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ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUMi: :
J. M. SYNGK
By p. p. Howe
HKNRIK IBSEN
By R. Ei.i-is Roberts
THOMAS HARDY
By Lascem.ks Ahercbombie
GEORGE GISSIN'G
By Frank Swikwertov
WILLIAM MORRIS
By John Dhinkwater
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
By A. Martik Fheemak
t-n^^T^iy
u^^A/z^t/eJ ^''^c^io^u^'i
z//t^
ALGERNON CHARLES
SWINBURNE
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
EDWARD THOMAS
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
MCMXII
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
PRINTERS, PLYMOCTH
To
WALTER DE LA MARE
'Questions, royal traveller, are eas'er than answers."
THE THREE MULLA-xMULGARS.
PR
NOTE
I AM very much indebted to Mr. Theodore
Watts- Dunton for permission to quote from
Swinburne's prose and poetry in this book,
and to my friend, Mr. ChfFord Bax, for many
consultations.
E. T.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAOE
I. ATALANTA IN CALYDON 11
II. PREPARATIOxNS 24
III. THE APPROACH 69
IV. POEMS AND BALLADS 75
V. OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS 100
VL SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE 127
VII. LATER POEMS : CHARACTERISTICS 150
Vm. LATER POEMS : RESULTS ]71
IX. TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE 211
X. THE PLAYS 225
I
ATALANTA IN CALYDON
It was the age of Browning's Dramatis Personae,
William Morris's Defence of Guenevere, Landor's
Heroic Idylls, Tennyson's Idylls of the King,
Meredith's Modern Love, Robert Buchanan's
London Poems : Longfellow, Alexander Smith
and Owen Meredith were great men.
The year 1864 arrived. " The poetical atmo-
sphere was exhausted and heavy," says Professor
Mackail, " like that of a sultry afternoon darken-
ing to thunder. Out of that stagnation broke,
all in a moment, the blaze and crash oiAtalanta
in Calydon. It was something quite new, quite
unexampled. It revealed a new language in
English, a new world as it seemed in poetry."
Two years passed, and, as an Edinburgh reviewer
says, "into the midst of a well-regulated and
self-respecting society, much moved by Tenny-
son's Idylls, and altogether sympathetic with
the misfortunes of the blameless King — justly
appreciative of the domestic affection so tenderly
portrayed by Coventry Patmore's Angel in the
11
A. C. SWINBURNE
House" — appreciative also oi Atalanta in Calij-
don — " Mr. Swinburne charged impetuously with
his Poems and Ballads" Some of the Poems
and Ballads, including Fuustine, had appeared
four years earlier in the Spectator ; but the
poems accumulated made a fresh and astonish-
ing effect.
The Poems and Ballads were interesting
enough to offend many people. Atalanta can
hardly have been interesting, though it contains
an interesting story which is probably revealed
to the majority of readers by the argument
alone. Althaea, Queen of Calydon, gave birth
to Meleager after dreaming that she had brought
forth a burning brand. The Fates prophesied
that he should be strong and fortunate, but
should die as soon as the brand then in the fire
were consumed. Althaea plucked out the brand
and took care of it. ]Meleager sailed away with
Jason and became a great warrior. But in one
of his wars he gave offence to Artemis, who
therefore afflicted Calydon with a terrible wild
boar. Only after all the chiefs of Greece had
warred against it was the boar slain, and that
by the virgin Atalanta, because xVrtemis loved
her. Meleager, enamoured of Atalanta, gave
the spoil of the boar to her, thus arousing the
jealousy of his mother's two brethren. These
two Meleager slew because they attempted to
12
ATALANTA IN CALYDON
take away the spoil from Atalanta, which so
moved Althaea to anger and sorrow that she
cast the brand at length back again into the fire,
and it was consumed and JNIeleager died ; " and
his mother also endured not long after for very
sorrow ; and this was his end, and the end of that
hunting." This story is obliterated by the form
of a Greek drama, by abundant lyrics put into
the mouth of a Greek chorus, by Greek idioms
and cast of speech, and by an exuberance and
individuality of language which could not always
transmit instantaneously a definite meaning.
But the obscurity is not one of incompetence,
the imperfectly intelligible speech is not an
imperfection : at least it persuades and insinuates
itself so into the mind that perhaps not many
pause at the end of the first sentence, part of the
Chief Huntsman's address to Artemis : —
Maiden, and mistress of the months and stars
Now folded in the flowerless fields of heaven^
Goddess whom all gods love with threefold heart,
Being treble in thy divided deity,
A light for dead men and dark hours, afoot
Swift on the hills as morning, and a hand
To all things fierce and fleet that roar and range
Mortal, with gentler shafts than snow or sleep ;
Hear now and help and lift no violent hand
But favourable and fair as thine eyes beam
Hidden and shown in heaven ; for I all night
Amid the king's hounds and the hunting men
Have wrought and worshipped toward thee ; nor shall man
13
A. C. SWINBURNE
See goodlier hounds or deadlier edge of spears ;
But fur the end, that lies unreached at yet
Between the hands and on the knees of the Gods.
The effect must always be partly that of a
translation even to those who are familiar with
Greek religion ; the words have a shade of the
quality inseparable from a translation, whether
it is or is not creative, for it is to be found
in the Authorized Aversion of the Bible ; the
reader is a little confused and yet not unduly,
when he hears of Artemis as a light *' for dead
men and dark hours," of the fair-faced sun that
kills "the stars and dews and dreams and de-
solations of the night," for it is not English thus
to collect four things of four different classes,
each requiring a distinct change in the meaning
of the verb which governs them all. Perhaps
the reader at first accepts " hidden and shown,"
and even the alternative pairs, " roar and range,"
"snow or sleep," "favourable and fair," etc., as
part of the foreignness. It does not decrease.
It is not absent from :
When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain ;
, And the brown bright nightingale amorous
f Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
I The tongueless vigil and all the pain.
\ 14
ATALANTA IN CALYDON
Only, here it is apparent that "the shadows and
windy places " may be due to rhyme ; at least it
seems a false limiting or defining of the action of
the lisp of leaves and ripple of rain, as later on
" peril of shallow and firth " is a distinction with
insufficient definiteness of difference. But the
metre is powerful enough to overcome this
difficulty, or to keep it from rising ; it makes us
feel that we may go astray if we ask why the
nightingale is called " bright " as well as " brown."
Later on it may be suspected that " bright "
is due partly to Swinburne's need of alliteration,
partly to his love of the " i " sound and of bright-
ness. Anyone inclined to show and expect a
stiff exactingness will be shocked at finding
" summer " and not " spring," " autumn," or
" winter," — " remembrance," without " forget-
fulness " and so on — in the famous lyric :
Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears ;
Grief with a glass that ran ;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven ;
Summer, with flowers that fell ;
Remembrance fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell.
This, however, has that appearance of precision
which Swinburne always affected, which is
nothing but an appearance. Nor would he have
15
A. C. SWINBURNE
claimed that it was anything more. He was
filling liis verse with solemn images acceptable
to that part of the human brain which is not
occupied with the music of the words and the
reverberation of earlier images. It may be that
Time received the " gift of tears " instead of the
" glass that ran " solely for the sake of allitera-
tion. It would doubtless be better if it were
not so, but nothing can be perfect from every
point of view, and this deceitful deference to the
pure intellect I speak of chiefly to show what
Swinburne's use of the sounds and implications
of words can overcome. Reverberation of sound
and meaning as in Milton's :
Chariot and charioteer lay overturned :
and Coleridge's icicles :
Quietly shining to the shining moon :
are a great part of Atalanta. Scores of times
words and sounds are repeated as in :
Saw with strange eyes and with strange lips rejoiced,
Seeing these mine own slain of mine own, and me
Made miserable above all miseries made :
" Breath " calls for the rhyme of " death," and
"light" for "night," with more transparent
purpose than in other writing ; " all " demands
to be repeated with a persistency that is not to
be denied.
Some of the repetitions may indicate simply
16
A
ATALANTA IN CALYDON
the poet's infatuation with certain words, but
that infatuation would not be without signifi-
cance. The use of the verb and the substantive
" dream " six times in eighteen Hnes spoken by
Althsea, and the constant use of " divide " and
" division " (not to speak of " sever " and
" sunder "), and above all of " fire " and " light,"
" bright " and " shine," — these are not accidents.
" Fire " and " light," " bright " and " shine," with
" desire " and " high " and " sky," and other
words which their vowel sound and Swinburne's
usage make cognate, were to become master words
in his poetry. It can almost be said that he never
writes one of those words without repeating it or
matching it with one of the others. Whether it
be through the influence of these words or some-
thing in the " i " sound that his nature found
expressive, I cannot say, but in many of the
poems in all his books it is predominant, so that
when he praises a thing he must call it bright : —
the wind is bright, the sea is bright : — and for
him the characteristic quality of the human face
is its light.
Pure repetition, also, is one of the deliberate
properties of his style, repetition of an idea as in:
O death, a little, a little while, sweet death,
or of a sound as in :
She bore the goodliest sword of all the world,
B 17
A. C. SWINBURNE
or of botli as in :
A little since, and I was glad, and now
I never shall be glad or sad again.
Already in Atalanta, and still more in later
work, this unconscious leaning and conscious
device, sometimes became a trick.
As Swinburne loved and used the qualities
of light and fire, so he did those of other bold
and splendid things. Atalcmta is full of swift,
fleet, violent, splendid, furious, thunderous,
fierce, ravenous, tumultuous, tempestuous, sharp
things, of foam and wind, and fire and hate, and
love, hounds and horses and warriors. JNIeleager
speaks to his mother of his father's "plough-
share " being; " drawn throucrh fatal seedland of a
female field" and " furrowing her body," to beget
him, so that he " sprang and cleft " her womb.
When the herald describes Atalanta he says :
. . . From her white braced shoulder the plumed shafts
Rang, and the bow shone from her side ;
and he compares Meleager to the sun that
" strikes " the branches into leaf and bloom ; he
is " a glory among men." Death for Meleager is
the " empty weary house " which lacks "beauty,"
" swift eyes," and " might of hands and feet " :
he says that there is nothing " tcrribler " than a
mother's face. The Cliorus sings of Love :
18
ATALANTA IN CALYDON
Thy wings make light in the air as the wings of a dove.
Thy feet are as wings that divide the stream of the sea ;
Earth is thy covering to hide thee, tlie garment of thee.
Thou art swift and subtle and blind as a flame of fire ;
Before thee the laughter, behind thee the tears of desire. . . .
The boar "cried no lesser cry" than "thunder
and the roar of wintering streams." So does the
poet love the extreme that he makes Meleager
strike the boar in "the hairiest hollow of his hide."
Where they flay the boar violets " blossom and
burn " and there is a fire and light of other
flowers.
Yet with all this fury and violence and fire,
the play is a delicate thing, full of a refined
extravagance at play with primitive and simple
experiences and passions. After a speech of
three pages about her murdered brothers
Althsea says :
These dead
I shall want always to the day I die.
Perhaps she need have said nothing more but
Ai, ai!
Along with the clear, visible, and tangible
things are equally noticeable the abstractions —
time, grief, sorrow, the " holy spirit of man " —
" home-keeping days and household reverences,"
compassion and pity, gates " barred with groan-
ings manifold." Nothing that moves the eye
19
A. C. SWINBURNE
or the hejirt of men, but finds a place. And
yet all is made into music and ends in music.
The poet is the master, not his characters : thus
he will make Atalanta speak of the flash of her
own "swift white feet," and Althaea describe
herself and her brother as infants " flowerwise
feeding as the feeding bees " at their mother's
breast. This comparison, if at all permissible,
should have been made by the poet who might
be supposed to have witnessed it, not by the
woman who could not. So it will be objected.
But what would have been a flaw in another
drama is not one in Atalanta^ where what was
necessary was to do nothing inharmonious with
the loveliness of the title, Atalanta in Calydo7i.
There is nothing inharmonious. So, too, with
the style ; alliteration that could have made
another ludicrous is in this only a fit portion of
the echoing balance of the whole. Hardly before,
perhaps, except in lyrics, or in narratives like
The Eve of St. Agnes, had words been so self-
contained, so much an end in themselves, so
little fettered to what they could suggest but
\ not express. The words are everything : all
that life of heroes and passionate women, seas
and winds, has been subdued to the colour of
the words and the music of their cadence.
Where the words cannot be everything, where
two characters interchange brief speeches that
20
ATALANTA IN CALYDON
allow no lyrical development, they deserve the
parody of Lowell :
Choeus : Foolish who bites off nose, his face to spite.
OuTis : Who fears his fate, him Fate shall one day
spurn.
Chorus : The Gods themselves are pliable to Fate.
OuTis : The strong self-ruler dreads no other sway.
Chorus : Sometimes the shortest way goes most about.
OuTis : A shepherd once, I know that stars may set.
Chorus : Why fetch a compass, having stars within ?
OuTis : That thou led'st sheep fits not for leading men.
Chorus : To sleep-sealed eyes the wolf-dog barks in
vain.
The play cannot be abridged or divided
without complete destruction. There are few
separable phrases or passages in it that are not
far more beautiful in their places, because the
key to them is only to be found in the play,
not in the human breast. The whole should
be read, or heard, at a sitting, for the first time
at least. Pause, to let in the light of every
day, and it may seem as it did to Browning,
" a fuzz of words." It is very nicely balanced
above folly. It is one-sided and makes but
a single appeal. It can suffer by the in-
trusion of the world, the sound of men talk-
ing or nightingales singing. For it does not
appeal to us as men knowing aught of men or
nightingales: experience can add nothing to it,
21
A. C. SWl NBUHNE
or take away anything ; and to-day it cannot
be seriously hhiined tor a clioriis which, as
Tennyson said, abused the deity in the style of
the Hebrew prophets. The words in it have
no rich inheritance from old usage of speech or
poetry, even when they are poetic or archaic
or Biblical. They have little variety of tone,
being for the most part majestically mournful,
and never suddenly changing tone. Variety is
given chiefly by the metre, and the differences
of that are almost numberless. The blank
verse changes and does everything save speak.
As to the lyric verse it is of many forms, and
each is so clear cut and so masterful to words
without show of tyranny that a man might
suppose any words would do as well and
would maintain the same joy of metre. Hardly
do we notice in the sweetness of it an un-
English phrase like " imminence of wings " or
" the innumerable lily," after the opening :
O that I now, I too were
By deep wells and water-floods. . . .
Again and again it tempts us to recall the
opinion that the w^ords are everything, and say
that they are nothing ; certainly it matters
little what exactly is meant by "bodies of
things to be in the houses of death and of
birth." It is sufficient that the words never
' 22
AT AL ANT A IN CALYDON
impede the music, and often colour it with
something noble, or delicate, or pathetic, that
^ the " rhythm," as Burne-Jones said, " goes on
' with such a rush that it is enough to carry the
world away." Swinburne could make even a
' line of monosyllables swift and leaping by using
in the unaccented places negligible words,
like " and," " of," and " the," which are almost
silent. Tennyson wrote to the poet telling him
that he envied him his wonderful rhythmical
invention. Tennyson's own had always been
carefully experimental and subordinate ; in
Atalanta rhythm was paramount, in rule sole
and undivided.
23
II
PREPARATIONS
Swinburne was twenty-seven years old in 1864,
yet he had been before the pubhc already six-
teen years. The reader of Eraser's Magazine in
April, 1848 — the year after Tennyson's The
Princess — might have seen some verses entitled
" The Warning " put into the mouth of a
minstrel singing to the nobles and far-descended
gentlemen of England, to this purpose :
Then don't despise the working man, he's sti-ong and honest
too,
And he would rather governed be than seek to govern you ; |
But lack of proper guidance at last may make him mad,
And when the best don't govern him, he'll call upon the
bad ;
From whence will come confusion and terrible turmoil.
And all because the lawmakers, the owners of the soil.
Will hear no word of warning meant, will take no step in
time,
Before the groaning millions burst from sorrow into crime.
These verses, signed A. C. S., were dated
fi'om the Carlton Club. What the effect of the
24
PREPARATIONS
warning was in 1848 it is now hard to say, but
certain it is there was still need, in January,
1851, of a further address, and in the same
magazine. "Ye landlords rich," cried the
poet:
Ye landlords rich ! lay it well to heart.
There is peril for all at handj
For the peasant has got too mean a part
Of wealth in his native land.
With a scornful eye and a heedless mien.
And a mantle of furs so thick,
How little ye dream of the fearful care
When the labourer's wife is sick.
How little ye dream, etc. . . .
This was from the same hand. An equally
solemn but less altruistic poem, in October,
1849, had informed the readers of Fraser's
Magazine that the poet had heard a spirit sing-
ing " as from a distant sphere," in the following
words :
" And oh ! my child, be heedful that you wander not in sin.
For your sorrow will be the greater, the more you venture
in;
And the sorrows of the essence, when it leaves its fleshly
cell,
Are deeper than the angels to mortality may tell."
At the silent hour of midnight thus my mother sang to me.
And I felt that she was near ; though her form I could not
see.
•25
A. C. S\V INBUUNE
He had siin«if, too, of *' Fate that rules us here
with adamantine wand," and of how —
A peace that is based on duty,
The will and the power to think,
Can carry, unscathed in beauty,
The brave where the feeble sink. . . .
Little need was there to tell the world that
the poet had " learnt in suffering what he
taught in song " :
Hark ! how the poet sings
Whom grief is wearing ;
Like as the Hower springs
Into full bearing.
Where amid old decay
Fine skill has laid it ;
Even so the poet's lay —
His woes have made it.
This was said in April, 1849. But he had
consolations. He published a poem in the same
magazine side by side with Kingsley's Yeast, in
August, 1848, on Chopin's playing, and stanzas
addressed to a " wild floating symphony " in
March, 1849. A month before had appeared
this "' catch " :
Near the moon a pale star clinging
Harbingers another morn.
Feeble spark to mortals bringing
Hopes and cares with daylight born.
26
PREPARATIONS
Fare thee well^ thou moon of sadness !
Silent night, awhile farewell !
Will the day give grief or gladness ?
Who of Adam's race can tell ?
Fare thee well, thou moon of beauty !
Hail, thou glorious rising sun !
Let the weak be strong in duty,
Till their course, like thine, be run.
He could write playfully of love as in " Under
the Rose," but his preference was rather for the
dignified reflection that marked his last contri-
bution, in June, 1851, " A Summer Thought " :
Upon that tree wave not two leaves alike,
Yet are they all oak leaves, and all derive
From the same source, by the same means, their food.
Each hath its voice, yet when the mighty wind
Sweeps o'er them as a lyre, one song is theirs.
One hymn of praise, to the Great Lord of All.
When shall we be like them — when understand
That if we grow upon the topmost bough
Of the great tree, — or be so lowly placed
That we must touch the daisy at its foot.
One origin is ours, one aim, one work.
One God to bless, one tie of love to bind.
This poem was sufficient to prove that the
author was not "lowly placed." The reader
might also have concluded that he was twenty-
three, that he had soon afterwards fallen in
love with a lady sharing his admiration for In
27
A. C. SWINBURNE
Memoriam, and had married and rested content
and graceful
Upon the topmost bough
Of the great tree.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, in fact, was
born on April 5th, 1837, in Chapel Street, Bel-
gravia, the only son of Admiral Charles Henry
Swinburne and his wife Lady Jane Henrietta,
daughter of the third earl of Ashburnham.
What he meant by telling the exiled Hugo
that he was " born of exiles " I do not know.
From his father he had the blood of a feudal
border ftimily, "which as long ago as Edward H
had produced a man of mark in Sir Adam de
Swinburne," says Mr. Edmund Gosse in the
Contemporary Review ; from his mother, the
blood of a loyal groom of the bedchamber to
Charles I. The child was not long in Bel-
gravia. His grandfather. Sir John Edward
Swinburne, baronet, had a house at Capheaton,
in Northumberland, where the family used to
spend half the year. His father bought East
Dene, in the Isle of Wight, between Ventnor
and Niton, and this house the grandfather
shared with him for the other half-year. Close
to East Dene, at The Orchard, lived other rela-
tions, whose kindness the poet was afterwards
to recall in dedicating The Sisters to his aunt,
28
PREPARATIONS
the Lady JNlary Gordon. Here and in North-
umberland he had, as he always remembered
and repeated in his poetry,
The sun to sport in and the cliffs to scale.
The sea to clasp and wrestle with. . . .
Such joys, he said, "even now make child
and boy and man seem one." Tennyson did
not come to the Isle of Wight until 1853, but
Swinburne preferred to think, and certainly to
write, about Northumberland. That tale of
Balen and Balan, "two brethren of North-
umberland," gave him an excuse for recalling
his own pleasures in describing Balen's :
The joy that lives at heart and home.
The joy to rest, the joy to roam.
The joy of crags and scaurs he clomb.
The rapture of the encountering foam
Embraced and breasted of the boy,
The first good steed his knees bestrode.
The first wild sound of songs that flowed
Through ears that thrilled and heart that glowed.
Fulfilled his death with joy.
Swinburne thought of himself as "a northern
child of earth and sea." In Tristram of Lyonesse
he rejoiced to have Tristram and Iseult at Joyous
Gard, because that castle might be supposed
Northumbrian and he could mingle the hero with
himself and the castle with his own home —
29
A. C. SWINBURNK
The great round girth of goodly wall that showed
Where for one clear sweet season's Kngth should be
Their place of strength to rest in, fain and free,
Hy the utmost margin of the loud lone sea.
'I'he poet shared his heroine, Mary Stuart's
lon<,nng, when slie cried : " O that I were now
in saddle ! " He shared with lier, too, her pre-
ference of the moors, where " the wind and sun
make madder mirth by midsummer," to the
smoother south. Reginald in The Siders makes
the same comparison, saying that even with-
out the streams the north would be sweeter,
that even with the northern streams the south
could not " match our borders." The youthful
Swinburne bound together the pleasures of
riding, the moor and the sea, in days which he
afterwards revived for the dedication of his
third series of Poems and Ballads :
Days when I rode by moors and streams.
Reining my rhymes into buoyant order.
He was a fearless rider, a fearless climber.
He chmbed Culver Cliff in the Isle of Wight at
a great risk, to prove his nerve, and his picture
in Tristram of the birds "on some straight
rocks' ledge,"
Still as fair shapes fixed on some wondrous wall
Of minster aisle or cloister-close or hall . . .
might be a memory gained from such a climb.
30
PREPARATIONS
Riding and climbing were good, and very
good, but swimming was best of all. The north
might be better than the south : the sea was
always the sea. In after years he wrote many
poems about the sea and hardly one without it.
;The sea and not the earth, he said, was his
I mother. Sometimes he coupled with it the
wind, hailing them, as in The Garden of Cymo-
doce :
Sea, and bright wind^ and heaven of ardent air.
More dear than all things earth-born ; O to me
Mother more dear than love's own longing, sea,
More than love's eyes are, fair. . . .
Sometimes he worshipped the sun, " O sun
that we see to be God " ; but it was in the sea
that he did so. For a beautiful or a terrible
comparison he had usually to go to the sea, and
having gone there seemed to forget, certainly
made others forget, why he had gone : as when,
for example, he says that Blake's verse " pauses
and musters, and falls always as a wave does,
with the same patience of gathering form, and
rounded glory of springing curve, and sharp,
sweet flash of dishevelled and flickering foam as
it curls over, showing the sun through its soft
heaving side in veins of gold that inscribe and
jewels of green that inlay the quivering and
sundering skirt or veil of thinner water, throw-
31
A. C. SWINBURNE
ing upon the tremulous space of narrowing sea
in front, like a reflection of lifted and vibrating
hair, the windy shadow of its shaken spray."
A fimciful critic has put down the faulty
lengthiness of Swinburne's poems to a " sea-
obsession," saying that " his major forces and
his high creative impulse have, since Marij
Stuart, been mainly devoted to the splendidly
impossible feat of providing continual lyrical
change for the most monotonous theme in exist-
ence." His Tristram shared his delight, leaping
towards the sea's breast with a cry of love " as
toward a mother's where his head might rest " ;
his Marino Faliero at the last hour desired —
" perchance but a boy's wish " — to " set sail and
die at sea." As a boy the poet earned the name
of Seagull, which he seems to recall in the poem
To a Sea-vieiv —
When I had wings, my brother,
Such wings were mine as thine . . .
This was in 1886 ; yet he ended :
Ah, well were I for ever,
Would'st thou change lives with me.
When he was a sea-gull he was writing those
serious poems in Fraser's Magazine. Reading
became a pleasure to him not unworthy to be
ranked with swimming and riding. He had
32
PREPARATIONS
Matthew Arnold's Strayed Reveller, Forsaken
Merman, and even the New Sirens by heart,
when he was "just ignorant of teens": Empe-
docles, and especially the songs of Callicles, he
knew as a schoolboy. His debts to Tennyson,
as he told the poet in acknowledging his praise
of Atalanta, had begun to accumulate in his
twelfth year. In his book on Shakespeare he
said that, from " well-nigh the first years " he
could remember, he had " made of the study of
Shakespeare the chief spiritual delight" of his
life. Probably he was one of those to whose
" innocent infantine perceptions the first obscure
electric revelation of what Blake calls the
'Eternal Female' was given through a blind
wondering thrill of childish rapture by a light-
ning on the baby dawn of their senses and their
soul from the sunrise of Shakespeare's Cleo-
patra." At home he was given the privilege of
reading at meals. What he very much Hked,
indoors or out of doors, he would read aloud or
recite : a cousin remembers him recitinsf " the
Victorian poets " and Lays of Ancient Rome. To
his heroes he could be a valet, and was doubtless
" thankful for having over our heads somewhere
in the world " heroes like " Victor Hugo or Miss
Cherbury the actress, Tennyson or a fellow who
rode in the Balaclava charge," as he says in Love's
Cross-Curi^ents. " The delight of feeling small
C 33
A. C. SWINBURNE
and ^nving in " at the sifi^lit of the hero was one
whicli lie never lost, but it may have been en-
courao;ed and defined by Carlyle's Heroes,
For Carlyle he did admire at first. Dickens
he admired from first to last, reading Bleak
House in its serial form while he was at Eton.
Except in cases of physical disobedience pro-
bably the only curb to his freedom was the
tradition of his class. But it is said that his
mother asked him not to read Byron till he was
twenty-one : if he literally obeyed her, as is said,
he gave a fresh proof that the like prohibitions
are powerless except as direct incentives to dis-
obey the spirit. The religion of his family was
presumably that of his class ; it either produced
or could not prevent an atheism like Shelley's,
but it encouraged a study of the Bible which
afterwards served him in helping Jowett to
make a selection for the reading of children,
and to draw :*rom his collaborator a cordial
compliment on his " thorough famiharity with
sundry parts of the sacred text." It left him,
as it helped to make him, such that one who
knew him all throufjh his life said : " I never
met with a character more thoroughly loyal,
chivalrous and — though some of his utterances
may seem to contradict it — reverent-minded.
His reverence for the aged and for parents,
women and little children was unlike any other
34
PREPARATIONS
man's that I ever knew." " For such an one "
as Othello, he wrote afterwards, " even a boy
may well think how thankfully and joyfully he
would lay down his life " : such a boy it seems
was Swinburne himself. Until his life is written
we can know little more of his home days,
except that they left him free to enjoy Nature
and literature to the uttermost, and kept in him
to the last a happy and passionate memory of
his childhood and a fond if independent regard
for those who shared it, father and mother, aunt,
cousin and sisters. Admiral Swinburne being
a sailor, the poet could magnify him and at his
death speak of him — but ambiguously — as cross-
ing " the last of many an unsailed sea " : in
A Study of Victor Hugo he records with " filial
vanity or egotism " his father's friendship in
youth with Admiral Canaris, to whom Victor
Hugo addressed " two glorious poems." While
he was writing Charlotte Bronte, not long before
the death of his father, he could not but use as
an illustration the landscape by Crome hanging
in the house where he worked, which he had
known all through the years he could remember.
Five years at Eton would appear not to have
interrupted or much aided his development,
unless they helped to make him a scholar.
Since he had been until then a home-bred boy,
and was neither an athlete nor an ordinary
35
A. C. SWINBURNE
amiisin<i^ person, it is possible that he enjoyed
his schooldays chietiy in retrospect. W'lietlier
or not, he was hard pressed for matter when he
came, in 1801, to write ''Eton: An Ode fo?' the
Four Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the
Foundation of the College " ; he had to drag in
Shelley, to remark that the reaches of the river
still sliine, and to suggest that in another four
hundred and fifty years " haply here shall Eton's
record be what England finds it yet." But he
was a good enough Etonian to rejoice, after
copying out some mistaken Greek of Shelley's,
that " Shelley was clear of Eton when he com-
mitted this verse." Swinburne himself mastered
and obeyed Greek scholarship to admiration.
He delighted in language. Once at Eton he
offered for an exercise a set of verses in Galli-
ambics, the metre of Tennyson's Boadicea, with
tragic consequences, for they were rejected by
the master as " no metre at all." The young
versifier and lover of poetry was not to be dis-
couraged by a schoolmaster : he was more likely
to be impressed by his first meeting with a poet
in his early school days, for though the poet
was only Rogers he showed " gracious and
cordial kindness " to the " small Etonian."
But he had already met in the spirit "the
spiritual sovereign of the nineteenth century " —
"greater than all other poets of his time to-
36
PREPARATIONS
gether " — " the greatest man since Shakespeare "
— Victor Hugo, his lord and master. He was
afterwards to speak of himself as one of those
who from childhood had fostered and fortified
whatever of good was born in them — "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 love " — with " the bread
of his deathless word and the wine " of Hugo's
immortal song. He was to recall how often
he had chanted or shouted or otherwise de-
claimed Hugo's Gastibelza on horseback or in
the sea in holiday time :
Gastibelza^ rhomme a la carabine
Chantait ainsi :
Quelqu'un a-t-il connu dona Sabine ?
Quelqu'un d'ici ?
Dansez, chantez^ villageois ! la nuit gagne
Le mont Falou.
Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne
Me rendra fou.
He recalled how its beauty had "reduced his
own ambition to a sort of rapturous and adoring
despair," and gave him a new delight in the
sense that " there is always Victor Hugo, living
or dead, to look up to and bow down to." He
had still further to recall the "paternal good-
ness " of Hugo in vouchsafing to take notice of
37
A. C. SWINBURNE
one of his early " crude and puerile " attempts
" to render some tribute of thanks for the gifts
of his genius." He was to use first of all as a
comparison for Hugo one of the sublimest
scenes of his life, a night scene in the Channel,
of forked and sheet lightning, of moonlight
and phosphoric fire on the waters together —
"Artemis watching with a serene splendour of
scorn the battle of Titans and the revel of
nymphs, from her stainless and Olympian sum-
mit of divdne indiflferent light." This was the
Channel Passage of 1855 which gave the title and
a subject to Swinburne's last book of poems.
The scene was used a third time in A Study of
Shakespeare^ because he could not forbear saying
that " the painter of the storm in Pericles must
have shared the adventure and relished the
rapture of such an hour." Except that he was
sailing from Ostend, I know nothing of the
travel which this crossing concluded. Probably
it was during the period between Eton and
Oxford, when Swinburne was either abroad or
under the tutorship of the distinguished " rumi-
nant ' Stubbs, afterwards Bishop of Oxford,
and then Vicar of Navestock in Essex, where
the boy sometimes resided with him.
In 1857 Swinburne entered Balliol College,
Oxford, as a Commoner. Pater, at Brasenose,
who was two years younger, was thus almost his
38
PREPARATIONS
exact contemporary. William Morris had just
taken his degree. Jowett, nearly twenty years
after his election to a Fellowship at Balliol, had
lately become Regius Professor of Greek, only
to pay for his religious liberalism, at the sentence
of the University, with the emoluments of his
office during ten years. He became a friend of
Swinburne's, travelled in England with him, and
was a guest at his father's house.
Swinburne apparently did not become quite
friendly to the University, though he remained
sufficiently Oxonian to enjoy a laugh at " certain
wise men of the east of England — Cantabrigian
Magi." In spite of his scholarship, he was
placed only in the second class in classical
Moderations, earned no classical prizes, and never
took a degree ; but in 1858 he had the Taylorian
prize for French and Italian. It is clear that he
was a very great reader, especially of poetry ;
even twenty years later he could not really feel
that prose could be as good as verse, and he
wrote of the spring of 1616 as "the darkest
that ever dawned upon England or the world "
because it killed Shakespeare. All young or
bold writers had his heart, whether they were
lofty hke JEschylus and Dante and Milton,
sweet like Sappho, Catullus, Villon, Coleridge,
Musset and Tennyson, or sweet and lofty like
Shelley and Marlowe. After Shakespeare and
39
A. C. SWINBURNE
Fliigo, he most loved Shelley and Marlowe,
most venerated Landor. He ehose, above all,
poetry that was in some way adventurous,
aspiring even to giddiness, free and yet ex-
quisite : whenee he could never fully admire
Spenser or Keats, Byron or Whitman. As an
older man he turned round on JNIusset, but as
a youth the poem where the Frenchman " whim-
pered like a whipped hound over the cruel work
of men w^ho shook the Cross and took away the
Saviour" seemed a genuine product of sincere
and tender inspiration, though he could not
look back to that period without "an inward
smile." New English poetry by itself — not to
speak of the personalities of the two living
poets then in Oxford, his friends Rossetti and
William Morris — was enough to produce his
"profound inattention to lectures on Aldrich's
Logic." Tennyson's finest short poems had
appeared : Maud was new and unpopular, but
admired by Swinburne. Browning was known
by his Pauline, Bells and, Pomegranates, Sordello,
and the plays ; Arnold by his Strayed Reveller,
Empedocles, and Scholar-Gypsy. Morris's De-
fence of Guenevere belonged to 1858. In France
Victor Hugo's Chutiments, Contemplations, and
Legende Des Siecles, Gautier's Emaux et Camces,
were new. Musset and Beranger were just dead
(1857) : Catullus and INIarlowe and Shelley were
40
PREPARATIONS
in their freshest youth. These were days prob-
ably when he would have exclaimed with
Musset :
GrecC;, 6 mere des arts, terre d'idolatrie
De mes veux insenses eternelle patrie,
J'etais ne pour ces temps on les fleurs de ton front
Couronnaient dans les mers I'azur de 1' Hellespont.
Je suis un citoyen de tes siecles antiques ; . . .
The conscious Pagan of France emphasized
the lesson of Greece ; with Theophile Gautier
he learned to rebuke the monk for anathematis-
ing the body, " votre corps, modele par le doigt
de Dieu meme, que Jesus-Christ, son fils, a
daigne revetir " :
L'esprit est Immortel, on ne peut le nier ;
Mais dirCj comme vous, que la chair est infame,
Statuaire divine, c'est te calomnier.
Swinburne was never to calumniate the divine
sculptor in his capacity of sculptor. Gautier
no doubt helped him to be one of those who
must thrust their hands into the side of beauty,
who love above all whatsoever beautiful things
are hard and clear and bright, whatsoever are
to be seen with the eye and touched with lips
and hands. He chose the company of the young,
the glad and the lovely.
In his first year at Oxford he began writing
and publishing. The " Undergraduate Papers "
41
A. C. SW INHURNE
of 1857 ;ind 18.58 contain both verse and prose
by Swinburne. AA'riting on tlic dramatists
Marlowe and Webster, he expressed his prefer-
ence for strong, fresh minds " from which the
stamp of a stern and glorious age was not yet
outworn," to those who, like Beaumont and
Fletcher, " mix with the very sources of poetry
that faint ftilse sweetness which enervates the
mind and clogs the taste of the reader." He
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 outward
side of love." He read with delight I.eander's
reply to Hero, the sacred nun of Venus :
The rites
In which Love's beauteous Empress most delightSj
Are banquets, Doric music^ midnight revel,
Plays, masks, and all that stern age counteth evil.
Thee as a holy idiot doth she scorn,
For thou in vowing chastity hast sworn
To rob her name and honour, and thereby
Commit' st a sin far worse than perjury.
Even sacrilege against her Deity,
Through regular and formal purity :
To expiate which sin, kiss and shake hands,
Such sacrifice as this Venus demands.
He believed that "w^ise enjoyment, noble and
healthy teaching, lies for all in the forgotten
42
PREPARATIONS
writings of the early masters," and concluded
with some original verses :
Honour them now (ends my allocution)
Not confer your degree when the folks leave college.
His poem, Queen Yseult, in the same number
of " Undergraduate Papers," shows the influence
of Morris's as yet unpublished early poems, both
in style and subject. Tennyson's Idylls did not
appear until 1859. The poem opens with the
death of Tristram's mother, Blancheflour :
There men found her as they sped
Very beautiful and dead,
In the lilies white and red.
And beside her lying there.
Found a manchild strong and fair
Lain among the lilies bare. . . .
And for the sweet look he had,
Weeping not but very sad,
Tristram by his name they bade.
The first and only Canto ends with Tristram's
embassage to fetch Yseult :
Spake the King so lean and cold,
" She hath name of honour old,
Yseult queen, the hair of gold.
All her limbs are fair and strong,
All her face is straight and long.
And her talk is as a song.
And faint lines of colour stripe
(As spilt wine that one should wipe)
All her golden hair cornripe.
48
A. C. SWINBURNK
l")rawn like red j^old cars that stand
In I lie yellow suniincr land ;
Arnnv-stniij^ht her perfect hand.
And her eyes like river-lakes
Where a gloomy glory shakes
Which the happy sunset makes.
Her shall Tristram go to bring,
With a gift of some rich thing
Fit to free a prisoned King."
As Sir Mark said, it was done ;
And ere set the morrow's sun,
Tristram the good knight was gone.
Forth to Ireland bade he come.
Forth across the grey sea foam,
All to bring Queen Yseult home.
The next number proved that Swinburne liad
not surrendered the " merry madness " of
youth to write Queen Yseult, for it contained
a review of the imaginary " Monomaniac's
Tragedy and Other Poems of Ernest Whel-
drake, author of Eve : A Mystery." " Eve,"
says the reviewer, " was anatomized * with a
bitter and severe dehght ' by all the critics who
noticed it with the exception (we beheve) of
Mr. Wheldrake himself." He quotes short
passages to show Belial blaspheming and dwell-
ing on " unbecoming topics," like " wine-
dishevelled tresses," " globed sapphires of
liquescent eyes, warmed with prenatal influx
of rich love," " luscious sweetnesses of vin-
44
PREPARATIONS
tage-tinctured raiment." The hero of the
"Monomaniac's Tragedy," who is engaged in
writing " Iscariot : A Tragedy," has broken into
his brother's house and wrung a nephew's neck
in order to gain experience of the feehngs of
thieves and murderers. It cannot be complained
that the fun is long drawn out, when the same
short review gives as a specimen of Wheldrake's
writing a poem on Louis Napoleon which Swin-
burne trusts will atone in imperial circles for
Hugo's Chatiments :
He stands upon a rock that cleaves the sheath
Of blue sea like a sword of upward foam ;
Along the washing waste flows far beneath
A palpitation of senescent storm.
He, the Lethean pilot of grim death,
Utters by fits a very potent breath.
He is the apex of the focussed ages.
The crown of all those labouring powers that warm
Earth's red hot core, when scoriae sorrow rages.
He is the breath Titanic — the supreme
Development of some presolar dream.
Owls, dogs, that bellow at him ! is he not
More strong than ye t His intermittent love
The measure of your wretched hate keeps hot.
Ye are below him — for he is above.
At least this "review" seems to foretell Swin-
burne's own poems on "unbecoming topics,"
the malicious hoaxing irony of his replies to
Robert Buchanan's pseudonymous attack, his
much furious and scornful abuse of Napoleon
the Little.
45
A. C. SWINBURNE
Swinburne had gone up to Oxford with a very
complete Republicanism founded on the words
of I'lutarch and Milton, Shelley, I^andor, and
Mazzini ; and Orsini's attempt on Louis
Napoleon is said to have moved him to uphold
" the virtue of tyrannicide " in public. He has
recorded how as a freshman in the fifth or sixth
year of Louis Napoleon's *' empire of cutpurses
and cut-throats " he had been smiled on tolerantly
by his elders for believing in " the principles and
teaching of men who ventured to believe in the
realization of Italian unity." The Society of
the Friends of Italy had just been reconstituted,
and Walter Savage Landor was one of them.
England was disturbed, chiefly through the
agitation of JNIazzini, Garibaldi, and Kossuth,
by a considerable feeling for Itahan unity, against
Austria ; but, like Swinburne's Oxford audience,
Carlyle was impatient with Mazzini's " Republi-
canism," his " Progress," and other " Rousseau
fanaticisms." To Swinburne the movement for
Italian unity was like the movements celebrated
by Shelley in the Ode to Liberty, the Ode to
Naples, and Hellas. Phrases like Mazzini's
"God and the People," "God, the People,
Love and Liberty," the grand style of his sum-
mons " to a task like the tasks of God, the
creation of a people," his vision of the future
and " the people rising in its majesty, brothers
46
PREPARATIONS
in one faith, one bond of equality and love, one
ideal of citizen virtue that ever grows in beauty
and might," his clear cry that " there can be no
moderation between good and evil, truth and
error, progress and reaction "—these words came
to unite in Swinburne's heart with Shelley's :
And thoUj lost Paradise of this divine
And glorious world ! thou flowery wilderness !
Thou island of eternity ! thou shrine
Where Desolation, clothed with loveliness,
Worships the thing thou wert ! O Italy,
Gather thy blood into thy heart ; repress
The beasts Avho make their dens thy sacred palaces.
Swinburne could spend his fieriest intellectual
emotions on the Italian risorgimento without
throwing them away. Enthusiasm for a genuine
social movement never yet failed to be repaid,
if only with increase of enthusiasm ; to Swin-
burne it gave a material that could arouse and
match his swiftest and lordliest measures. After
his visit to Italy in 1864 he called her "my
second mother country."
His first book, published in the year of his
leaving Oxford, 18G0, had, however, httle enough
of liberty and republicanism. It consisted of
two plays — one, The Queen Mother, ending in
the Massacre of Bartholomew, and having for
its characters Catherine de Medici, Charles IX
of France, Henry of Navarre, Catholic and
Huguenot nobles, and certain maids-of-honour ;
47
A. C. SWINBURNE
the other, Rosa fno fid, depictinfy tlie last days of
the love between Ilcnry 11 of Eiifrland and fair
llosaniond. Botli are distinguished and marred
by a too curious Elizabethanism of style, as
where King Charles says in 7V/t' Queen 3I()tJtcr:
Or now, this gold that makes me up a king,
This apprehensive note and mark of time,
This token'd kinfrdoin, this well-tested worth,
Wherein my brows exult and are begirt
With the brave sum and sense of kingliness.
To have this melted from a narrow head
Or broken on the bare disfeatured brows.
And marr'd i' the veiy feature and fair place
Where it looked nobly — were this no shame to us ?
Sometimes the copy is admirable, sometimes
obscure. Browning was a better influence, lead-
ing the young poet to lines like those spoken by
Rosamond :
Who calls it spring ?
Simply this winter plays at red and green.
Clean white no colour for me, did they say ?
I never loved white roses much ; but see
How the wind drenches the low lime-branches
With shaken silver in the rainiest leaves.
Mere winter, winter.
He adopts even the Browningesque " suppose
you," in a passage where he takes leav^e to use
almost more than the most Elizabethan licence
with lines like :
Lost me my soul with a mask, a most ungracious one.
48
PREPARATIONS
He showed the influence of Rossetti in the end-
ings of several such hues as —
Painted with colours for his ease-taking.
Both plays have songs, The Queen Mother in
French, Rosaviond in archaic English. Thus
early was Swinburne an excellent verse-master
outside his own tongue.
The Queen 3Iother holds the attention chiefly
through the character of Denise, the maid of
honour, Charles's mistress, who tries to per-
suade the king against the massacre, and at
last goes out in her madness into the bloody
streets and is killed. There are careful touches
of character on many pages, as where Catherine
says in the midst of the massacre :
I am hot only in the palm of the hands.
Do you not think, sir, some of these dead men,
Being children, dreamed perhaps of this }
But the play is more noticeable for the sympa-
thetic treatment of the amorousness and blood-
thirstiness of a palace which, he said at a later
date, in the Appendix to Mary Stuart, "it
would be flattery to call a brothel or a slaughter-
house," for "its virtues were homicide and
adultery." Denise is "a white long woman
with thick hair " ; and " not the lightest thing
she has that hair," says Margaret Valois. To
Marshal Tavannes the girl is "a costly piece
D 49
A. C. SWINBURNE
of white." Slie tells the King that she could
kill him " here between the eyes," rather than
lose his face to touch and his hair to twist curls
in : she reminds him of how he bit her above
the shoulder. During the massacre "twenty
with sweet laughing mouths " gathered about a
corpse to abuse it with " fleers and gibes " that
made the murderer merry. " Their blood," says
a noble :
Their blood is apt to heats so mutable
As in their softer bodies overgrow
The temper of sweet reason, and confound
All order but their blood,
Yolande, with an old man's brain "in her most
supple body," is one, thinks Catherine, who will
not " wry her mouth on tasting blood." Charles
practised as a boy to " pinch out life by nips in
some sick beast," likes the smell of a man's
blood : " it stings and makes one weep." Denise
alone is pitiful, telling her lover that the body
of the worst man is compounded of love and
pain, like himself, and "was worth God's time
to finish."
Rommond is far less a play. In The Queen
Mother Catherine talks about herself and the
mouth which " has been a gracious thing for
kisses to fall near " : in Rommond the best
passages are wliere Rosamond describes herself,
or where Henry or Eleanor describes Rosamond
50
PREPARATIONS
to her face. Rosamond, indeed, sees herself
already as the legendary beauty ; she speaks of
herself as having been in turn Helen, Cressida,
Guenevere ; before the King comes she says she
will sleep, in order to have " the sweet of sleep "
on her face "to touch his senses with." The
result is a languid, luxurious, impression of the
" fair fool with her soft shameful mouth," and
the reader agrees with Bouchard that "being
fair, a woman is worth pains to see." As
Rosamond is amorous and gentle, the Queen
is amorous and cruel, loving well to feel pain
and to inflict it on the shrinking hated mistress.
Cruelty and amorousness are mixed also in
the boy Arthur's story, how he thrust himself
through the lattice to see a woman with a
white, smooth neck and wonderful red mouth,
and how the thought of her made him shake
in sleep ; but his master Hugh beat him for it
with a switch like a beehive let loose — he
could touch separately the twelve prints of
"the sharp, small suckers." Perhaps Swin-
burne had become interested in the birch at
Eton : that he was interested is quite clear
from the frequent mention of it in Loves Cross
Currents, where the boy Reginald — afterwards
a writer of verse very much like Swinburne's —
" relished the subject of flagellation as few men
relish rare wine."
51
A. C. SWINBURNE
The effect of Roscnnotid is more like that of
such a narrative as Tlie Eve of St. Agnes than
of a play. It is stuffed with the pleasantness
and pitifulness of love among people who seenn
to have nothing to do but to love, unless it be
to hate. But it is lov^e, too, whicli the lovers
know as sin, though Rosamond regards her
beauty as "part of the perfect witness of the
world, how good it is."
I that have held a land between twin lips
And turned large England to a little kiss ;
God thinks not of me as contemptible.
The poet who made her thought not of her
as contemptible, for evidently he was one of
love's lovers, loving it for its own sake and
because it gives the keenest relish to all things
in Nature and men and women. The book is
rich enough in the luxury of love to stop any
complaint against the form of drama, but it
can hardly have foretold dramatic success. It
is a choice exercise in English, French, and
Latin, for those that can enjoy such. For the
rest, it seldom misses the sweetness of the song
of Constance :
Sweet, for God's love I bid you kiss right close
On mouth and cheek, because you see my rose
Has died that got no kisses of the rain ;
So will I sinu; to sweeten my sweet mouth,
So will I braid my thickest hair to smooth,
And then — I need not call you love again.
52
PREPARATIONS
The blank verse goes on and on with little
purpose but gathering sweets, and the rewards of
the gathering are undeniable. They were extra-
ordinary in a man of twenty-two or twenty-three.
The performance might surprise any but the
poet's friends. Among them his reputation as a
poet and a brilliant uncontrolled human being
was exceptional. He had become so worship-
ping a disciple of Dante Rossetti that Burne-
Jones said : " Now we were four in company,
not three," Morris being the other. " Courteous,
affectionate, and unsuspicious," he was " faithful
beyond most people to those he really loved."
Thus was deepened his " lifelong delight in the
forces of an art which is not my own, quickened
by the intercourse of many years with eminent
artists. ..." He continually saw these men,
going even three times a day to Burne-Jones
and often taking poems to repeat. He was a
noticeable small man with a "glorious abundance"
of " fiery " or "reddish yellow" or "orange" hair
and " blue-grey " or " clear green " eyes softened
by thick brown lashes. While he was repeating
poetry his eyes were lifted in a " rapt unconscious
gaze," his head hung on one side, his body
shook, his high - pitched voice expressed the
utmost fervour and excitement, and "in the
concentrated emphasis of his slow utterance he
achieved something like a Delphic ecstasy, the
53
A. C. SWINIUJRNE
transfii^unition of the Pythia quivering on her
tripod." The lialo of hair was sometimes
" gravely or waggislily " waved at the com-
pany. He might also "jump ahout the room
in a manner somewhat embarrassing to the
listener." He was always restless, never
standing still ; his walk was turned into a
dance ; even sitting, he moved his wrists, per-
haps his feet also, as if he were keeping time
with some "inner rhythm of excitement."
Reciting or not, he was continually subject to a
"violent elevation of spirits," yet "the extra-
ordinary spasmodic action " accompanying his
paroxysms of excitement seemed to produce no
fatigue, but changed into a "graceful and
smihng calm ... his eyes fixed in a sort of
trance, and only his lips shifting and shivering a
little, without a sound."
His conversation, rapid and yet not voluble,
was " very splendid in quality," always vigorous,
often violent and often biting, but always
sparing an absent friend. It was made the
more remarkable by his memory. When
Rossetti buried his poems with his wife (1862),
Swinburne's memory kept many of them alive.
In an account of an evening at Fryston with
Lord Houghton it has been recorded how the
young poet, the only unknown in the party,
made an impression :
54
PREPARATIONS
He was silent till the middle of dinner, when some-
body raised a literary ((uestion, touching Sophocles or
Shakespeare. Then he began ; and from his first words
his hearers knew they had to do with a master. Host
and guests played up to him, and he held them spell-
bound. " We dined, we smoked, he talked, and we were
enthralled," says, in effect, the writer ; and at midnight
I remember we all adjourned to my room, where we
sat about on chairs or on the bed listening while this
amazing young poet poured out page after page of the
Elizabethans and page after page of his own unpublished
verse till two in the morning.
To one who was not overwhelmed by him he
appeared "short, with shoulders that sloped
more than a woman's, from which rose a long,"
but not {it is also said) a "slender neck, sur-
mounted by an enormous head " with too small
a chin. " The cranium was out of all proportion
to the rest of th^ structure. His spine was
rigid, and though he often bowed the heaviness
of his head, lasso papavera collo, he never
seemed to bend his back. Except in conse-
quence of a certain physical weakness" — pre-
sumably one of those " follies of Bohemianism "
which are " dangerous to health and life " —
"which probably may, in more philosophical
days, come to be accounted for and palliated —
except when suffering from this external cause,
he seemed immune from all the maladies that
pursue mankind. He did not know fatigue ;
55
A. C. SWINBURNE
his u«^ility and brif^htness were almost mechani-
cal. I never heard him complain of a headache
or a toothache. He required very little sleep,
and occasionally when I have parted from him
in the evening after saying good night, he has
simply sat back in the deep sofa in his sitting-
room, his little feet close together, his arms
against his side, folded in his frock-coat like a
grasshopper in its wing-covers, and fallen asleep,
apparently for the night, before I could blow
out the candles and steal forth from the doors."
Out of doors he was like " something blown
before a wind," having the movements of a
somnambulist. I seem to see him in Camber's
description of his brother Locrine :
My brother is a prince of paramours —
Eyes coloured like tlie springtide sea and hair
Bright as with fire of sundawn. . . .
In his circle he was already known by many
of the poems afterwards printed in Poems and
BiiUads ; for these, he said, in the dedication of
1865, came from seven years of his life.
The youngest were born of boy's pastime,
The eldest are young.
Several appeared in The Spectator in 1862,
including Fcmstinc, forty verses of Faustinc —
tempora mutantur — down to the last. During
tliat winter he recited the L,aus Veneris on the
56
PREPARATIONS
sands of Tynemouth in the course of a visit to
William Bell Scott, as he recited " When the
hounds of spring are on winter's traces " on the
road between Newport and Shorwell in the
Isle of Wight. Like Rossetti he was writing
bouts-rimes and Limericks. He was also ex-
perimenting in metre, and one Sunday morning,
having looked at The Rhythm of Bernard de
Morlaix and an English translation, he wrote
twenty-six lines of "a projected version of
Bernard's Rhythm," of which these are a
specimen :
land without guilty strong city safe-built in a marvellous
place,
1 cling to thee, ache for thee, sing to thee, wake for thee,
watch for thy face :
Full of cursing and strife are the days of my life ; with their
sins they are fed.
Out of sin is the root, unto sin is the fruit, in their sins they
are dead.
He could turn aside, as he did in 1864, to
write a Morality^ the acting of which formed the
chief part of The Children of the Chapel, a story
by his cousin, now Mrs. Disney Leith. The
whole story was composed and written under
his eye. The morality. The Pilgi^im of Pleasure,
abounds in sweet characteristic verses, as where
Youth speaks :
57
A. C. SWINiniRNE
We have f?onc by many lands, and many jjrievous ways,
And yet have we not found this Pleasure all these days.
Sometimes a li<;htenin<jf all about her have we seen,
A /rlittering of her garments among the fieldes green ;
Sometimes the waving of her hair that is right sweet,
A lifting of her eyelids, or a shining of her feet,
Or either in sleeping or in waking have we heard
A rustling of raiment or a whispering of a word,
Or a noise of pleasant water running over a waste place.
Yet have I not beheld her, nor known her very face.
He was thus already a master of those means,
such as the frequent use of "a," "the," "of,"
" or," " in," and of participial nouns like " light-
ening," by which the language submitted itself
to all his love of metre. The piece is purest
Swinburne, nowhere more so than in the final
triumph of Death :
Alas ! your kingdom and lands ! alas ! your men and their
might !
Alas the strength of your hands and the days of your vain
delight !
Alas I the words that were spoken, sweet words on a
pleasant tongue !
Alas! your harps that are broken, the harps that were
carven and strung !
Alas ! the light in your eyes, the gold in your golden hair!
Alas ! your sayings wise, and the goodly things ye were !
Alas ! your glory ! alas ! the sound of your names among
men !
Behold it is come to pass, ye shall sleep and arise not again.
Dust shall fall on your face, and dust shall hang in your hair ;
Ye shall sleep without shifting of place, and shall be no
more as ye were ;
58
PREPARATIONS
Ye shall never open your mouth ; ye shall never lift up your
head ;
Ye shall look not to north or to south ; life is done ; and
behold you are dead !
With your hand ye shall not threat ; with your throat ye
shall not sing.
Ye, ye that are living yet, ye shall each be a grievous thing.
Ye shall each fare underground, ye shall lose both speech
and breath ;
Without sight ye shall see, without sound ye shall hear, and
shall know I am Death.
The repetitions, the rhetorical and Biblical
stateliness, the splendid farewells to what was
splendid, are admirable enough, yet seem to
reveal that the effort was an exercise and an
experiment only. The archaic song of Vain
Delight, in this form :
I am so noble a queen
I have a right little teen,
I were a goodly samite green.
Fresh flowers and red.
No man so sad there is
But if I will him kiss
With my good sweet lips, I wis.
He shall well be sped.
Whoso that will me see
He shall have great joy of me.
And merry man shall he be
Till he be dead —
this is as good as Swinburne always was at an
old form or dialect or foreign tongue. The
power to do it is the only originality shown.
59
A. C. SWINBURNE
He had already begun to write on Hlake in
1803; "•meanwhile some last word has to be
said concerning Blake's life and death," he writes,
still with something of Carlyle in his accent.
This book, with its necessary accounts of pic-
tures, encouraged Swinburne, if he had need of
encouragement, in pictorial description. Many
of his translations from pictures are as good as
possible in a concentrated style, owing a good
deal to Ruskin, which did not forbid Swinburne
the rhythms, the language, or the alliteration of
his verse, as for example in JVilliam Blake:
Dante and Virgil, standing in a niche of rifted rock
faced by another cliff up and down wliich a reptile crowd
of spirits swarms and sinks, looking down on the grovel-
ling and swine-like flocks of Malebolge ; lying tumbled
about the loathsome land in hateful heaps of leprous
flesh and dishevelled deformity, with limbs contorted,
clawing nails, and staring horror of hair and eyes : one
figure thrown down in a corner of the crowded clifF-side,
her form and face drowned in an overflow of ruined
raining tresses.
One page in this book alone shows into what
rhythms his thought ran when phrases Uke the
following are easily to be found :
" With limbs contorted, clawing nails, and staring
horror of hair and eyes."
" Amid heaving and glaring motion of vapour and fire."
60
PREPARATIONS
"The dark hard strength and sweep of its sterile
ridges."
" Washed about with surf and froth of tideless fire, and
heavily laden with the lurid languor of hell."
His descriptions of Rossetti's and Burnc-Jones'
pictures in Essays and Studies could not fail to
confirm the habit and to impress his mind still
more deeply with Rossetti's women, such as
LiUth :
" Clothed in soft white garments, she draws out through
a comb the heavy mass of hair like thick spun gold to
fullest length ; her head leans back half sleepily, superb
and satiate with its own beauty ; [compare " Faustine "]
the eyes are languid, without love in them or hate ;
the sweet luxurious mouth has the patience of pleasure
fulfilled and complete, the warm repose of passion sure of
its delight. . . . The sleepy splendour of the picture is a
fit raiment for the idea incarnate of faultless fleshy beauty
and peril of pleasure unavoidable."
" Peril of pleasure unavoidable " might have
been the last line of a sonnet in Rossetti's
manner. Swinburne must have known well
Rossetti's poems on pictures : we know that he
knew and admired that Song of the Bower which
seems to point us back to Browning and on to
Swinburne :
. . . Shall I not one day remember thy bower,
One day when all days are one to me ?
Thinking "I stirred not, and yet had the power 1"
Yearning, " Ah God, if again it might be ! "
61
A. C. SWINBURNE
Peace, peace ! such a small lamp illumes, on this high-
way,
So dimly so few steps in front of my feet.
Yet shows me that her way is parted from my way. . . .
Out of sight, beyond light, at what goal may we
meet?
If he needed incitement to a Biblical accent,
he found it in the picture of " The Card Dealer,"
and something else which he absorbed and
changed :
Whom plays she with ? with thee, who lov'st
These gems upon her hand ;
With me, who search her secret brows ;
With all men, bless'd or bann'd.
We play together, she and we.
Within a vain strange land :
A land without any order.
Day even as night (one saith)
Where who lieth down ariseth not
Nor the sleeper awakeneth ;
A land of darkness as darkness itself
And of the shadow of death.
What be her cards you ask ? Even these :
The heart, that doth but crave
More, having fed ; the diamond.
Skilled to make base seem brave ;
The club, for smiting in the dark ;
The spade, to dig a grave.
Though Morris was no painter, the influence
of his poetry, the mingled violence and dreami-
62
PREPARATIONS
ness of life in the land of his early poems, or,
rather, that arras
Where the wind set the silken kings asway
could not but second the influence of painting.
The young poet might be expected to see living
men and women
Made sad by dew and wind, and tree-barred moon,
or
In Avalon asleep,
Among the poppies and the yellow flowers.
If "the ladies' names bite verily like steel,"
and massier things weigh more light in " that
half sleep, half strife (strange sleep, strange
strife) that men call living," yet sometimes might
be heard a voice crying :
When you catch his eyes through the helmit-slitj
Swerve to the left, then out at his head.
And the Lord God give you joy of it.
Swinburne's memory of Morris's early verses,
or at least King Arthur's Tomb, enabled him
to quote them in reviewing Jason, and he
thought it would be safe to swear to his
accuracy ; " such verses are not forgettable," he
said; he found in the figures presented by them
"the blood and breath, the shape and step of
life." In 1862 he published a story in the
manner of Morris's early romances. Dead Love,
63
A. C. SWINBURNE
where a woman falls in love with the corpse of
her husband's murderer, and brings it to life by
her kissing, but is burnt along with it by the
cousin who had brought her the corpse to gratify
liate, not love.
Swinburne's training among artists taught him
to say of a poem of Baudelaire : " Nothing can
beat that as a piece of beautiful drawing." His
review of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mai is at least
as interesting now for its indication of his own
tastes and opinions. Taking occasion to remark
that French critics seemed to have forgotten
that " a poet's business is presumably to write
good verses and by no means to redeem the age
and remould society," he did not conceal the
fact that in the greater part of the book Baude-
laire *' has chosen to dwell mainly upon sad and
strange things — the weariness of pain and the
bitterness of pleasure — the perverse happiness
and wayward sorrows of exceptional people. It
has the languid lurid beauty of close and
threatening weather — a heavy, heated tempera-
ture, with dangerous hot-house scents in it ;
thick shadow of cloud about it, and fire of
molten light." Which is very much what Pater
was afterwards to say of Morris's early poems.
" It is " Swinburne went on, " quite clear of all
whining and windy lamentation ; there is nothing
of the blubbering and shrieking style long since
04
PREPARATIONS
exploded. The writer delights in problems and
has a natural leaning to obscure and sorrowful
things. Failure and sorrow, next to physical
beauty and perfection of sound or scent, seem to
have an infinite attraction for him. . . . Not the
luxuries of pleasures in their first simple form,
but the sharp and cruel enjoyments of pain, the
acrid relish of suffering felt or inflicted, the sides
on which Nature looks unnatural, go to make
up the stuff and substance of this poetry. . . .
Even of the loathsomest bodily putrescence and
decay he can make some noble use." Swin-
burne noticed Beaudelaire's "feline style of
beauty — subtle, luxurious, with sheathed claws."
Finally he said, what might appear to qualify
the remark first quoted, but does not and was
not meant to do so : " it is not his or any artist's
business to warn against evil ; but certainly he
does not exhort to it, knowing well enough that
the one fault is as great as the other." This is
the writing of a man whose intellect, whatever
his " Bohemian follies," was clear and serene.
One of Swinburne's chapters on pictures in
Essays and Studies consists of "Notes on
Designs of the old Masters at Florence," notes
made during a visit in the spring of 1864.
As in JVilliam Blake he made a number of
brilliant translations of pictures into words, of
a drawing by Michael Angelo, for example ;
E 65
A. C. SWINBURNE
IJroad biacelets divide the shapely splendour of her
arms ; over the nakedness of her firm and luminous
breasts, just below the neck, there is passed a band as of
metal. Her eyes are full of proud and passionless lust
after gold and blood ; her hair, close and curled, seems
ready to sjiudder in sunder and divide into snakes. Her
throat, full and fresh, round and hard to the eye as her
bosom and arms, is erect and stately, the head set firm on
it without any droop or lift of the chin ; her mouth
crueller than a tiger''s, colder than a snake's, and beautiful
beyond a woman's. She is the deadlier Venus incarnate ;
7roX\>] juev €P Ocoim koi'k ujwu^toy
Oeu'
for upon earth also many names might be found for
her ; Lamia re-transformed, invested now with a fuller
beauty, but divested of all feminine attributes not
native to the snake — a Lamia loveless and unassailable
by the Sophist, readier to drain life out of her lover
than to fade for his sake at his side ; or the Persian
Amestris, watching the only breasts on earth more
beautiful than her own cut off from her rivaPs living
bosom ; or Cleopatra, not dying but turning serpent
under the serpent's bite ; or that queen of the extreme
East who with her husband marked every day as it
went by some device of a new and wonderful cruelty."
By these fancies he prepared for his own
Faustine, for Pater's meditation on La Gio-
conda, for the metamorphoses of Dorian Gray.
Of one head which might be a boy's or a girl's,
<' having in it the delicious doubt of ungrown
no
PREPARATIONS
beauty, pausing at the point where the ways of
lovehness divide," he says, thinking perhaps both
of his own and Musset's Fragoletta — " we may
give it the typical strawberry flower {Fragoletta)
and leave it to the Loves."
This visit to Italy confirmed his love of her.
Italy, like the sea, became his " Mother " ; she
had made him, he said, before his lips could sing
her " choral-souled boy priest." Siena became
"the lovely city of my love." Above all at
Fiesole, with an introduction from Monckton
Milnes (Lord Houghton), he called on Landor,
the Roman-hearted gentleman, repubHcan, poet,
scholar, lover of Italy, dishker of Byron, who had
gained " a double crown of glory in verse and in
prose " like Milton's and no other Englishman's
since, whom, henceforward, man and poet,
Swinburne was to praise and re-praise and over-
praise continually. He asked and obtained
permission to dedicate Atalanta in Calydon to
Landor, but by the intervention of death was
compelled to dedicate it, which he did in Greek,
to Landor's memory, adding a memorial poem
to Poems and Ballads, and to Studies in Song a
"Song" eight hundred lines long for the
centenary, though five years late (1880). Yet
further indirect tributes he paid in verse from
time to time, by his deification of tyrannicide,
for Landor had written a poem, with a note
67
A. C. SWINBURNE
Iroin Cicero's "Pliilippics," called "Tyrannicide,"
saying :
Most dear of all the virtues to her sire
Is Justice ; and mfist dear
To Justice is Tyrannicide . . .
Other literary influence on Swinburne, except
perhaps in confirming his tendency to massive-
ness in prose, Landor had none ; for he was the
calmest, most temperate, and most motionless of
poets ; the author o^ ^italanta was the least calm,
the most intemperate, the fullest of motion.
But for many years Swinburne liked to recall
how I^andor, " Republican and Atheist," who
had encouraged and strengthened the young
spirit of Shelley half a century before, had done
the same for " another young man who aspired
to show himself a poet."
L
68
Ill
THE APPROACH
After Atalanta, but in the same year, Swiii
burne published another play, begun, at least,
when he was an undergraduate, in the period of
Rosamond and JVie Queen Mother. Later re-
vision probably made Chastelard a far more
characteristic piece. The style, for example, is
marked by ways that were to prevail in it
thenceforward. Such is the repetition of the
long " a " sound in these lines :
They shall not say but I had grace to give
Even for love's sake. Why, let them take their way ;
in many other places, and throughout Mary's
speech beginning, " One of you maidens there " ;
the repetition also of the same word, as here :
He says your grace given would scathe yourself,
And little grace for such a grace as that . . . ;
the fondness for an oft-repeated " i " as in :
And then fall blind and die with sight of it ;
69
A. C. SWINBURNE
and i'or chiming like " lied and died " and
Have made up my heart
To have no part ;
repetition of an idea under different forms, often
with a deceptive appearance of precision, as in :
Of sweet came sour, of day came night,
Of long desire came brief delight ;
a triumphant use of nothing but monosyllables,
for as many as seven lines on end in Mary
Beaton's speech beginning, " Nay, let love wait."
Throughout the play the variety and fluidity of
the lines make the least speeches pleasant to
read.
The subject is the love, evasively and incom-
pletely returned, of the poet Chastelard for
Mary Stuart (whom he had followed out of
France to Scotland), and his execution for " the
offence or misfortune of a second detection at
night in her bedchamber." Chastelard was be-
loved by one of JMary's "four Maries," Mary
Beaton, who tried to save him, and at his death
prayed for revenge :
So perish the Queeii's traitors ! yea, but so
Perish the Queen !
In the third part of the trilogy on Mary Stuart,
Mary Beaton watched the execution of the
70
THE APPROACH
Queen, the avenging of Chastelard, and heard
Elizabeth's men cry, "So perish the Queen's
traitors ! "
The play tells a story of aristocratic and poetic
courtship delicately, luxuriously, picturesquely,
with perfect sympathy and love of love. No
one else had made it superfluous by telling the
story in the same way and as well. Swinburne
himself could probably not at that time have
told it in the same way, if as well, in direct
narrative like that of Tristram or Balen : ques-
tion of the dramatic form is therefore idle. As
in The Queen Mother, there are many striking
encounters fitted with appropriate words ; but
as in Rosamond, the characters talk about them-
selves and one and another: Mary is "quite
sure I shall die sadly some day " ; she knows
" that I am beautiful " ; and describes the battle
of Corrichie and how she rode with her good
men and took delight as Swinburne would
have described it, but a little more briefly. The
story is enriched, but even more retarded, by
numerous picturesque delays of song or dance
with lyric or pathetic comment. Mary takes
Chastelard's sword, and seeing her fingers
Clear in the blade, bright pink, the shell colour,
becomes dreamy and suggests wearing it, and
pretending to be a man, Chastelard to be a
71
A. C. SWINHURNE
woman. A very prcLty book ini|rlii be made
out of the pretty, amorous, stately, melanelioly
passages. J^ike tlie poet, tliese men and women
love the clear, visible world of things under the
sun, with a certain fever at thought of things
which are under the earth. When JNlary sees her
maids talking together she says :
You weep and whisper zaith sloped necks and heads
Like two sick birds.
In one place she describes the device on a breast-
clasp as closely and well as Swinburne describes
a picture ; she describes the dress in which she
looks so beautiful, and notes, " T am too pale to
be so hot." Chastelard, alone in prison, sees the
last sunbeam of his life in the dust as clearly as
if it were a childish memory. The Scottish
citizen, remembering a sermon against Mary
and the foreigners, is equally vivid with his pic-
ture of Pharaoh's men " beautiful with red and
with red gold . . . curling their small beards
Agag-fashion," and the woman
That got bruised breasts in Egypt, when strange men
Swart from great suns, foot-burnt with angry soils
And strewn with sand of gaunt Chaldean miles^
Poured all their love upon her. . . .
(Here Swinburne was experimenting towards the
AlioUbah of his Poeim and Ballads.) Chastelard
will remember, even in the grave, INlary's lips,
72
THE APPROACH
More hot than wine, full of sweet wicked words
Babbled against mine own li])s, and long hands
Spread out and pale bright throat and pale bright breasts.
Nor will the reader of the play forget them
and her many cruel or bold or graceful or in-
flaming acts. Down to the eyelash, nay, the
" very inside of the eyelid," and " the blue sweet
of each particular vein," the picture of the woman
is finished with amorous hands. The '* splendour
of great throat " and the lips " curled over, red
and sweet," owed something perhaps to Rossetti's
studio. The snake at her heart that " quivered
like a woman in act to love," seen by Chastelard
in a dream, may also have come from a picture,
but certainly became Swinburne's own, like the
" curled lips " ; Chastelard, for instance, would
like to have his soul bitten to death by joy and
" end in the old asp's way, Egyptian wise " — in
the cruelty of extreme desire he says that to die
of life is "sweeter than all sorts of life."
The chief characteristic of the play is that
Chastelard and Mary are lovers rather of love
than of one another. They think and dream
about love more than they love, and they come
as near as persons of spirit can to sickliness.
This is no fault, but a limitation. It was Swin-
burne's intention, and no accident : not perhaps
conscious, but nevertheless the intention of his
nature which was towards amorousness, the
73
A. C. SWINBURNE
love and luxury of love. Thus C/iasfclard is
like a lyric multiplied and evolved into a play.
Less than in other plays do the lyrics contained
in it stand out clearly, like single ships on a
wide sea. The fragment,
Aloys la chatelaine
Voit venir de par Seine
Thiebault la capitaine,
is but a decoration among decorations. But
Mary Beaton herself stands out against the
decorations almost like a song. It is she that
sings the one English song :
Between the sunset and the sea
My love laid hands and lips on me ;
Of sweet came sour, of day came night,
Of long desire came brief delight ;
Ah love, and what thing came of thee
Between the sea-downs and the sea ? . . .
She opens the play with a French song as
she sits with the other three Maries in the
upper chamber in Holyrood. Then she is sad
with singing and sad to hold her peace, but by
the end of the play her dainty sadness has
grown to a full sorrow coupled with a hate.
She is like Denise in The Quec?i Mother, and
shows the poet's feeling for greys among scarlets,
purples and greens.
74
IV
POEMS AND BALLADS
When the Chorus in Atalanta, speaking magni-
ficently in spite of their conclusion that " silence
is most noble till the end," spoke of God as
" the supreme evil God " and said :
All we are against thee^ against thee, O God most high,
readers were confused because it sounded like
the Old Testament ; Chastelard disturbed them
because in it God undoubtedly looked small
beside Lust, not to speak of Love ; Poems and
Ballads made them indignant. At least the
poet cannot have disappointed them. They must
have guessed that
All day long
He used to sit and jangle words in rhyme
To suit with shakes of faint adulterous sound
Some French lust in men's ears. . . .
In the new volume " crueller than God " is a
term of comparison, God being a name for the
Supreme Being of Christian or Heathen. But
the " pale Galilean " also is accused and his end
foretold ; in spite even of his power when it was
75
A. C. SWINRMRNE
yet new the worshipper of Proserpina could tor
a moment cease to lament and say :
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the pa-an, the breast of the
nymphs in the brake ;
Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer
breath ;
And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before
Death. . . .
In Dolores the poet asks —
What ailed us, O Gods, to desert you
For creeds that refuse and restrain ?
and in Laus Veneris the knight of Venus com-
pares Venus with Christ :
Alas, Lord, surely thou art great and fair.
But lo, her wonderfully woven hair !
On the other hand the story of St. Dorothy
and The Cliristmas Carol, "suggested by a
drawing of Mr. D. G. Rossetti's," are faultlessly
devout ; and The Masque of Queen Bersabe is
a miracle play including a pageant of fair
women but ending ct tunc dicant laudamus ;
Aholibali is a chapter of Ezekiel put almost
unchanged into verse. The writer might have
been a member of the Church of England, or
a Catholic, though hardly a dissenter, and almost
certainly not a communicant. He abused God
that he might exalt Love and Life. In the
76
POEMS AND BALLADS
same way his lovers talk of death only because
they are so much in love with life and love that
they are indignant at the shortness thereof.
They are protesting against the view of that
other poet :
I am but a stranger here ;
Heaven is my home :
Earth is a desert drear ;
Heaven is my home. . . .
So, too, they speak often of weariness to show
the fury of life that has led to it ; and of pallor
to prove how they have spent their blood ; and
of sorrow that it may be known they have
tasted joy even to the end ; and as to sin, they
are monks and nuns in a shrine " where a sin
is a prayer."
At the end the poet could call it all a " revel
of rhymes."
It is even more true of Poems and Ballads
than of Chastelard that there is less love in it
than love of love, more passionateness than
passion. Yet in another sense it is all love and
all passion, pure and absolute love and passion
that have found "no object worth their con-
stancy," and so have poured themselves out on
light loves, dead women, women that never
were alive except in books, and "daughters of
dreams." Few other books are as full of the
learning, passing at times into pedantry, of love :
77
A. C. SWINBURNE
experience, fancy, and books have been ransacked
to store it, nor could anything but a divine
vitaHty have saved it from rancidity, putrescence,
dust. The vitaUty ascends to the height of
terror, that panic terror of noon which super-
stition truly discerned. In the midst of it stands
the poet, a young man of an ancient border
family with flame-coloured hair, a brilliant human
being who lived seventy-two years, and for the
most part flourished, until he died of influenza
and pneumonia. He resembles the beautiful
tyrant in Dolores :
When, with flame all around him aspirant,
Stood, flushed as a harp-player stands,
The implacable beautiful tyrant,
Rose-crowned, having Death in his hands ;
And a sound as the sound of loud water
Smote far through the flight of the fires.
And mixed with the lightning of slaughter
A thunder of lyres.
Until virtue produces a book fuller of life we
can only accept the poet's own label of sin in
peril of blasphemy. Nor is it inapt to recall
that Richard Jefieries, one of the holiest of
pagans and a lover o^ Poems caul Hal /ads, named
his sweetest heroine after one of its women,
Felise, and seems to reflect some of its ardours
in The Story of IVIy Heart.
Yet Swinburne did affix this label of sin. He
took it from the world and gloried in it, coup-
78
POEMS AND BALLADS
ling it with Love and Time ; coupling Desire
with Pain, Pleasure, Satiety, and Hate ; also
with Sorrow and Death. Now he was dwelling
on " loves perverse " and the " raptures and roses
of vice " in contrast with the " lilies and languors
of virtue " ; now calling sin " sweet," but " brief
beyond regret," and only a " brief bitter bliss " ;
acknowledging " all the sting and all the stain
of long delight " ; yet again acclaiming " the
strange great sins." Seldom is there any pure
so-called pagan delight in what may afterwards
be judged sin. At one time the very name of
" sin " is given where the world gives it ; at
another the pain and the weariness, the feverish-
ness, the bitterness, the faintness of it are pub-
lished, with moans or laughter. He consciously
exalts the name of sin, as Baudelaire did La
Debauche et la Mort . . . deux aimables filles ;
and Lady Macbeth, dme puissante au crime ; and
the Night of Michael Angelo :
Qui tors paisablement dans un pose etrange
Tes appas fa9onnes aux bouches des Titans ;
and the impure woman, that blind and deaf
machine, the queen of sins, the bizarre goddess,
the demon without pity :
Elle croit, elle sait^ cette vierge infeconde
Et portant necessaire a la marche du monde,
Que la beaute du corps est un sublime don
Qui de toute infamie arrache le pardon,
79
A. C. SWINBURNE
But Swinburne is more detaehed than Baude-
laire ; his praises are Hghter, and being from tlie
lips outward are less sincere as well as more
immoderate and unqualified. In a spirit of gay
and amateur perversity he flatters sin with the
appellations of virtue, as Geoi'ge Herbert gave
his religious poetry the unction of love. There
is no remorse, no repentance :
Until God loosen over sea and land
The thunder and the trumpets of the night.
The lovers are bruised and regretful but unre-
penting so long as they may " live and not
languish or feign." Even if " the keen edge of
sense foretasteth sin " they cannot relent.
Barrenness, sterility, perversity, monstrosity,
cruelty, satiety, are made into praises of Love
and Sin. Onnie animal post coituvi triste est, as
a criticism, cannot touch the wild drift of the
rhymes. If evil and misery have this sweetness
and tumultuous force, show me what is good
and joyous. Civilization and Christianity,
England and Puritanism, aristocratic breeding
and a classical education, and we know not
what, gave this man a ciu'ious knowledge of
bodily love and a loyal ardour, a wonderful
sweetness and mightiness of words, to celebrate
it as it was and as it had been. He brought all
the rays of life to bear upon this one thing,
80
POEMS AND BALLADS
making it show forth in turn the splendour and
gloom and strangeness of the earth and its
inhabitants. And one of his chief energies arose
out of opposition to the common, easy condemna-
tion or ignoring or denial of this thing. He
rebelled against the stupid ideal of colourless
polite perfection which would paste strips of
paper here and there over the human body, as
Christina Rossetti did over the words, " the
supreme evil, God," in her copy of Atahmta.
Personally, he was, I believe, not opposed to the
Criminal Law Amendment Act or even to
Divorce Law Reform. He sang what in his
hours of intensest life most rapt the attention
of his keenest powers of mind and body
together.
But, as a rule, he is not directly expressing a
personal emotion or experience. Few of the
completely characteristic poems of this volume
are or could have been addressed to one woman :
it is quite likely that the poet seldom felt mono-
gamous "three whole days together," and that
if he knew the single-hearted devotion to one
woman often expressed by Shakespeare, Burns,
Shelley, Wordsworth, or Rossetti, he never
expressed it, unless it was in A Leave-taking.
Instead of " Margaret and Mary and Kate and
Caroline," he celebrates Faustine, Fragoletta,
Aholibah, Dolores, Azubah, Aholah, Ahinoam,
F 81
A. C. SWINBURNE
Atarah ; and it is a shock, though a pleasant
one, suddenly to come upon the Interlude^
blithe, bright and actual, recording the happi-
ness between the singer and a woman who came
when
There was something the season wanted,
Though the ways and the woods smelt sweet.
This poem belongs to a class more numerous
than conspicuous in Swinburne's early poetry,
including, among others, Rococo, Stage Love,
A Match, Before Parting, and Anima Anceps.
They vary from the fanciful and playful to the
elegiac, but are all of such a kind that they
might have been not remotely connected with
the writer's experience. They have in them
something of Browning and something of
Rossetti under the influence of Browning.
They are admirably done, but they are ob-
scured by the poems of more astonishing
qualities, which were possibly drawn from a
longer fermentation of the same experiences.
Into the same class with them, as showing
Swinburne comparatively pale and mild, go the
narratives in the manner of Rossetti or some
other obvious model, and the decorative verses
after the style of Morris, and exercises, how-
ever consummate, like Aholihah, which could be
thought pure Swinburne by one ignorant of
Ezekiel.
82
POEMS AND BALLADS
Some of these lesser poems prove his ability
to idealize quite blamelessly, as in the meek
lines of St. Doi^othy :
Where she sat working, with soft bended brows,
Watching her threads, among the school maidens.
He could be blameless to absurdity, as in speak-
ing of the maidens' " cold, small, quiet beds."
He preferred to idealize beds that were neither
cold nor quiet. He himself has told us some-
thing of the origin of Faustine :
^' Faustine is the reverie of a man gazing on
the bitter and vicious loveliness of a face as
common and as cheap as the morality of re-
viewers, and dreaming of past lives in which
this fair face may have held a nobler or fairer
station ; the imperial profile may have been
Faustina's, the thirsty lips a Maenad's, when
first she learnt to drink blood or wine, to waste
the loves and win the lives of men ; through
Greece and through Rome she may have
passed with the same face which now comes
before us dishonoured and discrowned. What-
ever of merit or demerit there may be in the
verses, the idea that gives them such life as
they have is simple enough ; the transmigration
of a single soul doomed as though by accident
from the first to all evil and no good, through
many ages and forms, but clad always in the
same type of fleshly beauty. The chance which
83
A. C. SWINBURNE
suggested to me this poem was one wliicli may
happen any day to any man — the sudden sight
of a living face which recalled the well-known
likeness of another dead for centuries : in this
instance the noble and faultless type of the
elder Faustina as seen in coin and bust. Out
of the casual glimpse and sudden recollection
these verses sprang."
That Swinburne was ready to take a hint of
this kind may be seen from the story of how a
lady deceived him by playing " Three Blind
Mice " as a very ancient Florentine ritornello ;
for he found that " it reflected to perfection the
cruel beauty of the Medicis." He had a nature
that magnified, and taste directed his magnifica-
tion towards sin and the sublimity of little-
known or wholly imagined evil : nor was he
incapable of deliberately flaunting vices before
the incurious virtuous.
As his poems are seldom personal, so they
are not real as Donne's or Byron's or Browning's
are, though often " realistic " at certain points.
I They are magnificent, but more than human.
Bliss were indeed bitter and brief if wives and
mistresses were so lithe and lascivious and
poisonous, snakes so numerous, blood and foam
so frequent in bower and brake. They are divine
\ rather than human, like the pictures in the
I temple at Sestos :
^ 84
POEMS AND BALLADS
There might you see the Gods in sundry shapes,
Committing heady riots, incests, rapes :
For know, that underneath this radiant floor
Was Danae's statue in a brazen tower,
Love slyly stealing from his sister's bed.
To dally with Idalian Ganimede,
And for his love Europa bellowing loud.
And tumbling with the rainbow in a cloud. . . .
Nature and inanimate things are sympa-
thetic ; not only are the girdle and the hair
" amorous," but the water round a woman
bathing is "sweet, fierce water." In A Ballad
of Life the very ballad is human flesh :
Forth, ballad, and take roses in both arms.
Even till the top rose touch thee in the throat
Where the least thorn-prick harms ;
And girdled in thy golden singing-coat,
Come thou before my lady and say this ;
Borgia, thy gold hair's colour burns in me.
Thy mouth makes beat my blood in feverish rhymes ;
Therefore so many as these roses be.
Kiss me so many times.
Then it may be, seeing how sweet she is,
That she will stoop herself none otherwise
Than a blown vine branch doth.
And kiss thee with soft laughter on thine eyes,
Ballad, and on thy mouth.
Except for the " vine branch," the verse gives
by itself a perfect courtly picture, dainty and
joyous, as a man sometimes imagines some
utterly past mode of life to have been. Swin-
burne could use the same sensuous plenty upon
85
A. C. SWINBURNE
something in tlic ordinary plane of life, as in
At Partifij^; but not witliout a touch almost of
meanness in the absence of anything else : In
t/ie Orchard, a not dissimilar mediaeval piece
from the Proven(,'al, is far finer, if it is not the
finest of all. In his most characteristic work,
as in Laus Veneris, The Triumph of Timc^
Dolores, the ballads of Life and Death, he
multiplies thoughts and images, either very
clear or vaguely sublime or luxurious, consistent
with one another and given continuity by the
mood, and still more by the lovely stanza-form.
Only in the narrative work is this continuity,
logical or emotional, very definite, though the
pervading unity of tone usually gives a satis-
factory first impression.
Of confessedly decorative poems in the style
of Morris he wrote very few. He preferred
forms that allowed a loose combination of the
abstract and the concrete, where he could
multiply melodiously, as in A Hijnm to Proser-
pine, Hcsperia, A Lainentation. Catalogues,
like the Masque of Queen Bersabe, and A Ballad
of Burdens, and all stanza forms, the more
elaborate the better, permitting or commanding
repetition, like .i Litajuf and the Rondels,
pleased him. Every form made terms with him
except blank verse, wiiich naturally did not
compel him to the clear definition, the regular
86
POEMS AND BALLADS
pauses and slight variations of theme necessary
to produce his best poems and yet to confine
them ; even couplets were not always firm
enough in their hold on his energies.
The stanza forms of the book are numerous
and very different. Some are old, but he makes
the old seem new by making it leap, or making
it pause with "long reluctant amorous delay,"
so that it hardly moves at all. Some are new
or unfamiliar. Even the stanza of Omar, used
for Laus Veneris, is transmuted, by rhyming the
third lines of each pair of quatrains, and by
greater variety of movement than Fitzgerald
gave it. In each poem the rhythm and the
arrangement of rhymes give the form a richness,
a clear tangibility, which must be enjoyed for
its own sake if a full half of the poem is not to
be lost. They might be as fairly indicated by
their metres as their subjects, except that Swin-
burne's use of metre is so individual that we
should have to say " a study in the stanza of
Dolo?^es," and so on. This is true not only of the
poems of love and lust, and the confessed ex-
periments in Sapphics and hendecasyllabics, but
of poems with a more social significance, like
those to Hugo and the memory of Landor,
and the songs In Time of Order, In Time of
Revolution, where the poet reveals intellectual
passions. He does not, like another poet, have
87
A. C. SWINBURNE
to think ill his metre : his mastery compels the
metre to think for him.
Swinburne's style liad now fully manifested
itself. Some of its qualities were prominent,
especially the repetition— repetition of single
vowel or consonant sounds, of single words, of
groups of words, of ideas. AVhether always
conscious or not, these were essentials in Swin-
burne's art. Some of them obviously make for
pleasantness of sound, as in the repeated " ur "
sound in " and pearl and purple and amber on
her feet"; others more doubtfully, as in the
frequent use of " light and night " and the like,
and the " i's " of Fragoletta :
O sole desire of my delight !
O sole delight of my desire !
Mine eyelids and eyesight
Feed on thee day and night
Like lips of fire.
Almost certainly unconscious were repetitions
like that of the image of a wine press, four times
used in Laus Veneris and several times else-
were : unconscious, too, the extent of the
repeated use, not merely in close connection,
but all through the book, of snakes and sin, of
the words lithe, pale, curled, sting, strange, sad,
great, soft, sweet, barren, sterile, etc., and of
collocations like :
88
POEMS AND BALLADS
Or poisonous foam on the tender tongue
Of the little snakes that eat my heart.
But repetition was not the only element
in the sweetness and sonority of Poems and
Ballads. As Swinburne loved the vowel sound
in "light," so he did all full vowels, especially
in combination with 1, r, m, and n, as in the line :
Comfort and cool me as dew in the dawn of a moon like a
dream.
Much as he delighted in the speed of the
anapaest with its subdued "of the," "in the,"
"and the," "of a," "in a," "and a," etc., he
delighted also in the slow long vowels close
together which make the end of the last line of
A Ballad of Life a kiss :
And kiss thee with soft laughter on thine eyes.
Ballad, and on thy mouth.
The rich effect of the repeated "th," of the
"m," the "i," and the "ou," apart from the
rhyme, is incomparably beyond that of the same
idea — if it be called so — had it been expressed by
Ballad, and om the Lips.
Sometimes he must bring together " thine " and
"heart," as when he does so and gives such
fondness to the slow line :
The soft south whither thine heart is set.
89
A. C. SWINBURNE
Rather more than nothing perhaps is sacrificed
to sound, hut far more to the need for a stately,
a dchcate, or a suhhme scttincr to Love, Time
and Sin. The love of all lovely and pleasant
things deludes to some inexcusahly amphficd
similes. It may do no harm to the praise of a
woman to say that
Her breasts are like white birds,
And all her gracious words
As water-grass to herds
In the June days :
it certainly does not : but when Demeter in At
Eleusis describes herself unswaddhng the infant
Triptolemus,
Unwinding cloth from cloth
As who unhusks an almond to the white
And pastures curiously the purer taste,
she indulges the sense of taste inopportunely.
Other similes are carried so far that the matter
of the simile is more important in the total
than what it appeared to intensify ; others merely
add to the quality, not inharmonious and not
quite intelligible nor asking to be wholly under-
stood, of the passage, as in Hesperia :
And my heart yearns baffled and blind, moved vainly toward
thee, and moving
As the refluent seaweed moves in the languid exuberant
stream,
90
POEMS AND BALLADS
Fair as a rose is on earth, as a rose under water in prison,
That stretches and swings to the low passionate pulse of
the sea.
Closed up from the air and the sun, but alive, as a ghost
rearisen,
Pale as the love that revives as a ghost rearisen in me.
Here no likely reader will inquire, far enough
to be troubled, what it is that resembles the
rose, or that stretches and swings, or that is
closed up fi'om the air ; or object that finally
the subject of the comparison is virtually used
as a comparison for the comparison. Neither
perhaps should it be complained that in the
same poem Death is both a person and a some-
thing with " iron sides " through which hell can
be seen ; that in the same poem Love is a
"bloomless bower," and only "lives a day"; that
there are beds " full of perfume and sad sound,"
and doors " made " with music and " barred
round " with sighing and laughter and tears, and
that with the tears "strong souls of men are
bound " : nor complained that very different things
are frequently spoken of as if belonging to the
same class, as "lips," "foam," and "fangs," or
" serpents " and " cruelties," " summer and per-
fume and pride," " sand and ruin and gold,"
" the treading of wine " and " the feet of the
dove," " spring and seed and swallow " ; and
that exact correspondence is wanting in the
lines :
91
A. C. SWINBURNE
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest time and mowing.
Where metaphor and simile crowd they have
a lower scale of values than common, and no
attempt need be made to see Love filling itself
with tears, girdlintr itself with sighintr, letting
its ears be filled with " rumour of people sorrow-
ing," wearing sighs (not sighing) for a raiment,
decorated with " pains " and " many a grievous
thing," and having sorrows " for armlet and for
gorget and for sleeve." I do not know how to
defend it, except that in practice and in a state
of sobriety that verse of A Ballad of DeatJi can
be read with pleasure and without question.
But this confusion of categories and indefinite
definiteness of images is as common in Swin-
burne's poetry, as in bad prose. He will say
that a woman is " clothed like summer with
sweet hours," but that at the same time her
eyelids are shaken and blue and filled with
sorrow. He will say also that she had a cithern
strung with the " subtle-coloured " hair of a dead
lute-player, the seven strings being charity,
tenderness, pleasure, sorrow, sleep, and sin, and
" loving kindness, that is pity's kin and is most
pitiless " ; while of the three men with her one
is pity and another is sorrow. Who the lady is
and who " my lady " is, and what in A Ballad of
Life his soul meant in saying :
92
POEMS AND BALLADS
This is marvellous
Seeing the air's face is not so delicate
Nor the sun's grace so great,
If sin and she be kin or amorous,
remains a matter for subtle and perhaps eternal
debate. Marvellous it also is that such confusion
^ of what must be and what cannot be visualized
should yet be harmonized by rhythm, by sweet-
ness of words, and by the dominant ideas of Love,
etc., into something which on the whole the mind
accepts and the spirit embraces. At the same
time, not all the vagueness is good. " Grey old
miseries " is not good ; nor is " hours of fruitful
breath " or " lands wherein time grows " ; " the
wild end of things " is an inadequate description
of the scene of Prometheus' agony. There are
places, too, where the poet's figurative use of
" clothed " and " clad," from the first page to
the last but one, is vain, as when " the wave of
the world " is said to be " clad about with seas
as with wings " and also " impelled of invisible
tides." The source may, perhaps, be found in
the Biblical " clothed in thunder," which is said
to be a sublimity of mistranslation.
The Bible gave him the matter and language
of the whole of A Litany, and with Malory
and Morris gave him something at least of his
taste for monosyllables, the archaism of words
like " certes," " right gladly then," " begot," and
93
A. C. SWINBURNE
of wliole poems like The Manque of Queen
Bcrmbe. From Rossctti he took the habit of
rhyming " waters " with " hers " and so on ; from
Baudelaire something of his Satanism and some
of his snakes; from Hugo some of his exuberance.
But these elements are seldom unduly con-
spicuous save under a microscope. Elements
peculiarly his own are far more conspicuous.
Love of sound and especially of rhyme per-
suaded him to a somewhat lighter use of words
than is common among great poets. Space
would be wasted by examples of words pro-
duced apparently by submission to rhyme, not
mastery over it. The one line in Hespeiia :
Shrill shrieks in our faces the blind bland air that was mute
as a maiden,
is enough to illustrate the poet's carelessness of
the fact that alliteration is not a virtue in itself.
Since the adjective is most ready when words
are wanted he used a great number, yet without
equally great variety. He kept as it were a
harem of words, to which he was constant and
absolutely faithful. Some he favoured more
than others, but he neglected none. He used
them more often out of compliment than of
necessity. Compare his " bright fine lips " with
the passages quoted by Ruskin from Shake-
speare, Shelley, Suckling, and Leigh Hunt.
'J'hey do not belong to the same school of lan-
94
POEMS AND BALLADS
guage as " Here hung those hps," or Suckhng's
Her lips were redj and one was thin
Compared with that was next her cliin.
(Some bee had stung it newly.)
" Bright " and " fine " could doubtless be applied
to lips with perfect aptness, but they are not
applied so here. They are complimentary and
not descriptive. Swinburne admired brightness,
and he called a woman's lips "bright" and in
the next stanza but one a blackbird " bright."
1 do not know what " fine " means, but I sus-
pect that it is not much more definite than the
vulgar " fine " and his own " splendid." A group
of his epithets, as in "the lost white feverish
limbs" of the drowned Sappho, has sometimes
the effect of a single epithet by a master like
Keats. Many epithets express the poet's opinions
of things as much as their qualities, as in "mar-
vellous chambers," "strange weathers," "keen
thin fish," " mystic and sombre Dolores," " strong
broken spirit of a wave," " hard glad weather,"
"purple blood of pain," "feverish weather,"
" shameful scornful lips," " splendid supple
thighs," " sad colour of strong marigolds," " clean
great time of goodly fight," " fair pure sword,"
" like a snake's love lithe and fierce," " heavenly
hair," " heavenly hands," " mute melancholy lust
of heaven," " fine drouth," " fierce reluctance of
95
A. C. SWINBURNE
disastrous stars," "tideless dolorous midland
sea," " fresh fetlocks," " fervent oars," or the four-
teen epithets applied to Dolores. The epithets
in the last stanza of A Ihilhid of l^catli are all
appropriate to the intention of the poet —
"rusted," "rain-rotten," "waste," "late un-
liappy" — and in keeping with the ideas of
fading, sighing, groaning, bowing down, even-
ing and death — but are for the most part but
indifferently fitted for their respective places,
and could perhaps safely be transposed in half a
dozen ways without affecting the "sense, though
I shall not prove it. That transposition would
change and probably spoil the total effect there
is no denying.
But Swinburne has almost no magic felicity
of words. He can astonish and melt but seldom
thrill, and when he does it is not by any felicity
of as it were God-given inevitable words. He
has to depend on sound and an atmosphere of
words which is now and then concentrated and
crystallized into an intensity of effect which is
almost magical, perhaps never quite magical.
This atmosphere comes from a vocabulary very
rich in words connected with objects and sensa-
tions and emotions of pleasure and beauty,
but used, as I have said, somewhat lightly
and even in appearance indiscriminately. No
poet could be poorer in brief electric phrases,
96
POEMS AND BALLADS
pictorial or emotional. The first line of
Out of the golden remote wild west where the sea without
shore is,
is an example of Swinburne's way of accu-
mulating words which altogether can suggest
rather than infallibly express his meaning.
"Golden," "remote," "wild," "west," "sea,"
and " without shore " all have already some
emotional values, of which the line gives no
more than the sum, the rhythm and gram-
matical connection saving the words from death
and inexpressiveness. In the whole opening
passage of this poem there is the same accu-
mulation, aided by the vague, as in "region of
stories " and " capes of the past oversea."
Perhaps the greatest of his triumphs is in
keeping up a stately solemn play of words not
unrelated to the object suggested by his title
and commencement but more closely related to
rhymes, and yet in the end giving a compact
and powerful impression. The play of words
often on the very marge of nonsense has acted
as an incantation, partly by pure force of
cadence and kiss of rhymes, partly by the accu-
mulative force of words in the right key though
otherwise lightly used. Hardly one verse means
anything in particular, hardly one line means
G 97
A. C. SWINBURNE
anything at all, but nothing is done inconsistent
with the opening, nothing which the rashest
critic would venture to call unavailing in the
complete effect. Single words are used in some
poems, verses in others, as contributive rather
than essential ; their growth is by simple addi-
tion rather than evolution. Some pieces could
probably lose a verse or two without mutilation
or any loss. Faustine or JJo/o7'Cs, for example,
could ; and Felise would not miss many a verse,
and several of those phrases like
The sweetest name that ever love
Grew weary of,
in which it is exceptionally rich. Who would
miss a couple of queens from the crowd of
Herodias, Aholibah, Cleopatra, Abihail, Azu-
bah, Aholah, Ahinoam, Atarah, Semiramis,
Hesione, Chrysothemis, Thomyris, Harhas,
INIyrrha, Pasiphae, Sappho, IMessalina, Ames-
tris, Ephrath, Pasithea, Alaciel, Erigone ? AMio
could weep at the loss of a verse in the poems.
To Victor Hugo, or In Memorij of Walter Savage
lAUidor, which not even exaggeration can save ?
And yet at the same time the man who would
not miss Azubah or Atarah would not willingly
consent to her disappearance. It was not a good
thing to use simple addition very often as Shelley
had done once in The Sky-Lark ; but Swinburne
98
POEMS AND BALLADS
also wrote In an Orchard, Itylus, Anima Anceps,
The Garden of Proserpine, and Before Dazvn,
where addition had no part, where English
words sang together as before 1866 they had
never done. In some of the poems, and con-
summately in Anima Anceps, the rhyming words
have a life of their own, as of birds singing or
fauns dancing.
99
OPINIONS : PROSE-WORKS
England is said to have been troubled by the
sound of Swinburne praying to Dolores to
" forgive us our virtues." " The average English-
man," says an Edinburgh reviewer, " is not
easily thrown by the most potent spells into a
state of amorous delirium " ; he is anxious also
that others should share his salvation. The
book was withdrawn from sale by Moxon, but
taken over by Hotten. The " clatter," said
Swinburne at a much later day, gave him the
pleasure of comparing " the variously inaccurate
verdicts of the scornful or mournful censors who
insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or
sensation attempted or achieved in it as either
confessions of positive fact or excursions of
absolute fancy " ; in the Dedicatory Epistle to
the Collected Poems (1904) he was content to
say that " there are photographs from life in the
book ; and there are sketches from imagination."
He withdrew nothing. " There is not," he said
in The AtheniEum, 1877. " one piece, there is not
100
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
one line, there is not one word, there is not one
syllable in any one copy ever printed of that
book which has ever been changed or cancelled
since the day of publication."
The best-known attack, Robert Buchanan's
article on " The Fleshly School of Poetry " over
the signature of " Thomas Maitland," appeared
in The Contemporary in 1871, five years after
Poems and Ballads. In this article Tennyson's
Maud was summoned to receive blame for
affording "distinct precedent for the hysteric
tone and overloaded style which is now so
familiar to readers of Mr. Swinburne." Mingling
amused contempt with righteous anger, he
called the author of Anactoria and Laus Veneris
"only a little mad boy letting off squibs."
Swinburne's reply. Under the Microscope, was
withheld on account of an abusive digression
upon Tennyson's Idylls of the King, the " Morte
d' Arthur " and its " lewd circle of strumpets and
adulterers revolving round the central figure of
their inane wittol " ; but it is worth reading for
some of the criticism in that digression, and for
the loose and merry vigour of the retaliation
upon Buchanan of which this may serve as a
specimen :
Well may this incomparable critic, this unique and sove-
reign arbiter of thought and letters ancient and modern,
remark with compassion and condemnation, how inevitably
101
A. C. SWTNHURXE
a tmining in Greek literature must tend to "emasculate''
the student so trained; and well may we conifratulate
ourselves that no such process as robbed of all strength
and manhood the intelligence of Milton has had power to
impair the virility of Mr. Huchanan\s robust and masculine
genius. To that strong and severe figure we turn from
the sexless and nerveless company of shrill-voiced singers
who share with Milton the curse of enforced effeminacy ;
from the pitiful soprano notes of such dubious creatures as
Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Gray, Coleridge, Shelley,
Landor, cum semlviro comitatu, we avert our ears to
catch the higher and manlier harmonies of a poet with all
his natural parts and powers complete. For truly, if love
or knowledge of ancient art and wisdom be the sure mark
of " emasculation " and the absence of any taint of such
love or any tincture of such knowledge (as then in
consistency it must be) the supreme sign of perfect man-
hood, Mr. Robert Buchanan should be amply competent
to renew the Thirteenth labour of Hercules.
One would not be a young maid in his way
For more than blushing come to.
Nevertheless, in a country where (as Mr. Carlyle says in
his essay on Diderot) indecent exposure is an offence
cognizable at police offices, it might have been as well for
him to uncover with less immodest publicity the gigantic
nakedness of his ignorance. . . .
For some time after this Swinburne indulged
in the pleasure of harassing Buchanan, the
" polypseudonymous lyrist and libeller," with
prose and verse of some humour and much
hilarity. In later years he is said to have called
102
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
his early poems, or some of them, "sins of youth."
The crude mass of popular opinion had perhaps
made him feel that he had been too much of a
propagandist, or Satanic missionary. Whether
or not he felt that he had been guilty of " some
more or less inappropriate extravagance of
expression," as in some "hasty" topical lines long
afterwards, he had no wish to stand at street
corners beseeching all that would be saved to
adopt a wholesale un-English immorality. He
might not object to JNlaupassant's picture of
himself as perhaps the most extravagantly
artistic being then upon the face of the earth, a
fantastic apparition, dwelling among fantastic
pictures and incredible books, with an equally
surprising friend and a monkey, adorning his
dinner table with another monkey roasted. He
himself told how, when he was rescued from
drowning off the coast of France, he was
wrapped in a sail by the fisherman and beguiled
the return with declamations from the poetry of
Victor Hugo. In later years he declared at a
supper party that if he could indulge his whim
he would build a castle with seven towers, and
in each of the towers daily should be enacted
one of the seven deadly sins ; he enjoyed saying
that "after Catullus and Ovid," there was pro-
bably no poet "with whose influence a pious
parent or a judicious preceptor should be so
103
A. C. SWINBURNE
anxious to imbue or may be so confident of
imbuing the innocent mind of in^^enuous youth,"
as Musset. But he spoke in elderly tones of the
decay coming upon Musset " which unmistak-
ably denotes and inevitably chastises a youth
not merely passionate or idle, sensual or self-
indulgent, but prurient and indifferent, callous
and effeminate at once " ; he condemned with
impatience Keats' early verses as " some of the
most vulgar and fulsome doggerel ever whim-
pered by a vapid and effeminate rhymester in the
sickly stage of whelphood " ; and pronounced
that "a manful kind of man or even a manly
sort of boy, in his love-making or in his suffering,
will not howl and snivel after such a lamentable
fashion " as Keats in his letters to Fanny
Brawne.
Swinburne had in fact something like the
standards of any other Englishman of his class
in most matters excepting art and beauty.
Even his view of art was modified to suit these
standards in the presence of so new a phenome-
non as Zola or Whitman. "What," he asked,
when Zola's L'Assommoir was appearing in
La Republique des Lettres :
What in the name of common sense, of human reason,
is it to us, whether the author's private life be or be not
comparable only, for mystic and infantile purity, to that
of such men as Marcus Aurelius or St. Francis of Assisi,
104
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
if his published work be what beyond all possible question
it is — comparable only for physical and for moral abomina-
tion to such works as, by all men's admission, it is im-
possible to call into such a court as the present, and there
bring them forward as the sole fit subjects for com-
parison ; for the simple and sufficient reason, that
the mention of their very names in print is generally,
and not unnaturally, considered to be of itself an ob-
scene outrage on all literary law and prescription of
propriety ?
He confessed with some naivete that he had not
read the book through and could not do. He
was not interested in the matter of L'Assom-
moir ; he felt himself perhaps confronted with
an enemy of his class and tradition ; he proved
to himself that it was not a work of art and
condemned it. In the case of Whitman he
began by admiring the democracy and the
sexual freedom of Leaves of Grass. He said
in 1872 that as far as he knew he was entirely
at one with Whitman " on general matters not
less than on political " ; to him the views of life
set forth by Whitman appeared " thoroughly
acceptable and noble, perfectly credible and
sane " ; in Songs before Sunrise he had called
out to the American poet :
Send but a song over sea for us^
Heart of their hearts who are free.
Heart of their singer, to be for us
More than our singing can be. . . .
105
A. C. SWINIU ll\E
15ut by 1887 Whitman's opinions were no
longer sullicient to excuse his lorni or his con-
scious purpose. Therefore Swinburne said that
" Macpherson could at least evoke shadows :
Mr. Tupper and Mr. Whitman can only accunm-
late words. The informing principle of his
work is not so much the negation as the con-
tradiction of the creative principle of poetry."
So much for his art. As for his opinions,
" Mr. ^^^hitman's Venus is a Hottentot wench
under the influence of cantharides and adulter-
ated rum," and in Studies i?i Prose and Poetry
Swinburne appealed to public taste in an
eloquent passage beginning : "If nothing that
concerns the physical organism of men or of
women is common or unclean or improper for
literary manipulation ..."
In brief, Swinburne in his fiftieth year felt
that Whitman, his ideas and his methods, were
incompatible with fact and fancy at Eton,
Capheaton, Paphos or Putney. Probably he
was already equally admiring and "adoring"
both Imogen and Cleopatra, both Blake and
Baudelaire, in the days of Poems and Ballads
and of his first love of AVhitman, when it seemed
to him that the qualities common to Blake
and Whitman were so many and grave as
" to afford some ground of reason to those who
preach the transition of souls or transfusion
106
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
of spirits." So, too, when he had had enough
of Whitman and abused him with a virulence
due perhaps in part to shame at his former
admiration, he retained his detestation of Puri-
tanism " from whose inherited and infectious
tyranny this nation is as yet (1889) but im-
perfectly delivered." It may be surmised also
that he continued to be able to enjoy the rich
strong humour of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair,
having refused to leave the table in disgust at
the coarseness of the meats and the rankness
of the sauces. He did not resent Aristophanes
or Rabelais. But Coprology or the Science of
Filth he " left to Frenchmen," at a time when
his patriotism had the upper hand. Moreover,
he condemned Wycherley's Country Wife as
one of the disgraces of our literature — "the
mere conception . . . displays a mind so prurient
and leprous, uncovers such an unfathomable
and unimaginable beastliness of imagination,
that in the present age he would probably have
figured as a virtuous journalist and professional
rebuker of poetic vice or artistic aberration."
Nor could he stomach the "realism and ob-
scenity " of Shakespeare's third period, the
" fetid fun and rancid ribaldry of Pandarus and
Thersites " : though he was ineligible for mem-
bership of a Society for the Suppression of
Shakespeare or Rabelais, of Homer or the
107
A. C. SWINBURNE
Bible, he could feel only rcj)ulsion on reading
the prose portions of the fourth act of '* Pericles."
He was glad to be rid of these things, the only
matter in Shakespeare's work which could be
unattractive to the perceptions of " any healthy-
minded and reasonable human creature." Nor
should it be forgotten that he thought no man
ever did Shakespeare better service than Bowdler,
who " made it possible to put him into the
hands of intelligent and imaginative children."
These words were written thirteen years after
the publication of Poems and Ballads. With
very short intervals Swinburne probably ad-
mired " healthy-minded and reasonable " human
creatures all the days of his life. AVith aberra-
tions, he was himself a healthy-minded and
reasonable man. He thought Charles Dickens
the " greatest Englishman of his generation,"
and though his expressions were too easily
excessive, he was at most points in agreement
with general or respectable opinion, when he
had not, as in the case of Blake or Fitzgerald,
powerfully helped to create it, or far preceded
it. Never a shy solitary singer, he gradually
took a public or national, though not a popular,
position. He wrote patriotic sonnets about the
Armada and about the Boer War. Even when
not a patriot he was a passionate lover of Eng-
land, of her fields and waters, of her great men,
108
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
from the Bastard in King John to Cromwell
and Nelson, from Chaucer and Shakespeare and
Milton to Landor and Shelley ; and generously
he praised them, with a kind of mingled state-
liness and excitement, conservatism and revolu-
tionism. He would not have Arnold speak of
England as if it were the whole of Philistia,
and wisely answered a certain page with : " I do
not say that marriage dissoluble only in an
English divorce court is a lovely thing or a
venerable ; I do say that marriage indissoluble
except by Papal action is not." He not only
loved Shakespeare and Rabelais and Cervantes,
but it pleased him to repeat it : " And now
abideth Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, these
three ; but the greatest of these is Shake-
speare." If " to recognize their equal, even their
better when he does come," were the test of
great men, as Swinburne says it is their delight,
great would he be, for his praise of Hugo,
Leconte de Lisle, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold,
Rossetti, Dickens, Mrs. Browning. . . . He
lived by admiring usually to the point of adora-
tion, which was for him religion, though he
scorned idolatry. For on the whole he was
glad of the earth and what was upon it, past
i and present. He preferred Milton's Areo-
pagitica to Carlyle's Latter Day Pamphlets,
and Athens to New York, but he believed also
109
A. C. SWINBURNE
in " the incalculable progress of hunumity " since
Shakespeare's death, and he enjoyed the in-
comparable felicity of sharing the earth with
\'ictor Hugo.
As to the formal religions current in his time
he could seldom speak of them with much
civility, and there is no reason for doubting
that he shared the feeling of the singer of the
Hymn to Proserpine about " ghastly glories of
saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods." Abuse
of the deity was one of his chief poetic
pleasures. Of priests he always wrote as if
inspired to outgo Shelley's indignation at
thought of " the priest, the slave and the
liberticide." His indignation went, in fact, so
far as partly to disable him from appreciating
Dante, for the " ovens and cesspools " of whose
Inferno he expressed careless contempt as being
fit only for " the dead and malodorous level of
mediaeval faith." He rejoiced to discover that
the author of Hamlet was a free-thinker —
'* that loftiest and most righteous title which
any just and reasoning soul can ever deserve to
claim." He had discovered also that Shake-
speare, as the author of Julius Caesar and King
Lear, was a republican and a socialist. With
Jesus, Swinburne had no real quarrel, but only
with the Cross and its worshippers, and he once
flattered Jesus by a comparison with Mazzini,
110
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
and spoke of Emily Bronte's " Christ-like long-
suffering and compassion." When he had
written two sonnets on the death of Louis
Napoleon, with the title, The Descent into
Hell, and the conclusion, " the dog is dead," his
defence was that he could only have offended
"those to whom the name of Christ and all
memories connected with it are hateful, and
those to whom the name of Bonaparte and all
memories connected with it are not. I belong
to neither class " : he spoke with " horror " of
the " blasphemy offered to the name and memory
or tradition of Christ by the men who in
gratitude for the support given to the Church
by Louis Bonaparte and his empire, bestowed
on the most infamous of all public criminals the
name, till then reserved for one whom they
professed to worship as God, of Saviour and
Messiah." It had hardly been possible for
Swinburne to refuse reverence to Jesus, since
one of the few formal elements in his religion
was his exaltation of Man in place of God.
This became a form to which it was seldom
possible to attach a meaning, save a vague,
sublime one. At least, with all his enthusiasm,
he never gave it the solemnity of that passage
from Blake, which he quoted in his study of
the poet :
The worship of God is, honouring His gifts in other
111
A. C. SWINBURNE
men according to his genius and loving the greatest men
best : those who envy or cahnnniate great men hate God,
for there is no other God.
Of lesser men or men whom he found him-
self hating he was less respectful. His enemies
were "vermin." Capital punishment for "a
parricide or a poisoner, a Philip the Second
or a Napoleon the Third," seemed delightfully
equitable. He had evidently no instinctive or
philosophic regard for human life, or a very
keen enjoyment of the process of taking an
eye for an eye overcame it ; for it was his
opinion that an imaginary "dealer in pro-
fessional infanticide by starvation might very
properly be subjected to vivisection without
aucTsthetics, and that all manly and womanly
minds not distorted or distracted by pre-
possessions or assumptions might rationally and
laudably rejoice in the prospect of that legal
and equitable process." Even to Victor Hugo
he would not give up this sense of justice,
though at a later date he preferred to say
merely that it was a horrible notion that such
a murderer sliould be "knowingly allowed for
one unnecessary hour to desecrate creation and
to outrage humanity by the survival of a mon-
strous and maleficent existence." No better proof
could be given of his reasonableness and healthy-
mindedness, if it is remembered that when not
112
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
speaking as a plain citizen he could praise
Voltaire for doing so much "to make the
instinct of cruelty not only detestable but
ludicrous." A more real defection from the
religion of humanity which he appeared to pro-
claim can only be excused on the ground of
idolatry, for it is from Victor Hugo that he
accepts, without comment except of over-
praise, that pretty children grow up into ugly
adults because "God makes and man finishes
them." Which is blasphemy made doubly
vicious by its conventional source and its senti-
mental purpose. But Swinburne would concede
anything to a child in the company of Hugo.
Freedom or Liberty was a safer object of
worship than Man because she could never be
embodied though too easily personified. Some-
times he meant by it a state to which men
looked forward as lacking some present evil of
tyrant or law ; sometimes " that one thing need-
ful without which all virtue is as worthless as
all pleasure is vile, all hope is shameful as all
faith is abject." The Freedom of Byron and
Shelley or the Freedom of the wild-hearted
Emily Bronte was in his mind the object of the
Republicanism which he loved for the sake of
Brutus, Milton, Shelley, Landor, and ^Mazzini.
He used the words " repubhc " and " repubUcan "
as freely as he had once used " love " and " sin,"
H 113
A. C. SWINBURNE
and ^\dth equal fervour. When he found in
Ben Jonson the sentence :
A tyrant, how great and mighty soever he may seem
to cowards and shiggards, is but one creature, one animal,
he pronounced it worthy of Landoi*, and hastened
to say that " such royahsm as is compatible with
undisguised approval of regicide or tyrannicide
might not irrationally be condoned by the
sternest and most rigid of republicans " : he en-
rolled even Collins among the priests of tyran-
nicide. The kindly queens and princes who had
adorned his poems with their beauties and their
vices he quite forgot.
ISIazzini was always a bigoted republican in
his fight for the unity of Italy, and Swinburne
would probably have gone as far as Landor in
acclaiming an ideal republic and abhorring a real
democracy like the American ; he was content
to live under a harmless hereditary sovereign
and sing of a " white republic " that never was
on sea or land. In the poet's mind freedom and
republicanism had become inseparable from the
light, so much loved by him, to which he had
compared them in his adulation. They were
kept fresh as well as alive by his joyous hatred
of Pope "Pius Iscariot" and "Buonaparte the
Bastard." As a rule he was content that
" Freedom " sliould mean what it could, ac-
cording to the reader's prejudice or capacity ;
114
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
but Carlyle and Riiskin, proposing, as it seemed
to him, obedience instead of self-reliance, drill
instead of devotion, force instead of faith, for
the world's redemption, roused him to a tract in
1866 Of Liberty and Loyalty, privately printed
in 1909, with notes by Mr. Edmund Gosse. He
accused Carlyle of a doctrine of " utter passivity
and of absolute dejection." Loyalty, he said,
was a different thing ; " wherever there is a grain
of loyalty there is a glimpse of freedom " ; if we
give up the freedom of choosing between love
and hate we give up loyalty. He ended by
asking : " 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
withhold ? " " The law of the love of Hberty "
continued to be for him something beyond " all
human laws of mere obedience." It was with
Swinburne chiefly a question of personal re-
ligion : should he worship the dark goddess
Obedience, or the bright Liberty ? It had the
advantage of suggesting to him as the "only
two destinations " appropriate for the close of a
rogue's career — " a gibbet or a throne." It could
not seriously interfere with his mainly inherited
notions of what was " manly " and what was
" womanly."
Swinburne's judgments are less interesting
than his tastes, even in the arts. His judgments
115
\
A. C. SWINBURNE
were often just, his reasons for them exciiiisite,
but too often he sliowed how personal a matter
Htcrary criticism was to him, yet without giving
up the excessive judicial pomps; far too often
he could not praise one man without damning
\ another. Therefore, too seldom could he use
the power which enabled him to distinguish the
perfection of the execution in The Ancient
Mariner, as "not the speckless and elaborate
finish which shows everywhere the fresh rasp
of file or chisel on its smooth and spruce ex-
cellence ; this is faultless after the fashion of
a flower or a tree," or the complete devotion which
led him to write that essay in Miscellanies about
Lamb's IMS. notes on ^Vither, intended for
*' those only who would treasure the shghtest
and hastiest scratch of [Lamb's] pen which
carried with it the evidence of spontaneous en-
thusiasm or irritation, of unconsidered emotion
or unprompted mirth."
His one wholly necessary and perhaps un-
fading book of prose is the study of Blake,
since it ffives a vivid account, a subtle but also
forcible and well-supported criticism of a genius
then almost new to the world and the critics ; it
is almost free from truculence, asseveration and
waste digression ; and no one has superseded any
considerable part of it. The study of Shake-
speare has enough virtues to make a good book :
IIG
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
an equal combination of sense, acuteness, scholar-
ship and affectionate sympathy is hardly to be
found elsewhere, and a style so hostile to every
one of those qualities. For, as he grew older,
Swinburne developed a manner of writing
English such as had not raised its head since
Johnson's time. Massiveness and balance were
cherished in it with extraordinary singleminded-
ness, and humour that should have somewhat
pricked their follies commonly helped to swell
them, though once he admitted a Limerick
into his prose, saying that literary history would
hardly care to remember that " there was a bad
poet named Clough, whom his friends found it
useless to pufF: for the public, if dull, has not
quite such a skull as belongs to believers in
Clough." Not that the style crushed the
humour. When he described Dr. Furnivall's
writing as combining " the double display of an
intelligence worthy of Mr. Toots and a dialect
worthy of his friend the Chicken " ; when he
suggested that Charles Reade " should not desire
as he does not deserve to escape the honour of
being defamed or to incur the ignominy of being
applauded by the writers or the readers of such
romances of high life as may be penned by some
erotic scullion gone mad with long contempla-
tion of the butler's calves and shoulders, or by
some discarded footman who, since he was
117
A. C. SWINBURNE
kicked out of his last place with the spoons in
his pocket, may have risen or sunk into notoriety
or obscurity as a gluttonous and liquorish rhyme-
ster or novelist, patrician of the pantry, whose
aristocratic meditations alternate between the
horsewhip with which he is evidently familiar
and the dinner with which he apparently is not
— the prose and the poetry, the real and the ideal
of his life " — here Swinburne added to the more
usual qualities of humour that of carving in
marble what should be writ in water ; he made
dignity laugh at itself. When he quoted
JMacaulay's remark that a certain passage in
Crabbe's Borough has made many a rough and
cynical reader cry like a child, and added that he
himself was " not so rough and cynical as ever
to have experienced that particular effect from
its perusal," he was making the pompous letter
" p " do an amusing task. But this dignity was
not always laughing at itself, nor when it is can
it always be sure of company. Sometimes, on
the other hand, it is laughable when itself is
gravest. That laugh, however, is cheerless at
best, and at the end of half a dozen volumes can
be but a hollow "mocking at gi-ief." Only a
long labour of most diligent eugenists could
breed men to endure such sentences as this, in
The Age of Shakespeare, concerning a dialogue
in Dekker's Virgin Martyr.
118
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
Its simplicity is so childlike, its inspiration so pure
in instinct and its expression so perfect in taste, its utter-
ance and its abstinence, its effusion and its reserve, are so
far beyond praise or question or any comment but thanks-
giving, that these forty-two lines, homely and humble in
manner as they are if compared with the refined rhetoric
and the scrupulous culture of Massinger, would suffice to
keep the name of Dekker sweet and safe for ever among
the most honourable if not among the most pre-eminent
of his kindred and his age.
Sentences of this at present superhuman long-
windedness seemed to be aimed chiefly at long-
windedness. It is produced by the double pro-
cess of repetition and modification, both useless
except for that purpose, since no one gains
anything from the addition of "humble" to
** homely " or from the supposed distinction
between " most honourable " and " most pre-
eminent." A simple love of balance and inflation
compelled Swinburne to translate into the Swin-
burnian as it did Johnson into the Johnsonian.
He would speak of the year of The Alchemist
as "the year which gave to the world for all
time a gift so munificent as that of The Al-
chemist." He would say, after mentioning George
Eliot's Totty, Eppie and Lillo, that " the fiery-
hearted Vestal of Haworth had no room reserved
in the palace of her passionate and high-minded
imagination as a nursery for inmates of such
divine and delicious quality " ; he forgot that
119
A. C. SWINBURNE
" passionate and hifrh-minded," " divine and
delicious," retarded the sentence without giving
it depth, and that "divine" v^^as in any case a
vain vulgarism. But he was of a spending and
ceremonious nature, and this, coupled with his
artistic delight in balance, repetition and opposi-
tion, ruined his prose. At times lie seems to
write for the sake of constructing formally per-
fect and sonorous sentences, more often the kind
of sentence he prefers is dictated as much by
that preference as by his thought. Now he
must find something unqualified to say about
everybody ; again he must qualify everything,
and institute distinctions founded apparently
rather on a love of repeating phrases than on
subtlety, as when he says that Ben Jonson's
Discoveries would give him "a place beside or
above La Rochefoucauld, and beside if not above
Chamfort " ; or he will allow himself to be hag-
ridden by the letter " t " and " d " as in the
clause :
Some perversity or obliquity will be suspected, even
if no positive infirmity or deformity can be detected, in
his intelligence or his temperament ;
or having suggested " a curious monotony in
the variety " will ask " if there be not a curious
variety in the monotony." Had De Quincey
and Dr. .Johnson collaborated in imitating Lyly
they must have produced Swinburnian prose.
120
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
The Bible had helped : here and there Carlyle
is detected in a phrase like " Let that preferable
thing be done with all the might and haste that
may be attainable " : Landor had given his
benediction to the massiveness, Ruskin to the
early picturesqueness, Hugo to the effusiveness.
But from none of these could he have learned
to speak of " the right to seem right " ; to launch
himself upon rhythms too easily detached from
the context ; to praise the aged Corneille's
Psyche as
A lyric symphony of spirit and of song fulfilled with
all the colour and all the music that autumn could steal
from spring if October had leave to go a-maying in some
Olympian masquerade of melody and sunlight ;
to write passages very much like parts of
rhetorical sonnets. Time after time his prose,
especially in Blake, struggles to be metrical, but
remains agitated and dishevelled prose. The
hand which was loose on blank verse and the
heroic couplet, was no sterner on prose, which
offers still less incitement to control. The formal
sentence was perhaps a kind of feeling after a
stanza in prose, but it was inadequate. In short
passages it could, even to the last, be magnificent
in compliment, contumely or humour, and when
he set himself to pronounce eulogies of nine
dramatists of Shakespeare's age in turn his per-
formance was admirable as well as astonishing.
121
A. C. SWINBURNE
His style is meant for public orjition. Even so,
it has in it too many of the elements of debate.
It is restless in readiness for attack. It could
not live without comparison, and comparison
involved tlie most truculent disparagement of
someone, of Euripides, Byron, Carlyle, or Mar-
£^fes Hallam, or praise, too general, and too
mucli like flattery, of someone else, of Landor
or Victor Hugo. It never means a jot more
than it says, and by such a style " when all is
done that can be done then all is done in vain."
It makes no background for itself and no atmo-
sphere, being hard and gleaming and mechanical.
Swinburne had a singular knowledge of books,
because it was not mere learning but a violent
passion ; he was a voluptuary in books, and had
been free to indulge himself in the princely
library of his relative. Lord Ashburnham ; and
yet all he could do was to flatter or abuse them.
Seldom could he expose their qualities, never
his own feeling for them, witliout belabouring
them with praise. In criticism he makes laws
and pronounces judgments ; nor has he more
mercy for books tlian for men, whom he could
condemn to "lifelong seclusion from intercourse
with the humanity they dishonour "' as " the
irreducible minimum of the penalty demanded
rather than deserved by their crimes." He is
best at loyal flattery in verse : probably no other
122
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
poet has written so much poetry about books
and writers.
The study of Blake and many scattered
opinions and points of textual criticism, must
be long connected with Swinburne's name.
Oblivion, and for the first time peace, must be
the end for most of his prose, with all its passion
for literature, for what is beautiful and brave
and generous in men and women, with all its
eloquence and subtlety.
When he talked his prose the power of it was
undeniable. He talked much as he wrote, but
added his own priceless excitement of enthusiasm
or indignation. Mr. Gosse thinks his "mock
irascibility" and pleasure in fighting "dehber-
ately modelled on the behaviour of Walter
Savage Landor " ; but Swinburne's size, some-
thing between a third and a half of Landor's,
must have established a new variety. Mr.
Gosse recalls part of a typical conversation in
which Swinburne, in 1875, was indulging this
irascibility towards someone absent and un-
named :
He had better be careful. If I am obliged to take the
cudgel in my hand the rafter of the hovel in which he
skulks and sniggers shall ring with the loudest whacks
ever administered in discipline or chastisement to a howl-
ing churl.
After a slow beginning the words were poured
123
I
A. C. SWINBURNE
forth in rapid cxiiltjition " in towcrin<,' hi<rh
spirits, without a moment's pause to find a
word." So powerful was liis temperament that
he read Bothwcll, a double-length ehroniele
play, aloud to Burne-.Tones, O'Shaugnessy, P. B.
ISIarston, and Mr. Gosse, without giving any
recorded cause for complaint. Even Ruskin
bowed down before the portent of this most
extravagantly artistic being then upon the earth,
remarking of course that he was " righter " than
Swinburne, but " not his match." His spirit was
extraordinary. At the age of fifty he would
write, over the signature of " A Gladstonite," a
letter to the St. James's Gazette, saying that he
had observed a certain vagueness in the charges
against the boycotters of the Primrose League,
and giving this more definite instance :
On the 1st of April — I will confine myself to the
events of that single day — Mrs. Outis, of Medamothy,
was shot dead in her carriage, while returning from a
visit in the adjoining parish of Nustjuam, by a masked
assassin wearing a primrose in his buttonhole. . . .
The anonymity was unmasked by the editor.
Near the end of his life he wrote to The Times
protesting against " the unsolicited adulation of
such insult " as his inclusion in that " unimagi-
nable gathering," the British Academy. In all
things he is said to have been extreme. AVhen
he had left a dull meeting a noise broke in upon
124
OPINIONS: PROSE-WORKS
the dullness from outside, which proved on in-
quiry to be Swinburne dancing upon some
scores of silk hats by way of revenge for that
part of the dullness which he had endured.
Once, it is said, he amazed and delighted a
dinner party with his conversation and reappeared
the following day to apologize for having for-
gotten the invitation. Many stories of uncertain
historic and natural-historic value are told which
await the imprint of official biography, such as
that one relating how a Belgian poet, going to
pay his respects to the great Englishman, had to
ring at the door many times before it was opened
by Swinburne himself ; he was in his shirt which
displayed his chest covered with blood, the result,
as it turned out, on anxious questioning, of a
romp with his cat. In other ways he has been
reported "constitutionally unfitted to shine in
mixed society." The gentlest of his passions
seems to have been for babies, whom he wor-
shipped on his knees and was "very fantastic
over." In every way he acknowledged the
possession of " the infinite blessing of hfe," " the
fervour of vital blood," which made him, as he
said of Blake, " a man perfect in his way, and
beautifully unfit for walking in the way of any
other man," an extraordinary man, and yet
fundamentally a "healthy-minded and reason-
able " one. He made friends of other men with
125
A. C. SWTNRURNE
this possession. Like Shelley, he was, as he
said, fortunate in his friends, chiefly artists and
poets like the Rossettis, Morris, Burne-Jones,
Bell Scott, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, Mr.
Edmund (iosse, but ranging in type from the
saintly Christina Rossetti to the "unsaintly" Sir
Richard Burton, who called him his only beloved
son in whom he was well pleased.
126
VI
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS
SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE
Already by his verses on Landor and Hugo,
and his songs In Time of Order and In Time of
Revolution, Swinburne had shown that if Love
and Sin were a passion with him, they were not
an exclusive obsession. In the very year after
Poems and Ballads, his Song of Italy, dedicated
to Mazzini, proved that he had another passion.
Dolores moved him to no such tremorous
emotion as he gave to the words of Freedom
addressing Italy :
Because men wept, saying Freedom, knowing of thee.
Child, that thou wast not free. . . .
no such worship as he offered Mazzini, then in
despair at the unsuccess of Garibaldi and the
humiliating generosity of Napoleon :
Thy children, even thy people thou hast made,
Thine, with thy words arrayed,
Clothed with thy thoughts and girt with thy desires ;
Yearn up toward thee as fires.
127
A. C. SWINBURNE
Art thou not father, O father, of all these?
From tliiiu' own Genoese
To where of nights the lower extreme lagune
Feels its Venetian moon,
Nor suckling's mouth nor mother's breast set free
But hath that grace through thee. . . .
His Obhition could not but have been mis-
taken for a love poem to a woman had it
appeared in another of his books, though a
nation seems a more natural recipient than a
woman of the other kind of love poem, forty
stanzas long. Swinburne had never a better
excuse for repetition and for progress by addi-
tion, than in the doxology where he bids the
winds and all things, and one by one the cities
of Italy, praise Mazzini, " the fair clear supreme
spirit without stain." If there be such a thing
as religious poetry, this is religious, ending in
hopes for "a bloodless and a bondless world,"
Freedom and the "fair republic," an earth
" kingdomless," " throneless," " chainless."
The theme of A Song of Italy is magnificent ;
the poet's mood of grave sweetness and a kind
of dark joyfulness is worthy of it, and is above
thinking too much of priests and kings, " creeds
and crimes " ; his words and rhythms have a
religious sensuousness. But it is a poem that
ought not to be read, as most often it has to be,
dispassionately in a study, instead of being
chanted by some impersonal priest or priestess,
128
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS
So chanted, the rhythm, the majestic images
and words — hardly a word is used without sug-
gesting either subhmity of hope and sorrow,
or sharply contrasted qualities — should be com-
parable for effect to the greatest passages of a
religious service, that is among those for whom
Freedom and Italy mean something spiritually
vast. Freedom saying :
Though God forget thee, I will not forget . . . ;
the " hundred cities' mouths in one " praising
the " supreme son " of Italy ; the poet bidding
her
Let not one tongue of theirs who hate thee say
That thou wast even as they. . . .
these should make a joyful and noble sound
in any temple of Liberty or Fraternity.
At present there is no such temple. The
poem must be read by isolated citizens of the
world in places which A Song of Italy will not
convert into temples. There the words will
at least gain nothing by the reverberation which
they might so well set up amongst a multitude
assembled. Closer and quieter inspection will
reveal a hundred beautiful things, and an even
grace, a thrilling purity, hardly to be found in
any other poem of Swinburne's. At no point
is it lacking in dignity and fairness. But the
I 129
A. C. SWINBURNE
wliole is not equal to the sum of tlie admirable
parts. To have been as great as its aim, it
should have been more than equal. It does not
justify its length by a pervading, continuous
and accimiulating passion, wliich could absorb
until a second or third reading the pleasure of
O chosen, O pure and just.
Who counted for a small thincr life's estate.
And died and made it jrreat. . . .
of
This is that very Italy which was
And is and shall not pass.
Whether all these clear beauties would count
were the song publicly declaimed can hardly
be imagined. In private reading they cannot
be missed. They seem of too fine and delicate
a kind for a structure of this magnitude.
Neither is this delicate quality everywhere
effectual. The opening, for example, is defaced
by some of Swinburne's characteristic mixture
of precision and obscurity, as when he sees
the hours
As maidens, and the days as labouring men,
And the soft nights again
As wearied women to their own souls wed.
And ages as the dead.
In the doxology he gives way to the temptation
to appeal to such different things as winds,
130
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS
light, storm, summer, shore, wave, skies, graves,
hopes, memories, years, sounds, sorrow, joy,
human beings dead and aHve. Therefore, when
he comes to " dews and rains " it is hardly
possible not to be impatient of what is so Hke
in its weakness and so unlike in its strength
to the great original, " O all ye Works of the
Lord, bless ye the Lord : praise him and magnify
him for ever." Swinburne sacrifices the regularity
of the original, but takes only a licentious and
occasional freedom. The objects addressed, of
very different classes, are multiplied to excess ;
and some are treated with a fancy natural to
the poet, and both brilliant and appropriate,
as in
Red hills of flame, white Alps, green Apennines,
Banners of blowing pines,
Standards of stormy snows, flags of light leaves.
Three wherewith Freedom weaves
One ensign that once woven and once unfurled
Makes day of all a world.
Makes blind their eyes who knew not, and outbraves
The waste of iron waves. . . .
It is a fancy that helps to undermine the
structure both of the whole and of the doxo-
logical portion, though it adds to the pleasures
by the way. Thus the poem is the work of
Swinburne partly as an isolated lyrist and partly
also as a national, pubHc, or social poet. His
attempt to make the two one was glorious ; but
131
A. C. SWINBURNE
whether any modern poet wliatever eoiild liave
sueceeded in it or in any siniihir one is doubtful.
If any has done, it is Tennyson in his Ode on
the Death of the Duke of Wellington, and
perhaps Whitman ; but then Whitman is the
intimate and equal of everything and everyone
in his poetry, writing of what he has touched
and understood, moving freely and cheerfully in
and out. Swinburne seems to be definitely
assuming a part ; he has come from outside to
celebrate men and events of which I cannot feel
that he was the equal, save in ardour, and this
ardour has a certain thinness and shrillness.
When he had to call up city after city to praise
Mazzini, only a manly grasp of reality could
have saved him from the too " poetical " style in
which differentiation was impossible ; so to this
he gave way. His task was a more difficult one
than Shelley's, who, in the Ode to Naples, for
example, is a solitary man expressing private
imaginings which must succeed or fail with very
little help from aciual events and places. Swin-
burne, surrendering himself and his personality,
appeals to us, as it were, with an impersonation
of Freedom, Italy, Rome : he Avas in a public
capacity, his poem was addressed to a public
man, and to the general eye and ear. He per-
sonified Italy and Freedom and gave them words
to utter : he used as a model a poem which was
132
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS
not private, nor the work of an isolated man.
His song, with all its fire, grace, and strength,
falls short only of a kind of perfection which no
private stranger with one lyric impulse, how-
soever divine, could possibly achieve.
Freedom and revolution aiming at freedom
had come to mean for Swinburne something
very much what light and the sea meant. His
early Song in Time of Order shows him in a
mood like that which sent Byron and Landor
and Tennyson towards real fighting. The song
is sung at the launching of a boat to carry the
lovers of freedom out to sea, away from a land
ruled by a king :
Out to the sea with her there^
Out with her over the sand.
Let the kings keep the earth for their share !
VV^e have done with the sharers of land.
There are but three of them, but " while three
men hold together the kingdoms are less by
three," and they rejoice in the rain in their hair
and the foam on their lips. This eagerness was
in the spirit of Byron's
Yet Freedom^ yet thy banner torn but flying
Streams hke a thunderstorm against the wind. ...
and Shelley's
Let there be Hght ! said Liberty.
Putting behind him Dolores, Faustine, and
133
A. C. SWINBURNE
Felise, Swinburne dedicated to Freedom the
little time given to men :
A little time that we may fill
Or with such good works or such ill
As loose the bonds or make them strong
Wherein all manhood suffers wrong.
By rose-hung river and light foot-rill
There are who rest not ; 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.
But for the more than metaphorical relation-
ship to light and the sea Swinburne's freedom
might command our respect, but certainly not
our attention throughout Songs Before Sunrise
and his later poems. Unless his Freedom gains
sublimity or lustre from the associations with
eternal things it cannot but be held lightly after
a time save by bigots. To those fighting in the
cause of Italian unity the words " Freedom,"
" Liberty," and " Republic," may have had the
same value as certain other words at religious
revivals. These exalted values may or may not
be false ; it is certain that they do not give ever-
lasting life to hymns or poems. It is not diffi-
cult to find verses where one of these words is
used much as other words are used in hymns,
as, for example, in Tenebrce, in the verse :
134
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS
There all chains are undone ;
Day there seems but as night ;
Spirit and sense are as one
In the light not of star nor of sun ;
Liberty there is the light.
" Spirit and sense " gives no help. Swinburne's
great admiration for Shakespeare's phrase, "spirit
of sense," caused him to repeat and vary it be-
yond all reason both in prose and verse.
In Quia Multum Amavit Freedom speaks,
calling itself first, " God, the spirit of man,"
and next, "Freedom, God and man," which is
very much like popular poetical theology. Free-
dom is God and also " the spirit of earth," the
"earth soul," the only God, in the poem to
Whitman. Saluting her, as " God above all
Gods " and " light above light, law beyond law,"
Swinburne declares himself to be her harp and
her clarion, her storm thrush, having heard her
and seen her coming before ever her wheels
" divide the sky and sea." The Marching Song
speaks of Freedom "whence all good things
are." She is the " most holy one " — in The In-
surfTction in Candia — who will " cleanse earth
of crime." He does not succeed in giving the
word a high and distinct value by transferring
to it a value more often connected w^ith Jehovah
or one of the other deities, though unconsciously
from the context of aspiring and exulting words
135
A. C. SWINBURNE
it acquires a vaguely religious sense correspond-
ing to that Avith which it thrills perhaps the
majority of men, lovers of Shelley or not ; and
it may do more than this for men of any sect
that responds at once to the sentiment of A
Years Burden :
There should be no more wars nor kingdoms won. . . .
A man belonging to no sect must feel that here
and on almost every page of Songs Before Sun-
rise Swinburne is either addressing a sect or
starting one.
Throughout the book Swinburne applies
Christian terms to his own purposes. Whatever
Christians may feel, no one else can see more
than a naive and showy compliment in the end
of the Hymn to Man :
Glory to Man in the Highest ! for Man is the master of
things.
To say that " all men born are mortal, but not
man," as he does in T/tc Pilgrims, if ingenious,
is nothing more, being a matter of words only.
To compare men favourably ^vith the gods,
ancient and modern, is just, and can be both
amusing and inspiriting, but assertion and as-
severation is not beyond the strength of propa-
gandists, though commonly they have not the
solemn tones to pronounce for them, as in On
136
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS
the Downs, that there is no God but man. The
poet's abuse of God does not help the word
when appUed to man, as in A Years Burden :
Thy thought, thy word, O soul repubhcan,
O spirit of hfe, O God whose name is man :
What sea of sorrows but thy sight shall span ?
Cry wellaway, but well befall the right.
Here nearly all Swinburne's favourite significant
words are confused, inextricably if not sublimely.
"Cry wellaway, but well befall the right" is
repeated six times as a burden to the verses,
and the poetical "wellaway," especially in a
burden, first demands, and then at last almost
creates, a sensuousness overpowering words like
" repubhcan." Fortunately, these words are often
overpowered and reduced to the value of their
sounds. It would be pedantic and a proof of
viperish deafness to inquire into the verse of
Sie7ia for example :
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 !
Fill with a love keener than flame
Men sealed in spirit with thy name.
The cities and the Roman skies.
Light is everywhere in Songs Before Sunrise,
the light of the sun and the light of Swinburne's
137
A. C. SWINBURNE
li(,'lil-lovin<T spirit, us in the end of On the
Downs :
And the sun smote the clouds and slew,
And from the sun the sea's breatii blew,
And white waves laughed and turned and fled
The long green heaving seafield through.
And on tliem overheard
The sky burnt red. . . .
Possibly this end would gain were " time's deep
dawn" to have a spiritual meaning both clear
and powerful : certainly it is too closely allied
to the splendour of the physical sun to fail of
being poetry. JNlany poems like the IHvc of
Revolution are saved from simple dullness by
the actual and figurative presence of "the four
winds of the world," and by that metrical energy
which is not unworthy of wind and sun. Poem
after poem is worth much or nothing according
as the reader can take the first line or verse as
a keynote and then allow the metre to sing, with
occasional guidance from the words "light,"
"men," "sea," "thundering," "sleep," "weep,"
" sword," " grave," " time," " crown," etc. Not
that they are to be regarded as majestic non-
sense rhymes, for they treat grave matters
gravely and grammatically. But the writer
trusts more than usual to his metre and his
rhymes ; the interspaces are filled more loosely
with words. This looseness is guided by rules
138
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS
of sound, but sometimes of dignity. Thus
where Browning sings :
Hands from the pasty, nor bite take nor sup ;
Swinburne says in The Insurrection in Candia :
Let wine be far from the mouth.
In his Marcliing Song the singers have with
them the morning star, the dayspring — " even
all the fresh daysprings " — and " all the multi-
tude of things," also winds, fountains, mountains,
and not the moon but the mist which lies in the
valley, " muffled from the moon," also highlands
and lowlands, and sea bays, shoals, islands, cliffs,
fields, rivers, grass, haze, and not the hills but
the peace " at heart of hills," also all sights and
sounds, all lights, also the nightingale, and "the
heart and secret of the worldly tale." The
point is that Swinburne writes in such a manner
that the feebleness of the last phrase does not
tell against him but is absorbed, contributing to
the whole a certain cadence and the rhyme
"ale." It is not absurd for Swinburne to make
Spain speak of her " sins and sons " being dis-
persed through sinless lands : it is not out of
key, and does not prevent us from admiring the
words that follow, to describe how those sins
made the name of man accursed, that of God
thrice accursed.
Two pages afterwards Switzerland speaks of
139
A. C. SWINBURNE
" snows «and souls," considerably lowering the
value of " souls " for the plodding reader, who
is not blinded by the pomp of the Litany.
Even the reader too wise to plod is not content
with a trick, such as that in " before any world
had any light," when it is repeated as this is
three times within seven verses {Genesis) ; but
he will recognize too that the parallelism of
Slowlier than life into breath,
Surelier than time into death. . . .
in To Walt JFIiitman in America had never so
consistent a setting in prose or poetry before
Swinburne s time. At its best this style makes
its own terms, and often in long series of Unes,
beginning perhaps with the same word, " By " or
" Ah," as like one another as wave to wave, the
verse advances magnificently, in stateliness, or
turbulence, or eager speed. There is no other
poetry where the substance is so subdued to the
musical form of verse. It is not thought set to i
music, but music which has absorbed thought./
Far less than Shelley's will it permit paraphrase.
By comparison, the Ode to Liberty is massive
with thought and history, and the rhyme
seems a fortunate accident. In The Song of
the Standard, in Heiiha, in Monotones, in
Messidor, in Tenebnv, in A Watch of the
Night, for example, the metre and rhyme make
of each verse a spiritual being that never existed
140
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS
before, and has no existence except when evoked
by an exact repetition of each word. Where
the thought demands separate attention it fails,
as in the verse which asks to be visuaUzed, and
cannot, in On the Downs :
As a queen taken and stripped and bound
Sat earth discoloured and discrowned ;
As a king's palace empty and dead
The sky was^ without light or sound,
And on the summer's head
Were ashes shed.
The relative positions of earth, sky, and summer
can be settled by no diplomacy. Sometimes
even an indiscretion refuses to sink out of sight
in the music, as in Quia Multum Amavit, when
" lordly " is appHed to " laughter " on one page
as a word of credit, and on the next " Hes and
lords" are handcuffed together. The vague
is not of necessity unfriendly, but a line in
Tiresias like
Order of things, and rule and guiding song
is apt to detach itself There is also a large
class of comparisons, such as " A sound sublimer
than the heavens are high," which are preten-
tious and under no circumstances effectual : the
constant figurative use of " clothe " has no force.
Even verbosity can seem a vice when it makes
the line
But heart there is not, tongue there is not found. . . .
141
A. C. SWINBURNE
And language is not even a beautiful disease
in the lines :
O thought inimitable and infinite heart
Whose blood is life in limbs indissolute
That still keeps hurtless thy invisible part
And inextirpable thy viewless root. . . .
The risks run in this adventure were great ;
it is not wonderful that they proved sometimes
too great. That a volume coming only a few
years after Poems and Ballads should have been
so fully consecrated to Liberty, using Love
only for images of " bride " and " bridegroom "
and the like, is alone a superb proof of the
poet's devotion, but it is of small account when
compared to the positive proofs — the splendour
and variety of metre and imagery, the ardour
that changes and never abates.
In these same years Swinburne wrote other
political poems which were printed with A Song
of Italy in Songs of Ttvo Nations. They in-
clude a long Ode on the Proclamation of the
French Republic : September J4h, 1S70, and a
number of sonnets concerning, among others,
" the worm Napoleon." The ode shows that
already he ran the danger of becoming poet
laureate of Freedom, laboriously delirious. The
sonnets made him conscious that perhaps " wrath
embittered the sweet mouth of song," He had
142
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS
not the same regard for himself as he had for
Italy when he bade her
Let not one tongue of theirs who hate thee say
That thou wert even as they. . . .
The hissing, spitting, and cm'sing is the frantic
abuse of a partisan, which is the worse and not
the better for being done in the name of liberty.
It is a dead relic of 1870, proving that Swin-
burne was not of Shelley's or Byron's stature.
He speaks of " our blood " and " our tears,"
but the vomit is his own. His spirit is less
that of Dante condemning men to Hell than
of Judge Lynch. But the worst of these
sonnets is that they will support any doubts of
Swinburne's right and power to sing what he
strove to sing in Songs Before Sunrise and
Songs of Two Nations, since it is almost in-
credible that the same man should have room
for so much love of liberty as well as so much
hate of Napoleon. Swinburne continued to
hate Gods, priests and kings, though often with
deep respect and love of Christ, even to the
days of the South African War, when noble
blood and patriotism swamped his love of
Liberty without noticing it. He wrote a poem
*'for the feast of Giordano Bruno, philosopher
and martyr," coupling his name with Lucretius,
Sidney and Shelley, saying that surely his
143
A. C. SWINBURNE
" spirit of sense " had gone up to meet their
spirits. He iibused tlie Czar. He praised
Kossuth. He wrote lAnes on the Monument
of Giuseppe Mazzini^ once more saying that
JMazzini was greater than his fellow-townsman
Columbus. When the " shadows fallen of years
were nine since heaven grew seven times more
divine " at Mazzini's entry, Swinburne again
addressed him — " as very Christ " but not
" degraded into deity." The Saturday Re-
view's opinion that, "as a matter of fact, no
man living, or who ever lived — not Casar or
Pericles, not Shakespeare or Michael Angelo —
could confer honour more than he took on
entering the House of Lords " moved him to
write Vos Deos Lmtdamus : The Conservative
Journalisfs National Anthem, beginning:
O Lords our Gods ...
Because "What England says her lords unsay"
he wrote :
Clear the way my lords and lackeys !
and was not above reminding the lords, for the
sake of readers of the Pall Mall Gazette, that :
Lust and falsehood, craft and traffic, precedent and gold,
Tongue of courtier, kiss of harlot, promise bought and sold.
Gave you heritage of empire over thralls of old.
Nell Gwynn had drawn a sonnet from him to
Our Lady of LaugJiter and Our Lady of Pity,
144
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS
but even she could not save the dukes from
being reminded that they were :
Graces by grace of such mothers
As brightened the bed of King Charles. . . ,
Bright sons of sublime prostitution.
Landor's centenary reminded him of " Milton's
white republic undefiled," and the fact that
Song's " fires are quenched when Freedom's are."
Of Landor he could still say :
. . . Of all souls for all time glorious none
Loved Freedom better, of all who have loved her best.
Still as in the days when Landor promised a
money payment to the family of the first patriot
to assert the dignity and fulfil the duty of
tyrannicide, he could hail Felice Orsini with the
double honours : " Patriot and Tyrannicide."
An ode was addressed to Athens, showing that
the Greeks were Swinburne's Gods :
Gods for us are all your fathers, even the least of these are
Gods. . . .
and yet he laughed at other " Creed-wrought
faith of faithless souls that mock their doubts
with creeds."
Of more recent Gods he went on praising
Hugo, comparing him with Christ and Prome-
theus, and hailing him as King, comforter and
prophet, Paraclete and poet, In 1882 on the
K 145
A. C. SWINBURNE
subject of the Russian persecution of Jews he
appealed to Christ to know if it had not been his
passion " to foreknow in death's worst hour the
works of Christian men." The suggested
Channel tunnel was to him a "pursy dream"
of " vile vain greed," which could not link the
two nations ; nor could anything save " union
only of trust and loving heart." King, priest, or
God made no difference to his love of England
any more than of Eton :
Where the footfall sounds of England^ where the smile of
England shines,
Rings the tread and laughs the face of freedom^ fair as hope
divines
Days to be, more brave than ours and lit by lordlier stars for
signs.
All our past acclaims our future : Shakespeare's voice and
Nelson's hand,
Milton's faith and Wordsworth's trust in this our chosen
and chainless land,
Bear us witness : come the world against her, England yet
shall stand.
The question of Home Rule for Ireland naturally,
therefore, moved him to assert in Astrophcl that
Three in one, but one in three,
God, who girt her with the sea.
Bade our Commonweal to be. . . .
The jubilee of 1887 earned from him a loyal
poem which bade earth and sea join the "just
146
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS
and sacred jubilation." When he was thirty
England was " among the faded nations " because
that was the conventional view of a republican.
Patriotism destroyed his dreams as if they had
never existed : foreign nations became " dark
Muscovy reptile in rancour," " base Germany,
blatant in guile " ; the people became " blind
ranks and bellowing votes " ; Ireland was
" murderous Ireland." He was inclined more
and more to bestow the title of Cant on any-
thing beyond a general love of liberty and justice.
Thus in Ast?'ophel he sang without a smile :
Lovelier than thy seas are strong,
Glorious Ireland, sword and song
Gird and crown thee : none may wrong.
Save thy sons alone.
Thus with a smile, in 1876, he sang in A Ballad
of Bulgarie :
The gentle knight, Sir John de Bright,
(Of Brummageme was he,)
Forth would he prance with lifted lance
For love of Bulgarie.
No lance in hand for other land
Sir Bright would ever take ;
For wicked works, save those of Turks,
No head of man would break ;
But that Bulgarie should not be free,
This made his high heai't quake. . . .
presumably also with a smile in 1889, about
Parnell, in A Ballad of Truthful Charles :
147
A. C. SWINBURNE
Charles Stuart the crownless king whose hand
Sways Erin's sceptre — so they sing,
The bards of holy Liarland. . . .
Swinburne was then fifty-two. Hoth before
and after this he gave reason to beUeve that
accident had consecrated to Liberty, Love and
Peace a nature that might have sung Tyranny,
Hate and War with equal bigotry. It was not,
however, permitted to him to go farther than to
say first that the Enghsh are a people " that
never at heart was not inly free," and are " the
first of the races of men who behold unashamed
the sun " ; and second that " none but we . . .
hear in heart the breathless bright watchword
of the sea," and moreover that " never was man
born free" on the other side of the Channel.
Side by side with this strain ran that other of
general hope :
See the light of manhood rise in the twilight of the Gods ;
and :
Not for gain of heaven may man put away the rule of light.
The Englishman and the universal brother in
Swinburne were entirely different and distinct,
like soldier and priest. Hardly a second time
did he find the grave mellow note of Two
Leaders where he salutes two " prophets of past
kind," "high souls that hate us," men whom
148
SONGS OF TWO NATIONS
he thought reactionary children of night but
honourable :
Pass with the stars and leave us with the sun.
The note is worthy of Wordsworth or Tenny-
son at his best, but in Swinburne it seems almost
an accident of temper, in a moment of freedom
from the obsession of Liberty.
149
VII
LATER POEMS: CHARACTERISTICS
After So??gs Before Siuwise and Songs of Two
Nations, Liberty gave Swinburne little help
towards the making of poetry. His poems in
future were to be laid before many Gods, in-
cluding Liberty, Love, and Sin, but Music
before all. In 1878 appeared a second series of
Poems and Ballads, in 1880 Songs of the Spiing-
fides and Studies in Song, in 1882 Tristram of
Lyonesse, in 1883 A Centurij of Roundels, in 1884
A Midsummer Holiday, in 1894 Ast?'ophel, in
1896 The Tale of Balen, in 1904 A Channel
Passage. Except the two narratives, IVistraffi
and Bale?/, none of these books was so much of
a piece as Songs Before Sunrise or even as
Poems and Ballads : A Century of Roundels
comes nearest because all the poems are in
similar forms.
Altogether, hardly any of our poets have
written more short poems, save those Hke
Herrick, who wrote many of only a few lines
apiece. This multitude includes Latin, French,
and border dialect poems, narratives, descrip-
150
LATER POEMS
tions, odes, poems of reflection and of passion
and of both, and some translations. But the
great variety of forms and subjects is no obstacle
to one fairly clear but accidental division. On
the one hand lie perhaps the only poems which
have a distinguishable subject, those confessedly
connected with a particular person, place, or
event: these include the political poems, the
poems relating to men, whether friends or great
men, Uving and dead ; and with these go the
translations. On the other hand lie those
poems which essentially exist in Swinburne's
books or in the memories of his lovers and
nowhere else, and have no important connection
with anything outside — poems which at their
best could not be paraphrased or abridged or
represented by anything but themselves, which
could hardly be thought of as better or worse
than they are or in any way different.
The second class is superior to the first,
because as a rule either Swinburne abated his
style for the sake of things known to the world,
or he made an unsuccessful attempt to envelop
them in it. The best example of this failure is
the poem entitled A Channel Passage, which is a
travel sketch in verse, and never does more than
remind us that the actual scene was one of
uncommon magnificence. The poet calls the
steamer a " steam-souled ship " and the same
151
A. C. SWINBURNE
translation of reality into poetry — to put it in a
crude intelligible way — is the essence and the
fatal fault of the poem. Whenever art allows a
comparison with nature, wherever nature in-
trudes in her own purity and majesty, art fails.
Uniformity of illusion is a condition of success.
In A Channel Passage there is hardly any
illusion : it is a man being poetical on a steamer,
which is no less and no more absurd than being
poetical in an omnibus ; but being poetical is
not poetry.
Stern and prow plunged under, alternate : a glimpse, a
recoil, a breath,
As she sprang as the life in a god made man would spring at
the throat of death. . . .
is a versification and rhetorical treatment of
notes, whether in a pocket-book or not. The
prose description of the same scene in Essays
and Studies is brief and suggestive and humane.
The poem is an inhuman perversion of language
and metre.
The Lake of Gaube in the same volume is
also founded upon an actual, perhaps a single,
experience, with an entirely different result.
The experience has been digested ; the illusion
is complete, and no comparison with the lake
itself possible except as a late afterthought to
those who know it ; the same world, Swinburne's
world, is with us from the first words, " The
152
LATER POEMS
sun is lord and god," until the last. Swinburne's
style touches actual detail only at its peril.
When he speaks of" one sweet glad hawthorn," a
'* dyke's trenched edge," " the steep sweet bank,"
and " the dense bright oval wall of box in-
wound," he can seldom avert the fatal com-
parison. It gives occasion for the just and
cruel smile at the poet " turning beautiful things
into poetry," as the world says. There are poets
who can speak of "when the northering road
faced westward " and " as the dawn leapt in at
my casement," but Swinburne cannot. After
them the various metrical forms of Loch
Torridon, and the excited words, can do no
more than show us a composition in an inter-
mediate stage, between a memory and a poem.
Lines like these :
But never a roof for shelter
And never a sign for guide
Rose doubtful or visible. . . .
can be translated into prose, and have possibly
been translated out of it — not into poetry.
One of the poems in the same volume ap-
proaching perfection within this class is A Land-
scape by Courbet :
Low lies the mere beneath the moorside, still
And glad of silence : down the wood sweeps clear
To the utmost verge where fed with many a rill
Low lies the mere.
153
A. C. SWINHURNE
The wind speaks only summer : eye nor ear
Sees aught at all of dark, hears aught of shrill,
From sound or shadow felt or fancied here.
Strange, as wc praise the dead man's might and skill,
Strange that harsh thoughts should make such heavy cheer.
While, clothed with peace by heaven's most gentle will,
Low lies the mere.
It is spoilt by the irrelevant *'as we praise the
dead man's might and skill," which introduces
us to a group in a picture gallery.
Probably the finest of all the poems where
Swinburne deals with a quite definite, tangible,
well-known subject is the Elegy lSGO-1801, on
the death of Sir Richard Burton, though even
here some must pause at " our demigod of
daring," " the sovereign seeker of the world,"
and at other phrases that might seem only
exaggerations of rhetoric. In it he seems to be
half-way between a manly fleshly view of nature,
of "the swordsman's hand, the crested head,"
and a spiritual transfiguring view. Possibly the
name " Burton " in the last verse is no gain.
" Auvergne, Auvergne," however, which opens
the poem, is of itself sufficiently unfamiliar, per-
haps — the repetition gives it a slightly extra-
natural value — and onwards from the first verse :
Auvergne, Auvergne, O wild and woeful land,
O glorious land and gracious, white as gleam
The stairs of heaven, black as a flameless brand,
Strange even as life, and stranger than a dream. . . .
154
LATER POEMS
there is, I suppose, scarcely any temptation to
think of Auvergne apart from these massy
stanzas. The poem is in every way a charac-
teristic one. The "glorious" and "gracious,"
indefinite, complimentary, and excited epithets,
duplicating sound and sense, and the one clear,
small comparison to a "flameless brand," and
the three others indefinitely sublime to "the
stairs of heaven," and "fife" and "a dream,"
could hardly be found in another poet. He
begins by asking whether the earth would not
remember this man if it could remember men at
all. With him the poet had seen Auvergne,
" the mountain stairs "
More bright than vision, more than faith subUme,
Strange as the Hght and darkness of the world. . . .
strange also, as he goes on to say, as night and
morning, stars and sun. Somewhat rudely and
obscurely, but forcibly, he makes a comparison
between the effect of death on Burton, and
dawn on the mountain, using a crude line of
conventional type such as he now and then does
affect :
Whom fate forgets not nor shall fame forget.
There follow a number of stanzas where
similar comparisons are made in such a way
that the spiritual exalts the physical — an abyss,
155
A. C. SWINHURNE
" viewless even iis time's," makes him " now
dreiim how high the freed soul climbs " after
death — until at length the mountains and the
river are strange in a half Dantesque, half
Ossianic manner. The vague — " past and mon-
strous things " — " deadlier things unseen" — plays
a part. Everything is violent or extreme. In
the mist the two men are blinded as a pilot with
foam, and " shrouded as a corpse," and they go
along ledges too narrow for wild goats and sit
blinded over the abyss. The mist is "raging."
The " gi'im black helpless heights " " scorn " the
sun and " mock " the morning. The wdnds had
" sins for wings." The river below suggests the
river, soundless and viewless, in which the dead
man is being borne according to some super-
stition which the poet rejected ; and he turns in
thought to the priests, " loud in lies," who will
mock his dust with their religion. But the soul
of the man is free, with eyes keener than the
sun, and wings wider than the world. His
scorn, too, was " deep and strong as death and
life." The poet asks in what "illimitable, in-
superable, infinite " space the soul will use its
wings. He answers immediately that no dream
or faith can tell us. But having said that this
soul's flight had always been sunward, his mind
turns to Sophocles and the garden of the sun,
and the tree of wisdom growing in it which had
156
LATER POEMS
gone to make the sheaf "his strenuous spirit
bound and stored aright." Still thinking of the
sun he supposes a further advance of the soul
" toward the dawn " after death — " the imperious
soul's indomitable ascent." " But," he says,
meaning perhaps that a thin " soul " is not
recognizable as Burton :
But not the soul whose labour knew not end —
But not the swordsman's hand, the crested head. . . .
However much the Elegy tells us of Burton,
one verse at least pictures the mind of the poet :
We sons of east and west, ringed round with dreams.
Bound fast with visions, girt about with fears,
Live, trust and think by chance, while shadow seems
Light, and the wind that wrecks a hand that steers.
This is the man to whom Burton's path through
the world was beset with dangers that "coiled
and curled " against him, who saw the waves of
the mountains more "fierce and fluctuant" than
the seas, and the steep-built town as a "fear-
less " town hailing and braving the heights, who
felt the heights brighter than vision, sublimer
than faith, strange as light, darkness, night,
morning, stars and sun.
If Swinburne had written about Auvergne in
prose, and apart from Burton, his description
might well have differed from that of other men
only in lucidity and vigour : it would probably
157
A. C. SWINBURNE
have differed a great deal from that in the Elegy.
Memory and tliought had heen awakened and
excited by liurton's deatli, and the ordinary
values of things — the tourist value, for ex-
ample — had been disturbed or destroyed. His
recollections of the mountains ceased to be, if
they ever had been, more or less large dis-
integrated fragments of the earth and became
a region of the spiritual world, mingling with
other mountains seen, read of, or imagined,
coloured and changed by a hundred other
images assembled at the passionate thought of
death and of the past. He ceased to be a hard
Victorian atheist ; he was unveiled as a man
who through his ancestors and through his own
thought and fancy had entertained a multitude
of the forms of death. Once this paroxysm
of emotional thought had begun to enter the
form of
Auvergne, Auvergne, O wild and woeful land. . . .
the incalculable suggestions of rhythm began to
enter and still further to convert the humorous
and rational atheist. The result is, 1 believe,
as accurate and real as a map or a guide-book,
and that in spite of what, to another view,
might seem words only, begotten of words.
Rhyme certainly acted upon Swinburne as
a pill to purge ordinary responsibilities. He
158
LATER POEMS
became sensible to many of the values of words,
ancient and modern, ordinary and figurative,
etymological and melodic. Thus he played
with the literal meaning of Gautier's Christian
name, Theophile : " Dear to God," he said, and
went on to speak of the God that gives men
" spirit of song." Thus he played with the name
of Cape Wrath :
But north of the headland whose name is Wrath, by the
wrath or the ruth of the sea. , . .
Another form of play is noticeable in :
Enmeshed intolerably in the intolerant net,
and still more in :
And in the soul within the sense began
The manlike passion of a godlike man.
And in the sense within the soul again
Thoughts that made men of gods and gods of men.
This may turn out to be very nearly nonsense ;
but certainly it fills a place harmoniously in
Thalassms, a poem which is not nonsense. The
line before it is an example of another kind
of play with words. Instead of saying "the
nightingale " he says " the singing bird whose
song calls night by name " ; a thing " eight
hundred years old " is one " that has seen de-
cline eight hundred waxing and waning years."
Speaking of himself and others who read
Tennyson in their teens, he says that it was
159
A. C. SWINBURNE
"ere time in the rounding rhyme of choral
seasons had hailed us men," which is more than
mere periphrasis. The next line but one con-
tains an example of a kind of play which surprises
us by making perfect sense :
Life more bright than the breathless light of soundless moon
in a songless glen.
Its perfect sense is, I think, not more important
than its pattern, which is of a kind that seems
instantly to forbid examination save by the
ear. Another very old game played all through
Swinburne's books is that with the phrase
" spirit of sense." In one example, just given,
the play is with soul and sense : sometimes the
two are a line apart, sometimes combined as by
Shakespeare, sometimes in the form of " spirit
in sense," sometimes as " spirit and sense."
Mademoiselle de Maupin was "the golden
book of spirit and sense." The play of allitera-
tion needs no example, except one which shows
at the same time another variety of " spirit of
sense," and how the long line was yet another aid
to Swinburne's redemption from responsibility :
And now that the rage of thy rapture is satiate with revel and
ravin and spoil of the snow,
And the branches it brightened arc broken, and shattered
the treetops that only thy wrath could lay low^
How should not thy lovers rejoice in thee, leader and lord of
the year that exults to be born,
ICO
LATER POEMS
So strong in thy strength and so glad of thy gladness whose
laughter puts winter and sorrow to scorn ?
Thou hast shaken the snows from thy wings, and the frost
on thy forehead is molten ; thy lips are aglow
As a lover's that kindle with kissing, and earth, with her
raiment and tresses yet wasted and torn,
Takes breath as she smiles in the grasp of thy passion to feel
through her spirit the sense of thee flow.
Here the rhythm should subdue curiosity : if it
does not, March: An Ode will fail, since there
is nothing but rhythm, the descriptions and
even the form of the sentences being often
imperfectly harmonious with the rhythm, and
no serious aspirant will be satisfied with the
amount of sense in :
For the breath of thy lips is freedom, and freedom's the
sense of thy spirit, the sound of thy song.
Glad god of the north-east wind, whose heart is as high as
the hands of thy kingdom are strong. . . .
It is important to notice that verse permits
the poet to use *' the hands of thy kingdom "
and a thousand other aids to length and opacity.
Thus in Ex Voto he thinks of his "last hour"
— he personifies it vaguely— and how she will
kiss him.
The cold last kiss and fold
Close round my limbs her cold
Soft shade as raiment rolled
And leave them lying.
It bears analysis, but, except to lovers of the
161
^
A. C. SWINBURNE
rhymes and this stanza form, must seem long-
winded, llhyme and the stanza excuse him
when he pictures En*^]and not only with :
The sea-coast round her hkc a mantle,
but with :
The sea-cloud like a crown.
This would be a grave weakness in a poet who
encouraged reading closely with eye and ear.
In the next stanza of the same poem, llic
Commonweal, the rhyme " deathless " leads him
to speak of " the breathless bright watchword of
the sea." This is extraordinarily near nonsense,
almost a bull's-eye. He is speaking of English-
men bearing " in heart " this watchword,
" breathless " means perhaps silent or inner,
and " bright " is complimentary : but it is a
near thing. Swinburne is usually privileged
when singing of the sea, for it can mean the
wild sea water, or the spirit of the sea which
is freedom, or the mother of Venus. There-
fore, when Swinburne tells us that England
loves light for the sake of light, and truth for
the sake of truth, but song for the sake of the
sea as well as of song, we acknowledge the in-
separableness of song and sea.
Sometimes the god of rhyme leads him to
un-English writing, as when he speaks of Sep-
tember, the month of the proclamation in 1870
1G2
LATER POEMS
of the French RepiibHc, as "Having only the
name of honour, only sign of white." Hardly
more English are some of the Biblical phrases,
like " the strengths of the storm of them " ; but
they provided pairs of short syllables where such
were wanted.
Lengthiness through redupHcation or multi-
plication needs hardly an example, except per-
haps in the class of comparisons. In the two
first cases one comparison is seen provoking
another in almost merry mood :
The sea was not lovelier than here was the land, nor the night
than the day, nor the day than the night. . . .
So again, light at moonrise is lapped in gloom,
Even as life with death, and fame with time, and memory
with the tomb
Where a dead man hath for vassals Fame the serf and Time
the slave.
In this third case comparisons lead out of com-
parisons in a tangled network which helps to
hide from some readers that hzards are the
subjects of all the Hues but the first :
Flowers dense and keen as midnight stars aflame
And living things of light like flames in flower
That glance and flash as though no hand might tame
Lightnings whose life outshone their stormlit hour
And played and laughed on earth, with all their power
Gone, and with all their joy of life made long
And harmless as the lightning life of song,
Shine sweet like stars when darkness feels them strong.
1G3
A. C. SWINBURNE
The lizards are compared to lightninfrs, which
are then compared to song ; and finally flowers
and lizards are compared to stars : the stanza is
thus filled with words of light and movement.
Sometimes the comparisons overwhelm the sub-
ject of them, that is, for a reader disobedient
to the command of sound and metre and the
suggestiveness which they ordain. An Auhivin
Vision, for example, includes a storm which is
thus exalted by a complexity of abstract com-
parisons which is almost maddening to the
soberly inquiring intelligence :
As the darkness of thought and of passion is touched by the
light that gives
Life deathless as love from the depth of a spirit that sees
and lives.
From the soul of a seer and a singer, wherein as a scroll un-
furled
Lies open the scri})ture of light and of darkness, the word
of the world,
So, shapeless and measureless, lurid as anguish and haggard
as crime,
Pale as the front of oblivion and dark as the heart of time.
The wild wan heaven at its height was assailed, and subdued
and made
More fair than the skies that know not of storm and endure
not shade.
Comparisons, like these, which either combine
or confuse the physical and the spiritual world,
are numerous and intensely characteristic in
Swinburne : he would not be anything Hke what
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he is without his lands " loneUer than ruin," his
seas "stranger than death," his land of "sand
and ruin and gold," his friend's laughter that
was as kind "as love or sleep."
Akin to the comparisons are the lightly made
personifications as of England, of the " last hour "
in Esc Voto, of defeat and ruin, here :
Wherein defeat weds ruin, and takes for bride-bed France,
and of hope here :
And hope fell sick with famine for the food of change.
How ready we are for personification. Poems
and Ballads proved by the poem where the
Ballad is bidden to go with flowers to his lady,
who shall kiss him in several places :
Ballad, and on thy mouth.
There the personification is really lost in embodi-
ment : the ballad becomes a boy. As a rule
there is no embodiment of "hope" that "sets
wide the door," nor of empire, when " con-
founded empire cowers," and so on ; and we
accept it as indolently as perhaps it was offered.
It is part of the roughness of Swinburne's as
of other styles : what is necessary is that these
elements shall be absorbed into the spiritual
substance of words, as, for example, the witch
is in this beautiful verse from By the North
Sea :
165
A. c. swiniuirnf:
Far Hickers the light of the swallows,
Far (lutters the weft of the grass.
Spun dense over desolate hollows
More pale than the clouds as they pass :
Thick woven as the weft of a witch is
Round the heart of a thrall that has sinned
Where youth and the wrecks of its riches
Are waifs on the wind.
There the grass flutters as the swallow flickers,
and the earth becomes light and hollow under us.
Some vagueness and some cheapness exist
where words so abound ; where three words
have to do the work of one, there can seldom
be any fineness of single words or short phrases,
and at times the sea will be called "divine"
and "deathless," and so on, and things will be
" heavenly," " strong as life," " subhme as death,"
and so on. But more noticeable than the
vagueness is the violence and extravagance.
The dawn springs like a panther " with fierce
and fire-fledged wings " upon the lava-black
land of Auvergne. A tiger used for comparison
in T/talassius is
Drunk with trampling of the murderous must
That soaks and stains the tortuous close-coiled wood
Made monstrous with its myriad-mustering brood.
This is like the dream tiger of a child mad with
fear, and as superhuman as Dolores : with the
panther in Laus Vencrifi, which has a " hot,
sweet throat," it might almost have come
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LATER POEMS
from the days when the palm tree languished
for its mate, and the viper and the lamprey
most strangely loved. The child in llialassius
feels the thunder and the lightning as atro-
ciously as he dreamed of the tiger — he was
" half distraught with strong delight " while the
heavens were " alive and mad with glory and
angry joy." Of a quieter but equal extremity
is the phrase " inlaid as with rose " which is
used of a beaker "left divine" by the lips of
Dione at a feast on Olympus, and the state-
ment that the sun does not light the Channel
Islands like Victor Hugo's fame, or that
Tennyson (who died with Cymbeline open
beside him) was led from earthward to sun-
ward, "guided by Imogen," which Swinburne
cannot have believed. So Gautier's tomb was
a "golden tomb," and Bath was "like a queen
enchanted who may not laugh or weep."
These things remind us that Swinburne had
not only a splendid, vivid, exuberant nature,
but a spendthrift and reckless one. He has
defended himself in an interesting manner in the
Dedicatory Epistle of his collected poems to
Mr. Watts-Dunton :
Not to you, or any other poet, nor indeed to the very
humblest and simplest lover of poetry, will it seem in-
congruous or strange, suggestive of imperfect sympathy
with life or inspiration from nature, that the very words
167
A. C. SWINBURNE
of Sappho should be hoard and rccogni/cd in the notes of
the nightingales, the glory of the presence of dead poets
imagined in the presence of the glory of the sky, the
lustre of their advent and their passage felt visible as in
vision on the live and limpid floorwork of the cloudless and
sunset-coloured sea. The half-brained creature to vk'hom
books are other than living things may see with the eye
of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's
distinction between books and life: those who live the
fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books
are to poets as much part of that life as pictures arc to
painters, or as music is to musicians, dead matter though
they may be to the spiritually stillborn children of dirt
and dullness, who find it possible and natural to live while
dead in heart and brain. Marlowe and Shakespeare,
^schylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the
dusty shelves of libraries.
It is excellently said, and necessary ; but perhaps
S^\inburne was unaware that poets and their
poetry entered more directly into his work than
into other poets', that Landor, Hugo, Milton,
Shelley and Marlowe took a place in it which
Virgil did not in Dante's or Tennyson's, which
Spenser or Chapman did not in Keats', or Shelley
in Browning's. To give one example, he quotes
from Landor : " We are what suns and winds
and water make us," and on that text preaches
the sonnet beginning ;
Sea, wind, and sun, with light and sound and breath
The spirit of man fulfilling — these create
That joy wherewith man's life grown passionate
Gains heart to hear, and sense to read and faith
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LATER POEMS
To know the secret word our Mother saith
In silence, and to see, though doubt wax great.
Death as the shadow cast by Hfe on fate,
Passing, whose shade we call the shadow of death. . . .
As he was called the " seamew " in childhood,
so he often wrote of himself as one with more
than fondness, and of the sea as his " mother "
with more than gravity. It was an old-fashioned
name for the relation, but it meant more than
the name meant elsewhere and has its effect.
So also with the sun and the light, whose names
are repeated with strange frequency in his last
book of poems. The Prologue to Dr. Faustus
is full of light, bright, fire, lightning; on the
first page of The Afterglow of Shakespeare,
" light " occurs three times, " lighten " twice,
" sunlight " once, along with " fire," " shone,"
"shine," "bright," "brighter," "flame" and
" lustrous " ; the last words of the book are :
While darkness on earth is unbroken,
Light lives on the sea.
and the last in Poems and Ballads were :
With stars and sea winds in her raiment.
Night sinks on the sea.
That light and that sea have a beauty of spiritual,
and, as some would say, symbolical, significance.
And yet when Swinburne was writing A
Swimmers Dream the rhyme of water appears
to have sent him off to Love, who was " the sea's
169
A. C. SWINBURNE
own daughter." It is one of his most beautiful
poems, and to have overcome the effect of that
abrupt change in the third Hue :
Dawn is dim in the dark soft water,
Soft and passionate, dark and sweet.
Love's own self was the deep sea's daughter. . . .
was a consummate labour of suggestive music.
I will give one more example of a sacrifice to
rhyme, where Swinburne translates Words-
worth's lines :
I've heard of hearts unkind kind deeds
With coldness still returning ;
Alas ! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.
into this verse :
The poet high and hoary
Of meres that mountains bind
Felt his great heart more often
Yearn, and his proud strength soften
From stern to tenderer mood,
At thought of gratitude
Shown than of song or story
He heard of hearts unkind.
It was not for this that rhyme and metre were
evolved.
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LATER POEMS: RESULTS
Such a lover of words and music could only
spend his full powers on poems which essentially
exist in his books or in the memories of his lovers,
and nowhere else, having no important connection
with anything outside. Sometimes, as in the
Elegy oil Sir Richard Burton, he triumphed with
a distinguishable subject ; but his best work is
where he makes no overt appeal to our interest
or sympathy, though the richer we are in the love
of life and of words the greater will be our
pleasure. The same is true of all poets, but not
in this degree. For it may be said of most poets
that they love men and Nature more than words ;
of Swinburne that he loved them equally.
Other poets tend towards a grace and glory of
words as of human speech perfected and made
divine, Swinburne towards a musical jargon that
includes human snatches, but is not and never
could be speech. Yet it must never be forgotten
that this jargon was no arbitrary novel language,
171
A. C. SWINBURNE
no mere anarchic tumult of words. It was the
medium evolved out of human speech and liter-
ature by a man who was lovable and admirable
to many of his finest contemporaries ; that it was
at least as natural as any other medium is shown
by the fact that in a five-mile walk he would
think out a poem down to the last line and
syllable without touching paper and then join
a luncheon party and be companionable and
witty, full of interest in the newspapers and
topics of the day. In these witty moods he
was able also to turn round and look upon his
own jargon, parodying it and its content com-
pletely, thus :
Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit
and soul of our senses
Sweetens the stress of suspiring suspicion that sobs in the
semblance and sound of a sigh ;
Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical moods and
triangular tenses —
" Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the
dawn of the day when we die."
Mild is the mirk and monotonous music of memory, melodi-
ously mute as it may be,
While the hope in the heart of the hero is bruised by the
breach of men's rapiers, resigned to the rod ;
Made meek as a mother whose bosom-beats bound with the
bliss-bringing bulk of a balm-breathing baby,
As they grope through the graveyard of creeds, under skies
growing green at a groan for the grimness of God,
Blank is the book of his bounty beholden of old, and its
binding is blacker than bluer :
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LATER POEMS: RESULTS
Out of blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their
dews are the wine of the bloodshed of things ;
Till the darkling desire of delight shall be free as a fawn
that is freed from the fangs that pui-sue her.
Till the heart-beats of hell shall be hushed by a hymn from
the hunt that has harried the kennel of kings.
He parodied himself, Tennyson, Browning,
Whitman, Patmore, Owen Meredith, and Ros-
setti, and succeeded in being funnier than them
all. It is greatly to be lamented that he never
fulfilled his intention of writing the diary of
Mrs. Samuel Pepys, kept concurrently with her
husband's.
He said himself of his own work in the
Dedication to Collected Poems that his medium
or material had " more in common with a
musician's than with a sculptor's." Hence we
accept from him combinations far more astonish-
ing under analysis than those which Dr. Johnson
condemned in Lycidas. We accept them, for
example, in the Ave Atque Vale. A volume
might well and profitably be written upon this
poem which, compared to Tennyson's Ode on
the Death of the Duke of Wellington or even
to Adonais, is like an Elizabethan " Bestiary "
compared to a modern " Natural History."
How simple and natural in comparison are
Baudelaire's own words quoted at the head of
the poem, about the poor dead, suffering when
the October winds blow melancholy among the
173
A. C. SWINBURNE
tombs und feeling the ingratitude of living men!
He begins :
Sli.ill I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel,
Hrother, on this tlmt was the veil of thee ?
Or quiet sea-Hower moulded by the sea,
Or simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel.
Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave,
Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve ?
Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before.
Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale Avith heat
And full of bitter summer, but more sweet
To thee than gleanings of a northern shore
Trod by no tropic feet ?
It is the simplest of the eighteen verses, and,
after hesitating over those beautiful Dryads in
the two lines nearest to magic in Sv^^inburne,
sets the tune of the whole. No man, I suppose,
can be " all ear " to a poem ; he must stray a
little now and then to think, apart from the
tune. If it were possible never thus to stray in
reading or hearing, Ave Atque Vale would seem
a perfect poem. Compounded of different
elements arising from regret and inquiry, it
makes out of Nature and poetry, fancy, super-
stition, mythology, and truth, a perfect tune,
rich, sorrowful, and beautiful. I cannot pretend
to explain it. But I know that the sound and
the sense of the first line seem to prepare for it all
and to make almost impossible a false curiosity;
the " sea-flower moulded by the sea " lulls a
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LATER POEMS: RESULTS
little more, so does the rhyme of " sorrel " and
" laurel " ; so, far more, do all those long-vowelled
endings of thee, sea, weave, eve, heat, sweet,
feet, before, and shore. " Half faded " is ever
so little disturbing if I allow it to combine too
closely with the blossoms and to produce actually
half-faded flowers instead of fiery ones to which
are added the idea and the sound of fading but
not the fact. In the second verse Baudelaire's
" flowers of evil " lead Swinburne to far lands
and so to the sea, and in particular to the sea
round " Lesbian promontories," and to the
" barren " kiss of " piteous " wave with wave
which is ignorant what " Leucadian grave "
" hides too deep the supreme head of song " :
the sea, like Sappho's kisses, " salt and sterile,"
carries her hither and thither and vexes and
works her wrong. Here, too, I do not too
closely combine " barren " and " kiss," " piteous "
and "wave," nor ask how waves could know
where Sappho was lying, nor why she lies "too
deep." " Salt " and " sterile " enter into the
music to the extent of three syllables and, in
the faintest manner, add to the effect of the
" bitter " in the first stanza. So, later, in the
phrase " effaced unprofitable eyes," " unprofit-
able " belongs to the whole and not to the eyes
in particular : it is a faintly pervasive sound
and feeling, like "poisonous," "luxurious,"
175
A. C. SWINBURNE
" tumultuous," " sleepless," " sombre," " mysteri-
ous," " sunless," " irrevocable," and the recurring
" strange " and " bitter " and " sin." I confess
that I pause Avhen Swinburne speaks of laying
on the tomb, Orestes-like, " a curl of severed
hair." Now and then a thought will rise a little
too far above the surface, as when the dead is
once " a little dust," and again " wind and air."
But having reached the last words —
For whom all winds are quiet as the sun,
All waters as the shore,
I feel that there is more of death and the grave
and a living man venturing among them than in
any other poem except :
Full fathom five thy father lies. . . .
and in some of the ballads. The poem is not a
rational meditation, but the uncouth experience
of death clothed in the strangest variety of words
and ideas, which results in music rather than
articulate speech. Perhaps no single sentence
in the poem is unintelligible to the mind any
more than it is ungrammatical. But the com-
bination is one which the mind cannot judge,
though it may approve, seeing the effect, and
say that it is beyond her expectation or under-
standing.
Side by side with this may be taken At a
MoutJis End, in the same book. It opens with
17C
LATER POEMS: RESULTS
an interplay of sounds and words which might
have preluded pure enchantment :
The night last night was strange and shaken :
More strange the change of you and me.
Once morCj for the old love's love forsaken.
We went out once more toward the sea.
For the old love's love-sake dead and buried,
L One last time, one more and no more. . . .
But it develops into a psychological study of
two lovers in something like Browning's manner.
The man is Swinburne, or at least a " light white
sea-mew." His mistress is a " sleek black pan-
theress," a "queen of panthers" whose title calls
for the rhyme of " anthers " later on, and the
Browningesque tone which the rhyme denotes
refuses to mingle with Swinburne's lyric ardour,
ruining the piece as a study, making it seem
a grotesquely poetical handling of fact. Relics,
the solitary belated last successor of Fausthie
and Felise, is a failure of the same kind : it
shows us an experience plus an attempt to use
it in poetry. The other failures are the poems
to Barry Cornwall, where rhyme and fancy are
thrown as decorations over simple and sensible
thoughts. But the successes in Swinburne's
own richest style are many. One of them, " A
Vision of Spring in Winter," is said to have
been half composed in a dream, and the others
have a similar faithful relation to something
M 177
A. C. SWINRUTINE
which we do not quite reco^ize as reality.
llie Year of the Ruse, for example, is full of:
A music beginning of loves
In the light that the roses niadej
Such hght as the music loves.
The music of man with maid.
Tkc Last Oracle tempts by its sober appearance
to a more careful reading than it ought to have
if it is to succeed in making a grandeur of dark-
ness out of which emerges the cry :
O father of all of us, Paian, Apollo,
Destroyer and healer, hear.
The sestina called The Complaint of Lisa, and
the Choriambics, are two poems which give a
perfect content to the form of sestina and chori-
ambics. Tlie Ballad of Francois Villon is a
perfect ballad almost as saturated with colour
and sense and humanity as Ave At que Vale.
Before Sunset is a melodious arrangement of
words so sweet as to be almost wordless in
effect, ylt Parting fits the idea "For a day or
a night love sang to us, played with us " to
a tune lasting for three verses of seven lines.
A Forsaken Garden is nearly a successful
attempt to turn the reality of a " steep square
slope," fields that " fall southward," and a
"dense hard passage," into the music of "all
are at one now, roses and lovers." L^our Songs
of Four Seasons are similar attempts and less
178
LATER POEMS: RESULTS
successful, especially in the short lines of Winter
in Northumberland, where the frequent rhymes,
often of a comic sort, cause deafness to all else.
Swinburne was often in later years to repeat
this quality, a kind of joyless leaping and danc-
ing of lifeless words, often a masque of simple
facts or conceits in fancy dress. Rarely could
he repeat anything like the quality of Ave Atque
Vale. His translations from Villon make us
wish that all the enthusiasm for Love and Sin
of the sixties had left him a substance like
Villon's.
Erectheus (1876), being after the same model,
might have restored the glory of Atalanta. It
may be a better play, as Swinburne thought it,
but the style is too far gone in the Biblical, the
classical and the un-English, too rich in phrases
like " tongueless water-herds," " this holiness of
Athens," "nor thine ear shall now my tongue
invoke not," " a God intolerable to seamen," and
" as a cloud is the face of his strength " ; not to
speak of the tendency marked in this :
Drew seaward as with one wide wail of waves,
Resorbed with reluctation ; such a groan
Rose from the fluctuant refluence of its ranks. . . .
and the confirmed trick shown in this :
The whole world's crowning city crowned with thee
As the sun's eye fulfils and crowns with sight
The circling crown of heaven.
179
A. C. SWINBURNE
The blank verse is gracious everywhere and
subtly varied, yet is in efTcct monotonous be-
cause it is uncontrolled and lacking in con-
tinuous form and purpose. Lacking these it
cannot, except in the charge of some rare voice,
hold us long either with its speed and mass or
with the fullness of vowels in lines like these :
Hear then and know why only of all men I
That bring such news as mine is, I alone
Must wash good words with weeping ; I and thou,
Woman, must wail to hear men sing, must groan
To see their joy who love us. . . .
It is possible also to be tired of hearing
laments over the fact that a girl is to die a maid.
The movement of the chorus is always lovely or
magnificent, but the words have not enough of
any sensuous quality save sound to conceal a
thinness of substance, a formality of style. On
the stage it would have majesty: it offers per-
haps the greatest possible opportunity for the
extending of a perfect voice.
Studies in Song contixiu^ the fine endless poem
in seven movements, called Bij the North Sea,
dedicated to Walter Theodore Watts, now
Theodore Watts-Dunton, with whom he had
just gone to live at Putney. On examination
this proves to mention many things which have
sensuous properties, earth and sea and men and
women, but though written after the poet had
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LATER POEMS: RESULTS
become very deaf, it is sensuously powerful only
in sound. The length and monotony help to
conceal what lies below the sound and must, to
some extent, enrich it : refusing to give way to
the sound we may notice the verse :
For the heart of the waters is cruel^
And the kisses are dire of their lips,
And their waves are as fire is to fuel
To the strength of the sea-faring ships,
Though the sea's eye gleam as a jewel
To the sun's eye back as he dips.
Having noticed it we may question the value of
the comparison in lines 3 and 4 save to provide
" fuel," and we may be slow in perceiving that
the waves are said to be as fire " though " now
at sunset the sea is waveless and reflects as one
jewel. We may notice, too, that oft-repeated
thought that the border Hne "sundering death
from life, keeps weariness from rest." Yet we
may read the poem more than once without
seeing Ulysses in it. We shall not gain by dis-
covering him. The essence of the poem is :
A land that is lonelier than ruin ;
A sea that is stranger than death.
That is the key. At the end the sun — "our
father, the God "—is added to earth and sea,
and the poet appears to bow down to it and to
offer :
181
A. C. SWINIUJRNE
My dreams to the wind ever-living,
My song to the sea.
Sun and sea and poet make O//" shore another
complete and satisfactory poem : here, too, the
sun is his " Father God "...
But thou art the God, and thy kingdom is heaven and thy
shrine is the sea.
The forty stanzas are in praise of the liglit and
the sea. Nothing is said unworthy of them :
nothing remains in the memory of the forty
stanzas save the Hght and the sea. The eight-
hundred -Une Song for the Centamry of ]Valtcr
Savage Landor is not almighty sound, but re-
flection long drawn out through love of sound.
Thus the sound makes the reflection tedious,
and the reflection interferes with the sound, and
the poem is a monument for patience. Evening
on the Broads is another versifled travel sketch
which might seem more but for the intrusion of
the fact : " Northward, lonely for miles, ere ever
a village begin," which mars the music, and save
in music it is not strong enough to endure the
intrusion. A Parting Song (to a friend leaving
England for a years residence in Australia)
reveals very clearly that Swinburne could imitate
as well as parody himself, and that he could and
would write beautifully on a broomstick. The
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LATER POEMS: RESULTS
Emperors Progress is interesting because it
shows the poet condemning Nero's " heavy fair-
faced hateful head," partly no doubt because
Nero was an Emperor, partly because Swinburne
had turned forty.
Songs of the Springtides, three long medita-
tive lyrics and a longer birthday ode to Victor
Hugo, belonging to the same year as Studies in
Song, is one of the best of Swinburne's books,
and in its original form one of the most pleasant
to possess. It is also one of those in which he
himself plays a conspicuous part. Thalassius,
the first poem, appears to be an autobiographical
poem of the same class as Shelley's Epipsychidion,
and open to the charge brought by Swinburne
against that poem, of containing riddles as well
as mystery. The name Thalassius is presumably
a variant of his boyish nickname " Sea-mew,"
and in the dedication to Trelawny he compares
his book seeking favour of Shelley's friend to a
" sea-mew on a sea-king's wrist alighting." The
child is found in April, the poet's birth-month, on
the sea shore. By an old warrior poet, a man
like the sages in Shelley's Prince Athanase and
Laon and Cythna, he is taught Liberty, Love,
Hate, Hope, Fear (" fear to be worthless the
dear love of the wind and sea that bred him
fearless ") : and in the end the old man blesses
him:
183
A. C. S\V INIUJUNM^:
Child of my sunlij^ht and the sea, from birth
A fosterling and fugitive on earth ;
Sleepless of soul as wind or wave or fire,
A man-child with an ungrown God's desire ;
Because thou hast loved nought mortal more than me,
Thy father, and thy mother-hearted sea ;
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 one music of the skies ;
Because thou hast heard with world-unwearied ears
The music that puts light into the spheres ;
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 whole poem is a dimly grandiose and
luxuriant portrait-history of a poet's breeding.
The human figure in it is not often more dis-
cernible than a figure in fire or cloud, and Hke
such is easily lost. But it does not so much as
Epipsychidion suggest questions and riddles,
except to irrelevant or inessential curiosity. It
should be read first of all Swinburne's poems
both as showing his _conception of himself, and,
what is far more important, how inextricably
mingled with nature and with words, how
entangled and obscured by them, he really is,
and how they modify his conception. Analysis
proves the framework and the thought very
simple ; but the grandiose dimness is due to
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LATER POEMS: RESULTS
no mere exaggeration or mist of words, but to yr
a genuine, an insuperable sense of the mystery ^
of simple things, and also a dissatisfaction with
the debased simplicity of phrases like " He
loved the sea." This is one of the longest of
Swinburne's entirely successful pieces of music.
Like Ave Atque Vale it is in a so-called iambic
metre, resembHng Lycidas in the rhyming and
the occasional short lines, but more abundant
both in rhymes and short lines. Its success
illustrates the fact that his best work is almost
always done with a familiar English rhythm,
though very often with much added variety in
rhyme-pattern and length of line. The warmth
and richness of colour and feeling permitted
by these rhymes alone strengthen the music
incalculably.
On the Cliffs, the next poem in Songs of the
Springtides, is another example. It is similar
in rhythm and rhyme. Here, again, the poet
speaks of his "winged white kinsfolk of the
sea," and says " we sea-mews." And as he is
half a bird, so the nightingale, whose song
threads the poem, is half a woman, or rather
more than half. He identifies Sappho and the
nightingale, and addresses them separately or
together, and sometimes as a " soul triune,"
" woman and god and bird," throughout the
poem. But the identification is misty, perhaps
185
A. C. SWINHURNE
arbitrary, and never ceases to be a slight im-
pediment to the reader, while the interspersed
fragments of Sappho are both unintelligible in
their places and ineffectual. Though On tfie
Clifjs would gain by annotation, it does not
fail to make a powerful, harmonious impression
by means of a musical, passionate use of time,
sea, night, and solitude, the poet, the poetess,
and the bird, and a tracery of words more
delicious to the faculties combined in reading
than to the pure intelligence. Like TlialussiuH
it is enriched by autobiography, which some-
times asks in its turn to be illuminated by
intimate personal knowledge. As in Jlialassius,
the poet is dimly glorified. He is like the
nightingale :
My heart has been in thy heart, and my life
As thy Hfe is, a sleepless hidden thing.
Full of the thirst and hunger of winter and spring,
That seeks its food not in such love or strife
As fill men's hearts with passionate hours and rest. . . .
For all my days as all thy days from birth
My heart as thy heart was in me or thee,
Fire ; and not all the fountains of the sea
Have waves enough to quench it, nor on earth
Is fuel enough to feed.
While day sows night and night sows day for seed.
Child and bird have been " as brother and
sister" since first her I^esbian word flamed on
him. The " harmonious madness " which, as
186
LATER POEMS: RESULTS
Shelley foresaw and desired, is the result is not
birdlike more than it is childlike or manUke.
In the poet's own words, " light, sound and life
are one" in it: it is like that song which he
heard while swimming, with the sea-birds, his
"bright born brethren," skimming overhead, a
song of "earth and heaven and sea" molten
together. It shifts periods and attitudes and
moods, and combines them in a manner that
needs a book of words if ever music did.
The Garden of Cymodocc, the next poem, is
in the same metre, but varied with several
different lyric verses. It begins with a prayer
to the sea, to be :
A spirit of sense more deep of deity^
A light of love, if love may be, more strong
In me than very song.
The first half makes music of an unnamed wild
island, a garden that has snow-coloured spray
for its petals, black rocks for its thorns. The
verse, in spite of references to visible things,
has only the visual effects of music. It does
not build solidly, clearly, and fixedly ; its
rhythm and rhyme do not allow it; nor is it
desirable that they should. Photography has
convinced too many people that they see
what the camera shows them. The Garden of
Cymodoce is probably at least as near as a
photograph to what a human being sees, that
187
A. C. SWINBURNE
is, provided the human being has not seen a
photo Girapli beforehand and known what to look
for. But, ahis ! N'^ictor Hugo sets foot on this
fair island and he is celebrated, he the God and
Master and Lord, and Napoleon 1 1 1 is abused,
Whose reeking soul made rotten
The loathed live corpse on earth once misbegotten.
Only to those who can allow Hugo to become
a mythic figure, vast and vague, like the old
warrior poet in Thalassius, will the whole
poem be satisfactory. Still more is this ability
necessary to excuse the BirtJulay Ode for the
Anniversary Festival of Victor Hiigo^ Fel)-
ruary 26, 18S0. Being Hugo's ever-ready self-
chosen laureate was not much more profitable
to poetry than being Edward the Seventh's.
These birthday odes and the like are but
poems in the manner of Swinburne, with every-
thing of the original save the illusion, the
transfiguration, the absolute and unbroken
sense of music. It is a pity that he never said
of this imitator as of the others, according to
H. D. Traill:
They strut like jays in my lendings^
They chatter and screech : I sing.
They mimic my phrases and endings.
And rum Old Testament ring :
But the lyrical cry isn't in it,
And the high gods spot in a minute
That it isn't the genuine thing.
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LATER rOEMS: RESULTS
In the year of this Birthday Ode, 1880,
appeared his Heptalogia ; or the Seven against
Sense, with its parody of himself.
The Century of Roundels might at first seem
a disappointing failure from a poet who so loved
metre. But in fact they only prove how much
there is beyond metre in his best work. The
roundels are in fact nothing but roundels. The
difference between them and his best work
proves that they were written in a spirit of gay
if loyal experiment, so that the best of them
are the Envoi, bidding them " Fly, white butter-
flies, out to sea," and the roundel on the roundel :
A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere
With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unwroughtj
That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear
A roundel is wrought.
Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught —
Love, laughter, or mourning — remembrance of rapture or
fear —
That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought.
As a bird's quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear
Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught.
So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear,
A roundel is wrought.
With a public that suspects delight in tech-
nique for its own sake, the roundels tell a little
against Swinburne, but they should tell still
more in his favour because they make it so clear
that in that mood of delight he was one half a
189
A. C. SWINIUTRNE
poet, that his fire was not one to be kindled at
will, that the echoing and chiming of his words
could not be equalled by mechanical regularity
of recurrence, ^'et some of tlic loundels are
the prettiest saddest things alive ; for if Swin-
burne did not seek all in writing them, he
sacrificed nothing; and he was justified without
referring to Hugo when he said in the Dedi-
catory Epistle to Collected Poem^ :
A writer conscious of any natural command over the
musical resources of his language can hardly fail to take
such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift or instinct as
the greatest writer and the greatest versifer of our age
must have felt at the highest possible degree when com-
posing a musical exercise of such incomparable scope and
fullness as " Les Djinns."
It may even be regretted that Swinburne did
not always use this, or a similarly labelled form,
when writing occasional or complimentary
verses. Nearly all his poems to or about chil-
dren are of this kind. Many stories of his
devotion to children are told, and if any doubt
of his love remained it should be dispelled by
the last verse of "A Moss Rose," where he says
that the best of all moss-roses is that where the
flower is the face of a baby and the moss a
bonnet of plush. Few of his children's poems
can in fairness be offered except to other adorers.
They abound in the " silly " tones perhaps
190
LATER POEMS: RESULTS
inevitable in one-sided affections. They are
excessively one-sided, and the child is buried
under the man's indiscriminate compliments. If
the child appears he is delightful, as in A Child's
Pity^ where the poet tells how, after a piteous
tale was read of a mother crocodile that was
killed, hours after, the child — " our blithe small
lord of Paradise," Swinburne calls him — was
heard crying :
He was so sorry, sitting still apart^
For the poor little crocodiles, he said. . . .
Then the poet goes on to ask " what heavenliest
angels of what heavenly city could match the
heavenly heart in children here " ? The croco-
diles are delicious, but not poetry, any more
than " what heavenliest angels . . ." is poetry.
A Midsumnie?^ Holiday was remarkable for a
series of sketches after nature in ballade form.
But even the strict bounds of the ballade did
not give these sketches the unity and complete-
ness, the independent life necessary to poetry.
The form itself was wonderfully varied, and pro-
moted to a new rank of scope and power : the
landscape was very often gracious and some-
times perfectly felicitous as in the description
of a wasting coast where earth is " a fruit rain-
rotted to the core." But the form could not
make poetry of these incidents, which in their
turn were on such a scale and of such a nature
191
A. C. SWINBURNE
as rather to strain the form. Most of the other
poems in this vohime grew out of actual scenes
and actual events, like many great poems, but
are interesting perhaps only to readers with
a particular knowledge of these scenes and
events.
The third series of Poems and Ballads gave
an unsurpassable exhibition of metrical experi-
ments. They can only be judged when rendered
by an excellent voice. " The Armada," for
example, needs a " God-gifted organ voice of
England " to recite it : without such a voice,
the mere creeping intelligence intrudes and
interrupts, making a fatal pause in the tempes-
tuous tide of it. Read silently alone it loses the
effect of combining and accumulating sound :
at most, the words only giv^e occasional transitory
impulses to the spirit. In Swinburne's poetry
the large groups of sounds and meanings are
what count, and except in a short poem the eye
and the mind cannot do these justice. Ear and
mind are necessary. Possibly even March: A71
Ode would seem to have merit if declaimed as
well as possible. Without that advantage A
Woixl ivif/i the Wind is recognisable as a charac-
teristic piece of Swinburne, each of the roundels
of Retnrn fills the mind like a bell stroke, and
the Ballad of Bath is a stately flattery, but only
the dialect poems and the lines Fo?^ Seamen can
192
LATER POEMS: RESULTS
give up all that they have to give. To a Sea-
Mew is different ; it is in any case a spotless
ecstasy in rhyme, but is doubled in value by its
connection w^ith Swinburne and the sea-mew at
Beachy Head in September, 1886:
Ah^ well were I for ever
Would'st thou change lives with me.
The poems in folk-ballad style are among the
happiest of Swinburne's experiments in language
and dialects other than his own. When he re-
viewed Rossetti's poems he praised Stratton
Water but complained that "it is so far a copy
that it seems hardly well to have gone so far and
no further." Swinburne compromised by giving
his phrases and his rhythms a sharper finish
than is usual in the genuine ballads ; otherwise
he added nothing to place them among his best
original work. The Winds is a perfect thing :
O weary fa' the east wind.
And weary fa' the west :
And gin I were under the wan waves wide
I wot weel wad I rest.
O weary fa' the nox-th wind.
And weary fa' the south :
The sea went ower my good lord's head
Or ever he kissed my mouth.
Weary fa' the windward rocks.
And weary fa' the lee :
They might hae sunken sevenscore ships.
And let ray love's gang free.
N 193
A. C. SWINBURNE
And weary fa' ye, mariners a',
And weary fa' the sea :
It might hae taken an hundred men.
And let my ae love be.
In poems like The Balldd of Dead Mciis Bay,
the ballad has merely modified Swinburne's
customary style and produced an attractive
form of simplicity. But Kingsley did at least
as well in Airly Beacon. For dialect and for
substance Tennyson's Northern Farmer is
superior, because it enlarged the poet's range,
while Swinburne's was actually narrowed.
Astrophel contained more of these experi-
ments and perhaps an equal metrical variety.
Some of this, as before, is of a kind that is
three parts wasted if read in silence. Its sound
is its chief sensuous element : read in silence
the abstract nature of Swinburne's vocabulary
is painfully apparent, and lines like :
Faith, a splendour that hope makes tender, and truth, whose
presage the soul divines —
call for the fundamental brainwork that brings
to the verse nothing but calamity. Loud or
silent, pieces like G7-ace Darling can hardly es-
stablish a claim to be more than commonplace
thought decorated by enthusiasm in fancy dress.
But the Elegy on Burton — not the lines On the
Death of Richard Burton — is one of his master-
pieces of richly imaged emotion, the Threnody
194
LATER POEMS: RESULTS
on P. B. Marston, one of his masterpieces of
abstract contemplation made sensuous only by-
rhythm. A Sxvimj}iei-'s Dream can be seen even
by the eye to be the finest of Swinburne's
praises of swimming :
A purer passion, a lordlier leisure,
A peace more happy than lives on land.
Fulfils with pulse of diviner pleasure
The dreaming head and the steering hand.
I lean my cheek to the cold grey pillow,
The deep soft swell of the full broad billow.
And close mine eyes for delight past measure.
And wish the wheel of the world would stand. , . .
The ear makes it what the eye cannot make it —
a dream in music ; not the music of sweet words
in which Swinburne is often deficient, but of
rhythms and great images in harmony with
them. A Nympholcpt is yet finer, but being
longer suffers more from the mute and curious
eye, for it allows the mind to resent the emphasis
and the words which seem periphrastic rather
than expressive. But in fact this poem, almost
as long as if it were in praise of Hugo and not
of Pan, has, diffused but unbroken throughout
it, the magic unexpectedly revealed in those two
lines of Ave Atque Vale\
Such as the summer sleepy dryads weave.
Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve.
All the description, the reflection, the magnifica-
195
A. C. SWINBURNE
tion, do not obscure this magic, hut orchestrate
it tor tlie reader who has ears to hear and some-
one else to till them with
Thine immanent i)rescnee, the pulse of thy heart's hfe, Pan.
Then he will not inquire why the wave should
" reek " of the light that flickers or of the spray
that flies, but will submit liimself to the spirit
of the hour — and of the poet — that subdues all
to Pan :
And nought is all^ as am I, but a dream of thee.
Keats could have put as much magic into one
line ; but then he wrote no long poem which
sustains that magic until it possesses and enslaves
the reader. He does no more than put an in-
cantation into our lips which we use each accord-
ing to his capacity. Swinburne's poem has no
voice as of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, but a
blare and blaze of music which is tyrannous,
and allows a choice only between absolute
submission and rejection. It is impossible to
enjoy A Nympholept without this absolute
submission — impossible to slip quietly into
this brassy fairyland and out again. The effect
lasts while the sound reverberates in the ears ;
for a time the mind is mazed, not altogether
at ease. With the restoration of silence
the experience seems unreal, a little theatrical,
not wholly pleasant, and it cannot be recovered
19C
LATER POEMS: RESULTS
without a repetition of the performance ; nor
will this invariably succeed ; and if it does
not succeed it will disgust. There is no such
power in Astrophel where the metre is several
times, or in An Autiivni Vision, where it is
seven times, changed, nor in On the South Coast,
where the same verse is used throughout, as in
A Nympholept itself.
As Swinburne came more frequently to attach
his poems openly to definite persons, places and
events, he wrote many memorial poems for lost
fiiends, and it is worth noticing that he allowed
himself much latitude of conjecture or assump-
tion about death, and in exalting that unbodied
monster consents to blaspheme earthly " life that
is fettered in bonds of time and clasped with
darkness about as is earth with sea." Instead of
saying that Landor died, Swinburne used the
phrase : " went to find his equals and rejoin his
kin among the Grecian shades where Orpheus
and where Homer are." This alone does not
prove Swinburne's belief in the immortality of
the soul any more than " God damn " proves a
belief in God and Hell. But the phrase is not
the only one superficially incompatible with
Swinburne's statement that, like Landor himself,
he thought the immortality of the soul an
" utterly incognisable " matter " on which it is
equally unreasonable to have, or wish to have, an
197
A. C. SWINBURNE
opinion." Nor, perluips, is it incompatible with
his retort — to one who rebuked him for bhis-
phemy with the words, " You'll die like a dog,
sir ! " — " Oh, say a cat ! " for nine lives might well
have seemed to such a lover of life equivalent to
immortality, whether "where Orpheus and where
Homer are," or elsewhere.
It may fairly be urged that Swinburne's phrase
about Landor was used ceremoniously of one who
stood to him in place of a god. To strip some
poets of all such ceremonious traditional phrases
would leave them in rags, if not insufficiently
covered for decency. But the words of poets
cannot off-hand be accused as traditional and
condemned as meaningless. No one would treat
in this way, for example, the lines of Shelley :
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar ;
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
Here the traditional " soul " and " abode where
the Eternal are " commands more attention than
Swinburne's posthumous abode of Orpheus,
Homer and Landor. We feel that Shelley was
not using these grand vague words only because
grand vague words are impressive : nor perhaps
was Swinburne when he described the swimmer's
rapture, " the love of his body and soul for the
198
LATER POEMS: RESULTS
darkling delight of the soundless lake," and
exclaimed :
Might life be as this and death be as life that casts off time
as a robej
The hkeness of infinite heaven were a symbol revealed of the
lake of Gaube.
This image sent him off thinking about "the
spirit that is not breath," only to find that " deep
silence answers," and to conclude :
But well shall it be with us ever
Who drive through the darkness here.
If the soul that we live by never,
For aught that a lie saith, fear.
The "lie" must be the lie of the priests about
life after death.
Swinburne was fond of the variation of that
" lie " which I began by quoting. He spoke of
the inexhaustible labour of Victor Hugo's spirit
ceasing "among us at least, for ever," and of
that poet joining "the company of his equals."
Sometimes he chose a different expression,
quoting, for example, when he spoke of Byron's
death : "He was a great man, good at many
things, and now he has attained this also, to be at
rest." But again and again he preferred to think
of a sensible existence in some sort of Elysian
fields rather than of horizontal peace. " If," he
said, " as some thinkers or dreamers might ven-
ture to hope, those two great poets of the grave,
199
A. C. SWINBURNE
John Webster and Victor Hugo, have now met in
a world beyond the grave ..." In liis poetry he
ventured to indulge this hope time after time.
He spoke of " shades of dead lords of music " ;
of Tennyson joining Shakespeare, of Trelawny
— "surely" — rejoining Shelley, "if," that is,
" hearts of the dead may hear " ; of Barry Corn-
wall, on October 4, 1874, entering the garden of
death, " where the singers whose names are
deathless one with another make music unknown
of men " ; of P. B. Marston after death " haply "
meeting Milton, who also was blind ; of Aurelio
Saffi being received by " the wider world of men
that is not ours," and standing "in Dante's
presence, by Mazzini's side": he bade Shakespeare,
on June 27, 1901, "be glad in heaven above all
souls ensphered " and " rejoice that still thy
Stratford bears thy sign."
On the other hand, saluting Baudelaire, he
asked the dead if it were well, and were there
flowers or fruit where he was, but concluded by
bidding him be content :
For whom all winds are quiet as the sun.
All water as the shore.
So also James Lorimer Graham, when he died,
" went to the dark where all is done." This is not
less impressive than the idea of an Elysian re-
union. Consequently it is not surprising that
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LATER POEMS: RESULTS
the poet should sometimes combine the two, as
in the lines In Memory of Barry Cornwall, where
he spoke of the " soft long sleep " on the " broad
sweet bosom of death " as well as of " the world
of the dead men," rationalizing his belief or fancy
by the reflection that the living may keep alive
the powers of the dead. He liked to think of
the departed reaching a " painless place." Once
at least he admitted the love that desired to
have the dead friend, P. B. Marston, alive, yet
did not really desire it :
Would not love him so worse than ill.
Would not clothe him again with care ;
Death had given him "at last good day," pain
had "fallen on rest"; his friends knew that "the
worst was his on earth " ; nevertheless in this set
of poems also he could not refrain from the
fancy that " haply " the dead looked down from
" afar above."
The words "if" and "haply" play a part in
scores of passages concerning the dead and what
happens to them. Once, in the dedication of
Astrophel to William Morris, he spoke with con-
fidence of learning when we die, " if death be or
life be a lie " ; which presumably means, whether
death be an end or not ; and he assumed that
Sir Richard Burton, being dead, had "sought
what world the light of death may show." He
himself was still uncertain "if aught beyond
201
A. C. SWINBURNE
sweet sleep lie hidden, and sleep be sealed not
fast on dead men's sight for ever," though he
beheved that the dead knew. Once he asked
Death to let the dead send word " that if they
wake their life is sweet as sleep " ; immediately
afterwards he expressed the belief that death
could not give this grace. He said to the dead,
" if ought thou knowest where now thou art,"
or "yet haply may not — and haply may — no
sense abide of the dead sun's ray," or (in ad-
dressing a believer, Christina Rossetti) "If death
do its trust no wrong." He repeated, " if the
dead be alive," or " if ever a voice may be the
same in heaven," or " if hfe there be that flies
not " ; and in the dedication of A Channel
Passage to the memory of William Morris and
Burne-.Tones, he said, "if love do not utterly
die," but confessed that of their sleep :
We know not indeed if it be not
What no man hath known if it be.
Life quickened with Hght that we see not
If spirits may see.
When his father died in 1877 he had said simply
that he "knew not" if the dead one's life and
spirit and work " here are done."
Sometimes "vvhile saying that "peace, rest,
and sleep are all we know of death," he w^ould
add that " surely " the last sleep could not seal
up for ever the " keen swift light " of the eyes,
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LATER POEMS: RESULTS
or that " perchance " some " loveHer hfe " was
theirs. Once at least, in thinking of a dead
man, he speaks of the " roses," " music," and
" angels " round the " shrine " of death, and
hears Death answer:
Night has given what day
Denied him : darkness hath unsealed his eyes.
At other times he speaks of death lying dead,
and takes refuge in phrases which seem to be
derived from the words of Webster :
We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune's slaves,
Nay, cease to die by dying.
The death of Sir Richard Burton, for example,
makes him speak of death delivering " from life
that dies." Browning, by his death, " awakened
out of life wherein we sleep." Theodore de
Banville's life " dies and casts off death." P. B.
Marston is " healed of life," no longer '* suffers
life " ; Death for him is the " healer of life " and
" sets the soul that love could set not free."
Writing in memory of Aurelio Saffi, he speaks
of " the deathless life of death which earth calls
heaven." But of WiUiam Bell Scott's death he
can only say that "Haply . . . not life but
death may indeed be dead."
In one class of poems he casts off doubt.
His love of children led him to pay them the
tribute of feigning certainty. To a " baby kins-
203
A. C. SWINBURNE
woman " lie spoke of her dead mother's eyes
watching her " from I'aradise," and imagines
her " perehanee " seeing them shine on her,
though he afterwards eonfesses that he ean
" but deem or dream or guess thee not wholly
motherless." One ehild, Olivia Madox Frances
Rossetti,was" new-born "on earth just after Oliver
Madox Brown was new-born in heaven. A Babys
Epitaph is spoken by the baby, whom " angels '
have called " homeward," forbidding her " here
to rest beguiled." Another Babu's Death caused
him to speak of the " little soul " taking wing
*' with heaven again for goal " ; but in a third
poem he could only say that " perchance, though
love knows naught," "guiding angels" had caught
the little hands ; in a sixth he said that " heaven "
had " yearned " for the child " till angels hailed
him there angel by name." When one of twins
has died, he speaks of light breaking " haply . . .
into newborn spirit," which is obscure. Even a
living child he flatters with talk of angels ; say-
ing that a baby's feet might tempt an angel's lips
to kiss them : to one he speaks of the angels as
" your brothers " ; to another he cries: " O child,
what news from heaven ? " One child makes
him a believer to the point of exclaiming :
If of such be the kingdom of heaven.
It must be heaven indeed.
204.
LATER POEMS: RESULTS
and affirming that " we see the children above
us as they might angels above."
Writing of Blake's Auguries of Innocence, he
calls it a series of " such divine epigrams as
angels might be imagined to dictate, by way of
a lesson for repetition to little children." This
is a charming fancy, and confessed as such.
Whether the fancies quoted from his poems on
children are as charming may be a matter of
opinion. Expressed as many of them are in the
form of roundels question may be heavy-handed,
but to me at least they seem, even so, in-
sufficiently convinced, and not to be so readily
excusable as those which sorrow prompts and
the " monumentalist " more or less immortalizes
in country churchyards. I would not have a
poet disdain mythology, but if he shall handle
it and it remain mechanical, unentwined with
sincerity save of intention, he fails. In this
way Swinburne has failed. Too often, if not
always, his words are only words, involving
scarce even a wish, or a passionate inability, to
believe. For the poems on dead men there is
more excuse. The fancies, superstitions or old
beliefs were in part called up by the sorrow of
indignation, pity, or regret. Yet the variety
of solutions offisred, or entertained, or, in some
cases, accepted, is something too great, and it
may be felt that the poet too easily laid hold
205
A. C. SWINBURNE
of wliat was pathetic or in some otlier way
conventionally fit for poetry. Taken alone, the
confession of ignorance, as in the verses on his
fatlier, is dignified and suitable, and so might
any of the other attitudes have been ; but Swin-
burne had assumed the part of elegist, and too
often finding himself with little to say, or little
that would go into his verses, he fell into a sort
of professionalism in which he did merely better
than other professionals.
Swinburne was happier in writing of death
dramatically, and not upon a definite personal
occasion. He used an even greater freedom of
choice among the many states of bliss and pain,
rest and annihilation, which have been ftmcied
or believed to follow the stilling, stiffening,
chilling, and silencing of the body. It is, for
example, perfectly effective and natural when
Chastelard, in the pride of his life, deliberately
asking for death, reflects that he is to go "where
a man lies with all his loves put out and his lips
full of earth." Whatever his religion promised
him, he knew that as a lover the sum of his fate
was to be that. The lover's wish in The Triumph
of Time is equally to be accepted. He desires
to be dead and buried with his false mistress :
Clasped and clothed in the cloven clay
Out of the world's way, out of the \\(^\\t. . . .
and yet not wholly dead, but slumbering
206
LATER POEMS: RESULTS
dreamily, in a quiet where they would " laugh
low, live softly, murmur and muse," and even
something more. Or, he says, he will go down
to the sea, his " mother," and find a grave, and
"sleep and move with the moving ships," and
know of nothing. The lust of a miserable one
after an unimaginable tranquilHty, an unimagin-
able annihilation, stirs emotion without surprise ;
and the same can be said of the utterly satisfied
lover's feeling in the rondel, Kissing Her Hair,
that nothing could be added to him, save per-
haps death, which I suppose is regarded as in
some magnificent way dignifying and solemniz-
ing without destroying. Iseult, in Tristram of
Lyonesse, thinks of a Hell where she would be
happy if only she knew that her lover was with
God ; and, on the other hand, if he is to join
her in Hell he will not be disconsolate with
such love as hers. At another time she thinks
there would be some joy in death, to be made
one with Nature, and "lost in the sun's light
and the all-girdling sea," forgotten and forgetting
— nay, she would not forget all things. The
poet himself thinks of death for them otherwise.
He speaks of Tristram sailing home " to sleep
in home-born earth at last," and when the end
comes it will deliver them to " perpetual rest . . .
from bondage and the fear of time set free."
He imagines for them a kind of happiness and
207
A. C. SWINBURNE
distinction in lying dead at peace so near the
sea, troubled by nothin<^, whatever *' fear or
fancy saith/' Then he allows himself the plea-
sure of thinking what a "sublime sweet sepul-
chre" the sea would be, and forthwith he
supposes their grave swallowed up by the
waters :
But peace they have that none may gain who live.
And rest about them that no love can give,
And over them, while death and life shall he,
The light and sound and darkness of the sea.
Like the lover in The Tiivniph of Time, he thinks
of this as in some sort a noble peace. One of
his few solely and explicitly personal poems, Ex
f^oto, expresses the poet's own preference for
such a grave, if he might choose. In his last
hour, he says, he would pray for this one thing
fi-om " the birth-god of his day," that he should
not lie in the earth, but in "a bed of larger
girth, chaster and colder." For, he protests, he
was not earth's child, but the sea's, bred by her
and " the wind, her brother," having in his veins
like wine her " sharp salt blood " ; and he recalls
how once he was near drowned, and how he was
glad it was the sea that offered him " death to
drink." He compares the earth to the sea which
never even seems to be subject and not free. The
sea slakes all thirst for ever, and, rising to a
strange ecstasy at this thought, the poet begs
208
LATER POEMS: RESULTS
the sea to take him, alive or dead, when his time
shall come. Though Shelley's fate and the
several verses where he seems to foretell it may-
have had some share in begetting Swinburne's
poem, which was ignored, as it fell out, both by
the sea and by his birth-god, Ex Voto has in
it something of an instinctive rapture, such as
cannot be felt in Swinburne's other thoughts on
death. It is not enough to forbid the conclusion
that neither divination nor meditation taught
him anything new, or revived in him with fresh
force anything old, on what is hereafter.
Swinburne's last volume of poems, A Channel
Passage and Other Poems, was made up of the
same elements as the former books, but having
a large proportion of pieces openly or obviously
connected with various occasions political or
private. The hand had not lost its cunning ;
here and there the grace was beautiful ; over
several poems like Tlie Altar of Righteousness,
lay a solemnity with a new shade of seriousness
in it ; the heroics of the prologues to a number
of Elizabethan plays were clear and strong.
But except in the dedication, the volume is
weaker as well as graver and more even in tone.
Perhaps no quality can be missed except that
which came of the happy combination of all the
others. The poet piped and the words danced ;
it had never been a matter of words only or the
o 209
A. C. SWINBURNE
last would now have been as the first. His
power had lasted for full thirty years, up to the
Talc of Balcn in 189G. It is even possible that
another subjeet like the story of Halen would
have helped his powers to eombine even later
than 18U6.
210
IX
TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE: THE TALE
OF BALEN
Swinburne's two long verse narratives show his
powers at a height only excelled in a score of his
best short poems, since whatever the narrative
form refused to him which the lyric could not
have done — and that was little — the old tales of
Tristram and Balen made up for it, and he inter-
wove with them the richest of his own spirit-stufF.
Tristram of Lyonesse followed two years after
Songs of the Springtides, and with them repre-
sents a brilliant middle period in Swinburne's
art, when, in the earlier forties of his age, he was
able to combine the ardour of Songs Befoix
Sunrise with the richness of the first Poems and
Ballads. In undertaking to " rehandle the death-
less legend of Tristram," he says, his aim was
"simply to present that story, not diluted and
debased as it has been in our own time by other
hands, but undefaced by improvement and unde-
formed by transformation, as it was known to
the age of Dante wherever the chronicles of
211
A. C. S VV I N H U U N K
romance found licarin^, i'rom Ercildoiine to
Florence ; and not in the epic or romantic form
/ of sustained and continuous narrative, but mainly
through a succession of dramatic scenes or pic-
tures with descriptive settin<^s or backgrounds "
It is not, in fact, a fresh creative work upon
the foundation of the old tale, but a series of
lyrical studies from it which do in fact present
the main outlines in such a way as to make a
prior knowledge unnecessary, but yield all their
fullest savours to those who know and love the
tale like the poet. Those who do not thus know
and love it may think it buried deep under the
inessential magnificence of the poet's enthusiasm
and sympathy with each stage of the tale. He'
has given out of his life to make their dead
life live some days of his. Swinburne himself
seems to be in love with Iseult, to give her the
amorous adoration which had small outlet in the
books since Cliastclard and Poems and Bdllads.
He loves her before Tristram ; he pictures her
body when yet her love
Watched out its virprin vir^il in soft pride
And unkissed expectation
as if he were watching her as Lorenzo watched
Madeleine on St. Agnes' Eve. The narrative
core of the poem is sound and good, but the
whole is a praise of love that mingles the lofty
212
TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE
fervour of Epipsychidion with the sensual fer-
vour of Carew's Rapture.
In the first hne of the Prelude he sings of
Love that is first and last of all things made.
The light that has the living world for shade . . .
and how love brought these two lovers to death :
Through many and lovely days and much delight
Led those twain to the lifeless light of night.
" Yea, but what then ? " he asks, and in the
thought of the great love of famous lovers he is
rapt away and would believe, and have us agree,
that their fame
Till story and song and glory and all things sleep
is as it were a satisfying heaven in which
they re-enact their love before us to a glorious
amorous music. Tristram tells Iseult love-tales
before their love begins, and she compares her-
self with the women of the tales, in one beautiful
scene measuring her height against the mast, and
at the end exclaims :
What good is it to God that such should die ?
He sings her love songs and still she loves him
but " in holy girlish wise," until the love potion
makes their four lips "one burning mouth."
Thenceforward the poem is a frenzy of bodily
love either desirous or in mid-rapture, against a
background of keen air, wild lands, tempestuous
and rockbound sea, with crying of hunt and
213
A. C. SWINBURNE
battle, "and many a large delight of hawk and
hound. Alone together at night in summer,
Only with stress of soft fierce hands she prest
Between the throbbing blossoms of her breast
His ardent face, and through his hair her breath
Went quivering as when life is hard on death ;
And M'ith strong trembling fingers she strained fast
His head into her bosom ; till at last.
Satiate with sweetness of that burning bed
His e3'es afire with tears he raised his head
And laughed into her lips ; and all his heart
Filled hers ; then face from face fell, and apart
Each hung on each with panting lips, and felt
Sense into sense and spirit in spirit melt.
" Hast thou no sword ? I would not live till day ;
O love, this night and we must pass away.
It must die soon, and let not us die late."
Here echoes, " Ah God ! Ah, God 1 that day
should be so soon " from Poems and Ballads;
yet the poet and Tristram do not deny
Glory and grace and reverence and delight
To wedded woman by her bridal right.
Doubly splendid in contrast with all the soft
sweetness and bitterness of love, which is in its
turn all the softer for it, comes :
The breeze, the bloom, the splendour and the sound,
That stung like fire the hunter and the hound.
The pulse of wind, the passion of the sea,
The raj)ture of the woodland. . . .
This interchange of "the lovely fight of love and
214
TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE
sleep " with the open air makes up for the lack of
drama and continuous narrative.
As Tristram and Iseult are never anything
but passionate so nothing in Nature is loveless or
unrapturous. Thus, the hovering sea-gull turns :
With eyes wherein the keen heart ghttering yearns
Down toward the sweet green sea whereon the broad moon
burns.
And suddenly, soul-stricken with delight.
Drops, and the glad wave gladdens. . . .
Even drowned men are called " sleepers in the
soft green sea," as if they had some joy of it.
The wastes of Wales are " wild glad " wastes of
"glorious" Wales. The spear thirsts and the
sword is hungry. The sea takes the sun "on
her bare bright bosom as a bride." The arms of
Tristram swimming are "amorous," and the
touch of his lips and the wave is a " sharp sweet
minute's kiss." The leaves of Broceliande are
"full of sweet sound, full of sweet wind and
sun."
This alternation of Love and Nature, except
for one who persists in wanting a tale, is strong
enough almost to hide some of the few points
where Swinburne has kept the tale well in view,
as where he reminds us that the night when
Iseult of Ireland is praying to God, and at the
same time saying :
Blest am I beyond M-omen even herein.
That beyond all born women is my sin,
215
A. C. SWINBURNE
was the niglit when Iseiilt of Brittany married
Tristram, " a maiden in a marriage bower."
Nor are such points necessary. Swinburne's
love of Iseult and Iier lover, his joy to be witli
them in Northumberland, riding togetlier, the
rapture which he shares with Tristram in swim-
ming, his satisfaction when at last in death their
four lips make " one silent mouth " and he can
give them a "sublime sweet sepulchre" under
the sea, these sympathies make us well content
that he should merely give us the fragments of
the story and spend himself in magnii'ying them
and giving them a golden atmosphere. I should
have been glad to do without the methodical
nightly substitution of Bragwaine for Iseult in
the bed of Mark ; above all, without the letter,
found after his death, in which Tristram is
alleged to have explained that their love had
been " no choice of will, but chance and sorcer-
ous art " and to have prayed for pardon, which
was given by Mark with tears.
These things only speck the mighty lyric,
which sometimes swoons with its own extra-
vagance but never drops until it reaches
The light and sound and darkness of the sea.
Rightly does Swinburne call Iseult and Tristram
"my lovers," "my twain." Their love, their
youth, their beauty are equal in splendour
216
TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE
to the sun, the sea, the Hberty, which he so
loved. All his characteristic ways with words
help to enrich the poem, chiming of words,
repetition, duplication and balancing of words
and thoughts, abundance of full vowels and
especially of the vowel of "light" and "fire."
The lines are massive or rapid, often composed
of monosyllables, broken up in every possible
way and frequently extended to alexandrines,
while the rhymes are frequently in triplets
instead of pairs ; when he once adopts one or
both of these variations, he does so several times
in fairly close succession, just as when he once
begins a line with an important word, usually
accented on the first syllable, and often carried
over abruptly from the preceding line, he does
so two or three times, for example, here :
... Shattered from his steed
Fell, as a mainmast ruining, Palamede,
Stunned. . . .
He uses a pair of lines similar but different, at
irregular intervals, to break in as a sea-burden
upon Iseult's prayer with a sound of storm, and
uses it effectively.
Doing without much action he inevitably falls
into excessive multiplication without variety.
When Tristram has said that Iseult's hands used
to be more to him than watersprings to shadeless
lands he says also what her hair, her mouth and
217
A. C. SVVMNBURNE
her breast used to be, iind so ev^erywhere.
When Iseult hiis been Hstening to Tristram's
story and sighs and sees the sun at that moment
rise up, the sun's face burns against hers Uke a
lover's : but also the sea shone and shivered like
angels' wings ; a wind shook the foam flowers as
a rainfall of sea roses, for the foam was like
blossoms ; the moon withered as a face in a
swoon ; the air was moved with delight and
passion as of love, until air, light and wave
seemed full of beating rest like a new-mated
dove's heart, and liad a motion as of one Clod's
beating breast.
Everything is done which can make the poem
everywhere grand or sumptuous, and inevitably,
since all comes from Swinburne, it is at times
stiff and heavy laden. Every inch is Swin-
burne's. Compare it with Romeo and Juliet.
There the love and beauty is so much beyond
the sum of the details, that beautiful as they
often are the effect of the whole astonishes and
makes the words seem the servants of greater
spirits. No catalogue of beautiful things and
no cabinet of beautiful words can produce
beauty, and Swinburne's poem is far more than
a catalogue or a cabinet ; but the total result of
his expenditure is not astonishing or dispropor-
tionate. Shakespeare uses the breath of life,
Swinburne uses gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
218
TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE
But compare it with Laon and Cythna and
Endymion and it is at least as readable and
exuberant. Few poets have more gold, frank-
incense, and myrrh to offer, and having the
breath of life strong within himself he uses
them successfully to sweeten and to adorn. His
dangling sentences, his use of addition instead
of development, his abuse of some of his
favourite habits or devices of style, are not in
excess of what is to be expected in the work of
a man's hands. He undertook a lesser adven-
ture than Tennyson in the Idylls ; having made
no attempt to lift his hero and heroine out of an
" impossible age of an imaginary world " he
avoids Tennyson's failure. He creates nothing,
but his songs about these well-beloved shadows
constitute him one of their most perfect lovers,
and in English at least their most perfect poet.
The Tale of Bale?i, dedicated to his mother in
his fifty-ninth year, was the fine flower of
Swinburne's later work. By comparison with
Tristram it is naked narrative, and as near as
possible to the tale of Malory. From the Lady
of Shalott and the lovely fragment of Launcelot
and Guinevere he took the metre which made
entire nakedness of narrative impossible. Tenny-
son's own version of Balin and Balan, where
the story is moralized to death with (I believe)
219
A. C. SVVINBUIINE
no gain to morality, helped him if at all only by
provocation. In Tennyson's poem the deaths of
the brothers were due to a fit of Halen's temper
which he had earnestly striven to correct. Swin-
burne retained the " custom of the castle " by
which Balan had to fight with every comer, and
at last with Balen who was concealed under
strange armour. This irrational, but not unlife-
like and certainly imposing, fate brings an end
not less symbolic in its beauty now than it
could have seemed in the fifteenth century, and
we are satisfied when Merlin writes the brothers'
names on the tomb and weeps :
For all his heart within him yearned
With pity like as fire that burned.
The fate his fateful eye discerned
Far off now dimmed it, ere he turned
His face toward Camelot, to tell
Arthur of all the storms that woke
Round Balen, and the dolorous stroke.
And how that last blind battle broke
The consummated spell.
"Alas," Kino; Arthur said, "this day
I have heard the worst that woe might say :
For in this world that wanes away
I know not two such knights as they."
This is the tale that memory writes
Of men whose names like stars shall stand,
Balen and Balan, sure of hand.
Two brethren of Northumbeiland,
In life and death good knights.
Swinburne himself hardly intervenes, yet Balen
220
TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE
is conspicuously tinged by his preferences.
Tennyson appears to translate " le sauvage " as
" bad-tempered " : Swinburne's hero is " called
the Wild by knights whom kings and courts
make tame. ..." He was, like the poet him-
self, " a northern child of earth and sea " ; and
often the knight's mood and Nature's have that
brightness which he loved to praise. Every-
where are " moors and woods that shone and
sang," a " sunbright wildwood side," " bright
snows," " wild bright " coasts, " storm bright "
lands, and pride of summer with " lordly
laughter in her eye " ; men " drink the golden
sunhght's wine with joy's thanksgiving that they
live " ; even Tristram is " bright and sad and
kind " ; and round Balen shines a brief " light of
joy and glory." Nothing could be more charac-
teristic of Swinburne out of doors, and away
from love and Victor Hugo, than this opening
of a Canto :
In Autumn, when the wind and sea
Rejoice to live and laugh to be.
And scarce the blast that curbs the tree
And bids before it quail and flee
The fiery foliage, where its brand
Is radiant as the seal of spring,
Sounds less delight, and waves a wing
Less lustrous, life's loud thanksgiving
Puts life in sea and land.
High hope in Balen's heart alight
Laughed. . . .
221
A. C. SWINBURNE
All this bri^litiiess is quenched once and for ever
in perfect gloom.
The story is clearly and fully told, with only
such praise and dalliance as is necessary to depict
the background of earth loved by knight and
poet, and to flatter the graces of the stanza.
Each Canto begins " In hawthorn time," or " In
linden time," " In autumn," " In winter," or the
like, without confounding or obscuring the tale.
The stanza causes a good deal of length and
roundaboutness, but seldom fails to be gracious.
It can be grand also, as where Balen knows that
he shall die :
Nor fate nor fear might overcast
The soul now near its peace at last.
Suddenly^ thence as forth he past,
A mighty and a deadly blast
Blown of a hunting horn he heard,
As when the chase hath nobly sped.
" That blast is blown for me," he said,
" The prize am I w ho am yet not dead,'
And smiled upon the word.
Thenceforward there is no delay ; all is knightly
act and speech, of a ballad dignity yet with no
mere simpleness.
Those who read the tale here for the first time
will never be in difficulty and rarely impatient.
Those who know it in Malory and have sought
it in Tennyson will go to The Tale of Baleii
for the lustrous background and for the con-
222
TRISTRAM OF LYONESSE
tinuous but not monotonous pleasure of the
stanza, but also for the constant nobility of
temper ; for some tenderness like that where the
deadly-wounded Balan crawls on hands and knees
towards Balen, as when :
Beneath their mothex-'s eye had he,
A babe that laughed with joy to be.
Made toward him standing by her knee
For love's sake long ago. . . .
Sometimes the metrical form is allowed its
own way, to form perfect stanzas lovable for
their own sakes : as often the narrative sweeps
through the verses without submitting to them,
yet without shattering them. It becomes too
often abstract, even fantastically so, as here :
And seeing that shame and peril, fear
Bade wrath and grief awake and hear
What shame should say in fame's Avide ear
If she, by sorrow sealed more dear
Than joy might make her, so should die. . . .
but otherwise the style is less mannered and has
gained simplicity from its theme and from the
stanza perhaps some sweetness. The charac-
teristic play of words is not always happy, but
is only once as unhappy as in the Hne about the
wave bounding on the land and confounding
The bounding bulk whereon it bounds.
The success of this narrative, the failure of many
223
A. C. SWINHURNE
of his lyric, descriptive and reflective poems
written before it, and of all written after it,
proves that Swinburne owed much to the tan-
gible substratum of an old tale and justifies a
regret that he did not more often trust it.
224
X
THE PLAYS
After Balen came a drama, Rosa7no7id, Queen
of' the Lombards, after that A Channel Passage,
but Swinburne's last book, The Duke of Gandia,
was another drama. He began with plays, Rosa-
mond, and The Qiieen Mothe7% and Chastelard ;
he ended with a play. The first had some
qualities of the lyrics belonging to the same
period, because the lovers who were their heroes
and heroines gave practice and excuse for
Swinburne's amorous extravagance before he
appeared himself as a lyric lord of love. When
once he had so appeared he seems to have neg-
lected drama for many years. It was not until
1874, three years after Songs Before Sunrise,
that Bothwell was published. He dedicated it
like Chastelard to Hugo, " as a river gives up to
the sea its soul." In this dedication he called it
an "epic drama," and years afterwards while
approving this title he spoke of it as less a
tragedy than a " chronicle history." It was
what he called it, an "ambitious, conscientious,
p 225
A. C. SWINHURNE
and coiiiprehcnsive piece of work " ; yet for a
nineteenth-century lyric poet, in an age without
a poetic drama, to revive a form early discarded
by Elizabethan dramatists, was an adventure
more grim than serious. That he read it aloud
to his friends without causing any suffering that
has yet become famous is a superb testimony to
his voice, to his character, and to his friends.
For Bothzvell is four times as long as Ckastchird,
and contains four-hundred-line speeches. It is
a monstrous achievement, the most solemn proof
existing of Swinburne's power of fundamental
brainwork. The self-sacrifice was little short of
crucifixion. The style, for example, is allowed
to retain hardly more than the tricks of his
characteristic style, some chiming vowels, here
and there a phrase like " clothed and crowned
with force and fear," or " wiles and songs and
sins," or a passage of vowels like :
But I would not be weary, let that be
Part of my wish. I could be glad and good
Living so low, with little labours set
And little sleeps and watches, night and day
Falling and flowing as small waves in low sea
From shine to shadow and back and out and in
Among the firths and reaches of low life :
I would I were away and well. . . .
But it is a compromise between I lis lyric style
and a kind of average dramatic blank verse
which does not eschew dullness. Even the lyric
226
THE PLAYS
metre of Aniina Anceps is a little withered by
the shadow :
Lord Love went Maying
Where Time was playing.
In light hands weighing
Light hearts with sad ;
Crowned king with peasant.
Pale past with present.
Harsh hours with pleasant.
Good hopes with bad ;
Nor dreamed how fleeter
Than Time's swift metre.
O'er all things sweeter
How clothed with power.
The murderess maiden
Mistrust walks laden
With red fruit ruined and dead white
flower. . , .
Mary's speech after Rizzio's singing is pretty as
the speeches so often are after the songs :
What does Death i' the song ?
Can they not let love live, but must needs make
His grave with singing? 'Tis the trick of the song
That finds no end else.
Rizzio answers :
An old trick ;
Your merrier songs are mournfuller sometimes
Than very tears are.
At a hundred points INI ary's words show how
fondly and carefully the poet followed her, as
when she says :
227
A. C. SWINBURNE
Ay, we were fools, we Maries twain. . . .
I am not tired of that I see not here,
The sun and the large air, and the sweet earth. . . .
But the play, with Jill its conscientious study of
characters and events, its cliaste workmanship,
its many flowers, is intolerable when we think
what Swinburne could have done with this sub-
ject in narrativ^e, spending himself in rhyme and
rhythm and feeling directly upon Mary, instead
of indirectly.
Mary Stuart, dedicated, like the other two
portions of the trilogy, to Hugo, appeared be-
tween Songs of the Springtides and IVistram
of Lyo?iesse, a favourable time when Swin-
burne's genius was ripe and still ardent. There
is some unspoilt witness to its period, as when
INlary at Chartley cries :
That I were now in saddle . . . new-mounted now
I shall ride right through shine and shade of spring
With heart and habit of a bride, and bear
A brow more bright than fortune . . . ;
and when a little afterwards she sings :
"An ye maun braid your yellow hair,"
and Mary Beaton remembers singing it after her
nurse, and weeping upon it " in France at six
years old to think of Scotland " ; or when the
Queen thinks of the moors in comparison with
the midlands :
228
THE PLAYS
There the wind and sun
Make madder mirth by midsummer, and fill
With broader breadth and lustier length of light
The heartier hours that clothe for even and dawn
Our bosom-belted billowy-blossoming hills
Where hearts break out in laughter like the sea
For miles of heaving heather . . . ;
or when Chastelard's song — which she thinks
Remy Belleau's — sung by Mary Beaton at
Fotheringay, makes her think of her French
years :
Laughter of love and lovely stress of lutesj
And in between the passion of them borne
Sounds of swords crossing ever^ as of feet
Dancing, and life and death still equally
Blithe and bright-eyed from battle . . .
or when Barbara describes the last minutes of
the Queen to Mary Beaton, until the very last
when the listener uncovers her eyes to see for
herself :
He strikes awry : she stirs not. Nay, but now
He strikes aright, and ends it.
But as a rule the speech is made roundabout or
dull by the blank verse and the Ehzabethan
influence ; the dangling relative clauses may be
true to the characters of Sir Amyas Faulet and
Sir Drew Drury, but even so are an unpardon-
able realism. The trick of repeating " all," here
and in several other places :
229
A. C. SWINBURNE
By minds not always all ignobly mad
Nor all made poisonous by false grain of faith,
She shall be a world's wonder to all time . . .
is a poor coinpenstition lor the loss of what
gives Hfe to Thdldssius, On the Cliff's, and
Tristram of Lyonesse, and cannot save the play
from being a conscientious versification of facts
and conjectures, in which only one half of the
poet was employed. Even into the prose of
the pseudonymous A Year's Letters he had
put as much of himself and at least as much
of his knowledge of men and women and old
women, and that in a form sufficient in itself
and never tedious.
Marino Faliero gave Swinburne an outlet
for his hate of God and king and priest, his
love of Man, Liberty, Tyrannicide, Italy,
Mazzini, and of the Sea. But it is hard to see
why Swinburne should thus deface speech with-
out making it poetry :
Sir,
For one wrong done you, being but man as we,
If wrath make lightning of your life, in us,
For all wrongs done of all our lords alive
Through all our years of living, doubt you not
But wrath shall climb as high toward heaven, and hang
As hot with hope of thunder.
It is not Swinburne, and it is not Shakespeare,
it is not speech, and it is not poetry ; it is the
product of an attempt to combine all four.
Often he puts noble words into the mouth of
230
THE PLAYS
a noble man, and the last speech has a prophetic
grandeur :
I go not as a base man goes to Death,
But great of hope : God cannot will that here
Some day shall spring not Freedom : nor perchance
May we, long dead, not know it, who died of love
For dreams that were and truths that were not. Come :
Bring me toward the landing whence my soul
Sets sail, and bid God speed her forth to sea.
Yet he could have signified his admiration of
Marino Faliero in a briefer or less mutilated
fashion, by enveloping him, like Tristram or
Balen, in a great love or wrath of verse. The
verse here is by no means negligible ; some of
the variations are original and definitely extend
blank verse. But though written " with a view
to being acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or
the Black Friars " before audiences, " incredibly
intelligent " and " inconceivably tolerant," which
accepted Chapman's eloquence instead of study
of character and interest of action, it has to be
read in silence, and therefore with greater need
of intelligence and tolerance. It seems to me
to resurrect of an old form simply the archaism,
to make a tomb for eloquence.
Swinburne took more liberty in his next play.
Perhaps Greene's tragedy of Selimus, which
contains scenes in the verse forms of Don Juan
and Venus and Adonis, suggested the far more
231
A. C. SWINBURNE
cunning and far more various schemes of rhyme
in Locrine. It begins with couplets, but with
each scene the rliyming is changed, though the
hues remain decasyllabic, until the last restores
the couplets : in the first scene of the fifth
act the scheme is that of a Shakespearean
sonnet. The story of " Sabrina fair" was a
" wan legend " Hke that of Tristram and Balen,
and the poet did not think that any life or life-
likeness possessed by it had "suffered from the
bondage of rhyme or been sacrificed to the exi-
gence of metre." The rhyming in fact helps to
confine the " wan legend " within strait hmits
and to remind the reader of the fact. Only a
consummate artist could have made this choice
and so justified it. He tells the tale and he
finds abundant good excuse for such indulgence
as in her mother Estrild's speech to Sabrina :
. . . Thou hast seen the great sea never, nor canst dream
How fairer far than earth's most lordly stream
It rolls its royal waters here and there,
Most glorious born of all things anywhere,
Most fateful and most godlike : fit to make
Men love life better for the sweet sight's sake
And less fear death if death for them should be
Shrined in the sacred splendours of the sea
As God in heaven's raid mystery. . . .
Estrild's song, " Had I wist, quoth spring to
the swallow," calls forth still prettier speeches
from the child Sabrina :
232
THE PLAYS
. . . Methoughtj though one were king or queen
And had the world to play with, if one missed
What most were good to have, such joy, I ween.
Were woeful as a song with sobs between.
And well might wail for ever, " Had I wist ! " . . .
But rhyme, dramatic form, and the " wan
legend " bring about an extraordinary thinness
in Locrine, lightness and transparent thinness.
The deaths of Locrine, Estrild, and Sabrina,
and the sudden repentance of the Queen
Gwendolen, are neat and beauteous in accor-
dance with this light, thin manner.
" The tragedy of The Sisters" wrote Swin-
burne, " however defective it may be in theatri-
cal interest or progressive action, is the only
modern English play I know in which realism
in the reproduction of natural dialogue and
accuracy in the representation of natural inter-
course between men and women of gentle birth
and breeding have been found or made com-
patible with expression in genuine if simple
blank verse." It was an odd ambition to twist
and confine the very speech of ordinary modern
people within the limits of decasyllabic lines.
The result was that the descasyllabic lines were
usually decasyllabic lines and nothing more,
while the speech was made to look trivial or
weak, because it was without the concentration,
and that colouring from the inexpressible, which
are essential to dramatic poetry. By writing :
233
A. C. SWINIUJRNE
But if she does
Love you — if you can win her — as I think
(There !) — you're the liappiest fellow ever born. . . .
he tried to prove that his class talked in blank
verse, and sometimes as here :
Woodlands too we have,
Have we not, Mabel ? beech, oak, aspen and pine.
And Rcdujie's old familiar friend, the birch,
W^ith all its blithe lithe bounty of buds and sprays
For hapless boys to wince at, and grow red.
And feel a tingling memory prick their skins —
Sting till their burning blood seems all one blush. . . .
to prove that they loved the chime and the birch
as well as he did. What he does prove, as in
Loves Cross Currents^ is that, in the flesh, men
of the Eton-and-Army and outdoor type, frank,
simple and chivalrous, and women to match,
appealed to him. \Vhen two of them, lovers,
are dying from poison accidentally taken, they
converse in this manner :
Reginald : Think we are going to see
Our mother, Mabel — Frank's and ours.
Mabel: I will.
But, Reginald, how hard it is to go !
Reginald : We have been so happy, darling, let us die
Thinking of that, and thanking God.
Mabel: I will.
Kiss me. Ah, Redgie. (^Dies.)
Reginald: Mabel I I an) here. (Diex.)
-SVr Arthur : They could have lived no ha])pier than they die.
234
THE PLAYS
This can hardly be taken as a contribution to the
natural history of the upper classes, but rather
as a testimony to a poet's sentimental esteem
of them, and of the religion, the tradition and
the birch that make them, like those two breth-
ren of Northumberland, " in life and death good
knights." The jealous woman who causes the
tragedy is false to the type. She is allowed to
soliloquize in blank verse that is not common
speech, a concession that emphasizes the tame
and literal naturalism of the greater part.
Rosamond, Queen of the Lombards, written
when Swinburne was past sixty, is one of his
best plays. The revenge taken by Rosamond
upon the king for being asked to pledge the
health of his kingdom in a cup made of the
skull of her father, whom he had slain in battle,
forms a tragic story, simple and brief Its
brevity and simplicity help Swinburne to his
best compromise between his own style and that
of an EUzabethan dramatist. Enjambment
like this :
I
Love her. . . .
is too often used without any such effect as it
gave to Shelley in :
Is this the scene
Where the old earthquake demon taught her young
Rum ?
235
A. C. SWINBURNE
the " spirit of sense " recurs twice ; God and
the priests are despitel'ully treated ; but the
mannerisms are no bar to force and rapidity.
The poet's most noticeable intervention is the
device of casting over the play, and cliieHy over
the deceit by which Rosamond turns the king's
favourite warrior into her seducer and her
avenger, the *' mad might of midsummer." The
warrior, Almachildes, when told that it was not
his mistress who had shared his bed, asks :
Art not thou —
Or am not I — sunsmitten through the brain
By this mad might of midsummer ?
The king himself, in a scene where Rosamond
plays with her avenger and her victim tragically
and ironically, cries :
I would tliis fierce Italian June were dead . . . ;
and again in the banqueting hall at his last hour :
This June makes babes of men . . . when the heat
Burns life half out of us.
He asks Almachildes if his memory is "burnt
out by stress of summer," putting down all that
is strange to that ; when he is about to take the
cup and drink to the queen he reflects that there
are " but two days more for June to burn and
live." " Queen," he says, " I drink to thee."
236
THE PLAYS
She thanks him and bids a counsellor give him
the cup, saying ; " Women slain by fire thirst
not as I to pledge thee." Almachildes rises
and stabs him, and with the words, " Thou, my
boy ? " he dies. Then says Rosamond :
I. But he hears not. Now, my warrior guests,
I drink to the onward passage of his soul
Death. Had my hand turned coward or played me false.
This man that is my hand, and less than I
And less than he bloodguilty, this my death
Had been my husband's : now he has left it me.
(Drinks.)
How innocent are all but he and I
No time is mine to tell you. Truth shall tell.
I pardon thee, my husband : pardon me. (Dies.)
and the old counsellor says :
Let none make moan. This doom is none of man's.
Swinburne had, in fact, written a play admirably
like those which he had been imitating since he
wrote The QueeJi Mother. Among his many
experiments in foreign languages and in archaic
forms, Rosamond^ Qiieen of the Lombards, is one
of the most perfect.
His last play, four brief scenes, in which
Csesar Borgia procures the death of his brother
Francesco, Duke of Gandia, must have been
written chiefly for the pleasure of blasphemous
laughter at the intricate relationships of the
Borgia family. When Vanozza, the Pope's
237
A. c. svviniujunp:
mistress, tells her son Franccseo that he is over
fond, Cicsar says :
Nay, no whit.
Our heavenly lather on earth adores no Jess
Our mother than our sister : and I hold
His heart and eye^ his spirit and his sense.
Infallible.
The contrast between Caesar's licentiousness
and shrewdness and his father's heavier and
kindlier worldliness, Francesco going among the
assassins sinmnff :
Love and night are life and light :
Sleep and wine and song
Speed and slay the halting day
Ere it live too long :
lAicrezia being flattered by her father — the
father's dread, and then his grief at the news of
Francesco's murder — Ca?sar's scornful banter —
do not make a play. The excessively mannered
verses produce an effect something like one of
Lucian's Dialogues of the gods, though the
loose and lengthy method obscures the effect
and lessens the credit of it. With good speak-
ing, dresses and scenery, it might prove amusing,
but so might a tliousand other dialogues. It
was not a brilliant conclusion : it was more in
the nature of a posthumous indiscretion : but it
was a sally characteristic of the poet, the climber,
swimmer and rider, tlic lover of women and
238
THE PLAYS
sunlight, of the Sea and Liberty, who died a
year afterwards, on April 10, 1909. He was
buried in the rocky cemetery at Bonchurch,
Isle of Wight, near the home and the sea of his
boyhood, of the days when he was chanting
Atalanta in Calydon, celebrated often in his
poetry and lastly in the dedication of The Sisters
to his aunt, the Lady Mary Gordon. The
garden of her house, The Orchard, near Vent-
nor, had been to him one of the sweetest corners
of the island, and recalling it in that dedication
he connected it for the generations of his lovers
with himself and the sea :
The springs of earth may slacken^ and the sun
Find no more laughing lustre to relume
Where once the sunlight and the spring seemed one ;
But not on heart or soul may time or doom
Cast aught of drought or lower with aught of gloom
If past and future, hope and memory, be
Ringed round about with love^ fast bound and free.
As all the world is girdled with the sea.
THE END
NOTES AND REFERENCES
Swinburne : A Lecture by J. W. Mackail.
Oxford.
Edinburgh Review, October 1906.
Mrs. M. C. J. Leith in The Contemporary
Review, April 1910
Quarterly Review, October 1905.
The Contemporary Review, April 1910.
Poems and Ballads — Third Series.
Essays and Studies.
A Study of Shakespeare.
The Contemporary Review, April 1910,
Studies in Prose and Poetry.
The Contemporary Review, April 1910.
Studies in Prose and Poetry.
Astrophel.
Essays and Studies.
Contemporary Review, April 1910.
Studies in Prose and Poetry.
A Study of Victor Hugo.
Studies in Prose and Poetry.
Essays and Studies.
A Study of Victor Hugo.
Studies i7i Prose and Poetry.
Miscellanies.
Studies in Prose and Poetry.
Miscellanies.
Memoirs of Burne-Jones.
Essays and Studies.
Memoirs of Burne-Jones.
The Contemporary Review, June 1907 —
Edmund Gosse.
54 10 Memoirs of Burne-Jones.
PAGE
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7
12
2
30
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11
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32
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3
33
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22
35
1
35
4
36
10
36
14
36
20
36
26
37
10
37
27
38
11
39
21
39
24
40
14
40
19
46
12
53
13
53
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53
25
54
6
PAISE
LINE
54
20
55
12
50
14
57
20
65
20
68
17
75
16
84
8
84
14
103
7
105
10
108
18
111
19
117
17
122
28
124
3
125
19
172
11
The Contemporary Review, June 1907 —
Edmund (Josse.
The Times, April 12, 1909.
The Contemporary Review, June 1907 —
Edmund Gosse.
The Contemporary Review, April 1910.
The Spectator, September 6, 1862.
Les Cenci. Translated into French by Tola
Dorian, with Introduction by Swinburne.
Chustelard.
Quoted by Ernest Rhys. The Nineteenth
Century, July 1909.
The Contemporary Review, June 1909.
Studies in Prose and Poetry.
The Athenaeum, June 16, 1877.
Quarterly Review, July 1902.
The Spectator, May 31, 1873.
The Athenaeum, April 14, 1877.
Introduction to Shakespeare. (World's
Classics.)
The Contemporary Review, June 1909.
The Contemporary Review, June 1909.
Ernest Rhys in the Nineteenth Century,
June 1909.
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