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J 1JJI\» ^yl . r 1 I r, n * n \ ' ^ A' UUJIIVJ JV> (JUailvj C3 '^ /Au T uui I a : !ivMan.r-N'^' jyAM.tUJ/^ 3> ^1^4=: '' *■" o -^/ ^ C' t*r ir; I J) -^ ''^aUdlJVJdU' •'Jiijwviur^ 'Mfl3/\ipiirin>' "auaiivj-aw ^OFCAIIFO%. ^ >&Aaviian-#- ^^WE•UNIVER% ^lOSMElfx^ o %a3AINfl-3WV ^OFCAIIFO% ^OF ^(^AHvaaiH^ > c? ,^ ~ T O )>■ := o u. ^ %a3AiNn-3V\v^ -5^lllBRARYQr. -j^^tUBRARYOc. aWMJNIVER% m^my\^ ^^mmyi^ -^nwmm^ o ^OFCAIIFO/?^ tl5 '%a3AiNn-3WV^ ^OAavaan# .^OFCAIIFO/?^ ^^ "^(JAavaani^ ^ME■lJNIVER% •<:" u 9/r ^>MLIBRARY^^. )g § ^ >- << OS BQ ^WE-l)NIVERy/A Ir^ _ S3 ^ viNQ-aW'^ -< ^lllBRARYQr >i ^^SOJIIVJJO'^ ?^^ ^OFCAllFOff^ ^ -n ■.(_» CO %a3AiNn-3\<^ -j^^lUBRARYQ^. ^iiOJIlVDJO'^ A^UIBRARYQ<- ^WEUNIVERS"/- -'jujnv iur ^lOSANCElfj-^ o %a3AINn-3WV ^OF-CAIIFO/?^ ^^Aavaan-^" ^OFCAIIFO% Cx- > tr iikii% imn. • /u« tfti^ri ffo- 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] 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