the chapter on Songs before Sunrise will show in detail. But even at this time he was finding it. And we can only record the fact that the relationship with Landor seems to have been one of the paths to its discovery. It is clearly a Landorian ideal in the Lament, It may very well be a flower of the same stock in " Hesperia." And this is not mere deduc- tion. Practically it is Swinburne's comment upon the significance of Landor in the termination of his erotic period and the induction of another, happier and nobler. In " Thalassius " and in the Prelude to Songs before Sunrise he describes an orgiastic period from which release is secured by the assertion of strength fed upon Landor's thought. Both of these descriptions plainly apply to the particu- " TOO MUCH LOVE OF LIVING " 119 lar mood of Poems and Ballads (and it must be Chapter remembered that there are other and happier) — L treated in tliis chapter — the mood of overmuch sensuousness and the deification of vice : We too have tracked by star-proof trees The tempest of the Thyiades, Seare the loud night on hills that hid The blood-feasts of the Bassarid ; Heard their song's iron cadences Fright the wolf hungering from the kid, Outroar the lion-throated seas, Outehide the north-wind if it chid, And hush the torrent-tongued ravines With thunders of their tambourines. Since, then, the period of peril is the same in action (that is in Poems and Ballads and Chastelard) as in the descriptions, we are forced to conclude that the medium of deliverance is also one : the one described, the one that stands out in Poems and Ballads and in Atalanta — Landor stimulating his disciple to a manlier song. But now attention must be given to that angry- protest against " oppressive heaven " which gathers vehemence throughout Poems and Ballads, and comes to its climax in Atalanta in Calydon. " Dolores," indeed, gives way to the glorious parados, and " dim goddesses of fiery fame " to virgin Artemis. The blare of Corybantine brass, " rhymes that smite on the ear like cym- bals," softens to the chime of smitten silver, and the feet turn from the paths of their old pursuit. But the voice of fierce praise rises to fiercer denunciation. This denunciation or " blasphemy " (as some 120 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter called it in the 'sixties) may be the final and L fateful fruit of the " too much love of living '' with which this chapter has dealt, just as Sappho's protest in " Anactoria " is " the first outcome of foiled and fruitless passion recoiling on itself " : or it be one of the " oppressions " that have come upon the head of the genius of these poems who has wandered in far places — by shrines of Cotys and Ashtaroth, in " the grove of the Eumenides children of the night (130)," in " the darkness of Lear which is the night everlasting " (131), and the palace of Catherine which is preparation for the axe of Fotheringay, and Holyrood which is Mount Horsel ; and has heard strange blas- phemies of Borsola (132), or Malevole (133), or Monsieur (134), and violences out of Paris and Paphos (135). But as such it is not definable. Only here and there it reveals its derivation, and only sometimes its sympathy with Landor. CHAPTER VI " OPPRESSIVE HEAVEN " In one of the finest of the Imaginary Conversa- chapter tions, that between Marcus TulHus and Quinctus L Cicero, Quinctus charges his brother with speak- ing " as if there were a pluraHty of gods," and Marcus rephes : "I know not and care not how many there may be of them. Philosophy points to unity : but while we are here, we speak as those do who are around us . . . and I, as you remember, adopting the means of dialogue, have often delivered my opinions in the voice of others, and speak now as custom, not as reason leads me " (136). Almost the same explanation applies to Swinburne's use of " God " and " gods," and must be applied if the poet who treats of God as the supreme evil (137) in the fourth chorus of Atalanta in Calydon, and of God's breath as moving upon the face of the waters (138) the first freedom in the " Eve of Revolution," is to be absolved from the charge of loose think- ing and writing. For most often he speaks dramatically, and as those do who surround him, and as custom not as reason bids him ; under- standing this custom and this surrounding to be, not the conventions of English mid-Victorian 121 122 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter society, but the literary company that sur- Z!l rounded his spirit ; and of these, most important, Aeschylus, Blake, Shelley, Arnold, FitzGerald, and Landor. Aeschylus, because whatever be the latest opinion as to the nature of the lost Prometheus Luomenos, and whatever reluctance modern criticism may feel to take the exposition of " Zeus " in Prometheus Bound at its face value, it is certain that Swinburne adhered to the opinion which places that Zeus beyond any possible future recovery or vindication as Divine Wisdom. For him this Zeus was " the lord and oppressor of mankind." But he must also have been aware, as a devoted student of Aeschylus, that there is a second signification of " Zeus " in that poet, the term being more often used to describe not the deposer of Kronos and the torturer of Prometheus but the *' Zeus supra Zeus," the mystic supreme and divine idea " which through all human and superhuman interposi- tion works for righteousness " (139). Shelley, for despite his repudiation of Queen Mob Swinburne seems to have found some encouragement in its anti-orthodoxy, and certainly sustains himself on Prometheus Un- bound. Blake, for as must soon appear Swin- burne was early attracted to him. Arnold and FitzGerald, for such poems as " Felise " and " Laus Veneris," in their reflective passages, or the second chorus of Atalanta, or " Hertha " evidently borrow from them (140). And, most important, Landor, for the reasons which follow. " OPPRESSIVE HEAVEN " 123 It is of course Landor's own defence that he Chapter puts into the mouth of Cicero. He allowed — 1 himself a dramatic licence in speaking of " god " and "gods" — especially in his Hellenics, the collection of his poems that Swinburne first read and most of all admired, especially in his college years and those just following. No complete philosophy or theology is to be obtained from these poems. Yet one of their outstanding features is concern with the gods. It is constant, far beyond what might be forced upon any poems dealing dramatically with classic life; and it is free, since very often the persons of the poems are beyond the popular level of belief — as the scoffing Lucian, who since each mortal calls his god inscrutable, which " at least is true," wonders why some go on to subsidise him, others to split him down from nape to navel (141) ; or Aurelius, in the same dialogue, whose religion consists in gratitude to the gods, and good will to men, leaving as many gods upon the ground as, season after season, may spring up and stifle one another ; or Sophocles, who thinks of Aeschylus as comforting chained Prometheus, " keeping the vultures and the gods away"; or Homer, who thinks they love praise — having made his best hymn in Apollo's honour; and Laertes, who thinks they "would more approve good works than glossy words," since they know everything we can tell them of themselves or us. They seem to be very far away (except the ill-natured ones) and to be unknowable, unconcerned, and not above reproach : 124 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter About the Gods above I would not sav VT A word to vex you : whither rolls the orb We stand upon I know not, or who trims The fires ethereal, or who rules the tides. (vii. 421.) Because unknowable, they appear unconcerned : The world as ever let Injustice rule, Let men and Gods look on and little heed. (vii. 443.) Because unconcerned, except in their own immutable will, minding not man above the atoms of the earth whereof great and little are composed, to appeal to them is vain. Chrysaor, " flusht with insolence," goes further : . . . men wrong By their prostrations, prayers, and sacrifice, Either the Gods, their rulers, or themselves. (vii. 457.) Their now is more than life's duration (142), beauty they will not pity, reproaches they may not brook (143). They enjoy glory through endless days : youth eternal is their delight, and they do not suffer age. They are bounteous, and give genius and beauty (seldom together), but they rarely grant the same blessing twice, and " they smile at incense, nor give ear to prayer " (144). This is their lack, for the soft voice of compassion is unheard among them ; no tear has ever dropped upon Olympus (145). Love is their highest law, and is solace for all uncertainties, save for those that perplex them ; but a maiden who trifles with her lover and yet would not wish his love nor him away, is — " OPPRESSIVE HEAVEN " 125 Conscious that she is walking over fire Chapter Umvounded, on a level with the Gods, VI. And rendering null the noblest gifts they gave. (vii. 434.) From which it is liardly to be deduced that they care for human passion : nor if to be on a level with them is to trample over desire unconcerned ; nor if it be considered how (as the Homer of the Hellenics says) — The best men Have most to weep for, whether foreign lands Receive them (or still worse !) a home estranged. (vii. 531.) These are, of course, dramatically delivered ideas ; and it is only with considerable danger of doing an injustice to Landor that they can be taken as really representing his fundamental religious thought. At the same time, something of system will be noticed in them, delivered as they are by different persons in the Hellenics, and they must be accepted as belonging to Landor in his role of classic, whatever different ideas he may have held as modern and Christian. There is very little of equal weight in the Hellenics that runs counter to them — a little praise, for the gods have given us birds and herds not scantily ; and a little elsewhere in the Classical Conversations, as where Artabanus tells Xerxes that " One sits above the sun, observes it, watches it, and replenishes it perpetually with his own light to guide the walk of the seasons. He gives the sun its beauty, its strength, its animation." But praise is common as comely, and though Swin- burne has much the same sort in Bersabe and the Queen Mother and (most beautifully) in 126 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter " St. Doi'othy " there is little chance of establishing ZL his relation to Landor by this means ; nor would there be even if the matter were an important one in Landor : which it is not. Whereas, the " theology " of the Hellenics has weight and a degree of individuality sufficient to prove its influence on Swinburne even against various other of his poets who gave partial expression to the same doctrine. In a number of respects it is practically unique — in modern literature before Swinburne. First, in its commingling of "theology" with idyllic and erotic poetry. Then, as opposed to Blake, it is unique, foremost, if superficially, in form ; as opposed to Shelley, in its comparative complete- ness, negative though this is, and unsupple- mented by Shelley's Platonism and creed of Love; as opposed to FitzGerald, in offering no positive ethic (no opportunism), unless it is the creed of political freedom urged in Chrysaor and Regeneration ; and, as opposed to Arnold, in its superficial reticence — " about the gods above I would not say a word to vex you " — and its quiet licence, both of which conflict with the doctrines of Pantheism as regards God, and self-sufficiency as regards man announced in Empedocles on Etna. Not that self-reliance is absent from the Hellenics. It is a primary assumption. But it is not the philosophic self-reliance of Arnold's poem, which equally looks down upon praise or blame of the gods as childish unreason. It supposes that the gods are aloof, and with Arnold (and with FitzGerald) proposes not to " OPPRESSIVE HEAVEN " 127 assail them with vain obsecration. But it has Chapter VI. not arrived at the point of foregoing a httle sly — - cavil as equally vain. This, too, is the case of the author of Poems and Ballads, except that with his large capacity for assimilating sad things, and his sombre sense of all the oppressions that are done beneath the sun, a little cavil becomes bitter denunciation, being fused with protesta- tions out of Omar and refuted charges out of Empedocles by what appears a very intense personal feeling. The concern with these problems comes very early in Swinburne. It begins in The Queen Mother with an idyllic praise of God who shuts and opens rain and the sweet sun with his hand ; develops seemingly into the perfection of " Saint Dorothy," conscious (but not troubled) that "He is the end as well as the beginning, making the red pale with his breath," and " filling with blood faint faces of men dead " ; and hardens into the doubt and desperation of the erotic poems. Here it seems to take colour from the general mood, defiant in " Laus Veneris," sodden and expectant in " The Leper," troubled and hope- less in " The Triumph of Time," where, perhaps mindful of that impotently rolling bowl from the Rubdiydt (Ixxxiii) as well as of Landor, the question is asked as to love : Do the high gods know or the great gods care ? Though the swords in my heart for one were seven, Would the iron hollow of doubtful heaven. That knows not itself whether night-time or day be. Reverberate words and a foolish prayer ? (§ 32.) 128 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Later on, question gives place to positive '_ statement — the gods are vindictive and oppressive and cruel — not, we must suppose, the " young compassionate gods," merciful and " clothed with pity," whose speedy fulfilment the neo-pagan of " The Hymn to Proserpine " foresees ; nor yet the god of a " Hymn in Time of Revolution " who is above and beyond pact with blood-spotted high priests and kings, and his breath of resurrec- tion felt even in the bones of the dead — but some other gods or god. He is satiety in " Rococo," the blood of pain throbbing in the heart of pleasure, and he is the " mystery of the cruelty of things " in " Anactoria." In " Felise," for all its dependence upon Arnold's Empedocles, there are gods to dispraise ; whereas praise and blame had been shown on Etna (146) to be equal folly. As in Landor, they are cruel and beyond prayer : none has known them except by their intolerable scorn of futile petition. Will men always be fools of fate and pray to the blind sky ? Yet God is not given up (again contrary to Arnold, whose soliloquy concludes with comfort drawn from the fact of life, the good thing it is to behold the sun). He cannot restore a ruined thing nor make dead things thrive (147) ; but he has given us two gifts — to forget and to die. In " A Lamentation " (148) their evil will is unknowable : " man's fate is a blood-red fruit," and the mighty gods have their fill of it, relaxing neither rein nor rod. Such grief as ours they wrought long ago to bruise men one by one ; and no man sees beyond them and fate. In " Ilicet " there still lingers, reminiscently, " the " OPPRESSIVE HEAVEN " 129 laughter of the old unalterable gods " (149). Chapter But they are here " clothed and crowned with L patience," bear witness of concealed things, and as all life stands chidden before them, so they stand chidden before the eyes of Fate, nor for love of them shall Fate retire (150). " Ilicet " is among the latest of the Poems and Ballads (151), and is, seemingly, a preliminary study, or corollary of one of the most beautiful of the poems, " The Garden of Proserpine." In both, the angry protest against " oppressive heaven " has been replaced by a sad fatality, and the acute life of the senses by a poppied sleep. But beyond both (and as I am inclined to think later than Atalanta in Calydon, as they also seem to be) is the poem to Hugo, which is the consummation of the sadness of the earlier poems : but restrained, not hectic ; hopeful, and not cast down. The " chance central of circum- stance still makes him exile who will not be slave." God is still far. He has made us ; but we know not if he care for anything. Only we know that he bade what is, be so : light and night, hope and fear, good and ill to kill and to redeem. We ask not remission of the whole world's wrong — for there is no peace to have. Yet, as men may, we can be free. And to love and work and sorrow, and not sin for gold or fear or the world's changes — this it is to live praiseworthily and beyond the power of gods or men or death to defame. It will be seen that the positive ethics of this is an advance upon the earlier poems, which it nevertheless recalls in its rather Landorian witness- ing of the evil in the world. It is reminiscent K 130 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter also of theiTies in other poems so far no more 1 than mentioned — themes that relate to Hugo somewhat, and to Landor Httle, but to Swinburne's spontaneous feeUng very closely indeed. Their burden is the sadness of nature external to man. Poems from Les Contemplations or Les Chdtiments may have been its early stimulus, or North country ballads of grief on Till or Tyne ; but there is no proof of this, or need, as against the certain circumstance of things seen and remembered from stormed Northumbrian headlands or from the cliffs of Wight : preferably from these places of his boyhood and later wandering, for the burden is of the sea. It is part of " the mystery of the cruelty of things " that maddens Sappho — plunging prows of ships amid flame-like foam, comets and dis- astrous stars, eclipse and shaken hills with sorrow of labouring moons and altering light and planet- ary travail ; part of " the old pain of the earth " in " A Lamentation," and of the third and of the fourth fierce chorus of Atalanta. From the soul that abides beset and vexed in the sea that is Fate (152) a cry arises as love is added, a sur- plusage of grief. Was there not evil enough — ■ with storm and famine, peril of shallow and firth, thunder of surf on the sands ; loud shoals and reefs ; wrecks afar, rent sail and shattered oar, darkness and noises of the night, and the sound of women wailing on the sands (153) ? But the cruelty is more than this. It is of perishing lands, and of people in prison and of infinite griefs suffered under all the oppression that is done beneath the sun. It is of desire (( OPPRESSIVE HEAVEN " 131 slain with shame, the soul mismated with the Chapter grievous bodily clay, love taken and grief returned, 1 springs that the sea makes bitter, roses fed on the dust of many men, " change and the secular sway and terrene revolution of the sun." And all this, and a cloud of grief- spiritual and misfortune natural, is heaped as hatred upon God. Because thou hast made the thunder, and thy feet Are as a rushing water when the skies Break, but thy face as an exceeding heat And flames of fire the eyelids of thine eyes ; Because thou art over all who are over us ; Because thy name is life, and our name death ; Because thou art cruel and men arc piteous. And our hands labour, and thine hand scattereth : • • • • • • At least we witness of thee ere we die That these things are not otherwise, but thus (154). This is indeed but a vain extract. But it repre- sents the whole : tenebrous and tense, suggesting a Pantheism, and yet railing as though railer and railed-at were not one : suggesting an Absolute, and bestowing upon him as sum of all grief both cognition and will perverse from his own being ; deriving from schools of abuse a concept and clothing it in the language of the psalms. No one but Swinburne could quite describe the process and (after due reverence to his real feeling for things suffered, his burning compassion for wrongs endured) it is from him that we must borrow a description that is at all adequate : he alone can solve his own riddle of Materialism and Mvsticism. He had read much and blindly ; he had no leaning to verbal accuracy, and never acquired any faculty of 132 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter comparison. Any sound that in the dimmest way sug- V^- gested to him a notion of hell or heaven, of passion or power, was significant enough to adopt and register. . . . Over these clamorous kingdoms of speech and dream some few ruling forces of supreme discord preside, and chiefly the lord of the world of man ; Urizen, God of cloud and star, "Father of jealousy," clothed with a splendour of shadow, strong and sad and cruel . . . ; the night is a part of his thought, rain and wind are in the passage of his feet, sorrow is in all his works ; he is the maker of mortal things, of the elements and sexes . . . ; in his worship faith remains one with fear. Star and cloud, the types of mystery and distance, of cold alienation and heavenly jealousy, belong of right to the God who grudges and forbids (155). Admittedly the first part of this much more than overstates the case as it might be made out against Swinburne ; but except that it has suffered something of a sea-change, the latter part will serve for a description of one of the gods of Atalanta ; and will designate the " lord of love and loathing and of strife " of the fourth chorus, by the name which Blake, his creator — the subject of this quoted criticism — gave him, Urizen, the god of this world ; " god of restraint, creator of prohibition, whose laws are forbearance and abstinence." Yet we are not wrong in presupposing even for Atalanta some relation to Landor. For, as we have already said, the drama is dedicated to him. Furthermore, it seems to have arisen from a passage in the Hellenics or in the Greek and Roman Conversations — it matters little ; for one is the prose and the other the verse expression of the same sentiment. Swinburne certainly VI. " OPPRESSIVE HEAVEN " 133 knew both, and all of Landor's published works — Chapter by 1864, the year of his pilgrimage to Florence, and the year when Atalanta was written. The reference to Atalanta comes in the dialogue between Achilles and Helena. Helena meets him on the summit of Ida, having been brought there miraculously out of Troy by Artemis and Thetis. She speaks of her brothers, Kastor and Polydeukes, and of her girlhood. " Often shall I think of you as ye were (and oh ! as I was) on the banks of the Eurotas." And at the first mention of her brothers Achilles interjects : Companions of my father on the borders of the Phasis, they became his guests before they went all three to hunt the boar in the brakes of Calydon. Thence too the beauty of a woman brought many sorrows into brave men's breasts, and caused many tears to hang long and heavily on the eyelashes of matrons, (ii. 6.) The story (which has other possibilities) could not have been suggested with more high serious- ness, nor with more compressed beauty of perfect detail. Swinburne expands it, realising all. Even the girlhood of Helena finds a place in his account, for his Meleagcr is made to report that sailing back to Calydon he had seen her, swan- white Helen, where Eurotas hollows his moist rock, and, less fair than she, fair Clytemnestra ; "sisters grave as pasturing fawns" (156). Other matters in " Peleus and Thetis " seeminfflv reflect in Atalanta, Achilles' answer to Helena's question about the hunt, for instance, telling her that he himself was not present because his father, who feared some foretold evil, sent him away. In 134 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Swinbumc's poem, Meleager announces to Althaea 1 the names of the coming heroes, and speaks first — Peleus the Larissaean, couched with whom Sleeps the white sea-bred wife and silver-shod, Fair as fled foam, a goddess ; and their son Most like a god, full of the future fame. But no more is heard of Achilles — perhaps for the reason Landor gives. The mention of Thetis is, admittedly, quite in classic custom ; but it is also a very likely circumstance for one fresh from Landor's account of her lament (in another of the Hellenics : " Peleus and Thetis ") for her slain son. In this dialogue there is also mention of hunt and *' the impetuous rush of the beast of Kalydon." Once again Landor mentions this hunt, and, touching upon another in passing, shows his narrative skill in a little passage not unsuggestive of the incomparable report of the messenger in Swinburne's poem. Corythos comes from Oenone to Helena : Not so fast The motion of his heart when rush'd the boar Into his toils, and knotty cornel spear Whiz'd as it struck the bristles, and the tusks Rattled with gnashing rage thro' boiling blood. (vii. 499.) Atalanta is then doubly connected with Landor. It probably was suggested by a passage in the Hellenics, and it is dedicated to his memory " with equal affection, reverence, and regret," having been " inscribed to him while yet alive in words which are now retained because they were laid before him." We may then suppose that Swinburne was conscious of " OPPRESSIVE HEAVEN " 135 nothing in his poem that made it an unsuitable Chapter memorial — neither the violent choruses nor the — L sympathy with Blake. On both of these matters he had indeed some reason to be at rest. For as early as 1837 Landor had been fascinated by Blake's writings, and had gone so far (in his Boythorn manner, we may be sure) as to maintain that Blake was the greatest of poets. Also Swinburne was able to write of Landor's dealings with slaves and kings that — These, with scorn's fieriest rod, These and the Lord their God The Lord their Hkeness, tyrant of the skies As they Lord Gods of earth, These with a rage of mirth He mocked and scourged and spat on, in such wise That none might stand before his rod, And these being slain the Spirit alone be Lord or God (157). And it is true that Landor assailed the deity of " Holy Alliances " and temporally tyrannising priesthoods with more insistency and vigour than even the extracts from the Hellenics will suggest, so that Swinburne might conceivably have taken sanction from him, and must have expected approval, had he been able to dedicate Atalanta to the living man. At the same time it must be noticed that Landor's attack on superstition and oppression does not recommend itself overmuch for Swin- burne's description, nor for directer influence upon Atalanta, His belief was orthodox. And his assault upon the God invoked by Catholic and most Christian kings " when any great violence or injustice was to be perpetrated " (158) 136 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter fell rather upon the kings and priests who in- ^^' voked him. It was an assault upon that impiety which called the Maker the Destroyer, and called him Lord of Hosts who (as Lucian says to Timotheus) " according to your holiest of books declared ... so plainly that he permits no hosts at all ; much less will he take the command of one against another " (159) ; upon " the religion of Constantine and of Charlemagne, falsely called the Christian, and subversive of its doc- trines and benefits " (160) ; upon such religious ceremonies as in courts " cover with their em- broidery moral obligations " and in which " the most dishonest and the most libidinous and the most sanguinary kings (to say nothing of private men) have usually been the most punctual worshippers " (161). In a word, his attack was upon injustice invoking false religion ; and it is concerned with political wrongs, not with those unalterable conditions of life which are (to the comparative neglect of things medicable) so heavy a burden in Swinburne's drama. We cannot but observe a divergence between the two poets at this point. Landor believes in life : Atalanta in Calydon is oppressed by life's bitterness. The choruses of denunciation are the fulfilment of the sadness and mystery of " the making of man " described in the second chorus. Here, out of the attributes of decay and mutability and grief, the high gods with loathing and love fashion his spirit — " the holy spirit of man." Time incarnate waits upon his creation, bearing a gift of tears ; and Grief, with a running glass ; and Summer with falling / " OPPRESSIVE HEAVEN " 137 flowers. The gods give him light in his wavs Chapter and foreknowledge of death, love and a space — L for delight and beauty. But : He weaves, and is clothed with derision ; Sows, and he shall not reap ; His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep. The darkness is pervasive — " the same weird gloom of fatalism," says a critic of the time, " wraps the classic stateliness of Atalanta, the fierce untamed passion of Chastelard and the many-sided, many-coloured life of the Poems and Ballads.'' . . . "In everything that Mr. Swin- burne has written the same absence of faith is to be marked " . . . " And bv faith we do not mean religious belief, compact of formulas or not, but a moral ivipyeta, a principle underlying and informing life and action, whether it be belief in duty, or liberty, or virtue. Faith such as this made Rousseau great, and Goethe, and Shelley, and Carlyle, and Victor Hugo ; as it did Job and Ezekiel, and Paul and John of Patmos. But there is no sign of it in Mr. Swinburne" (162). To which we must answer — " The darkness is pervasive " — but even that is a presage of belief, and the forerunner of a faith. Let alone that happiness of technique, that " special and intense life " which the very words take on themselves (as de Banville said of Hugo's) (163) ; let alone the reahty and joy of music treading upon dark dilemma with fairy and airy feet, we even then come to proof of a certain faith that is in this poet, a certain love 138 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter beyond all his loves — and this is the faith and ^^' love of Liberty. The Love of Liberty is expressed negatively, in the very protest against irremediable ills which burdens them upon God ; unchangeable laws of which the witness is that these things are not otherwise, but thus : grievous and com- pelling. More philosophical poets had been content to accept these laws and to devise human freedom in respect of them. Swinburne pro- tests ; and, if we may use an almost contemporary judgment of his own on the subject of liberty, he protests because of their compulsion. In the pamphlet Of Liberty and Loyalty, written probably in 1866 (a year after the publication of Atalanta), he opposes Carlyle and Ruskin who proposed, as it seemed to him, " obedience instead of self- reliance, drill instead of devotion, force instead of faith, for the world's redemption," and asks : " What virtue can there be in giving what we have no choice but to give ; in yielding that which we have neither might nor right to with- hold ? " " The law of the love of liberty " continued to be for him something beyond " all human laws of mere obedience " (164) ; and in Atalanta (not to be overshadowed) it has also positive expression. We may not do all we would, " yet somewhat ; and one choice we have ; to live and do just deeds and die" (165). Such just deeds are in the service of liberty ; and the desirable death (lacking that of those who fall " for their sweet land fighting " or a sacrifice) (166) is of those who have loved her. And in this we " OPPRESSIVE HEAVEN " 139 must notice certain characteristics, over and Chapteu above those innately Greek, that bear testimony — 1 of Landor. The first of these is the idea of the importance of speech — not so much in its harmful effect (which is a proper Greek sentiment given full expression in the fourth chorus) but in its help- ful aspect : Speech too bears fruit, being worthy ; and air blows down Things poisonous, and high-seated violences, And with charmed words and songs have men put out Wild evil, and the fire of tyrannies. /•• 44Q.4K0 \ This may be mindful of Tyrtaeus or of Korner — though, as Swinburne says, he was given rather to be mindful of Sappho and Goethe. But it has the closest sympathy with Landor. It utilises his dogma as a positive faith against the prevalent despair of the drama, and also, it may be said, as a promise of the Songs before Sunrise and Songs of Two Nations in which, a little later, Swinburne was to add the reality of song blown against tyranny to the creed he announces here. This sympathy is confirmed by the open evidence of all Landor's writings, and also by the constant testimony of his disciple, as in the " Song for the Centenary " which records how ... in the soft clenched hand Shone like a burning brand A shadowy sword for swordless fields of fight, Wrought only for such lord As so may wield the sword That all things ill be put to fear and flight. (§4.) This, however, might refer with equal pertinence 140 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter to the poct of Les ChdUments or UAnnee L Terrible, And it is only when Landor's theory is considered, in addition to his action, that the reason fully appears for naming him as sponsor for this hopeful theme in Atalanta. The importance of speech was one of his cardinal doctrines. " On words," says Lucian in the Conversations^ " on words . . . rests the axis of the intellectual world. A winged word hath stuck ineradicably in a million hearts, and envenomed every hour throughout their hard pulsation : on a winged word hath hung the destiny of nations " (167). " I am persuaded," Lord Peterborough says to Penn, " that even the highest national character might be raised still higher, by inspiring boys with a timely love of it, (patriotic music) and by supplying them with lofty and generous sentiments in graceful and well-composed songs " (168). The same sentiment is given to Trelawny, friend of Shelley and also of Swinburne, who praises him as " World-wide liberty's life-long lover." " One well-sustained note of a public singer is able to stir and scatter those accumulations of exaction, which would lie motionless and inert as in the mine, at the cries of all Greece, all Christendom, all Nature" (169). And (to quote but one more) Landor in his own character, immediately after his stirring lines " on the slaughter of the Brothers Bandieri, betrayed to the King of Naples," places another poem beginning : There are whose hand can hurl the shafts of song Athwart wide oceans ; barb'd with burning hght Do they dispell all mists Time throws around, " OPPRESSIVE HEAVEN " 141 And where they fall men build the beacon-tower Chapter And watch the cresset, age succeeding age. VI. (vii. 219.) Swinburne then allies with Landor in preach- ing this doctrine : he raises Landorism as a banner against the spirit of fatalism. And he does more than this. He lays hold upon Landor as a faith. In the midst of the flow and uncer- tainty and distress of things, he seizes upon him as example and proof of the abiding Soul ; and raises to him a memorial which is an extension into the drama itself of the perfect praise and trust of the Greek dedicatory verses. Obviously he is thinking of Landor in this picture of the life glorious and the death desirable, which are greater than all else : The sweet wise death of old men honourable, Who have lived out all the length of all their years Blameless, and seen well-pleased the face of gods, And without shame and without fear have wrought Things memorable, and while their days held out In sight of all men and the sun's great light Have got them glory and given of their own praise To the earth that bore them and the day that bred. Home friends and far-off hospitalities. And filled with gracious and memorial fame Lands loved of summer or washed by violent seas, Towns populous and many unfooted ways. And alien lips and native with their own. But when white age and venerable death Mow down the strength and life within their limbs, Immortal honour is on them, having past Through splendid life and death desirable To the clear seat and remote throne of souls. And these, filled full of days, divine and dead. Sages and singers fiery from the god. 142 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter And such as loved their land and all things good ^^- And, best beloved of best men, liberty, And whatsoever on earth was honourable And whosoever of all the ephemeral seed. Live there a life no liker to the gods But nearer than their life of terrene days. The passage is one of the most beautiful in Atalanta. But its general beauty is no greater than its particular tenderness and perfect fitness as tribute to the " old demigod " to whose memory the drama is dedicated ; whose life and death to find here described perfectly requires only re- collection of those great commemorative poems, " Thalassius " and the " Centenary Song," pre- viously noted ; and hardly of those, in the light of the Greek dedication which gives him hail in death : " know that thou hast honour before men and gods, if god there be over those beneath the earth. Hail, sire ; hail, beloved father, the best by far of singers whom we knew." It is true that after this profession of faith in song, and this great tribute to a human ideal, Atalanta grows sombre and ends in a cry of help- lessness. But there is no need, because of the darkness to forget the light that shines in it, especially since Swinburne's later work shows that this light (which we have thought to call Landor's), grew brighter into a more perfect day where faith in man, and faith in the power of Song ran hand in hand to proclaim the Republic that should regenerate the nations. CHAPTER VII TRANSITION During the period of the production of Poems Chapter and Ballads Swinburne was a somewhat ardent ^^^' exponent of a narrowly conceived doctrine of " art for art." He seems to have conceived and expressed it under necessity of opposition to the theory that would make art the " hand-maid of religion." But "handmaid of religion," he answered, " exponent of duty, servant of fact, pioneer of morality, she cannot in any way be- come." Her one business is not to do good, but to be good ; and any attempt at compromise with Puritanism, any indulgence in " the deleterious appetite of saving souls or helping humanity in general along the way of labour and progress" (170) is worse than suicidal. Of his product of this period and theory it is worth noting that the best of contemporary criticism (that attributed to John, now Lord, Morley) said that it was deficient in large human sympathy. " The greatest men," the critic explained, " are neither mere subtle- minded elves frisking about in the heated places of passion simply for the joy of frisking, nor mere giants surveying all life indifferently as epicurean gods." 143 144 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter In 1872, just after the production of Songs Z^ before Sunrise (1866-1871), Swinburne made another, and a somewhat advanced, confession of artistic faith. Still maintaining that " the only absolute duty of art is the duty she owes to herself," he announced that the " doctrine of art for art is true in the positive sense, false in the negative." " The worth of a poem has properly nothing to do with its moral meaning or de- sign . . . ; but, on the other hand, we refuse to admit that art of the highest kind may not ally itself with moral or religious passion, with the ethics or the politics of a nation or an age " (171). The devotion of the Singer before Sunrise to the Spirit of Freedom and Progress connects itself, naturally, with this creed : I am the trumpet at thy hps, thy clarion Full of thy cry, sonorous with thy breath ; or a little later in the same poem, *' Mater Triumph- alis," I have no spirit of skill with equal fingers At sign to sharpen or to slacken strings. . . . The new creed and the new deed were one. The poet who had thought to serve art as an ideal separate from the interests of life as a whole, had come to find a more perfect service. Here art and morality, love of beauty and moral passion go hand in hand. And the love of beauty is the nobler because allied with a virile inspiration which, though it allow no " sharpening or slacken- ing of strings," no delight of languorous and lovely subtleties, keys song into grander harmony. The difference between these two creeds, TRANSITION 145 between the two series of poems of which they chapter are counterparts, is the difference between Swin- ^^^' burne's youth and his maturity. It is to be measured not in terms of external influence, but in terms of his growth. Yet, in so far as develop- ment does answer to external influence, we may be permitted to refer to one of the influences that stimulated this growth — the influence of Landor's precept and example. He did not conceive of great art except as the union of great mastery of expression with real exaltation of thought. For Landor, " invention, energy, and grandeur of design [are] the three requisites to constitute a great poet " (172) ; and he found the combina- tion in no modern poet since Milton. Energy, he calls the " soul of poetry " ; but energy without ideal beauty, that sublimer emanation of things sensible, gives us — Byron: "a large grasp of small things, without selection and without cohesion " (173). Design is the better for some- thing of severity, for that " hath always been appertaining to order and to grace ; and the beauty that is not too liberal " (perchance, that does not " sharpen or slacken strings " at the dictates of the moment) " is sought the most ardently and loved the longest " (174). Gravity and solemnity, however, fitness and propriety in every part, mere perfection of workmanship — these do not by themselves alone define a work as noble. No human works are so perfect as some of Catullus' ; " but many are incomparably greater " (175). " Invention " is the distinguishing characteristic of great poetry ; and this we may understand to be synonymous with " Imagina- L 146 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter tioH " as he clscwhere describes that. " Vigorous ^"' thought, elevated sentiment, just expression, development of character, power to bring man out from the secret haunts of his soul, and to place him in strong outline against the sky " — these belong to it. It is distinct from Fancy, which is Imagination in her youth and adolescence, dwell- ing among the faeries and their congeners with whom the weak and ductile poet is fond of play- ing. " Their tiny rings . . . are no arena for action and passion. It was not in these circles that Homer and Aeschylus and Dante strove " (176). Even so little as this may be sufficient to in- dicate Landor's poetics. These are, however, scattered utterances : their collective force may have failed of effect on the reader. Even so, they are gathered up in other Conversations, and with such definiteness and appropriateness to such a condition as Swinburne's poetry presented when he became acquainted with them, that it is diffi- cult to conceive him uninfluenced. The greatest of these is the Pentameron, the series of con- versations between Petrarch and Boccaccio, which is Landor's most important single claim on fame as a critic and artist in prose. The doctrine of the importance of literature is here nobly expressed with its significant corollary. To weak man is given the power to lay up " thoughts in their cabinets of words which Time, as he rushes by, with the revolution of stormy and destructive years, can never move from their places." Where- fore unremitting care should be taken that nothing soil the work that is being raised against the ages ; for which ministration let there stand with TRANSITION 147 unclosing eyes Integrity, Compassion, Self-denial. Chapter And he who would win greatness must heed this : — 1 " We may write Uttle things well, and accumulate , one upon another ; but never will any be justly '■ called a great poet unless he has treated a great subject worthily. He may be the poet of the lover and of the idler, he may be the poet of green fields or gay society ; but whoever is this can be no more. A throne is not built of birds' nests, nor do a thousand reeds make a trumpet " (177). In some yet narrower details Landor's criticism may have commended itself to the writer of Poems and Ballads, the player of Tunes touched from a harp with man's fingers Or blown with boy's mouth in a reed. (" Dedication," P. and B.) " From the mysteries of religion," he says, " the veil is seldom to be drawn, from the mysteries of love never. For this offence the gods take away from us our freshness of heart and our susceptibihty of pure dehght" (178). And again (though this is from a private letter that Swin- burne can scarcely have seen) : " If you turn your mind to poetry, let me for once have in- fluence enough with you to persuade you not to indulge in any kind of it which verges on sad- ness. . . . Take my word for it, if we fondle and pamper our griefs, they grow up to an unwieldy size and become unmanageable" (179). Not in- cluded among the formal works, this passage has the sanction of them all. And if Swinburne knew Landor's acclamation of the stalwart - souled 148 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Acschylus, of Pindar and Milton and Browning, [ then he knew the advice from the letter in its very essence. These precepts find example in the whole body of Landor's work, high in artistic ideal so that his instinct for form seals as his the least thing he put his hand to ; elevated in moral ideal to over- throw evil and enthrone good in human life. And these, in the light of Swinburne's praise, we must believe to have been somewhere instru- mental in bringing about the change from Poems and Ballads to Songs before Sunrise. Beginning of change has already been witnessed in Atalanta. Its first fair fruit comes in " A Song of Italy " and the " Ode on the Insurrection in Candia." And after these, but under the additional culture of the Italian patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini, comes the glorious additional harvest of political poems which, with the two just mentioned, go to make up Songs before Sunrise and Songs of Two Nations. CHAPTER VIII SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE AND SONGS OF TWO NATIONS But when God commands to take the trumpet, and blow a dolorous or a jarring blast, it lies not in man's will what he shall say or what he shall conceal. — Milton, " Against Prelaty" (180). I. The Literary Tradition There have been trumpets enough astir in Ch.vpter EngUsh literature since Chaucer heard the clarion ' of Eolus blow " est and west, and southe, and north " (181), or since Knox blew his first blast. Republicans have loved the metaphor : Blake and Shelley and Landor ; Meredith also, who in the book, Vittoria, which Swinburne praised, describes Italy of the '48 revolts : " Even the shadowy vision of Italy Free had no bloom on it, but stood fronting the blown trumpets of re- surrection Lazarus-like " (18*2). But it may be allowed that never was the matter so turned into Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds as in the hand of Milton, in particular in the passage from " The Reason of Church Govern- ment urged against Prelaty " that heads this 149 150 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter page. Landor quotes it (incorrectly) and com- Y^' ments upon it four times. Through Marvel he describes it as " the grandest piece of harmony that ever was uttered from the heart of man " (183) ; and evidently was himself influenced by it, as in the Pentameron, where his Boccaccio is made to say : " Rome, she, I think, will be the last city to rise from the dead," and Petrarca answers : " There is a trumpet, and on earth, that shall awaken even her " (184). What is more significant, he seems to have passed on the metaphor and the instrument to his disciple, to be used triumphantly in " The Eve of Revolu- tion " {Songs before Sunrise). I hear the midnight on the mountains cry With many tongues of thunders, and I hear Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer, And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly, Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear, A sound sublimer than the heavens are high, A voice more instant than the winds are clear, Say to my spirit, " Take Thy trumpet too, and make A rallying music in the void night's ear, Till the storm lose its track, And all the night go back ; Till, as through sleep false life knows true life near. Thou know the morning through the night, And through the thunder silence, and through darkness light. (§2.) I set the trumpet to my lips and blow. (§ 3.) Further on in the same poem Swinburne appeals to England by her great names and memorial past : SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 151 O Milton's land, what ails thee to be dead ? Chapter VIII. • • • • • • Such sons were of thy womb, England, for love of whom Thy name is not yet writ with theirs that fell, But, till thou quite forget What were thy children, yet On the pale lips of hope is as a spell ; And Shelley's heart and Landor's mind Lit thee with latter watch-fires ; why wilt thou be blind ? (§ 16.) From this (and what has preceded) it must be plain that the office and the instrument Swinburne undertakes here were urged upon him and accepted at the hands of Landor — Landor in the first instance, and also again in the last, for almost all of Swinburne's republican inspirers had previously received his praise and approval (185). One, indeed, the highest and brightest, v.'hom Swinburne calls the perfect Singing God, had to some extent anticipated Swin- burne's discipleship in a way that could not but have made it for him a holy and perfect succession. For Shelley had been influenced by Landor. " C'est I'ideologue par excellence (Swinburne writes, mindful, we may believe, of his own experience in his oblique praise of Shelley), I'habitant des nuages, le fou criminel qui avait eu ce double avantage dc naitre aristocrate et d'etre eleve par des pretres, et qui en avait profite pour se declarer a vingt ans libre-penseur et repubUcain " (186). He goes on to discuss Shelley's Ccnci (the subject of this French essay), to score the " Vicaire du Dieu catholique " 152 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter who had sold to Francesco Cenci for so much * cash the fee simple of the outrage he committed, and to consider Landor's scenes of Beatrice's tragedy. " RepubHcain et Hbre-penseur lui aussi, Walter Savage Landor avait a son insu inspire et raffermi par ses premieres poesies I'ame et le genie du collegien qui devait ecrire le Promethee delivre:' And then he adds (the itahcs are mine) : " Plus d'un demi-siecle apres, un autre jeune homme qui aspirait a se montrer poke est alle remercier le meme grand ecrivain, alors age de quatre-vingt-neuf arts, d' avoir fait pour lui la meme chose " (187). As to the first of these incidents, it must be said that Swinburne hardly overstates the case. Landor's Gehir came into Shelley's hands at Oxford in 1811. Hogg relates that he was captivated by it, would at times read nothing else, " would read it aloud to himself, or to others with a tiresome pertinacity," and when so engaged, his attention could in no wise be drawn away, even though Hogg snatched the book and threw it out of the window to the quad, whence it was speedily redeemed for the poet's reabsorption. Long after, Shelley's widow wrote to Landor that her husband's passionate love for Gehir had outlived his college days and remained with him to the last (188). We already know who was the " autre jeune homme," and how he came to present himself before Landor at Florence in 1864. It is only necessary to remember Swinburne's comment (already cited) on the three " children of the pohtical idea " of the early nineteenth century, SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 153 Byron, Shelley, and Landor, in order to appreciate Chapter how important to him was personal relation with the last of them. They were poets " strong enough to work and breathe in the air of revolu- tion, to wrestle with change and hold fast the new Kberty, to beheve at all in the godhead of people or peoples, in the absolute right and want of the world, equality of justice, of work and truth and life ; and these three came all out of the same rank, were all born into one social sect, men of historic blood and name, having nothing to ask of revolution, nothing (as the phrase is now) to gain by freedom, but leave to love and serve the light for the light's sake " (189). He does not openly assert his connection with them, it is true. But it is obvious that he was conscious and careful of it. It was brought home to him in various ways, perhaps much to his liking by Hugo, who wrote him : " Vous avez raison : vous, Byron, Shelley, trois aristocrates, trois republicains " (190) ; though, from what he himself has said, Landor's name must be sub- stituted for Byron's that the accord may be not only between men of birth and lovers of liberty, but between lovers of beauty as well — men who loved the art they served too fervently to give it anything but perfect service (191). Of these three, Shelley, Landor, and Swinburne, the first was the soul of belief in human perfecti- bility through change, " brooding on things to come " ; the second, a sword drawn against oppression ; and the third, the trumpet of Revolution. Swinburne must have inherited various ideas. 154 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter interests, and impulses from these three and from ' the larger community of poets they represent. Ideas of liberty, impulses to assist and maintain it, to celebrate its name or promise, and particular devotion to Italy and to Greece were perhaps chief of these. The idea of liberty in the early nineteenth century had been rationalised. Political freedom was considered essential, but not all-important. The mere fact of it, coolly estimated, did not represent anything more than the beginning and entrance upon a new life. A slave of the day before cannot suddenly become " liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent," Shelley wrote in the Preface to the Revolt of Islam : " This is the consequence of the habits of a state of society to be produced by resolute perseverance and indefatigable hope and long believing courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of intellect and virtue." Shelley, however, did not represent the whole thought or feeling on the subject of Liberty. There remained vestiges of the old revolutionary or pre-Revolutionary fallacy, that if mankind were freed from " the disabilities that wrong systems of government have imposed, their own interests (would) supply them both with energy and with morality " (192), There re- mained vestiges of the old political religion that would do reverence to the mere name of liberty. And it must be said that these strays continued to exist because of Landor. He was " a child of the political idea " of the eighteenth century — a child who never grew up. Sir Sidney Colvin, SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 155 one of the most earnest of his admirers, authori- Chaptkr tatively describes the situation : ' In the sphere of poHtics and government, it must be allowed that he never got beyond the elementary principles of love of freedom and hatred of tyranny ; ... of the complexity of political organisms and political problems he had no conception, and practical as he believed and intended much of his writing on politics to be, it is usually so much high-minded declamation and no more (193). This is literally true of Landor's poetry, as well of his political prose, but here, perhaps, with less unfortunate results. The defect is plain ; but the highness of mind and greatness of style somehow contrive to give to even half- truths an enviable immortality, A single glorious passage will serve as an illustration of this : We arc what suns and winds and waters make us ; The mountains are our sponsors, and the rills Fashion and win their nursling with their smiles. But where the land is dim from tyranny. There tiny pleasures occupy the place Of glories and of duties ; as the feet Of fabled faeries when the sun goes down Trip o'er the grass where wrestlers strove by day. {Regeneration, vii. 4G1.) He is liere led to establish the benefits of free nature (inferentially) under free governments, and to disestablish them because of a political condition. And it is his great love of freedom, associating with it all good ; his great hate of tyranny, associating with it all ill, that has done this, his impatience with all the oppressions which are done beneath the sun. He " panted to be 156 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter present " on the day of resurgent nations, especi- ' ally of resurgent Italy and Greece. In Swinburne's words, most ardent and most awful, but also most fond, his Apollonian eye yearned over Greece till she rose from her long sleep. " Greece," he says (through Johnson), " ought to be preserved and guarded by the rulers of the world, as a cabinet of gems, open and belonging to them all. . . . Her ancient institutions and magistracies should be sanctioned to her, in gratitude for the inestimable blessings she has conferred on us " (194). This is what Shelley and Byron, each in his own way, had also urged. More beautiful than this (because involved with natural beauty), though not more powerful, was the love poured out upon Italy for her political regeneration. Even Wordsworth (as Swinburne gratefully records), " conservative and reactionary as he was considered, and as he con- ceived himself to be," in unconscious anticipa- tion of Mazzini's evangel, had foretold to Italy the third stage of her great destiny, and at a time when prospect of Itahan freedom and unity must have seemed wellnigh hopeless. He had hailed her as " the whole world's darling," and summoned her, " Mother of heroes," to awake from her death-like sleep (195). Byron was possessed by the same feeling. Venice was " the fairy city " of his heart ; Rome, his country, " city of the soul " ; for all Italy his longing was that she should be less lovely or be more strong (196). And Shelley gave her perfect love, as passages in " Julian and Maddalo " SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 157 show perfectly, or the " Lines Written among chapter the Euganean Hills," or the fervid appeal in the " Ode to Liberty." VIII. II. Landor's Example In beauty and sincerity and force nothing that Landor wrote about Italy could go any further, and we must consider Swinburne as inheriting from Shelley and Byron especially, as well as from him. Yet Landor has an advantage over them in having been able, while yet alive, to pass on the tradition of love for Italy to his disciple, and to pass on a hope for Italy that was informed by the actual progress made. The movement for Italian liberty developed from disordered hopes to political achievement (not quite com- plete) within his long life. The men, the events, the excitements were known to him : particulars to oppose or to celebrate, so that whatever ideal he may have had for Italy, gathered from con- templation of pre-imperial Rome or post-imperial Venice, it was both modified and strengthened by contemporary events and possibilities. " Italy," he says (through Petrarca), " is our country ; and not ours only, but every man's . . . who watches with anxiety the recovery of the arts, and acknowledges the supremacy of genius " (197). In a little poem to Dickens he tells him to show " how less than lovely Italy is the whole world beside " (198). Again, in a shorter reflection entitled " To Shelley," he ex- presses the same sentiment, but saves it from excess by a sudden thought, induced perhaps by 158 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter the vcrv subicct of liis Doem : VIII. "^ •' ^ He who beholds the skies of Italy Sees ancient Rome reflected, sees beyond Into more glorious Hellas, nurse of Gods And godlike men : dwarfs people other lands. Frown not, maternal England ! thy weak child Kneels at thy feet and owns in shame a lie. (viii. 234.) One of his earhest schemes for the reformation of Italy advocated the formation of seven feder- ated repubhcs, whose common council should meet in Rome, deliberate in the capitol, and house themselves in the Vatican, whose normal incumbent should be permanently removed to Venice (the suggestion is given to Machiavelli in conversation with Michael Angelo), in order that he might be successor to St. Mark as well as to St. Peter, and, as a most salutary matter, be in the midst of a community better practised in opposing him than any other in Italy (199). This scheme, of 1843 or earlier, gave place to the larger conception of unified Italy. In a later " Conversation," published in the Athenaeum in 1861, the same spokesman (graver with the years) gives expression to the new idea : " Re- publican as I am, I would willingly see all Italy under one constitutional hereditary prince " (200) ; and the collocutor, in this case Guicciardini, replies that if Italy is ever to be so ruled, the only prince eligible is the Duke of Savoy. At the end of his life, then, Landor gave his sanction to the unification of Italy as it was then pro- ceeding, under Victor Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy, King of Piedmont. SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 159 In reality the change was great in appearance chapter rather than in principle. Landor's republic was ' to be no democracy — the American principle as he understood it was entirely unacceptable. It was to be an aristocratic republic with strong centralised authority — " unity of power being the principle of republicanism, while the principle of despotism is division and delegation " (201) ; and an aristocracy (not necessarily of birth) being more likely to promote the interests of the people than the people are to know them (202). Such a republic certainly differed little from a constitutional monarchy created (as was united Italy) by the will of the people. Between 1843 and 1862 Landor wrote a great deal on the subject of Italy, and often to the end of enforcing the idea that each revolting city represented the cause of the whole people, in opposition to Austrian or Papal oppression : " Are ye Anconites ? " " No, sir, but Italians, and in Ancona lies the cause of Italy " (203) : and enforcing the idea that the northern Italian kingdom was fighting the battle of the nation : " If Piedmont falls, Italy falls. . . . Unhappy land of breathless hope ! of enchanted heroism ! of consecrated lies ! " (20-1). His benediction lay upon all the cities. Upon Milan (of the 1818 revolts, the " Five glorious days ") he invoked the blessing of its patron saint — Borromeo : And, O most holy one ! what tears are shed Thro' all thy town ! Thou wilt with pity on the brave and dead, God will with wrath, look down. (viii. 214.) (205.) 160 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Wrongs Were heaped on the head of fair Verona ; y^' his pen would help the sword to sweep them off. And he bade her " Lift the wave of war," as Nature lifts Benacus at her side (206). He appealed to Venice, dishonoured but not debased, and comforted her that deliverance was nigh. On earth are venomous reptiles who lift high the crested head — " But one calm watcher crushes them ere long" (207). He cried to Syracuse, long asleep, but yet alive, to raise again her head ; for Garibaldi the avenger was come and one loud shout would shatter the polluted throne (208). He took his place with Hiero, Gelon, and Pindar to praise reborn Sicily for deeds more glorious than the old, and first saluted Palermo who called : " Arise, be free!" He scourged with scorn the destroyers of the Roman Republic, glorified the memory of its defenders — and through the lips of Garibaldi and Mazzini, awaiting the consum- mation of Napoleon's perfidy, he delivered eternal praise to Belgioso, the nursing angel of the siege (209). He celebrated the slaughtered Bandieri Brothers, betrayed to the King of Naples ; and gave such comfort as he could to the heart of patriotism : And could not you, Mazzini ! wait awhile ? The grass is wither'd, but shall spring again ; The Gods, who frown on Italy, will smile As in old times, and men once more be men. (viii. 177.) And, lastly, in his final volume, the Heroic Idylls, with Additional Poems, 1863, he appealed to the SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 161 first of great English republicans, who had Chapter sounded the trumpet against Italian tyranny : \' O Milton ! couldst thou rise again and see The land thou loved'st in thy earlier day. See springing from her tomb fair Italy (Fairer than ever) cast her shroud away, That tightly-fasten'd triply-folded shroud, Torn by her children off their mother's face ! O couldst thou see her now, more justly proud Than of an earlier and a stronger race ! (viii. 339.) These are the Last Fruit off an old Tree, the last Dry Sticks Faggoted, by Walter Savage Landor. The old splendid spirit of the young century flowed up in them into the harvest that Swinburne came to gather. In these " dry sticks " was the blaze of Republican fire. Love of liberty ; desire to maintain or establisli it which held as anathema the doctrine of Non- intervention between state and state ; love of Greece and love of Italy, — these things then came to Swinburne direct from Landor. So it was most fitting that Swinburne should open his career as singer of revolution by cele- brating the cause and commiserating the oppres- sion which are respectively the themes of his two great poems after Atalanta : "A Song of Italy" written in the winter of 1866-67; and the "Ode on the Insurrection in Candia," com- pleted by January of 1867 (210). Of this latter poem George Meredith, not yet having seen the first, wrote : " The Ode is the most nobly sus- tained lyric in our language, worthy of its theme. Broader, fuller verse I do not know" (211). He might as well have said that it was worthy of its M 162 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter great anccstrv of hope and devotion : and we VIII J i. ' may be allowed to do so, recollecting Landor in the light shed by an extract from W. M. Rossetti's Diary, Jan. 13, 1867 : " Swinburne read me at night his poem, approaching completion, on Italy ; yesterday, one which he has written for the Candiote refugees, to give them the profits." These, we may hope, were not, like Landor's, so often prede voted to a humanitarian cause " also imaginary." III. " A Song of Italy " {Songs before Sunrise) The " Song of Italy " opens with a dream- vision in which Freedom, as a woman of supreme presence, blesses and enheartens Italy who bows before her and, as child with mother, clasps her knees. And this is the need of the blessing : that Italy had been stretched on Promethean rocks, torn by fouler eagles ; that a serpent stains with slime and foam her chief city ; that this had happened to her who was Freedom's most glorious child, and perfect jewel : My lesser jewels sewn on skirt and hem, I have no need of them Obscured and flawed by sloth or craft or power ; But thou that wast my flower. I were not Freedom if thou wert not free Nor thou wert Italy. Freedom has not forgotten her through dark days of blood and labour, and now she bids her rise : SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 163 sweetest head seen higher than any stands, Chapter I touch thee with mine hands ; VIII. 1 lay my Hps upon thee, O thou most sweet. To hft thee on thy feet, And with the fire of mine to fill thine eyes, I say unto thee, Arise. And Italy arises. The vision closes and the poet takes up the song, and appeals to her by the passion that rent her chain to manifest herself. Let her flag fly till kings, seeing it, should wail, priests grow faint. He reminds her of her disastrous years, when Emperor and Pope and priest said that she had been, but was not any more ; reminds her of those who gave this word the lie ; the Bandieri foremost among them ; Pisacane, and Agesilao and Orsini. And all these fair dead he summons to see resurgent Italy who was not dead, but slept, and is and shall not pass. The poem then turns toward Mazzini, tells him to take no shame or grief because the supreme sunrise is not yet. A little while and it comes. The fruit comes ; but the perfect flower is now here : he has set Italy free. For Austria would not have fallen had not Italy (even unvictorious) opposed her : not even the blood of defeat was shed in vain (212). There is praise, too, for Garibaldi, but the song returns to '' the chief," blessed beyond all men, who found his country bare and bound and took her woes upon him, and from suffering became god. All Italy is invoked to praise him — winds, skies, vineyards, hills, rivers, fallen and risen faces, and the voice of a hundred cities — " Benedicite opera omnia." 164 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Risen Italy is then besought to show pity on her ' fallen enemies : because they had no pity, let her be pitiful. And last there is invocation of the supreme city, priestless Rome that shall be — to conserve the memory of those who held its vision greater than their lives ; and there is appeal to the repubUc universal (the love-bond of all men) that was with England before she passed among the faded nations — appeal that she should consecrate Strong with old strength of great things fallen and fled, Diviner for her dead, Chaste of all stains and perfect from all scars, Above all storms and stars. All winds that blow through time, all waves that foam, — Our Capitolian Rome. One or two points, even in this outline of a poem covering twenty-nine pages, will have re- called Landor's usage : the invocation of the cities, for instance ; in particular, too, that so vehement expression of love for Italy which overthrows other and older allegiances. Landor indeed corrected his errant expression, and affirmed his devotion to England (as in the poem " To Shelley "). But Landor was old. This is no more than a superficial resemblance however : and if we are to have any right to refer the spirit of this poem to the spirit of Landor as in any real degree its inspirer, the superficial resemblance must be guaranteed by others not superficial. But before this can be done two important facts must be considered. These facts concern the immediate literary impulse that led Swinburne to the production of this poem ; and SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 165 the historical occasion for it. Both of these Chapter circumstances in a very real way advance the ' person of Joseph Mazzini, whom Meredith called " the soul of the Risorgimento." " A Song of Italy " is dedicated to him. The immediate literary impulse was, without a doubt (the evidence is circumstantial, yet of extreme plausibility) the novel Vittoria by George Meredith which first appeared, serially, in the Fortnightly Review, January to December 1866. As we have learned from Rossetti's Diary, Swin- burne's " Song " was only " approaching com- pletion " on January 13, 1867. Vittoria is the Epic of Italian revolt, the inspired and tortured soul of Italy athirst for Freedom. It thrills with contagious energy that lifts the spirit of the reader even now, when there is no longer political freedom to win or celebrate for Italy. It must have been fire in the blood and song in the ears of at least one reader in that last bitter year of Italian disunity. The " Song of Italy " is proof that it was. The opening pages of Vittoria describe a meet- ing of Italian patriots and conspirators on the top of Monte Motterone, above the Lombard plain. One man rises spiritually above them all ; and another describes him : " There stands the man who has faith in Italy though she has been lying like a corpse for centuries. God bless him ! He has no other comfort. Viva I'ltalia." The man is Mazzini. His. language is airy and cloudy and mingled with symbolism (213) ; he taught his people to " read God's handwriting," to see defeat of 166 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Austria for ever in the skv. Morning and the VIII ' east; " black and yellow drop to the earth : green, white and red mount to heaven " (214). Watching over his Italy ; her wrist in his meditative clasp year by year ; he stood like a mystic leech by the couch of a fair and hopeless frame, pledged to revive it by the inspired assurance, shared by none, that life had not forsaken it, A body given over to death and vultures- — he stood by it in the desert. Is it a marvel to you that when the carrion-wings swooped low and the claws fixed, and the beak plucked and savoured its morsel, he raised his arm, and urged the half-resuscitated frame to some vindicating show of existence ? Arise ! he said, even in what appeared most fatal hours of dark- ness. The slack limbs moved ; the body rose and fell. The cost of the effort was the breaking out of innumerable wounds, old and new ; the gain was the display of the miracle that Italy lived. She tasted her own blood, and herself knew that she lived (215). The Italy of Vittoria is the Italy of the 1848 revolts. The purpose of that initial meeting on Monte Motterone is to plan the first rising. It is to be in Milan, and the signal is to be an opera, Camilla, an allegory, which, as such, has escaped obtuse Teutonism in the censor's chair. By the marriage of Camillo and Camilla is represented the union of the old indolent, amorous, aimless Italy and (Camilla) young Italy. Camillo has had an earlier passion, for Michiella, (Austria's spirit of intrigue) : but gives her over. Before the wedding Camilla dreams that her lost mother (Italia) comes to her bedside to bless her nuptials : she is shrouded and weeping — and she dishrouds limbs like a goddess — but martyred. *' My child ! " she says, " were I a goddess, my SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 167 wounds would heal. Were I a saint I would be Chapter in Paradise. ... I cry to God. The answer of ' our God is this : ' Give to thy children one by one to drink of thy mingled tears and blood. . . ." and she hands to Camilla a silver sacramental cup, so filled. And Camilla drinks. The fulfilment of this dream vision is given in the finale. Camilla has been stabbed by Michiella; and dying she sings. Allegory is stripped off : truth glows undraped, and the interdicted name of Italy rings like a trumpet-call : I cannot count the years. That you will drink, like me, The cup ol" blood and tears, Ere she to you appears : Italia, Italia shall be free ! '* So the great name was out and its enemies had heard it." You dedicate your lives To her, and you will be The food on which she thrives, Till her great day arrives : Italia, Italia shall be free. Swinburne's welcome praise was " poured out " (216) before Meredith in a personal letter ; and is certainly spread broadcast, though subtly, through " A Song of Italy," which, but for Meredith, could hardly be just what it is, if indeed it could have been written at all. It seemed that Italy's great day had arrived in 1866 — if one did not look at it too closely, nor inquire too carefully into the circumstances under which it had come. The circumstances, it will be remembered, were these : 168 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter The barbarous disunity of 1848 had given ' place gradually to the extension of monarchy, and by 1861 there existed a Kingdom of Italy. From this there were lacking Rome and Venetia, which the Kingdom was too M^eak to seize and incorporate with itself, the temporal power being sustained by grace of Napoleon III., and Venetia being under Austrian domination. Italy had to seek an ally ; and that ally Prussia became. In 1866, consistent with this agreement, war was declared against Austria. The southern cam- paign was disgracefully managed, the Italians being badly defeated at Custozza and, at sea, at Lissa, where they possessed the advantage of iron-clads against the enemy's wooden ships. Meanwhile the Prussian campaign had prospered, and the Austrians suffered a crushing defeat at Koniggratz. In accordance with a secret treaty, Venetia was handed over to Napoleon and, following a plebiscite which declared overwhelm- ingly for union with Italy, Venetia became a part of the Kingdom. Victor Emmanuel was elated at the news from Venice. " ' This is the finest day of my life,' he said ; ' Italy is made ; but it is not complete ! ' Rome was still wanting " (217). The King may have been elated : but there were many Italians who were humiliated — who could not but feel the dishonour of accepting Venetia as dole from the Emperor. Mazzini was one ; and he did not realise what hard necessity had driven the government into un- willing acceptance. " To him it seemed mere pusillanimity, pregnant with ' dishonour and ruin.' ' It is my lot,' he sadly wrote, ' to consume SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 169 my last days in the grief, supreme to one who Chapter really loves, of seeing the thing one loves most ' inferior to its mission ' " (218). It is to him, in these circumstances, that " A Song of Italy " is addressed. Yet the song shows itself either heroically unmindful, or rashly un- appreciative of Mazzini's condition. It calls upon liberated Italy to praise him : but to him Italy was not yet free. It calls upon " risen Rome " to praise him : but Rome was not yet risen — even Victor Emmanuel knew it was not yet risen ; and the word in Swinburne's mouth must surely be a surprise to the student who has accepted the dedication of the poem to Mazzini, as proof that the poet himsc;lf had turned Mazzinian. He has Mazzinian ideas and shows himself conversant with Mazzini's " airy cloudy language." But this treatment of these ideas is un-Mazzinian. For Mazzini they were ideals, certain, but very distant ; for Swinburne's im- patience they are ever at hand. In short, he seems at once a Mazzinian idealist and a Landorian realist. And in what ways, since the problem continues throughout Songs before Sunrise^ it may be of value to determine now. First, the idea of Capitolian Rome with which the poem ends is from Mazzini. Such a Rome was his dream city, and in 1849, for some hopeful days in the hfe of the ill-fated Roman republic, he had thought it an opening reality. " After the Rome of the Emperors, after the Rome of the Popes, will come tlic Rome of the people. . . . The world shall see that it is a starry light, eternal, pure, and resplendent as those we look up to in 170 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter the hcavcns " (219). That particular manifesta- ' tion had faded. But even as the '49 repubUc fell, Mazzini declared again his immovable hope in the significance of the city : " Rome is the centre, the heart, of Italy ; the palladium of the Italian mission ; and the city wherein broods the secret of our future religious life " (220). Popeless and republican, this Rome was to be for the healing of the nations — a city of God whose Prophet is the People. Mazzinian also is that sublime plea for clemency to enemies whom the hurrying hope of the poet pictures as already broken and abashed. For, set as was Mazzini against Papacy and tyranny, his ideal was one of just clemency. The Republic that was to atone for the dishonour of 1866, brought upon Italy by the " primal falsity of royalty," was to be a great " moralising education, to change men from serfs to citizens, and make them conscious of their mission, their strength and dignity " (221). Revenge, spolia- tion, violent anti-clericalism were to be absent from it. It would — and it alone could — win Rome for Italy, gain Istria and the Tyrol, and stretch out a hand to alleviate what (in the language of the " Song of Italy ") we may describe as " the huge eastern woes." By this care for the rights and sufferings of men the whole world over, this working for " God's holy cause, for His holy truth, for the freedom of the peoples and of the Soul of man " (to use the words of Mazzini's Prayer for the Planters) (222), by this alone could the state approve that divine necessity which brought it into being. SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 171 Mazzinian again (almost as we have already Chapter ^ VIII seen it in Meredith) is the turning of nature to * account in " A Song of Italy " to prophesy or record Italian triumph and Austrian defeat — the black and orange banner like withering leaves in autunm ; the tri-colour, green as summer, and red as dawn. But un-Mazzinian (as has been suggested) is the lack of discrimination between the thing attained and the thing desired, between the Italy of 1866-1867 and the Italy that might merit such adoration as is poured out in the " Song." There is pathos in the circumstance that saw the publica- tion of this poem followed after only a few months by the tragedy at Mentana ; that, while Swin- burne was glorifying Italy, saw her finances tottering, her people disgraced and impoverished, Sicily rampant with Bourbon and clerical in- surrection, " risen Rome " throttled by Papal and French troops and 10,000 of her best patriots in exile (223) — that saw, finally, Mazzini writing : " If Rome is to be annexed to the Kingdom, like the rest, I would rather that the Pope stayed at Rome another three years." Un-Mazzinian indeed is Swinburne's concep- tion of liberty. Liberty was essential in Mazzini's scheme of things. " Where liberty is not, life is reduced to a simple organic function. The man who allows his liberty to be violated, betrays his own nature, and rebels against God's de- crees " (224). The Republic was essential because it insured liberty. But " the Republic ... is the enthronement of the principle of association, of which liberty u- merely an element^ a necessary 172 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter antecedent " (225). Liberty is the condition under ' which individuals may associate in a state and promote the prosperity of all by the development and exercise each of his special function ; in which states may associate and promote the interests of humanity, each by the exercise of its national talent (226). Liberty for Italy meant nothing for Mazzini unless it brought a consciousness of duty and mission. " The liberty of Rome," he wrote, " is the liberty of the world. If Rome revolts, she must proclaim the victory of God over Idols, of eternal Truth over Falsehood, the inviolability of the human conscience " (227). And again, writing historically of the crude result of Rights-of-Man individualism : " Mere liberty of belief . . . destroyed all community of faith. Mere liberty of education generated moral anarchy " (228). " Liberty is but a means. Woe unto you and to your future should you ever accustom yourselves to regard it as the end " (229). But for Swinburne, at this time, was not liberty itself the end ? Otherwise, could he have so poured out his soul in exaltation of an achievement which only by a stretch of republican imagination, and by comparison with the tyrannies of the 'forties and 'fifties, might be called an achievement of Italian liberty ? He admits as much by omitting from the book of his maturer Mazzinianism — Songs before Sunrise — this " Song of Italy " which, by the superficial fact of its dedication and central praise would seem to belong in it, reserving it, until it should have become by four more years less inopportune. He had accepted Mazzini's dream and been SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 173 thrilled by the imperial fancy of a Roma del popolo Chapter where, perhaps, a council of the United States ' of Europe might assemble. But what he had in large measure celebrated was the simple common- sensible fact of the final overthrow of Austrian oppression in Italy, And in this he was following not the Mazzinian but the English tradition, somewhat content in its mid-course with the ingenuous idea that once tyranny should cease a people would in the course of nature look out for themselves. He was (we are tempted to remark) walking in the footprints of Landor. Of Landor, because nothing in a " Song of Italy " shows any correspondence to either Byron or Shelley. And of correspondence to Landor there are many evidences. Some of these are inevitable, almost, as between the work of two men who had followed the various stages of Italian development : but others betoken the similarity of two similar temperaments moved by the same circumstances, if indeed they do not betoken a certain willing acceptance of the manner of one by the other. The most striking of these is hero-worship. In Swinburne this was certainly indigenous. As early as 1861 in his novel Love's Cross Currents : A Year's Letters, he had entrusted one of his characters with an expression and explanation of it which all his later work merely develops and exemplifies : As to me . . . when I see a great goodness I know it — when I meet my betters I want to worship them at once, and I can always tell when any one is born my better. When I fall in with a nature and powers above 174 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter me, I cannot help going down before it, I do like Y^' admiring ; service of one's masters must be good for one, it is so perfectly pleasant ... it seems to me all the same whether they beat one in wisdom and great gifts and power, or in having been splendid soldiers or great exiles, or just in being beautiful (230). But this innate generosity of spirit had re- ceived support and direction from at least two sources — from Blake and from Landor. Hero- worship had become almost a religious duty : and that it is worship indeed no reader of " A Song of Italy " can deny. Blake had taught that " the worship of God is : Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest man best ; those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God" (231). An unnamed critic of Blake (and correspondent of Swinburne's, quoted in the Essay on Blake, p. 225) had so defined the Pantheistic creed (which Swinburne was adopting gradually it seems) that, the according of just such praise may be construed to be its absolute and essential ethic. " God," he says, " appears to a Theist as the root, to a Pantheist as the flower of things. . . . There is no God unless man can become God. ... So it is in the spiritual world ; tyranny and treachery, indol- ence and dulness cannot but impede and impair the immutable law of nature and necessary growth." Lack of appreciation, one may then say, stiff self-righteousness and narrow acknow- ledgment and obtuseness — these indeed are the prime offence and hindrance of God. Innocent of mysticism, but instinct with real SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 175 reliffion the doctrine of the obhgation to praise Chapter VIII had been announced with equal force and fre- .' quency by Landor. " Whenever a man capable of performing great and glorious actions is emerg- ing from obscurity, it is our duty," he says, " to remove, if we can, all obstruction from before him ; to increase his scope and his powers, to extol and amplify his virtues " (232). He himself found cause for just pride in having freely given praise and encouragement to his deserving contem- poraries (233), and pleasure in the act of praise : " there is delight in praising " he assures Brown- ing in a poem which makes praise a dehght (234). And he recommends praise as a function of poetry : " Poetry is the voice of Fame, and celebrates, not what is famous, but what deserves to be " (235). All this flowed in upon Swinburne and fed the current of his already eager spirit ; turned pleasurable impulse into valid principle. And about the time of the publication of the " Song of Italy," he gave new expression to the creed to which he adhered in that and his later work — that " it is not only more profitable, but should be more delightful for all who desire or who strive for any excellence of mind or of achieve- ment to do homage wherever it may be due; to let nothing great pass unsaluted or unen- joyed " (236). " Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers who were before us," became a motto which at any moment he would be glad to obey as a command — especially in behalf of those " who while alive had to dispense with the thanksgivinsf of men " (237). 176 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Even witli this crecd and the explanation ■ given of it, the praise accorded to Mazzini may seem not only extreme but wild. Extreme it must remain — for the perversion of the canticle " Benedicite opera omnia " into the service of any man is beyond all defence. But it is not beyond explanation — not even by the limited example of Landor. And Landor's example is limited : for whereas Swinburne was constantly able to find " his betters," and constantly able to praise them, the case was entirely different with Landor. " Among all men elevated in station " who had " made a noise in the world," he never saw any in whose presence he felt inferiority, excepting Kosciusco (238). And he probably never con- ceived of any — for Pindar and Aeschylus should take him between them ; Milton say to him : Commonwealth's man, we meet at last (239), never any before whom he could consistently feel inferiority, except one : Shakespeare. And he praises him in a manner too nearly associated with Swinburne's to be desirable : " Glory to thee in the highest, thou confidant of our Creator ; who alone hast taught us in every particle of the mind how wonderfully and fearfully we are made " (240). And again : In poetry there is but one supreme, Tho' there are many angels round his throne, Mighty, and beauteous, while his face is hid. (viii. 82.) In theory, too, Landor almost allows for an extension of a similar method of adulation to lesser men than this supreme. He knew but of SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 177 two genera of such — " the annual and the chapter VIII perennial " (241). And he counsels : " Let every ' man hold this faith, and it will teach him what is lawful and right in veneration ; namely that there are divine beings and immortal men on the one side, mortal men and brute beasts on the other " (242). Furthermore, he adds that " the throne of God is a speck of blackness, if you compare it with the heart that beats only and beats constantly to pour forth its blood for the preservation of (its) country " (243). How then was Swinburne to praise Mazzini : a patriot of patriots, pouring out his blood for the regeneration of Italy, not in one throbbing effusion, but drop by drop, as it were, through years of exile and privation ; hounded from Italy, from Switzerland, from France ; finding refuge — and for a time a seemingly precarious refuge — in England (244) ; and throughout it all teaching, exhorting, slaving that Italy might be free ? How^ else was Swinburne to praise him than by exhorting all the works of the Lord to praise the name of Mazzini ? IV. Songs before Sunrise Swinburne did not at this time (January- February 1867) know Mazzini personally, nor (as has been suggested) adequately realise the significance of his evangel. But this state of affairs was soon to see change, such change as makes it obligatory even for an essay on Swin- burne and Landor to give something more than N 178 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter passing heed to the figure of Mazzini. The ' circumstances follow. The " Ode on Candia " appeared in the Fortnightly Review, March 1867, and on the 11th of the month Swinburne, " to his unspeak- able satisfaction," received a letter from Mazzini concerning the poem, urging him to devote his powers to the great public cause, and to lay aside what (in the dry phrase of W. M. Rossetti's diary, which records the incident) we may describe as " love, etc., poems " (245). Further extracts from the same journal are terse descrip- tions of the drama that ensued : Tuesday, April 16 (1867).—. . . Scott says that Swinburne, being at Karl Blind's the other evening, met Mazzini personally for the first time. Mazzini walked straight up to Swinburne, who fell on his knees before him and kissed his hand. • ••••• Tuesday, May 7. — . . . Swinburne called — full of his interviews with Mazzini, who has a great objection to the present Italian Government, even apart from the question of monarchy, and would prefer to leave the Roman States quiet for five years or so, rather than see them annexed to the present Italian Kingdom by an immediate revolutionary movement, as contemplated (it seems) by Garibaldi. Swinburne speaks of Mazzini's immense magnetic power, which he feels operating upon him, Swinburne, apart from the enthusiasm which he entertains for his character. . . . Mazzini urges him much to write poems with a directly democratic or humanitarian aim : which Swinburne finds it difficult to shirk, at the same time that he feels conscious that is not exactly his line, and would not promote his true poetic development (246). Obviously an uncritical acceptance of Mazzini's SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 179 advice would have been no promotion of Swin- Chapter VIII. burne's complete development. It would have ' been impossible for him to devote his art to the service of any moral principle and maintain at the same time his integrity as an artist ; for the utmost latitude of his poetic theory allows only that art may ally itself with moral or religious passion, and never that it may enslave itself (247). But he did not accept it uncritically : five months after the meeting recorded in the diary he had planned Bothwell, Mary Stuart, Tristram of Lyonesse, as well as various political poems, and had begun work on Bothwell (248). In January 1868 his incomparable ode, "Ave Atque Vale," in memory of Baudelaire, appeared. But obviously, too, Mazzini's advice, properly understood in accordance with Swinburne's mani- fold capability, was precisely what he most needed. In the natural course of his development his innate humanitarianism and love of liberty had come to fruition in two noble poems, the " Ode on Candia " and " A Song of Italy." It was desirable that he should bring forth such fruit more abundantly. And with Mazzini's sympathy and inspiration he did this. He accepted the advice as a command, and set himself to obey it with an assiduity as perfect as becoming in a disciple of the great Italian, whose sublime and supreme ethic was that of duty. It was not always easy to perform : there were depressions between crests of excitement, and at these times Mazzini's desire was as light upon him. Such a period seems to have come in 1868, which Mr. Gosse describes as a critical year in the poet's 180 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter development. " His principal pleasure was the ' encouragement given him by Mazzini, ' my be- loved chief, still with us, very ill and indomitable, and sad and kind as ever.' ' Siena ' was finished in May and ' Tiresias ' was begun in June. Swinburne was doggedly and painfully working at what he always called ' His book,' the Chief's book, the volume of political lyrics which Mazzini had commanded him to write for the glory of Liberty and Italia " (249). He was working at it, it seems, with a consciousness that his work was a faithful service of the man he " most loved and revered on earth," or, indeed, of the symbol he most revered on earth (for Swinburne's praise and adoration of sublime men and of little children is essentially religious). And of this no better proof can be given than that, near death by drowning at Etretat in 1868, the one matter that filled him with annoyance was that Songs before Sunrise was not completed ; and the one that filled him with satisfaction was " that so much of it was ready for the press, and that Mazzini would be pleased with him " (250). One other thought came to him in these drowning moments, the last it seems before he lost consciousness : he reflected " with resigna- tion " that he was " exactly the same age as Shelley was when he was drowned." It was a mistaken idea, for he was a year and more older than Shelley. But it is not without significance as indication (in addition to the proof afforded by the poems themselves) that he was continually conscious of the English tradition he represented, even in the midst of the devotion to Mazzini. SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 181 The same idea is implicit in the statement he Chapter makes (in the Dedicatory Epistle to his collected ' poems) : " The writer of Songs before Sunrise, from the first line to the last, wrote simply in submissive obedience to Sir Philip Sidney's pre- cept, ' Look in thine heart and write.' The dedication of these poems, and the fact that the dedication was accepted, must be sufficient evi- dence of this. They do not pretend, and they were never intended to be merely the metrical echoes, or translations into lyric verse, of another man's doctrine. Mazzini w^as no more a Pope or a Dictator than I was a parasite or a papist. Dictation and inspiration are rather different things. These poems, and others which followed or preceded (251) them in print, were inspired by such faith as is born of devotion and rever- ence," and not, he goes on to say, by any servile faith compatible with spiritual prostration, proof of which is his reservation on religious matters : " You know that I never pretended to see eye to eye with my illustrious friends and masters, Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Mazzini, in regard to the positive and passionate confidence of their sublime and purified theology " (252). But this statement is Janus-faced, and looks toward both his artistic individualism and his inspiration by Mazzini. And before coming to the former matter (which involves Landor, as we have seen) some regard must be had for the latter. In what way are Songs before Sunrise the " translations into lyric verse of another man's doctrine," but not merely this ? Some of Mazzini's ideas have already been 182 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter stated, that of the '* Rome of the people," which ' should succeed the " Rome of the popes " as that had succeeded the " Rome of the emperors " : this Swinburne translates into Ivric verse in The Song of the Standard (stanzas 8-11 inclusive) ; the idea, too, of the universal Republic which should have as its capital the new and glorious Rome. This Swinburne accepts as inspiration for his whole conception in Songs before Sunrise. The advent of this Republic Universal is the supreme sunrise, toward which every poem in the collection sets its gaze. To its realisation the poet summons all the countries of his love : Build up our one Republic state by state, England with France and France with Spain, And Spain with sovereign Italy strike hands and reign. {Eve of Revolution, § 17.) For its realisation he appeals to Italy, the (Mazzini-appointed) hope of the nations : Let there be light, O Italy ! For our feet falter in the night. O lamp of living years to be, O light of God, let there be light ! (§34) • ••••• Till the inner heart of man be one With freedom and the sovereign sun ; And time, in likeness of a guide. Lead the Republic as a bride Up to God's side. ("Siena," §36.) But this ideal was only the distant climax of Mazzini's hope. And that it might be attained and permanently possessed he thought and laboured his life long to sweep away oppression, SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 183 and bv inspiration and education to make man Chapter VIII. really noble. ' Only a few essentials of his system can be given here — those that affect Songs before Sunrise. Mazzini's whole teaching is a protest against the philosophy of the French Revolution and its derivatives in his own day. They promulgated doctrines of Individualism, Rights of man to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the State as a utilitarian social contract. He preached Col- lectivism, the Duties of man to God and to humanity, the State as an expression of man's essential nature, his divinely appointed need of association (253). God is the crown of this system : His works are His witness (254), the earth the garment of His idea. His law is the law of life ; duty has its source in Him, and the great duty is Social progress. God, in judging us, will not ask, " What hast thou done with thy soul ? " but " What hast thou done for the souls of others ? " God's prophet, the ultimate interpreter of His law, is Humanity, a Being greater, holier, more divine than the individual, who lives though individuals die, and garners up the good of their lives (255). God's city is the Republic, where the principle of associate progress is best reahsed, " the similitude of that divine society where all are equal, and there is one love, one happiness for all " (256). Royalty, " the primal falsity of royalty," Avas in opposition to this progress. The Papacy was also opposed to it ; Christian dogma was also opposed to it. Therefore Mazzini bade these institutions and this faith go by. 184 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter The law of associatc progress, he taught, was ■ to be worked out in the nation ; but the ultimate good was always to be sought, the good of humanity. He steadily opposed, therefore, the doctrine of international " Non-intervention," especially as announced in England in the mid- century. " Can it be England," he wrote in 1847, " the England of the Reformation, the England of Elizabeth and Cromwell, self-centred in immoral indifference, that gives up Europe to the dictatorship of force ? " In 1867 " he attacked the Manchester school for perverting the sense of human solidarity " (257). In May 1869 Rossetti's diary reports : " Swinburne says that Mazzini has no liking for Bright, on account of his non-interference in politics, and especially the affair of ' Perish Savoy.' " His sympathy was strong for all suffering peoples — for the oppressed Balkan States, for Hungary, for " poor sacred Poland," whose cause he tried to advance in England as late as 1863. The "Dedication" and the "Epilogue" of Songs before Sunrise, both to Mazzini, declare that these poems are " of the seed of his sowing." Some of them seem also to have been of Mazzini's watering. But there was other seed to spring up under the same culture — seed earlier sown, which (at least in the " Ode on Candia ") was already far advanced before Mazzini appeared in person. This continued to spring up, and it both thwarted and enriched his harvest. For it there were many " sowers," by no means least among them Landor. The first Mazzinian idea somewhat thwarted SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 185 was the foremost of his creed — the idea of God. Chapteb VIII. Swinburne was unable to accept it, and " never ^ pretended to see eye to eye with . . . Mazzini " (258), or with Hugo in regard to this matter. This rejection gave a new significance to all the ideas that he did accept, even, it seems, to the idea of the Republic. The city of God for Mazzini, it becomes for Swinburne " God." It is the City of God for Mazzini ; but so by right of becoming rather than achievement. " We believe the human period of our existence too distant from the highest ideal ... to allow that the virtue of which we are capable here below can suddenly deserve to reach the summit of the ascent leading to God " (259). " We shall not be able absolutely to destroy (evil) here below " (260). For Swinburne it is manifestly a symbol of absolute perfection, and an idea for adoration and worship : . . . thou that art Where one man's perfect heart Burns, one man's brow is brightened for thy sake, Thine, strong to make or break ; O fair Repubhc, hallowing with stretched hands The limitless free lands. (" A Song of Italy.") From Mazzini (or from observation) he came to learn that Italy was further away from the first light of his ideal than " A Song of Italy " had conceived. And in the " Halt l^efore Rome " he acknowledges that the earlier cry, " Italia is risen," was premature : So spake we aloud high-min(k d. Full of our will ; and behold 186 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter The speech that was half way spoken ^^^I- Breaks, as a pledge that is broken. But he continues to be " high-minded " and " full of his will," in his fervid hope, his splendid trust, and. passionate appeal to the " immeasur- able Republic, that should arise and lighten above quick and dead " (" Quia Multum Amavit)." He watches by time's shut gate, till, " in some short sacred space " : . . . the slow soundless hinges turn, And through the depth of years that yearn The face of the Republic burn. And not only he, but the whole family of dis- united nations, seek and entreat the visitation of this deliverance. It may be possible for some people to believe that Swinburne was celebrating here only Maz- zini's Republic, and that the increase of spiritual and political importance he gives it is a matter of style and rhetoric merely. But the possibility depends upon something of a disregard of the facts. Accept them, and one is forced to realise that his conception of the Republic made it a more millennial sort of institution than it was for Mazzini, and more than it was for any but those Republicans of the untried dawn when " it was very heaven to be young." Its fabric is more ethereal and shimmering; there is more faith and serene hope in it. One hesitates to explain this by any cause external to Swinburne's own exuberant and unreflecting spirit ; but is forced to accept it when he himself gives such an explanation. It is generous, no doubt, per- SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 187 haps over-generous. It is coloured by hero- Chapter • • VIII worship and heightened in the way that heightens ' almost any single theme of personal history when an attempt is made to isolate and describe it apart from the rest. But there can be no doubt that there is some important truth in it. The explanation is made in " Thalassius " in con- nection with the instruction by that High Song immortalised in the poem : And hope the high song taught him : hope whose eyes Can sound the seas unsoundable, the skies Inaccessible of eyesight. . . . For she can see the days of man, the birth Of good and death of evil things on earth. Inevitable and infinite. And it is confirmed by what Swinburne further says of his hero in the Centenary Song : He bade the spirit of man regenerate, Rekindhng, rise and reassume the rights That in high seasons of his old estate, Clothed him and armed with majesties and mights Heroic. . . . Further, it must be noted that if Swinburne's optimism was sustained from the outside at all, no one is so likely to have sympathetically sustained it as Landor, for, in contradistinction to Shelley, who entrusted to Love the regenera- tion of liberated man ; and to Hugo (261), who invoked Pity for this office and God as the supreme hope ; and to Mazzini, who invoked Duty because he thought love too frail for the laborious education and uplifting of humanity, Landor, as has been shown, in many moods supplied no regenerating principle whatsoever, 188 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter political and moral emancipation being for him ' almost the same one thing. In the poem " Re- generation," which Swinburne perfectly describes in the lines just quoted, this idea is explicit. " Regenerate man has risen," because of a political tyranny overthrown. Another of Mazzini's ideas accepted, but some- what revalued by Swinburne, is the idea of Humanity as a continuous collective Being, holier than the individual. For Mazzini, Humanity was the Prophet or Interpreter of God. For Swinburne, Humanity is " God." Mazzini, ad- dressing the Ecumenical Council in 1870, declared that the Council, whatever its members intended by it, would proclaim the death of a religion, and, therefore, the inevitable and not distant advent of another. He himself had desired a Council — of a different sort, one that should meet " for the purpose of religiously interrogating the pulsa- tions of the heart of Collective Humanity " (262) — that is, the peoples. In sequence of this (263), it would seem, Swinburne wrote his " Hymn of Man " (during the session at Rome of the CEcumenical Council), proclaiming the death of Catholic deism and the birth of the Religion of Man : Thou and I and he are not Gods made men for a span, But God, if a God there be, is the substance of men which is man. Our hves are as pulses or pores of his manifold body and breath, As waves of his sea on the shores where birth is the beacon of death. We men, the multiform features of man, whatever we be Recreate him of whom we are creatures, and all we only are he. SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 189 Not each man of all men is God, but God is the fruit of the Chapter whole ; ^- Indivisible spirit and blood, indiscernible body from soul. Not men's, but man's is the glory of godhead, the kingdom of time, The mountainous ages made hoary with snows for the spirit to climb. This is patently from Mazzini, but the idea has been converted from the deistic service to whicli he puts it, to the service and expression of a downright Pantheism to which it belongs — a Pantheism (in Swinburne) that almost inevitably traces back its metaphysics to Blake, and its ethics to Blake and Landor. For Blake (as summed up by Swinburne) had taught :' " God is no more than man : because man is no less than God " ; that " those who calumniate . . . great men hate God, for there is no other God " (264) ; and Landor had taught what was practically the doctrine of the divinity of " great " men. The idea of the divinity of the " great " is expressed in this collection in a number of poems : the earliest, perhaps, being " On the Downs " where (almost in the exact words used by a commenter on Blake quoted in Swinburne's essay) it is urged : " There is no God, O son, if thou be none." It is evident again in poems that are probably later than the " Hymn of Man," such as the " Epilogue." It is evident in " Hertha," related closely in time (and in some ideas) to the " Hymn." It is an idea inevitable in an individualist of Swinburne's temper and training. But the fact remains that, as it were led up to Mazzini's opinion by this 190 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter individualism, he abandons the individualism VIII ' during splendid intervals, and gives to Mazzini's creed dramatic utterance that has in it the very throb and pulse and light of personal feeling and faith. " The great men of the earth are but the marking-stones on the road to humanity " (265). " Individuals die, but the amount of good they have thought, and the sum of good they have done, dies not with them. The men who pass over their graves reap the benefit thereof, and Humanity gathers it up " (266). So, Mazzini. And Swinburne responds (in one of most perfect of those rare intervals in which he adequately conceives the necessarily slow progression of the ideal he seeks) : We pray not, we to behold The latter august new birth. The young day's purple and gold, And divine, and rerisen as of old, The sun-god freedom on earth. All we ask is : To feel on our brows as we wait An air of the morning, a breath From the springs of the east, from the gate Whence freedom issues and fate, Sorrow and triumph and death. Seeing each life given is a leaf Of the manifold multiform flower, And the least among these, and the chief, As an ear in the red-ripe sheaf Stored for the harvesting hour. (" Tenebrae.") SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 191 In one other poem, " The Pilgrims " (267) Chapter (the completest of Swinburne's pictures of those who follow the Spirit of Truth whom the world cannot receive because it seeth him not neither knoweth him), the same idea of voluntary sacrifice for a cause, and for humanity, finds expression in words of everlasting significance : The Questioners. Pass on then and pass by us and let us be, For what Hght think yc after death to see ? And if the world fare better will ye know ? And if man triumph, who shall seek you and say ? The Pilgrims. Enough of light is this for one life's span That all men born are mortal but not man : And we men bring death lives by night to sow That man may reap and eat and live by day. In yet other poems the reflex of Mazzini's doctrine is luminous : the assurance that with these Martyrs of Faith it is well, with these who, in Mazzini's words " loved life, . . . loved the beings who made that life dear " ; to whom every impulse of their hearts cried Live ! but who, for the salvation of generations to come chose to die (268) ; who thus satisfied the law of their being, which is association, and the law of human progress. Such an assurance is evident in the " Ode on the Insurrection in Candia," and its tribute to the patriot dead : O kings and queens and nations miserable, O fools and blind and full of sins and fears, With these it is, with you it is not well ; Ye have an hour, but these the immortal years ; such is evident in " A Marching Song " (" We have the morning star, O foolish jjcoplc, O VIII. 192 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter kings ! ") and (most perfectly) in " Super Flumina ' Babylonis " : Unto each man his handiwork, unto each his crown, The just Fate gives ; Whoso takes the world's hfe on him and his own lays down, He, dying so, lives. Whoso bears the whole heaviness of the wronged world's weight And puts it by, It is well with him suffering, though he face man's fate ; How should he die ? Such a man, for Mazzini, was reincarnated " from life to life, from world to world " for continuous progress : and watched over and brought inspiration to the cause he had served when on earth (269). Swinburne's poem continues : For an hour, if ye look for him, he is no more found, For one hour's space ; Then you lift up your eyes to him and behold him crowned, A deathless face. Such men, for Mazzini, were as we have seen " but marking stones on the road of humanity." " There is yet something greater, more divinely mysterious, than all the great men, and this is the earth which bears them, the human race which includes them, the thought of God which stirs within them, and which the whole human race collectively can alone accomplish. Disown not, then, the common mother for the sake of certain of her children, however privileged they may be ... " (270). It is just here that Swinburne draws away SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 193 from him, afRrmino^ that those men who choose Chapter \ r 1 T T the arduous path of service, who hve by the ' unsweet fruit of self-sacrifice, In the end men follow and know for very God. {Genesis. ) He thus upholds Individualism against Mazzini's Association. Furthermore (increasing the divergence) he practises the doctrine, not only in worshipping great men, but in arrogating to himself, as though by right of inherent superiority, a vituperative scorn for men who oppose and impede. This was not Mazzini's doctrine for the era of Collectivism ; for he taught " Speak your thoughts boldly, and make known your wants courageously ; but without anger, without reaction, and without threats. The strongest menace — if indeed there be those for whom threats are necessary — will be the firmness, not the irritation of your speech " (271). It was not Mazzini's doctrine for the Poet (specially privileged, as Mazzini allows genius to be) in the age of Collectiv- ism ; for the new social poetry he foresaw (in 1847) was to " soothe the suffering soul by teaching it to rise towards God through humanity " (272). But it was the practice of poets in the age of Individualism — tolerated, if not praised, by Mazzini in the practice of Goethe and Byron (273), and accepted by Swinburne, in part at least, in consequence of his service of Landor, and his likeness in spirit to him. If there is any doubt of this, any doubt that Swinburne (except on exceptional occasions o 194 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter already shown) was temperamentally distinct ' from Mazzini, and really no exponent of the doctrine of the duty and necessity of love and association, it should dissipate in the light thrown by the " Prelude " to these songs. The poem has been explained in an earlier chapter and its whole philosophy related to Landor. Little is necessary here but to confirm the relation, first by showing how unlike Mazzini's this philosophy is, and then by showing how like is its exercise in Songs before Sunrise to its exercise in Landor's poems and prose on political affairs. The contrast with Mazzini, it must be noticed, is one of temper, the impulse for action, and manner of it, rather than the action itself. But even so the contrast is severe. For Mazzini preached an Apostolate, valid through service not succession, strong by support of Duty, humble because of that necessity of association laid upon all men who would progress or aid progression : conscious that " history is not the biography of great men ; the history of mankind is the history of the progressive religion of man- kind, and of the translation by symbols, or external actions, of that religion " (274). Landor embodied and inspired a knight errantry, valid in its own proud strength, serene in the com- panionship of kindred souls and the belief that the history of these is the essential of human history : "Of all studies the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface : historians delve too deep for them " (275). The " Prelude " leaves no doubt as to which of SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 195 these systems it adopts. Its " Youth," instructed Chapter by " Time," stands up and treads to dust, ' doubts, faiths, fears. To him the Ugbts (276) of even and morn Speak no vain thoughts of love and scorn, Fancies and passions miscreatc By men in things dispassionate. Nor holds he fellowship forlorn With souls that pray and hope and hate And doubt they had better not been born, And fain would lure or scare off fate And charm their doomsman from their doom And make fear dig its own false tomb. His own soul is his one sole guide ; drawing light indeed from the souls of other men, " in whom the light of trust (was) one " — but main- taining its own constant flame. Since only souls that keep their place By their own light and watch things roll And stand, have light for any soul. For such an one, a " soul free," " good works," such as loose the bonds in which all mankind suffers, are, it seems, the natural expression. But how such good works are to be done by one who holds no fellowship with souls that pray and hope and hate, and are supposedly by these very things bound, the poem does not determine. Nor need we be over-anxious to discover : not v/hen we find Swinburne entirely disregarding his occasional belief in the oneness of Humanity (established by Mazzini in the " Hymn of Man " and by Blake and Arnold in " Hertha " (*277), and assailing kings and priests and tyrannies in a manner that leaves it for unmistakable inference 196 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter tliat they are apart from the rest, the one great ' weight upon man's spirit constraining it from freedom : a manner that is Landor's — and hardly any one's but his, though Landor bestows it on Milton, making him profess it : "At least be (my hand) instrumental in removing from the earth a few of her heaviest curses ; a few of the oldest and worst impediments to liberty and wisdom . . . mitres, tiaras, crowns, and the trumpery whereon they rest " (278). The Song for the Centenary of Landor is (as we have seen) very complete evidence that Swinburne thoroughly sympathised with this important part of Landor's activity. It records that song was a shadowy sword to him, wrought to put all evil things to flight. He struck dumb the lying and the hungering mouths of priests ; he scourged kings and living slaves with the fiery word of his scorn ; he mocked and spat upon the Lord their God whom they had erected tyrant of the skies as they were tyrants and lords of earth, and he would have it that these things being slain, the spirit alone should be Lord and God. Songs before Sunrise is as complete evidence that Swinburne set himself to emulate this. The time was favourable, certainly, for such emulation, seeing that many of the usurpers, perjurers, blasphemers, " false gods that make earth hell," of Landor's comminations still re- mained for his disciple's attention ; seeing too that his last occasional attacks on them were by no means antiquated during the period of Songs before Sunrise, but matters of fresh memory, since his final volume came out in 1863, and un- SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 197 published fragments from his Roman hand were Chapter reaching Swinburne as late as 1869 (279). In ' particular, there remained Louis Napoleon (whom Swinburne reserved for treatment in Songs of Two Nations) and Pius IX., the " infidel who assumes in mockery the Crow^n of Christ, who calls himself God's vicegerent, subverts His attributes, effaces His laws, and stamps upon His image " of one of Landor's letters (280) ; still reigning, and still exercising in Italy the pernicious influence for disunity and demoralisation, with whose con- tinuous exercise one of Landor's quietest, and certainly his gravest, criticisms had charged the Papacy (281). Swinburne's method of dealing with the latter of these individuals, or of dealing generally ^vith priests and kings, is essentially Landorian. The very terms of abuse, " He who hath claws like a vulture " and " a wolf cub his life-giving Lamb " (addressed to Pio Nono), are no more than variants of Landor's—" The Roman Vulture " (282) and " Rome's old wolf " (283) ; and the " King- snakes," the " fanged meridian vermin " (" A Marching Song ") are, again, no departure from Landor's terminology — his " fanged reptiles lift- ing high their crested heads " (284). There is, liowever, one important difference between Swinburne and Landor in the abuse of kings and priests. For Swinburne, the process implicates the faith they possess. For Landor, it nearly does : but only " nearly " : an extract from a poem to two missionaries, the first lines of which (not quoted here) suggest Swinburne's " Pilgrims," will serve to illustrate : 198 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter I will believe that Christianity VIII. (Merciful God ! forgive the manifold Adulteries with her valets and her grooms, Rank gardeners and wheezing manciples !) Is now of service to the earth she curst With frauds perpetual, intermittent fires, And streams of blood that intersect the globe : I will believe it : none shall kill my faith While men like thee are with us. Kings conspire Against their God. . . . [etc. etc.] (viii. 150.) Furthermore, even when there are no " Pilgrims " to prove it to him he believes in Christianity, maintaining always a devout reverence for its divine Founder, and casting the burden of errant reUgion on the shoulders of those in whom it erred : " The religion of Christ is peace and good will ; the religion of Christendom is war and ill will " (285). " Cannot we agree to show the nations of the world that the whole of Christianity is practicable ; although the better parts never have been practised, no, not even by the priest- hood in any single one of them " (286). For Swinburne the case is different. With Mazzini he forgoes belief in the divinity of Christ ; and thus addresses the Crucified in one of the most moderate of the stanzas of his medi- tation " Before a Crucifix." The tree of faith ingraffed by priests Puts its foul foliage out above thee, And round it feed man-eating beasts Because of whom we dare not love thee ; Though hearts reach back and memories ache We cannot praise thee for their sake (287). At the same time, though Landor is, pro- fessedly, orthodox, and Swinburne heterodox. SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 199 there is no essential distinction between their Chapter secular literary use of circumstances in the life ' of our Lord. The Anointing, the Agony, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection become metaphors of Freedom — especially in Swinburne. In " Siena " he describes himself as having sat and wept under the cross of Italia, slain and raised again. In " Super Flumina Bab}lonis " the metaphor is expanded, to include Calvary, Gethsemane, and the grave-clothes found folded up in the grave's gloom (288) ; " The Litany of Nations " appeals to earth, By the blood-sweat of the people in the garden, inwalled by kings ; " Before a Crucifix " sees, in the transfixed figure on the cross, the semblance of humanity, martyred by kings and priests : And Priests against the mouth divine Push their sponge full of poison yet And bitter blood for myrrh and wine, And on the same reed it is set Wiicrcwith before they buffeted The peoples' disanointed head. This image may derive from Mazzini. In 1870 he accused the Council of crucifying humanity on Calvary, and was then possibly repeating a metaphor he had turned before. But for flagrant completeness it is doubtful whether it has any parallel outside the works of Landor — outside what is perhaps the richest of Landor's poems, " Regeneration " (289). He describes the con- dition of Italy, and appeals to the nations to spring to life, moved by the breath of God. 200 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Let the last work of his right hand appear Y^' Fresh with his image, Man. Thou recreant slave That sittest afar off and helpest not, O thou degenerate Albion ! with what shame Do I survey thee, pushing forth the sponge At thy spear's length, in mockery at the thirst Of holy Freedom in his agony. And prompt and keen to pierce the wounded side ! (vii. 461.) " Regeneration " must by this same token have served Swinburne in yet another, and a more important way — by implanting in him the doctrine of the duty of international sympathy and aid. Landor (290) enforced the lesson else- where. And there was Mazzini, as we have seen, to nourish and sustain it. But not only Mazzini : for the time and liberalism urged the same duty. England — in Swinburne's words — had " passed among the faded nations " : for a time. " Our sins of commission " — so wrote John (now Lord) Morley in 1867 — " are not so very many. But the things left undone that we ought to do are count- less. An energetic, full-blooded and generous initiative is no more seen. Under our present set of social conventions it is for ever impossible." He called attention to the condition of anarchy prevailing on the Continent, the certainty of Franco- German war, and to the circumstance that gave to these conditions their fatal vitality — " the premeditated absence from the scene of the only nation which could possibly quell or restrain the violence of these detestable ani- mosities." Meanwhile, the Peace-at-any-Price men were vociferous at home with " Schleswig- SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 201 Holstein or Poland or Luxemburg, is nothing to chapter us," mindless that " national morality involves ' positive obligations " (291). Swinburne took up the cry. And if more shrilly than others, it may be forgiven him, because of external history alone. For a " re- publican who was also an Englishman " could hardly take delight in the incidents then evolving under his eyes — the State reception, for instance, Queen's kindness, Spithead Review, and what not, accorded to his malignity Abdul-Assiz of Turkey in the same year that had seen the commiseration of his tyrannised subjects in the " Ode on the Insurrection in Candia " ; or the patronage afforded to " Eyre Pascha" (292) of the legalised Jamaica massacres by some of the greatest writers then living in England, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Tennyson (293) ; or the too harsh justice meted out to the Fenian conspirators of Man- chester, despite public protest and one earnest (Mazzini-praised) poetic '' Appeal " (294) from the Singer of Songs before Sunrise. It is only when he is mindful of these things and their like that Swinburne's song on England grows shrill — into the "royalties rust-eaten," the " masters of thee, mindless " of " A Marching- Song." It is they who have turned her sea-like sounded name to laughter. But those things are forgotten, in the prophetic brooding of a " Watch in the Night " on the dishonour of her national sleep ; in the light of that marching Freedom in the " Halt before Rome," who looks back appealingly on her who once bore up the weight of man's liberty. Glad and innnemorial things 202 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter are remembered of her as the song advances, VIII , ' because of which the poet calls upon her to arise. Even in the stern reproof of " Perinde ac Cadaver," Liberty invokes her : O Cromwell's mother, O breast That suckled Milton ! In " A Marching Song " she is " Milton's Eng- land," " thou that wast his republic." In " The Litany of Nations " she appeals : By the star that Milton's soul for Shelley lighted, Whose rays ensphere us ; By the beacon-bright Republic far off sighted, {Clio.) O mother, hear us. > It is inevitable that this should be so : that the poet of the universal republic should invoke England by her supreme republican names. But it is doubly inevitable because of his relationship with Landor. We have seen how Landor is saved from profaning England in his poem " To Shelley (295), as it were by light of that remem- bered name. The glory in Milton and another brought him to his knees in as perfect a reverence : The rivulets and mountain-rills of Greece Will have dried up while Avon still runs on ; And those four rivers freshening Paradise Gush yet, tho' Paradise had long been lost Had not one man restored it ; he was ours. Not song alone detain'd him, tho' the song Came from the lips of Angels upon his. But strenuous action when his country call'd. . . . (viii. 299.) It is for such men's sake that Landor praises England : England ! I glory that mine eyes First open'd on thy sterner skies, SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 203 Where the most vaUant of mankind Chapter Bear gentlest hearts. VIII. (viii. 251.) t>^ And again and again he returns to do Milton reverence : One man above all other men is great, Even on this globe, where dust obseures the sign. God closed his eyes to pom- into his heart His own pure wisdom. In chill house he sate. Fed only on those fruits the hand divine Disdain'd not, thro' his angels, to impart ; (viii. 215) to which may be added the comment on Samson Agonistes (vv. 265-277), " Verses worthier of a sovran poet, sentiments worthier of a pure, in- domitable, inflexible republican, never issued from the human heart " ; added because of its nobility and because of Swinburne's praise : " No other of all the most glorious among our countrymen could have paid to the crowning work of Milton such a tribute as this of Landor's " (290). It is for such men's sake that England in " The Eve of Revolution " is not yet written among the nations that fell ; for the sake of these that England is bidden Live, thou nuist not be dead, Live ; let thine armed head Lift itself up to sunward and the fair Daylight of time and man. Thine head republican, AVith the same splendour on thine helmless hair That in his eyes kept up a light Who on thy glory gazed away his sacred sight ; 204 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter By those eyes blinded and that heavenly head VIII. And the secluded soul adorable, O Milton's land, what ails thee to be dead ? Thine ears are yet sonorous with his shell Such sons were of thy womb, England, for love of whom Thy name is not yet writ with those that fell. But, till thou quite forget What were thy children, yet On the pale lips of hope is as a spell ; And Shelley's heart and Landor's mind Lit thee with latter watch-fires ; why wilt thou be blind ? It is for the sake of such men that the Songs before Sunrise were sung : and chief of them all, for Swinburne, is Landor, hater of kings and priests, lover of Greece and Italy and England and Liberty. The tones of his Roman trumpet sound among the shriller and more rapturous music blown from the silver throat of his disciple's instrument ; and the inspiration of his life-long blast is discernible in the very act by which the disciple put aside the plaintive but perfect reed of his early fancy and assumed the symbol of manhood and mission, crying : I set the trumpet to my lips and blow. V. Songs of Two N'ations With the poems gathered under the title of Songs of Two Nations we may deal briefly. The " Song of Italy " has already been described. The " Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic " is an adoration of the ideal Universal Republic seen with too foreseeing eyes as be- SONGS OF TWO NATIONS 205 ginning with the new regime in France ; and it Chapter further emphasises the principles of Swinburne's " poUtical and poetic theory already dealt with : his rash if magnificent optimism, his overweening confidence in the Republican idea. The sonnet sequence " Dirae " alone remains ; and of these there is but one, the last, that anger does not mar. Some were praised by Hugo, and may have been written in some measure to deserve this praise. They are vituperative ; and their vituperation, though not of the gutter as is Hugo's in his perverse moments, has a Hugocsque rancour. But they make use of all extreme and wild things, reaching out in " Mentana," for instance, for the aid of Shakespeare's Margaret, praying for Richard's death {Richard III. iv. 3). They may also make use of Landor's imaginary conversa- tion between Nicholas and Diogenes in the midst of Hell. But it is impossible to prove this in a collection of poems that borrows from Dante. In one poem only is it possible to discover a note clearly related to Landor's. This is the last, the one perfect, beginning If wrath embitter the sweet mouth of song, etc. Spontaneous as may be the criticism it gives of the preceding poems in the series, it is just that of Landor's " Boccaccio on Dante " : " Of all the sins against the spirit of poetry (unrelenting rancour) is the most unpardonable " (297). CHAPTER IX for greece and athens "Erechtheus" (1875) and "Athens: AN Ode " (1881) Most ardent and most awful and most fond, The fervour of his Apollonian eye Yearned over Hellas, yet enthralled in bond Of time whose years beheld her and passed by Silent and shameful, till she rose and donned The casque again of Pallas ; for her cry Forth of the past and future, depths beyond This where the present and its tyrants lie. As one great voice of twain For him had pealed again, Heard but of hearts high as her own was high, High as her own and his And pure as love's heart is. That lives though hope at once and memory die : And with her breath his clarion's blast Was filled as cloud with fire or future souls with past. (Swinburne: Song for the Centenary of Landor.) Chapter In his first Poems and Ballads Swinburne made ^^' his confession of faith in Greece. " Phaedra " — or better " Anactoria," since " Phaedra " is rather out of Seneca than Euripides — is a monument in " a baser and later language " to the " divine words which even when a boy (he) could not but 206 FOR GREECE AND ATHENS 207 recognise as divine." The confession is yet Chapter completer in Atalanta in Calydon, both in the 1 flawless Greek dedicatory verses and in the text of the drama itself. The poet has learned, for the occasion at least, to think as did his Greek masters. His sentiment and his thought, except perhaps in the more violent choruses, recall many passages from the Greek dramatists ; his syntax and cadence, even his vision, seem Greek also, the last in its ability to discover immediately, as it were, the essential sense-quality of the objects described. Another aspect of his love for Greece appears in the " Ode on the Insurrection in Candia," " The Eve of Revolution," and " The Litany of Nations " of his Songs before Sunrise. In tliese poems, despite Mazzini and the preoccupation of the volume with Italian themes, a very perfect passion for Greece, present and past, is evident : nowhere more convincing than in the first-named poem : Had I words of fire Whose words arc weak as snow ; Were my heart a lyre Whence all its love might (low In the mighty modulations of desire, In the notes wherewith men's passion worships woe : Could my song release The thought weak words confine, And my grief, O Greece, Prove how it worships thine, It would move with pulse of war the limbs of peace Till she flashed and trembled and became divine. But more important even than these, as 208 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter expressing tliis passion, is the greatest (though not ^^' the most loved) of his classical dramas, Erechtheus, and his long " Ode to Athens." In all these poems his spontaneous Hellenism is plain — the sincerity of his love and the sym- pathy of his genius for things Greek. It was because of this that he was the only Englishman who could write Greek, as Headlam, perhaps the foremost Greek scholar of that time, wrote of (and to) him. They were affections and powers bred in his bone, as it were. And yet — he had spiritual ancestors. His glory in Greek culture and his passion for the political regeneration of Greece are of a sort that must have been old-fashioned even in 1860 or 1870. They identify his mood with that of the eighteenth- or early nineteenth -century humanists, who might well have said of them- selves (as Landor's Home Tooke says to his Johnson, — but with a different accent), " The liberation of Greece is the heirloom of our dreams " (298). He belongs with those three great " children of the eighteenth-century politi- cal idea " with whom he claims kinship : Byron, Shelley, and (the sturdiest Hellene of them all) Landor. Only for these Englishmen, as for him, was Greece The land of the royallest race, The most holy land. Without doubt he was nmch affected by Byron's, and more especially by Shelley's ex- ample. The lyric fervour of Hellas was some- FOR GREECE AND ATHENS 209 thing he could understand. Yet what he says Chaptku of Landor and his devotion to the Greek cause i^ (quoted as chapter heading) makes it clear that he felt peculiarly sustained by this practice. It is natural that he should have felt so. For though Shelley and Landor have exactly the same belief as to the importance of Greek civilisa- tion, bold as Shelley may be, as in tlic preface to Hellas, Landor has passages in the Conversa- tions that are even bolder : Dignity of thought arose from the Athenian form of government, propriety of expression from the genius of the language, from the habitude of listening daily to the most elaborate orations and dramas, and of eontemplat- ing at all hours the exquisite works of art, invited to them by Gods and heroes (299). And again : Greece ought to be preserved and guarded by the rulers of the world, as a cabinet of gems, open and belonging to them all. . . .To Greece is owing the conversation we hold together . . . the very city in which we hold it ; its wealth, its power, its equity, its liberality (300). Then there is much besides — Conversations between classic heroes, as that in which Sophocles and Pericles extol the glory of Athens, or in which Scipio and Polybius discourse on the same high tliemc : " What Aspasia (anywhere else) led Philosophy to smile on Love, or taught Love to reverence Philosophy ? " or, perhaps most important, that so nearly complete resurrection of heroic Greece which is the Hellenics, the work which, as has been shown, first captured Swin- burne's devotion for Landor. P 210 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter So read, therefore, so trained, it is but natural — L that Swinburne should have made love of Greece a dominant theme in his poetry. Because of his love for Greece, he is with these, and all great poets, in yet other aspects of thought and feeling. At least it would seem so. For there is only a little sturdy faith in his poetry before it espouses the Greek theme, and com- paratively little wide social feeling, whereas an entirely different situation obtains after this theme has come to prominence. This it did in the " Ode on the Insurrection in Candia " (1866- 1867), and in this poem, for the first time, maturely and without reservation, Swinburne revealed himself as possessing what no poet can lack and be great : positive faith, and, in his own words, fervid pity and passionate compassion for all the oppressions that are done beneath the sun. We have seen this spirit growing as he grew, beginning with that Landorian oblique arraign- ment of Napoleon III. in The Queen Mother and its equally Landorian eulogy of the idea of " freedom " ; taken up in certain of the Poems and Ballads, and in Atalanta as well, where the protest against " oppressive heaven " is merely a counterpart of the unremitting pity for all human ills with whose burden the poem is oppressed ; partially fulfilled in " Hesperia," in the lament for Landor in Poems and Ballads, and in that second episode of Atalanta whose glory is its picture of Landor and its praise of such a noble life and desirable death as were his. This spirit came to flower in Songs before FOR GREECE AND ATHENS 211 Sunrise, treated in the foregoing chapters, but chapter its perfection is even greater in the work that ^^' next occupied Swinburne's attention, Erechtheus, especially when this is considered in relation to Atalanta in Calydon. Fate, in the earlier drama, is the dominant theme. Such Landorian hero- isms as we have shown are only interludes for it ; only interludes also are the two or three other heroic sentiments given in the same drama (generally in connection with Meleager). But in Erechtheus the situation is reversed : heroism prevails — will to pluck service and glory from the day, be it fair or foul. And it is fate that is interluded. The very premise from which the drama develops is resignation and trust in the gods, love of life and country, and delight in vicarious sacrifice. A new happiness as well as a new reverence prevails, and the " hps that were so loud, so long," with protest or blasphemy, are sweet with honey of praise — for life and heroic opportunity to serve it : For lovely is life, and the law wherein all things live, And gracious the season of each, and the hour of its kind, And precious the seed of his life in a wise man's mind ; But all save life for his life will a base man ffive. But a life that is given for the life of the whole live land. From a heart unspotted a gift of a spotless hand. Of pure will perfect and free, for the land's life's sake, What man shall fear not to put forth his hand and take ? In noticing this nol:)lc advance in Swinburne's development, Landor and all other possible aids to it must be put out of mind for the moment, or allowed only minor consideration. It is the really inexplicable development of genius that 212 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter is the important fact, in this as in every case. L Yet Swinburne declared that Landor had much to do with it. And we merely record this. Doubtless others of his heroes were also contribu- tory to it — Mazzini, for instance, whose dogma of humanity, treated in the last chapter, seems to have expression here in the more-than Greek praise of the glory of sacrifice. Shelley is here, Milton, and, of course, the Greek masters : Aeschy- lus furnishes the suggestion for the fifth great chorus with its marine picture of the battle on land, and Sophocles has been but a little exceeded in the praise here poured out before Athens, for . . . time nor earth nor changing sons of man, Nor waves of generations, nor the winds Of ages risen and fallen that steer their tides Through light and dark of birth and lovelier death. From storm toward haven inviolable, shall see So great a light alive beneath the sun As the aweless eye of Athens. . . . Erechtheus seems to have been written in the summer of 1875. In 1881 Swinburne took up the song of Greece again in the " Ode to Athens," and once more before his death in " For Greece and Crete " in 1897. One new phase of feeling must be noticed in the earlier of these two poems. A little of the glory of Athenian godhead has fallen in it upon England ; and the poet who but a few years before had given riotous praise and abuse to Elizabethan seamen and their Spanish enemies in " The Armada : an Ode," finds opportunity to reintroduce the better part of the same theme : FOR GREECE AND ATHENS 213 Sons of Athens born in spirit and truth are all born freemen ; Chapter Most of all, we nurtured where the north wind holds his reign : ^^' Children all we seafolk of the Salaminian seamen, Sons of them that beat baek Persia they that beat back Spain. And with this he gives one more proof of liis connection with the Pliil-Hellenes of the early century, not least among whom, in words that are only a variation of those already quoted from Landor, records that " Our laws, our litera- ture, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece." '' We are all Greeks." CHAPTER X " THALASSIUS " And fear the song too taught him : fear to be Worthless the dear love of the wind and sea That bred him fearless, like a sea-mew reared In rocks of man's foot feared Where nought of wingless life may sing or shine, Fear to wax worthless of that heaven he had When all the life in all his limbs was glad. • ••••• Fear to go crownless of the flower he wore. When the winds loved him and the waters knew. (Thalassius.) Chapter The foregoing chapters have described chiefly — 1 the sympathy between Landor's and Swinburne's poHtical opinions and temper. They were " children of the eighteenth -century idea " — " children that never grew up." We come now to other points of contact between them. These relate to their feeling for Nature and their belief about Love. Strange as it may seem at first thought, Swinburne testifies that Landor affected him, for good, in both of these matters ; that even the most intimate of all his loves, that for the sea, was made nobler by Landor's teaching, and that his conception of love itself responded in the same way to that influence. An examina- 214 " THALASSIUS " 215 tion of the prevailing circumstances shows that chapter the testimony is true. Landor's opinion on L these subjects, especially when accepted and perhaps magnified by the avid spirit of his dis- ciple, possesses singular beauty and great moral value. Swinburne's development shows a steady response to just such moral instruction. Swinburne's feeling for nature, especially for the sea, is too well known to need any general description here. Landor's, however, is little known, except perhaps in so far as Swinburne has shown it in the splendid line from " Regenera- tion " he quotes as prelude to his own marine meditation, " By the North Sea " : Wc are what suns and winds and waters make us. It would be hard to find another line that so succinctly states the naturalistic philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. And it must at once be evident that it involves a definite ethical teaching, particularly for any one who maintained (as Swinburne did) a deep and passionate love for " suns and winds and waters." There is not another closely resembling it in content elsewhere in I^andor's poems, though there are many poems showing a singularly tender love for nature. But there are important ex- pressions of the same idea in his prose. Reference has already been made, in an earlier chapter, to one of these passages. But it is pertinent again. " I assemble and arrange my thouglits with free- dom and with pleasure in the forest air, under the open sky." So he says through his Epicurus. " Many a froward axiom, many an inhuman 216 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter thought, hath ariscn . . . from hearing a few '_ unpleasant sounds, from the confinement of a gloomy chamber, or from the want of symmetry in it. We are not aware of this until we find an exemption from it in groves, on promontories, or along the sea-shore, or wherever else we meet Nature face to face, undisturbed and solitary " (301). Not a lover of the sea to any such extent as was Swinburne, his feeling for it comes to light in yet other Conversations, nowhere more beautifully than where he makes Sidney remind Lord Brooke of their experiences during a walk by the sea, and how, " when our conversation paused a while in the stillness of midnight, we heard the distant waves break heavily. Their sound, you remarked, was such as you could imagine the sound of a giant might be, who, coming back from travel into some smooth and level and still and solitary place, with all his armour and all his spoils about him, casts himself slumberously down to rest" (302). To this there should be added a commentary from yet another context, explaining the significance of beauty : I do believe that beauty, in its early innocence, has something of what, for want of a better and more definite name, we call etherial ; something pure and rapid, something that stands impassably between us and evil, and holds our little world from ruin and corruption, something that unites us here in love and amity, inas- much as what is mortal can be united, and converts us at last to itself in fulness and perfection, (vi. 232.) In all of these quotations there will be noticed, explicit or implicit, the naturalistic philosophy that was so popular with some of Landor's early (( THALASSIUS " 217 contemporaries. It is not mere sensuous delight Chapter in nature they express, and he with them, but a L reason and interpretation of this for a moral end. It is because of this philosophy, this turning to high moral account of a sensuous experience, that Landor was able to sanctify and sustain Swinburne's passion for the sea. No other so superb and lasting passion ever moved Swinburne. But at its fervent beginning it was as independent as such a passion can be, and certainly demanded no reference of other activities to itself as a controlling principle. It was non - moral. " Thalassius " records how Landor made it moral. First it was non-moral, or nearly so : and it was possible for the " man foiled in love and weary of loving " of Poems and Ballads (I.) to espouse the sea, or death, or moral anarchy as equally acceptable refuges from his distress. So the " Triumph of Time," his first great poem relating to the sea, witnesses : I will go back to the great sweet mother, Mother and lover of men, the sea, I will go down to her, I and none other, Close with her, kiss her, and mix her with me ; Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast ; O fair white mother, in days long past Born without sister, born without brother, Set free my soul as thy soul is free. Here there is, it must be admitted, moral aspira- tion in the last line ; but it is faint, and falls at once into disuse : I shall go my ways, tread out my measure, Fill the days of my daily breath 218 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter With fugitive things not good to treasure, ^- Do as the world doth, say as it saith. For a while the sea becomes even a menace and the memorial of a curse : in this same poem, despite the sweetness of the tender heart, she is Fair mother, fed with the lives of men, Thou art subtle and cruel of heart, men say : Thou hast taken and shall not render again ; Thou art full of thy dead, and cold as they ; and in later poems her lover comes to speak more and more like the unenamoured " men " of these lines. So he does in " A Lamentation," where no memory of things seen and heard at sea, wind and the division of waves, stars or sunrise, can dispel the sense of imminent doom : Or ever the stars were made, or skies, Grief was born and the kinless night. . . . The situation remains practically unchanged throughout Atalanta in Calydon. Meleager has indeed seen great things, with his fellow- Argonauts ; but the general cry, even when the sea is remembered, is one of tribulation : . . . thunder of storm on the sands, And wailing of wives on the shore, Loud shoals and shipwrecking reefs. Fierce air and violent light ; Sail rent and sundering oar, Darkness and noises of night. It is not until the first of the Songs before Sunrise came to be written that the sea became (what it thereafter remained in Swinburne's poems) a noble spiritual as well as a comforting physical presence. Especially is this evident in " THALASSIUS " 219 two poems which have already been shown to Chapter subscribe to Landor as in some degree their L inspiration : the " Prelude," an aristocratic re- publican poem of the political school of Landor, closing (as so many of Swinburne's later poems close) with a picture of the sea ; and the " Eve of Revolution," where England is invoked : O thou, clothed round with raiment of white waves, Thy brave brows brightening through the grey wet air, Thou, lulled with sea-sounds of a thousand caves, And lit with seashine to thine inland lair. • ••••• O by the centuries of thy glorious graves, By the live light of the earth that was thy care. Live. . . . And the following stanzas go on to amplify this invocation — by the names of these glorious dead : Milton, Shelley, and Landor. In Erechtheus, as the last chapter has shown, a crown of praise is placed on the brows of Athens. The circlet is a sea-coronal, a sea- tribute — though a tribute enforced, as it were, Torn from the wave's edge whitening, that her head should " wear worship for a gar- land." By the time the " Ode to Athens " came to be written, city and sea are friends again. The Aeschylian and poetic necessity (present in Erechtheus) of making Athens represent the land and her enemies the battering sea is over. All that is remembered concerns Salamis and the " Salaminian seamen," who made liberty and the sea a dual glory. And this is typical of Swinburne's feelins whenever he moralises about '13 220 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter the sca during his entire maturity. It is an L emblem of Uberty. It is also more than this, for it functions both as cause and as symbol of an aspiration which is essentially religious. Other writers had expressed just such an aspiration : Landor, as we have seen in the quotations just given, where he shows himself responsive to the beneficence of Nature met face to face, undisturbed and solitary, in groves, on promontories, or along the sea-shore ; Shelley, even more than Landor (though each expresses with individual emphasis the same eighteenth- century romance of distance) : ... I love all waste And solitary places ; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be : And Swinburne, coming after them, only restates the underlying thought. He does not change it ; he does not give it, especially as compared with Shelley, any new significance ; but he does colour it with his own peculiar loves, of heroes and the sea itself. Sometimes his delight in sea-spaces is simple — the delight of a bird in the air, of wind in an open moor. He follows every shift of waves visible from skyline to shore ; exults in the breach or lapse of water, in foam on reefs, or the pulse of the tide felt among creeks and inlets, " lined and paven with sea flowers " (as in those desolate salt marshes of Dunwich which " Off Shore " and " By the North Sea " make so memorable). But the desolate miles and changeless leagues grow, soon, too narrow a ii THALASSIUS " 221 confine for him : and there conies as it were an Chapter extension of horizons giving out into the infinite. L Here he hovers, brooding and content ; or if he send his soul out, it comes back with no assurance or answer, yet with peace : Slowly, gladly, full of peace and wonder Grows his heart who journeys here alone. Earth and all its thoughts sink under Deep as deep in water sinks a stone. He even seeks out, as though to heighten this sense of spiritual liberation, some vantage point toward the Arctic ocean, finding comfort in the thought that these waters are limitless : These whereby we stand no shore beyond us limits, these are free. Gazing hence, we see the water that grows iron round the Pole, From the shore that hath no shore beyond it set in all the sea. His meditation here may be thought unprofit- able. At least it is genuine, and he strove to give it no factitious appeal : Friend, who knows if death indeed have life, or life have death for goal ? Silence answering only strikes response reverberate on the soul From the shore that hath no shore beyond it set in all the sea. Then there come more auspicious seasons — when he himself is dissatisfied with mere negation. The spacious sea sets his spirit roaming ; and it returns assured. In one great poem ("In the Bay ") his spirit longs for the companionship of Marlowe and of Shelley : 222 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter Above the soft sweep of the breathless bay, ■^* South-westward, far past flight of night and day. Lower than the sunken sunset sinks, and higher Than dawn can freak the front of heaven with fire, My thought with eyes and wings made wide makes way To find the place of souls that I desire. If any place for any soul there be, Disrobed and disentramnielled ; if the might, The fire and force that filled with ardent light. The souls whose shadow is half the light we see, Survive, and be suppressed not of the night, — This hour should show what all day hid from me. He is not soon assured, nor does he suddenly find them. There is doubt, search and question, pathetic appeal : O well-beloved, our brethren, if ye be, Then are we not forsaken. But at the end there is a deliberate confession of faith in some kind of immortality : Ye rise not, and ye set not : we that say Ye rise and set like hopes that set and rise. Look yet but seaward from a land-locked bay ; But where at last the sea's line is the sky's, And truth and hope one sunlight in your eyes, No sunrise and no sunset marks their day. It is safe to say that in hardly another circum- stance in his published formal literary work — the circumstance is somewhat different in his private correspondence — does Swinburne allow himself similar liberty in confessing a faith of this sort : except one — where his expression is even more forceful than it is here. It is the circumstance, constantly recurring throughout " THALASSIUS " 223 his life, in which he thinks of Landor. If one chapter may use the figure he so often used, the liorizon L and sea over which his spirit broods seem to widen immeasurably, as beneath a sudden sun- rise, when the memory of this love comes upon them, giving back into measureless distance. It is so in that earliest lament for Landor which is the spiritual crown of Poems and Ballads (I.). There, by " the white wandering waste of sea, far north," he hears of his master's death, and yet appeals to him with a faith in his continued existence that becomes firmer as the poem progresses, up to the final acclamation — royal and released, Soul, as thou art. It is, but less certainly, so in the " Prelude " to Songs before Sunrise, where, as has been shown, he is evidently thinking of Landor as one of the prophetic souls unresting, who think long Till they discern as from a hill At the sun's hour of morning song, Known of souls only, and those souls free, The sacred spaces of the sea. It is so in the " Centenary " poem, and again in the last poem referring to Landor, " On tlie Death of Mrs. Lvnn Linton " — in these last two cases unconnected with the sea. It is so obviously in " Thalassius," witnessing as it does of one of the influences that made Swinburne's splendidly sensuous love of the sea spiritual also, and changed his agnosticism into a posi- tive faith : 224 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter And hope the high song tauglit him : hope whose eyes '_ Can sound the seas unsoundable, the skies Inaccessible of eyesight ; that can see What earth beholds not, hear what wind and sea Hear not, and speak what all these crying in one Can speak not to the sun. CHAPTER XI DE AMORE For love the high song taught him : love that turns God's heart toward man as man's to Godward : love That life and death and life are fashioned of. Love that, though body and soul were overthrown, Should live for love's sake of itself alone, Though spirit and flesh were one thing doomed and dead, Not wholly annihilated. {Thalassius.) Swinburne here confesses that Land or taught chapter him of Love : not Pandemos, but Urania. And ' it is now for us to review briefly those aspects of Landor's work and of Swinburne's which support this profession of allegiance. Swinburne's praise of Landor's treatment of gentle and domestic love has already been given : for such themes are frequent among the " light verse " of Landor's that he so exuberantly praises in connection with extracts of it in Locker-Lampson's Anthology (303). His praise of Landor's treatment of tragic and mad passion is as readily forthcoming : The very finest flower of his immortal dialogues is probably to be found in the single volume comprising only Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans ; 225 Q 226 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter his utmost command of passion and pathos may be tested by its transcendent success in the distilled and concentrated tragedy of Tiberius and Vipsania, where for once he shows a quality more proper to romantic than classical imagination — the subtle and sublime and terrible power to enter the dark vestibule of dis- traction, to throw the whole force of his fancy, the whole fire of his spirit, into the " shadowing passion " (as Shakespeare calls it) of gradually imminent insanity (304). Fortunately, Landor is in no need of a com- mentator to shape him to this praise : to those who know the power of his truly " distilled and concentrated " tragedies it will seem little more than adequate ; to those who are not so informed, even such description as is possible here of his conception of love, will at least indicate that such praise is not misplaced. For Landor is not only the dramatist but the philosopher and essayist of love : and the spirit which makes luminous his most easily quotable passages on this subject is the same which lightens even his " vestibules of distraction." No light of quite this perfect and mellow ray was displayed by any other of Swinburne's heroes or associates — no message at once so tender and manly, serene and com- prehensive, reasonable and mystical, was given him, perhaps at all. Enough has already been said on some aspects of this topic in the chapter of transitions, where both Landor's possible contribution to the passional and pagan elements of Poems and Ballads and his acknowledged aid in maturing Swinburne's conception have been described : the first almost as fully as Landor's not extensive DE AMORE 227 treatment permits, the second in its negative Chapter rather than positive phase. This latter is of the i^ first importance, for Landor beUeved with his Petrarca that " if love be holy, no sentiment is so essentially divine " (305), and made many of his characters the spokesmen of such a philosophy. Such a spokesman is his Beatrice, who reminds Dante in the Conversation that " love is the kindest and the gentlest breath of God " (306) ; or Aspasia, who sums up the matter : How wrong are all who for ever do not follow Love, under one form or another ! There is no God but he, the framer, the preserver of the world, the ])ure In- telligence ! All wisdom that is not enlightened and guided by him is perturbed and perverted (307). Equally admirable is the delicacy with which Landor describes love, inarticulate, pensive, quiet. " Could Sappho be ignorant how infantinely inarticulate is early love ? " his Cleonc replies to Aspasia as they discuss the alleged answer to the enamoured Alcaeus. " Could she be ignorant that shame and fear seize it unrelentingly by the throat, while hard-hearted impudence stands at ease, prompt at opportunity, and profuse in declarations ? " There is gloom in deep love, as in deep water : there is a silence in it which suspends the foot, and the folded arms and the dejected head are the images it reflects. No voice shakes the surface : the muses themselves approach it with a tardy and a timid step, and with a low and tremulous and melancholy song (308). And as perfect and stately is his avowed belief in love's immortality : 228 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter The heart that has once been bathed in love's pure -^^- fountain retains the pulse of youth for ever (309) ; and again — But we believe that our affections outlive us, and that Love is not a stranger in Elysium (310). It is then with such precepts that the sea child was taught; with such high songs that he was instructed. And these high songs he heard More than all notes of any landward bird ; and learned how . . . the breath, Too frail for life, may be more strong than death ; And this poor flash of Sense in life, that gleams As a ghost's glory in dreams. More stabile than the world's own heart's root seems. By that strong faith of lordliest love which gives To death's own sightless-seeming eyes a light Clearer, to death's bare bones a verier might Than shines or strikes from any man that lives. So much for Swinburne's general conception of love as it was inspired by Landor. And now it may be permitted to point out how particular aspects of this conception show a sympathy with Landor which confirms the thesis of general inspiration as, in some measure, deriving from him. Swinburne's early poems — the series end- ing with Atalanta in Calydon — may have given little evidence of having been instructed of the divinity of love : as has been shown. There is, however, some evidence of it, already referred to in the opening chapter as witnessing to the truth of our early statement, that Swinburne and DE AMORE 229 Landor were spiritually akin : and this is the chapter love of children. But this sentiment in Swinburne establishes not only kinship but inheritance from Landor — and from that romantic tradition in this special connection which Landor represents. Swinburne must have loved children in no matter what age he was born (if one can imagine him born outside the nineteenth century) ; but it is certain that, coming when he did, his innate love was duly influenced by the eighteenth-century esteem of childhood. He praises the spirit as it is mani- fested in Landor, " the tender and ardent love for children . . . (which) makes fragrant alike the pages of his writing and the records of his life." And, in praising this aspect of his master's genius he sets his sign of acceptation upon what is sometimes as nearly infant worship as could be possibly expected outside the " Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollec- tions of Childhood." His own later poems are witness to this fact. And these are the senti- ments he accepted : How much fondness, how much generosity, what hosts of other virtues, courage, constancy, patriotism, spring into the father's heart from cradle of his child. These slender and graceful columns (children) are not only the ornament, but also the support of society. Men are the braver for the reverence they bear toward them, and in them do they find their reward. The pleasure a man receives from his children re- sembles that which, with more propriety than any other, we may attribute to the Divinity. The first result of this instruction in Swinburne's 230 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter poetry has already been commented on : the 1 singularly lovely picture of Althaea and the infant Meleager in Atalanta in Calydon. This, it will be remembered, together with the picture of the " old man honourable " of the 3rd Episode, is the one light in a drama whose paths are dark indeed. The light grew ; and its perfect day gave birth to poems among the loveliest on children in our language — " The Salt of the Earth," "Etude Realiste," "Babyhood," "Not a Child," "Children," — to name but a few of many whose perfection it is impossible to describe, scarcely possible to illustrate here except with fragments that wrong the whole from which they are taken. Their general music may however be caught in this single stave from " Babyhood " : All heaven, in every baby born, All absolute of earthly leaven, Reveals itself, tho' man may scorn All heaven. Swinburne may be thought (with little perver- sion of the truth) to have been such a man — for when he was not scorning " oppressive heaven," as in Atalanta, he might not seldom be found abusing organised religion, and voiding his store of eighteenth-century anti-clerical spleen upon priests and priestcraft. But in the presence of children his bitterness is thrown into discard. In this connection, if priests be as he describes them in the last great poem that he wrote, " The Altar of Righteousness," then he is their opposite : Priests gazed upon God in the eyes of a babe new-born, and therein Beheld not heaven and the wise glad secret of love, but sin. DE AMORE 231 For in the same poem he does reverence (so Chapter long withheld) to " the child that we see in Christ," 1 and lays his carol for tribute upon the manger of Bethlehem : Then soft as the dews of night, As the star of the sundown bright, As the heart of the sea's hymn deep And sweet as the balm of sleep Arose on the Avorld a light. Too pure for the skies to keep. This marks, surely, a far journey from Poems and Ballads, and the so avidly elaborated con- ception of the neo-pagan who in the " Hymn to Proserpine " glories in the birth of his Goddess, superb from the sea, and compares it with that of the Virgin — " weeping, a slave among slaves and rejected." It is a measure of Swinburne's development. And it is also in some intangible way a measure of what Landor meant to him. An equal progress may be gauged by contrast- ing his later with his early treatment of other aspects of love ; and by noting his developed power to give significant expression to sentiments of love which are, like the early passion of Landor's description, so often infantinely inarticulate. The classic example of his mature concep- tion is, of course, his version of the greatest of love stories, Tristram of Lyonesse. The theme came straight to his hands, with most of its perfections on it, from Thomas, Beroul, and the compiler of the romance of Tristram — and he has retold it with great faithfulness, neglecting no important incident of the original ; except 232 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter in SO far as he has minimised the importance of L the love potion and enlarged upon the forces of love and fate as sponsors of this sublime tragedy. Even this is in a measure prepared for by the early versions of the story — especially by Beroul's, where the efficacy of the love drink is limited to six years — for in these there come moments of reflection when the lovers, separately, suddenly find themselves unswayed by the currents that enthrall and divinise them. Yet their medita- tions under these circumstances are generally personal : Swinburne makes them cosmic. He gives to his Tristram and Iseult in their " life of tears and fire " the rapture and grief of the sea for sympathy ; he makes their melancholy and their glory germane to the stars. Withal he does not forget the main springs of physical passion ; this is no puritan tragedy. The poet of Poems and Ballads would have had a strange develop- ment if it were. The passional and physical aspects of love are emphasised — with all his power of allusion and interpretation. Old themes reappear : the lovers are oppressed by the same eternal burden given such vivid expression in the first volume — the brevity of things too sweet ; their love song is an " Aubade " of the Proven9al order ; Iseult, like the knight of " Laus Veneris " and his similars (in Morris or Browning), is "perfect in her transgression" : the heaven she discards is the Albigeois heaven that Rosamond despises ; the universal law of which complaint is made is the same that tortures Atalanta in Calydon; with this difference — there is now no frenzy. Things sad are matched with things DE AMORE 233 glad, and apparent inequipoise is viewed with a Chapter new calm, sprung from the will to esteem highly 1 the things that are glad. Love is as bitter as it ever was ; the lament upon love more moving, because constrained, an appeal after long service : And now, O Love, what comfort ? But the joy of love is matched against its grief — Love's reward follows upon this invoca- tion, and close upon Iseult's vigil come the splendid days at Joyous Gard : And their great love was mixed with all things great As life being lovely, and yet being strong like fate. Dramatically as well as philosophically Swin- burne then approves the creed the " high song taught " ; and with Landor's praise of love leaves his own as an equal accompaniment : Love, that is first and last of all things made, The light that has the living world for shade, • ••••• Love that keeps all the choir of lives in chime ; Love that is blood within the veins of time. There is yet one other aspect of this subject, which it were as unhappy to forget as it is happy to remember. It proves Swinburne to be among those his own enviable phrase describes as our lordliest lovers of love. Furthermore, it again exhibits his tender sympathy with the master who taught him of it : " There is a silence in (deep love) which suspends the foot, and the folded arms and the dejected head are the images it reflects." This is the voice he gives to love inarticulate. Eros and Pandemia and Urania 234 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter had spoken through him : love oppressed and 1 hopeless, frenzied, heroic, tender ; and according to the perfection of his utterance had left him gloriously crowned as the poet of love. It is even a higher glory that comes to him in this last office. No words of praise are needed for the poem (dedicated to his sister, Alice Swinburne, and prefaced to his great tragedy Locrine) in which he performs it, so perfectly does it guard and yet reveal the perfection that is its theme. He is one with Landor's muses in approaching it — and they go " with a tardy and a timid step, and with a low and tremulous " song : The love that comes and goes hke wind or fire Hath words and wings wherewith to speak and flee. But love more deep than passion's deep desire, Clear and inviolable as the unsounded sea, What wings of words may serve to set it free. To lift and lead it homeward ? Time and death Are less than love : or man's live Spirit saith False, when he deems his life is more than breath. II No words may utter love ; no sovereign song Speak all it would for love's sake. Yet would I Fain cast in moulded rhymes that do me wrong Some little part of all my love. . . . Ill Love needs not song nor speech to say what love Would speak or sing, were speech and song not weak To bear the sense-belated soul above, And bid the lips of silence breathe and speak. Nor power nor will has love to find or seek Words indiscoverable, ampler strains of song DE AMORE 235 Than ever hailed him fair or showed him strong : Chapter And less than these should do him worse than wrong. ^I- But if the gracious witness borne of words Take not from speechless love the secret grace That binds it round with silence, and engirds Its heart with memories fair as heaven's own face, Let love take courage for a little space To speak and be rebuked not of the soul. Whose utterance, ere the unwitting speech be whole, Rebukes itself, and craves again control. CHAPTER XII EPILOGUE Chapter We havc HOW followed the development of Swin- "VTT ; burne's genius from its earliest to its latest period, and have noted the circumstances in this develop- ment that show " Thalassius " to be true auto- biography. This poem describes a relationship between Landor and Swinburne, involving a spiritual fatherhood on the one side and a spiritual sonship on the other. And we have seen that because of similarities in temper, in circum- stances of birth and social tradition and training, in instinct of devotion to liberty and to art, both were qualified to enter into and to sustain this relationship in the intimate and yet liberal way which made subserviency of the younger to the older impossible, and real difference between them equally so. Swinburne says that Landor taught him to love liberty and to hate tyranny, and we have seen that his first published work. The Queen Mother, witnesses of this love and this hate. He records that as a youth, fresh from the instruction of his spirit's father, Love met him, and led him through wild mad days. And we have seen how in almost the earliest of his poems and ballads the mood is already acrid, and the song already 236 EPILOGUE 237 sad ; demonstrably not in fulfilment of Landor's Chapter precept or example, but governed now by one, '. now by another literary influence alien to him, distinct from his almost Greek clarity and con- fidence. Here, too, it was seen that the brightest and highest songs were close in spirit to Landor and in time to the " pilgrimage " Swinburne made to him : that, indeed, Landor was leading toward a higher poetic mood. After Poems and Ballads the aftermath, as it were, of the erotic mood shrouds Atalanta in gloom. But there is a faith even there that is greater than the prevalent despair : and this is the faith in noble manhood — the sort of man- hood exemplified by Landor ; and faith in the strength of song to overthrow tyranny — such a " sword of song " as Landor had wielded through- out his life. The logical outcome of this faith is the " Ode on the Insurrection in Candia " which follows soon after Atalanta ; and " A Song of Italy." The first of these poems brought Swinburne into relationship with Mazzini. From him a great and noble influence descended upon Swinburne, and it was nobly responded to. But the old ingrained individualism, the old simple love of liberty and hatred of oppression was not to be subdued to the requirements of this new influence ; and the Singer before Sunrise, who, as a Mazzinian should have chanted of collectivism and duty, sang, not seldom and not weakly, of proud independence and knight-errantry scornful of mean men. Here, too, he was one with Landor. Perhaps, had he been able to receive Mazzini's 238 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter doctrine in its fulness, to understand some of the — '. subtleties of political and social organisation at which it hinted, Songs before Sunrise would be even greater than it is. He was not able to receive always, or always to understand, these matters, and so the idea of freedom in these poems receives a confident trust commensurate rather with eighteenth- than with nineteenth-century practice. Even so the collection is noble and imperishably great, a trumpet call for the one fundamental liberty, which is political ; and a witness of the dual nature of all great art — high moral passion and perfect love of beauty. Songs before Sunrise marks the height of Swinburne's first great productive period, and Landor, having accompanied him thus far, goes with him yet further : first to the triumphant celebration of Athens which is the theme of Erechtheus (1876), obviously one in sympathy with that passionate eighteenth- and early nine- teenth-century Hellenism of which Landor was the leader. Here not only love of Greece but love of life also gives proof of a moral advance in the poet who, but a few years before, had almost hopelessly bewailed in Atalanta in Caly- don the oppressions of heaven and the sorrows of earth. The theme of Erechtheus is taken up again in two later poems, " Athens : An Ode " (1881) and " For Greece and Crete " (1897), the latter poem showing by its date how enduring a trait in Swinburne's character was his love for Greece, and how persistently he followed the command and example to love and serve liberty. The relationship with Landor shown in these EPILOGUE 239 poems is important, but it is even more intimate Chapter in the poems on the sea. In these the attitude ! toward nature, the significant and unique love of the sea itself, find support in Landor's philo- sophy, " We are what Suns and Winds and Water make us," and find a moralising force and urge toward positive faith in the memory of Landor himself. Wide as sea horizons may be, and comforting to the poet who so often pictures himself as brooding over them, when the love of Landor, as light, comes upon them, they widen immeasurably, give back into infinite reaches ; and between this light and infinity comes to Swinburne belief in immortality, and a vision of the soul. Swinburne's poems on love also respond (as does every class of his poetry) to his hero-worship. His conception of Love grew to include those elements forgotten in Poems and Ballads, by operation of which Love is (in the words of Landor's Aspasia) " the framer, the preserver of the world, the pure Intelligence." Tliey are dramas of the manifold moods of love that Landor's explanation of them, comprehensive and tender, reveals as so absolutely lovely. They are the consummation of his development ; adorn- ing his entire mature period, to the end ; and to remember them is but to concur in the transfer- ence to himself made in the beginning of this essay of his own tribute to Landor — " his tender and ardent love for children, of animals and of flowers, make fragrant alike the pages of his writings and the records of his life," — and in the addition to this of praise for yet one other circum- 240 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Chapter stance of singular felicity — that with these poems ^^^' are others, even nobler, in which he pays tribute to his heroes, and most to his supreme hero, who in the beginning had helped to establish a boy-worshipper's spontaneous delight in prais- ing famous men and " our fathers that were before us." APPENDICES Dealing with the Dating Problem in Poems and Ballads and WITH SOME External Incidents that help to solve it ; and showing Traces in Swinburne's E^vrly Work of his Affection for Baudelaire, Arnold, Meredith, and Hugo. PAGE Appendix I. — Showing the importance of the problem, and establishing the dates of " Laus Veneris," " Aholibah," and " The Masque of Queen Bersabe " . . . 243 Appendix II. — Showing the probable date of " Anactoria " considering its relationship with certain poems of erotic love of early date ...... 251 Appendix III. — Showing the relationship of " Anactoria " with Atalanta in Calydon ; and concluding that it is of middle date, 1863 . . . . . .257 Appendix IV. — Showing that " A Ballad of Burdens," " A Lamentation," " To Victor Hugo," " Ilicet " and its corollary " The Garden of Proserpine," and " Felise " relate to Atalanta in Calydon ; and that by its relation- ship with this drama " Anactoria " enters into this family of poems ...... 260 Appendix V. — Showing that " Anactoria " relates to " Satia Te Sanguine " and to " The Triumph of Time " . 266 Appendix VI. — Showing that the explanation Swinburne gives of " Anactoria," and the development of the moods of that poem from violent love to violent blas- phemy and thence to regained pride of life, is also the explanation of the development of the moods of Poems and Ballads. 241 R 242 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR PAQE Chronology of Poems and Ballads as estimated in accordance with this principle, in connection with inter- relationships estimated in earlier Appendices, and with the known dates ...... 268 Appendix VII. — Swinburne and Baudelaire . . . 274 Appendix VIII. — Matthew Arnold and Swinburne . . 278 Appendix IX. — George Meredith's Modern Love and Swin- burne ....... 281 Appendix X. — Notes on Hugo's influence in this early period of Swinburne's work .... 284 APPENDIX I So much of the quarrel over Swinburne's early poems Appendix was the result of a misconception as to their order of ^' composition, and of mistaken deductions therefrom as to the poet's unsatisfactory development, that it may be worth while to record what is actually known of their chronology, and what of it is surmisable from their inter-relationship. Poems and Ballads (First Series) was published in 1866 ; but the " Dedication " (the last poem in the collection) is dated 1865, and in it the poet speaks of the poems as fruits of his growing, leaves of his un- folding : Some scattered in seven years'' traces, As they fell from the boy that was then ; Long left among idle green places, Or gathered but now among men. Seven years, counting back from 1865, would define the period of composition as from 1859 to 1865. And lest any one should suppose that " seven " is mere ballad convention, it must be noticed that the " Dedication " definitely places the terminus a quo in the days of tutelage (the last of which was in 1859) : Some sang to me dreaming in class-time, Ajid truant in hand as in tongue ; For the youngest were born of boy's pastime, The eldest are young. • •••••• Tunes touched from a harp with man's fingers. Or blown with boy's mouth in a reed. Swinburne, it is true, later said that he had destroyed everj^ scrap of his college MS. Well and good : he prob- ably did — but this is not equivalent to saying that he 243 244 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Appendix did not remember and perhaps rewrite and publish some '_ of the poems so destroyed. In addition to this general statement, certain indis- putable facts are forthcoming to establish the opening of the period of these poems at an early date. Eight poems of the series had appeared previous to their pubHcation in 1866 : " The Bloody Son " (under title of " The Fratricide ") in Once a Week, February 15, 1862 ; " A Song in Time of Order," " A Song in Time of Revolution," "Before Parting," "After Death," " Faustine " (one of the poems found offensive by the 1866 critics) " The Sundew," and " August," in the Spectator, April to September 1862. Furthermore the poem " Hermaphroditus " is dated March 1863. And to this date, or at least within a year or so of it, may be assigned a somewhat similar poem, " Fragoletta " ; some sanction for this being derived from the " Notes of the Designs of the Old Masters in Florence" {Essays and Studies, p. 346), which, published in 1868, records impressions and experiences of 1864 : " Next, three heads together ; the first may be boy's or girl's, having in it the delicious doubt of ungrown beauty, pausing at the point where the ways of loveliness divide ; we may give it the typical strawberry flower [Fragoletta) and leave it to the Loves." The poem " In Memory of Walter Savage Landor " was certainly written in 1864, the year of Landor' s death, and of the visit to Italy — (" As once this year," st. 4). " Itylus " belongs to nearly the same season, having been written in a garden in Fiesole, " with the whole air vociferous with nightingales," as Swinburne de- scribed it to Mr. Gosse (Fortnightly Review, xci. p. 1019). Poems dated by recollection of contemporaries in- clude the " Hymn to Proserpine," which William Bell Scott (a gentleman whom Swinburne very much honoured — see the Ode — but once chastised for his " anecdotage ") places prior to 1862 ; and " Laus Veneris," which he places in that year. APPENDIX I 245 Of poems to be dated approximately by reference to Appendix other poems of known date, one preparatory word may ^' be said. There is often observable correspondence between poems of known date. For instance, the idea underlying " Faustine " (1862) is that of the continuance, through many bodies, of a spirit doomed from the first to evil and no good. Rosamond (of 1860) expresses something of a corollary thought when she identifies herself, as one in the continuity of love, with Helen, Crcssida, and Guenevere. Passages from " After Death " (1862) echo or parallel others from " Laus Veneris " (1862 ?) ; see below. Compare also " A Song in Time of Revolution " (1862) st. 5-8 (on this same theme, the abasement of the evil and voluptuous great) with " Laus Veneris " or " The Queen Mother " ; see below. Note the connection between " A Song in Time of Order " and " A Song in Time of Revolution " (both of 1862). Compare the artist's vision in " Before Parting " (1862), " I know each shadow of your lips by rote," with You have the eyes men choose to paint, you know. And just that soft turn in your httle throat, etc. (Queen Mother, ii.) It may therefore be allowable to suppose that poems allied in subject and treatment (other evidence for dating being favourable or wanting) are of the same general time of composition — the aim being to arrange the Poems and Ballads in rough chronological order. " Laus Veneris " Certain of the poems connect themselves ■with the two dramas published in 1860 : " Laus Veneris," "Aholibah," " The Masque of Queen Bcrsabe." Of these " Laus Veneris," hardest hit by the 1866 reviewers, must have been written between 1860 and 1862. The stanza (and partly the ])hil()s<)phy : cf. stanzas 18 and 19 with the Rubdit/aL xWii and Iviii) is from the Rubdiydt of Omar Khayydm, given to 246 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Appendix fame after 1860 when Rossetti discovered the Httle book ^' (unnoticed at its pubhcation in 1859), only that Swin- burne pairs his stanzas by rhyming the third hnes of the members of each pair. " Laus Veneris," according to one tale, was written out very rapidly — thirteen stanzas in one hour — almost as soon as FitzGerald's poem had been read. W. B. Scott {Autobiographical Notes, ii. 69) is authority for the later date, 1862. Towards Christmas of that year, bound for a vacation at Tynemouth, his party was suddenly joined by Swinburne, who had posted to Morpeth from Wallingford early that morning. Why so early he could not explain : it seemed a secret. Nevertheless, by the much-resounding sea something evolved : to wit, " Laus Veneris " and the " Hymn to Proserpine," the sea full of sympathy meanwhile, " its breaking waves running the whole length of the long level sands toward Cullercoats, and sounding like far-off acclamation." In all probability the poems were but newly composed (note stanza 22, the beautiful allusion to the advent of " Christ's Birthnight "). Compare the idea of unforgivable sin in " Laus Veneris " with a similar idea in The Queen Mother ; also the picture of hell ; and the Pre-Raphaelite contrast of fighting to love. The Queen Mother, 1860 Laus Veneris Unforgivable Sin Den. — A grave thing is it to feel Me, most forsaken of all souls sure of hell, that fell ; But who should fear it if I slip Me satiated with things in- the chance, satiable ; And make some holy blunder in Me, for whose sake the extreme my end, hell makes mirth, Translating sin by penitence? Yea, laughter kindles at the heart For none of hell. ^gt. 36.) Sinned ever yet my way ; treason Yea, with red sin the faces of and lust, them shine ; Sick apes, red murder, a familiar But in all these there was no fool, sin like mine ; etc. To this new trick set by them, (St. 52.) will be shamed In me forever. (iv. 2, p. 114.) APPENDIX I 247 The Albigeois Hell as in '' Aucassin and Nicolette'''' Appendix All fair lords and knights, Into sad hell where all sweet love ^- Great kings with gold work hath end. wrought into their hair, ..... Strong men of price and such as There are the naked faces of great play or sing, kings, Delicate ladies with well-shodden The singing folk with all their feet, lute-playings ; Tall queens in silk wear and all ..... royal things . . . There sit the knights that were All shall God set awork. ... so great of hand, We shall lie down and curse. . . . The ladies that were queens of (iv. 2, p. 112.) fair green land. (St. 46 and 47.) Pre-Raphaelite (Morris) contrast of War to Love I would have paid gold coin to The clean great time of goodly turn a man, fight, etc. /t^^. -jj x And get me bone to handle the good steel. The fair pure sword smites out in (i. 3, p. 22.) subtle ways, etc. ,^^ -^ ^ Rows of beautiful mailed men, etc. (St. 55.) The idea occurs also in Chastelard and Atalanta, however. But it does so inevitably, for the Pre- Raphaelites, with whom Swinburne was at this early- time associated, were nourished on the "Morte d' Arthur" and on Froissart, where the chief alternative to love is the practice or actuality of fighting. In Atalanta there is praise of The brilliance of battle, the bloom and the beauty, the splendour of spears. In Chastelard, Mary, like Catherine, longs to know that clean ardour : . . . twice I laughed — I tell you, twice my heart swelled out with thirst To be into the battle. /•• , ^ Other ideas in Chastelard which repeat those of " I>aus Veneris " include the whole idea of the drama. The knight of Mount Horscl is merely the type of which Chastelard is the individual. In him surges the bitter- 248 SWINBURNE AND LANDOR Appendix sweet madness of love which rose first in the hot chamber '_ of Venus Panemia : I know her ways of loving, all of them ; A sweet soft way the first is ; afterward It burns and bites like fire ; the end of that, Charred dust and eyelids bitten through with smoke. (i. 1.) Actual description of Mary as Venus ("A Venus crowned that eats the hearts of men") and many other details enforce the idea of the connection of the drama Chastelard with " Laus Veneris." So far then, in " Laus Veneris," we have a poem that derives from The Queen Mother and Rosamond, and con- tributes much to Chastelard, and a very little to Atalanta. Of these last two Swinburne writes that the order of the publication of his works was not that of their composi- tion. Atalanta (published 1865) was begun on the very day when he gave the final touches to Chastelard. He also writes (in the Dedicatory Epistle to his collected poems) that Chastelard was " conceived and partly written by a youngster not yet emancipated from servi- tude to college rule." Hence, from its alliance zvith two dramas of early date, we may place the terminus a quo for " Laus Veneris" in 1860 {after the " Rubdiydt" had become known to Swinburne). At the very latest, it was composed before the end of 1862. "Aholibah" and "The Masque of Bersabe" Much the same result as that obtained for " Laus Veneris" is also to be obtained from a study of the alliances of "Aholibah" and "The Masque of Queen Bersabe" (in which Aholibah, with Sappho, is one of the queens). " The Masque " has some slight connection with " Rosa- mond," where mention is made of . . . how the golden king that made God songs Chid at their ways and called them this and that : And he loved many queens with just such hair And such good eyes. . . . APPENDIX I 249 I. It also has some connection with a Morality, The Appendix Pilgrim of Pleasure, written by Swinburne for the tale by Miss Gordon (Mrs. Disney Leith), The Children of the Chapel (1864-), only that parts at least of this Morality, the Interlude of Youth for instance, seem quieter and maturer than the poems treated in this section. The general alliance of the '"''Masque" tends to place it then between the dates 1860 and 1864, or around these dates ; preferably near the earlier, for other alliances point to that date. Compare it with " After Death " (1862) and " Laus Veneris " (1862 ?). After Death (\%V,2). I had fair coins, red and wliite, And my name was as great light. I had fair clothes, green and red. And strong gold bound round my head. My live thews were of great strength. Now am I waxen a span's length. My live sides were full of lust. Now are they dried with dust. Masque of Queen Bersabe. I am the Queen of Amorites. My face was like a place of lights. With multitudes at festival. (Azubah.) lam the Queen of Scythians. My strength was like no strength of man's. (Thomyris.) There sit the knights that were so great of hand. The ladies that were queens of fair green land. Grown grey and black now, brought unto the dust. Soiled, without raiment, clad about with s