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 SWINBURNE
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 POEMS 
 
 OF 
 
 MEN AND 
 
 HOURS 
 
 1911 
 
 
 COPHETUA 
 
 A Play, 
 
 1911 
 
 POEMS 
 
 OF 
 
 LOVE AND 
 
 EARTH 
 
 1912 
 
 
 WILLIAM ] 
 
 VIORRIS 
 
 A Critical 
 
 Study 
 
 1912 


 
 SWINBURNE 
 
 AN ESTIMATE 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN DRINKWATER 
 
 LONDON AND TORONTO 
 J. M. DENT & SONS, LTD. 
 NEW YORK : E. P. DUTTON & CO. 191 3
 
 All rights reserved
 
 
 TO 
 MY FRIEND 
 
 EDWARD PROSSER
 
 I have to thank Mr. Watts-Dunton for 
 generously having allowed me to quote from 
 Swinburne's work as I wished for the purposes 
 of this study.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I Lyric Technique i 
 
 II Lyric Thought 37 
 
 III Lyric Art 89 
 
 IV The Dramas 105 
 
 V The Critic 166 
 
 VI Conclusions 190 
 
 Bibliography 
 
 Index 
 
 209 
 213
 
 SWINBURNE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 
 
 The most immediate impression gathered from 
 a close acquaintance with Swinburne's lyric poetry 
 is its curious distinctiveness from all other poetry. 
 We do not feel Swinburne to have surpassed his 
 great forerunners whom we honour, nor that the 
 personality that informed his art was a very rare 
 or lonely one; and yet his work, among that of all 
 the masters, bears most emphatic witness of its 
 source. Suppose an intelligent reader of poetry 
 to have no memory save for general characteristics; 
 let him have explored the English poets with some 
 thoroughness, and have forgotten the detail of his 
 experience. It is conceivable that if he were then 
 shown lyrics by Tennyson and Keats, odes by 
 Shelley and Wordsworth, songs by Shakespeare 
 and Jonson and Herrick, even allowing these to 
 be representative examples, he might find himself 
 in some confusion. But with most of Swinburne's 
 
 B
 
 1 SWINBURNE 
 
 representative work he could make no mistake. 
 Reading again such things as The Triumph of 
 Time and the Hymn to Proserpine, Ave atque 
 Vale and The Forsaken Garden, he could have no 
 hesitation in assigning them to their poet. It is 
 not that he would find here an utterance that could 
 not conceivably have been framed by another, or 
 that heights have been reached possible to this 
 man alone. Nor would his clue be merely the 
 marvellous expansion and elasticity that this poet 
 brought to lyrical measures. His certainty would 
 arise from the recognition of a radical distinction 
 between the ordering and principles of Swinburne's 
 art and those which are in varying degrees common 
 to his peers. 
 
 The poet's control of words is, normally, de- 
 pendent upon the intensity of his impulse, the 
 rarity of his vision. Each poet, indeed, will 
 develop his own not unpleasing mannerisms of 
 speech, his own tricks of craft, but in the more 
 urgent matter of arresting and full expression 
 neither he nor another can predict anything of his 
 labours. Working at the direction of some new 
 effort of imaginative comprehension, he may 
 mould shapes hitherto undreamt of, bearing no 
 apparent relation to anything yet sprung of his 
 energy. There was in Coleridge and Shakespeare 
 and Milton no manner of prophecy of —
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 3 
 
 The night is chill, the cloud is gray : 
 'Tis a month before the month of May, 
 And the Spring comes slowly up this way. 
 
 and — 
 
 daflFodils, 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty; 
 
 and — 
 
 Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd 
 
 Under the opening eye-lids of the morn, 
 
 We drove afield, and both together heard 
 
 What time the Gray-fly winds her sultry horn . . . 
 
 Words, when the poets are writing thus, stand 
 tiptoe with all kinds of strange adventure calling 
 them. They may at any moment be put to some 
 unaccustomed yet perfect use. The words them- 
 selves, separate and not yet quickened, the poet 
 holds in his deliberation, but their flowering into 
 language is a ritual of which the poet himself can 
 tell nothing until its consummation. And the 
 divine visitation that invests the veriest drudge 
 among words with something more than royalty 
 will as readily use one true poet to its purpose as 
 another. It was not distinctive of Shakespeare's 
 art to say — 
 
 Golden lads and girls all must, 
 
 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust; 
 
 nor, let us say, should we find any peculiar token 
 of Chidiock Tichborne in — 
 B 2
 
 4 SWINBURNE 
 
 My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, 
 My feast of joy is but a dish of pain. . . . 
 
 It is by reason of this quality of surprise in the 
 disposition and informing of words that the poets 
 have their admirable but, in a sense, bewildering 
 kinship. The new witchery may fall from the lips 
 of one or another, and a line or group of lines, 
 having the fine and unmistakable flavour that is 
 poetry's chief aim and distinction, might quite 
 reasonably be attributed to any poet great enough 
 to have written them, precisely because they could 
 only belong to some single moment over which 
 any poet might have had the good fortune to pre- 
 side. They were not foretold by experience, and 
 their secret cannot be recaptured. And so it comes 
 about that the great poet's work is of a splendid 
 and shining variety, promising always something 
 unexpected, incalculable. His complete achieve- 
 ment is marked by philosophic and temperamental 
 unity; through it we may see what manner of man 
 he was and know the issue of his contemplation. 
 But beyond this it is clearly a mistake to think of 
 his work as being of a piece. He traces a thousand 
 patterns and calls a thousand tunes. Some turn 
 of his imagination may to-morrow order a new 
 speech of which to-day he has no intimation, and 
 this without violating his fixed basis of faith. He 
 need never deny his own reading of life, and yet
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 5 
 
 in passing from discovery to discovery he will find 
 that reading forcing him to new and untried utter- 
 ance. Using old and familiar words he will yet 
 re-create them, liberating in them hidden and un- 
 suspected meanings, finding for them new partner- 
 ships, and re-distributing their relative values. 
 His faculty of expression, signed as it may be by 
 his own character, will remain flexible, ready to 
 the bidding of his impulse and the needs of his 
 spiritual discovery. 
 
 These conclusions are drawn from the witness 
 of the poets themselves, arid it is in reflecting upon 
 them that we see Swinburne as a strange pheno- 
 menon in the progress of poetry. He alone among vy 
 the poets of high rank is disobedient to the prin- 
 ciple that is implicitly acknowledged by all his 
 fellows, the principle of faith in this matter of 
 expression, of surrender of form to the impulse of 
 the moment, of willingness that the word should 
 not be fore-ordained. His first inspiration en- 
 dowed him with an astonishing richness of utter- 
 ance perfectly fitted to his purpose. With the fine 
 and insatiable greed of genius he took up all the 
 measures practised by his forebears, readjusting 
 them and finding new dispositions for them : he 
 pressed into his service every precious word from 
 their stores, cherishing every shade of accumulated 
 poetic significance that it had won, and with his
 
 6 SWINBURNE 
 
 own fearless instinct fashioned the whole into a 
 marvellous instrument. But it came about that 
 Swinburne, rightly proud of this splendid articula- 
 tion, knowing it to be rare and fresh in its beauty, 
 subdued it and became its master. And one of the 
 worst disasters that can befall a poet is the attain- 
 ment to mastery over utterance. Poetry is most 
 worthily served when the poet's speech is beyond 
 his control, when he submits humbly to the divine 
 caprice that his imagining breathes into his words. 
 Swinburne at his first venture made a fortunate and 
 divinely ordered choice, but thereafter he was con- 
 cerned to force all moods and discoveries into this 
 marvellous form of which he was master. The 
 medium, incomparably lovely when used for fitting 
 things, once perfected, he might be as uncertain as 
 any other poet as to what would next move him to 
 speech, but he could predict, and others could pre- 
 dict for him, the manner in which the speech would 
 be shaped. 
 
 The results of this determination or instinct 
 were of profound significance to Swinburne and to 
 English poetry. They suggest themselves to us 
 in logical order, one shaping itself out of another. 
 We see first the curious distinctiveness of this body 
 of poetry from all others, the strange resemblance 
 within itself of its corporate parts. There is no 
 internal evidence that the poet who wrote —
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 7 
 
 O, for a draught of vintage ! that hath been 
 Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, 
 
 Tasting of Flora and the country green, 
 
 Dance, and Provencal song, and junburnt mirth ! 
 
 also wrote — 
 
 And there we slumbered on the moi8, 
 And there I dream'd, ah ! woe betide ! 
 
 The latest dream I ever dreamt 
 On the cold hill side; 
 
 but it would need no very acute perception to 
 assert that — 
 
 Mother of loves that are swift to fade, 
 Mother of mutable winds and hours. 
 
 A barren mother, a mother-maid, 
 
 Cold and clean as her faint salt floweri, 
 
 and — 
 
 All hers is the praise of thy story, 
 All thine is the love of her choice, 
 
 The light of her waves is thy glory, 
 The sound of thy soul is her voice, 
 
 acknowledged the same begetter. If we take ex- 
 amples wherein there is an obvious superficial 
 difference not only in the measure but also in the 
 mood, the contrast is yet more striking. Blake 
 
 wrote — 
 
 O Rose, thou art sick ! 
 
 The invisible worm. 
 That flies in the night, 
 
 In the howling storm, 
 
 Has found out thy bed 
 
 Of crimson joy, 
 And his dark secret lore 
 
 Does thy life deitroy.
 
 8 SWINBURNE 
 
 And he also wrote — 
 
 I will not cease from mental fight, 
 Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, 
 
 Till we have built Jerusalem 
 
 In England's green and pleasant land; 
 
 but we can only determine the fact by documentary 
 and historical evidence. Knowing the authorship 
 of the one, we should find the knowledge of but 
 little help in discovering the authorship of the 
 other. But knowing that Swinburne wrote — 
 
 With chafe and change of surges chiming. 
 The clashing channels rocked and rang 
 
 Large music, wave to wild wave timing. 
 And all the choral water sang, 
 
 we need no more than the evidence of our own 
 senses to discover the source even of so dissimilar 
 a thing as — 
 
 Flowers wherewith May crowned us 
 
 Fall ere June be crowned : 
 Children blossom round us 
 
 All the whole year round. 
 
 Is the garland worthless 
 
 For one rose the less, 
 And the feast made mirthless ? 
 
 Love, at least, says yes. 
 
 It will be seen that even in these instances the poet 
 does not lack either variety of measure or variety 
 of language. In both of these he is prodigal of 
 change. But measure and language do not alone
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 9 
 
 constitute the visible pressure of poetry. There . 
 is__a spirit in expression which is a thing distinct • 
 from the thing expressed. Language in its work- / 
 ing has an independent life of its own, and it is 
 by the strict adjustment of this life to the life of 
 the poet's thought and vision that he achieves the 
 perfect proportion of his art. This spirit of lan- 
 guage was, under the control of Swinburne, fixed dm^ 
 in its nature, not pliable and eager to make honour- 
 able concessions to the changing moods and adven- 
 turous thoughts with which it might have to walk 
 in service. 
 
 An inevitable consequence of this fixity in the 
 temper of his language is that Swinburne is at e / 
 times compelled to force a mood and form together! 
 when there can be no just union. With so excel-^ 
 lent an array of words at his command he never 
 fails to make his imagining articulate, when, that 
 is to say, he is truly writing from imaginative 
 impulse. But clarity, even when it is lovely and 
 an attribute of translucent colour, is not in itself 
 enough. There must also be this chiming of spirit 
 with spirit, the high agreement between the life 
 which is in the imagination and that which is in 
 the language. And it is precisely this agreement 
 that is too often lacking in Swinburne's poetry. 
 
 Statelier still as the years fulfil their count, subserving her 
 sacred state,
 
 10 SWINBURNE 
 
 Grows the hoary grey church whose story silence utters and 
 
 age makes great : 
 Statelier seems it than shines in dreams the face unveiled of 
 
 unvanquished fate. 
 
 The meaning is clear enough, the mood behind the 
 lines is revealed, the movement is free, the mastery 
 of words is complete. And yet there is something 
 amiss, some radical flaw that goes far deeper than 
 the suggestion of teclinical glibness in the pro- 
 fusion of rhyme. The mood, grave, reflective, 
 restrained, has been twisted in its growth; its life 
 has been sacrificed to the life of the poet's lan- 
 guage. Where there should be harmony and 
 fostering there is conflict and destruction. The 
 essential spirit of utterance, which can live only in 
 service and humility, has usurped the government 
 and, being proud, has failed in its function and is 
 dead. For gravity, reflection, quiet, we have un- 
 timely sound and indifferent haste, swift vigour. 
 The mood is lost, the poetry gone out of it. Or, 
 again — 
 
 King, with time for throne and all the years for pages, 
 
 He shall reign though all thrones else be overhurled, 
 Served of souls that have his living words for wages. 
 
 Crowned of heaven each dawn that leaves his brows 
 impearled; 
 Girt about with robes unrent of storm that rages. 
 
 Robes not wrought with hands, from no loom's weft 
 unfurled; 
 AH the praise of all earth's tongues in all earth's ages, 
 
 All the love of all men's hearts in all the world.
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE ii 
 
 Has not the true spirit of reverence and adoration 
 here been quelled, in spite of all the strenuous and 
 full-throated assertion, subdued by the rebellious 
 life of that language which should have cherished 
 it, bringing it humbly into strong and lovely birth ? 
 By fostering in language this absolute instead 
 of relative life, Swinburne became enmeshed by a 
 further difficulty. The thing that had grown so 
 strong in his hands, while it destroyed at times the 
 spirit that it should have served, was yet always 
 within the control of the poet himself. And not 
 only did he force it on occasion to uses for which 
 it was not shaped, but he was also betrayed into 
 using it for its own sake. He not only called it 
 into service when the mood needed other ministers, 
 which was bad, but he also allowed himself to 
 exercise it at moments when there was no mood 
 at all to be served, which was, if possible, worse. 
 But when it was so used, the language still moved 
 in its customary habit, and the result is that there 
 is no great poet whose bad work bears superficially 
 so marked a resemblance to his good. It is this 
 fact which is more likely than any other to stand in 
 the way of Swinburne's wide popularity. Reading 
 through his poems we are aware that there are 
 many that do not move us. We are aware, more- 
 over, that these very poems are apparently of the 
 same texture as others that have really stirred us.
 
 12 SWINBURNE 
 
 This means perplexity, and the obvious way to 
 solve the difficulty is to tell ourselves that Swin- 
 burne's achievement is such that we can only 
 respond to it at intervals, not being impelled to 
 follow its sustained flight. And the consequent 
 tendency is to feel that in reality his actual achieve- 
 ment is sealed to us, and that is a dangerous rift 
 in the fellowship between a poet and his readers. 
 If we allow this to happen we are merely being 
 deceived by what are certainly strangely bewilder- 
 ; ing appearances. It is only when we discover that 
 I those poems which are apparently admirable, and 
 yet leave us cold, are in reality no more than the 
 husks of poetry, not quick with any virtue, and 
 that those others, so like in raiment and carriage, 
 and yet moving us to eager response, are in truth 
 i essentially and utterly different, being among the 
 i supreme masterpieces of lyric poetry, that we can 
 ^, hope to shape our judgment of Swinburne and 
 ji measure our debt to him with due proportion. 
 We conduct this sifting process in the case of other 
 poets instinctively, without deliberation, the dis- 
 tinction, broadly speaking, between the good work 
 and the bad being swiftly and easily apprehended. 
 But with Swinburne it is not so; his technique 
 having a separate entity, it undergoes no external 
 change when it fails in its rightful function and is 
 employed in meaningless exercise, and the dis-
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 13 
 
 tinction calls for deliberate effort and shrewd con- 
 sideration. Swinburne himself seems to have been 
 quite unconscious of this singular condition of his 
 work. In the preface to his collected poems he 
 says, " And when he (the poet) has nothing that 
 he could wish to cancel, to alter, or to unsay, in 
 any page he has ever laid before his reader, he need 
 not be seriously troubled by the inevitable con- 
 sciousness that the work of his early youth is not 
 and cannot be unnaturally unlike the work of a 
 very young man. This would be no excuse for 
 it if it were in any sense bad work : if it be so, 
 no apology would avail; and I certainly have none 
 to offer." There is an almost pathetic dignity in 
 the words. If we fail to perceive this governing 
 and far-reaching principle in Swinburne's work, we 
 err, certainly, with the poet himself. And yet it I 
 it impossible to read those six volumes, balancing 
 enthusiasm with judgment, without feeling that 
 they contain much which is intrinsically as neg- 
 ligible as the dullest production of Wordsworth or 
 the most ingenuous self-deception of Tennyson. 
 
 The misfortune is that whilst with other poets a 
 glance is sufficient to tell us which pages to pass 
 over and which to absorb, each page of Swinburne 
 has to be examined carefully before any determina- 
 tion can be made. For this reason he needs 
 selection more than any of his fellows. An editor
 
 14 SWINBURNE 
 
 who could detach with perfect precision those 
 poems wherein the spirit of language is used to 
 embody the spirit of vision from those wherein the 
 spirit of language is accepted as a complete instead 
 of a complementary thing, would be of rare service 
 to the poet's reputation and to literature. But the 
 inherent difficulties of the task and the poet's own 
 proclamation against it are likely to have their way, 
 and we can but severally exercise our wits. 
 
 The difficulty of this matter has another rami- 
 fication. Language, accepting the freedom and 
 separateness that this poet bestowed upon it, was 
 at times merciless in the abuse of privilege, but 
 there were also times when it gave something in 
 return. The very words themselves became at 
 moments a world for Swinburne, a mood. The 
 phenomenon was one, it may perhaps be said, 
 without a parallel in poetry, but it was in poetry 
 nevertheless. This strange thing happened by 
 some scarcely definable whim of the creative 
 faculty. Contrary to all experience, Swinburne 
 did from time to time write poetry of unmistakable 
 beauty and integrity, that sprang from no discover- 
 able spiritual impulse, but was created out of the 
 life of language itself, words growing, as it were, 
 into a dual being of vision and form. His 
 imitators have nearly always chosen work done 
 at these moments as their model, with disastrous
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 15 
 
 results. It was only by a very ecstasy in the 
 worship of the life of words that the idol was 
 beneficent and liberal in recompense, and it is 
 inconceivable that this ecstasy should be caught 
 by another. Swinburne's normal energy, shaping 
 his inner perception through the medium of his 
 wonderful speech, created a body of poetry which 
 may be measured by normal standards; his undis- 
 ciplined use of language resulted in failures that 
 differ from the failures of other poets only in the 
 difficulty of distinguishing them from the suc- 
 cesses; but these poems written under what may 
 be called the emotion of words, as apart from the 
 mere pleasure in words, constitute a narrow 
 stratum in the poet's work of a nature not easily 
 to be found elsewhere in poetry. The strangeness 
 of its character and occasion is in itself enough to 
 place it lower than Swinburne's highest achieve- 
 ment, but it is not inconsiderable, and it has a 
 curiously sequestered place in English verse. 
 
 The point at which Swinburne's poetry passes 
 from its dependence on this emotion of language 
 to the full dignity of spiritual impulse is only more 
 difficult to define than the point at which the mere 
 exercise of technical deftness become poetry by 
 virtue of that emotion which was his peculiar 
 province, as apart from the accustomed heights of 
 inspiration on which, at its best, he moved in
 
 i6 SWINBURNE 
 
 common with the masters of whom he was one. 
 But those points once determined in our conscious- 
 ness, there can be no misconception as to the rela- 
 tive values of the degrees that they mark. 
 
 Sleep, when a soul that her own clouds cover 
 Wails that sorrow should always keep 
 Watch, nor see in the gloom above her 
 Sleep, 
 
 Down, through darkness naked and steep, 
 Sinks, and the gifts of his grace recover 
 Soon the soul, though her wound be deep. 
 
 God beloved of us, all men's lover. 
 All most weary that smile or weep 
 Feel thee afar or anear them hover, 
 Sleep. 
 
 Analysis of those lines yields nothing but metrical 
 precision, brilliant ordering of words. There is 
 certainly no mood, no vision; there is not even 
 distinction of thought. Nor does the failure spring 
 from the infirmity from which no great poet 
 escapes consistently — the inability to realise some 
 swift passage of apprehension, the unavailing 
 struggle of words to capture some remote process 
 of the imagination. Beyond a wholly trite re- 
 flection, in itself and untranslated of no poetical 
 value whatever, Swinburne had in his mind 
 nothing of which to make a poem when he wrote 
 Sleep. But words called him, and he answered, 
 bringing a complementary force wholly inadequate 
 to the issue. In distress, says Swinburne, sleep
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 17 
 
 may still come, a most blessed relief. No more 
 than that, and really not one whit more poetically. 
 He was not interested in the thing said, but only 
 in the saying. By style, indeed, does poetry live, 
 but style implies not only worthy utterance, but 
 utterance of something worthy. That same cir- 
 cumstance of sleep, perceived poetically, might 
 flower into excellent poetry, but in Swinburne's 
 case it was not perceived poetically; it was not, 
 properly speaking, perceived at all, it was merely 
 called up for service coldly, without passion. Any 
 like tag of reflection would have been just as fitted 
 to his purpose. There is no trace of imaginative 
 fusion behind the marvellous felicity of phrasing. 
 And here it is no more than a felicity of phrasing. 
 The words do not beget a mood out of their own 
 life. Sleep is typical of Swinburne's positive 
 failures, shining, passionless, brittle. There are, 
 besides work of this quality, other failures in his 
 work arising from actual defectiveness in tech- 
 nique. They are extremely rare, but there was a 
 faultiness in the mere technical perception that 
 allowed tours de force like Faustine and RococOy 
 or lines such as — 
 
 Far flickers the flight of the swallows, 
 Far flutters the weft of the grass . . . 
 
 and even in his best work there is seldom absolute 
 assurance that verbal daring and richness will not 
 c
 
 t8 SWINBURNE 
 
 pass into abandon and licence. It is astonishing 
 how, by an almost imperceptible transition from 
 command to indulgence, lines of flawless beauty 
 get woven up with others of almost intolerable 
 magniloquence — 
 
 I shall sleep, and move with the moving ships, 
 
 Change as the winds change, veer with the tide; 
 My lips will feast on the foam of thy lips, 
 
 I shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside; 
 Sleep, and know not if she be, if she were, 
 
 Filled full with life to the eyes and hair, 
 As a rose is fulfilled to the roseleaf tips 
 
 With splendid summer and perfume and pride. 
 
 The opening lines of Hesperia may well be 
 
 taken as a text upon which to consider that part 
 
 of Swinburne's work that passes from failure into 
 
 poetry, and yet not the more absolute poetry by 
 
 which his greatness is established. 
 
 Out of the golden remote wild west where the sea without 
 shore is, 
 Full of the sunset, and sad, if at all, with the fulness of 
 
 As a wind sets in with the autumn that blows from the 
 region of stories, 
 Blows with a perfume of songs and of memories beloved 
 from a boy. 
 Blows from the capes of the past oversea to the bays of the 
 present, 
 Filled as with shadow of sound with the pulse of invisible 
 feet. 
 Far out to the shallov^^s and straits of the future, by rough 
 ways or pleasant. 
 Is it thither the wind's wings beat ? is it hither to me, O 
 my sweet ?
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 19 
 
 There are in those lines flashes of pure poetry, 
 begotten of spiritual adventure and the faculty of 
 co-relation. There is a certain sweep of vision 
 in — 
 
 Blows with a perfume of songs and of memories beloved 
 from a boy . . . 
 
 and in 
 
 Filled as with shadow of sound with the pulse of invisible 
 feet 
 
 there is, definitely, imaginative perception, an em- 
 bodying of poetic truth. But they are flashes only. 
 Those lines are not really the translation of a poetic 
 mood, arisen within the poet's meditation, into the 
 rhythmic speech of poetry, and yet, by some curious 
 dispensation, they are poetry. Although there is 
 in them no emotion drawn from the poet's brood- 
 ing and exultation over life, there is yet an emo- 
 tion. The life of language has borne witness that 
 it has a temperament, a passion, of its own. Again 
 there is discoverable no distinction of thought or 
 intensity of personal feeling behind the expression. 
 It is always possible in reading great poetry, by 
 an efi^ort of the imagination, to identify ourselves 
 more or less vividly with the poet's emotional state 
 before it became articulate, with the mood ante- 
 cedent to the moment of its formation in words. 
 And further, the whole process of art from its con- 
 ception, through birth and on to its influence upon 
 c 2
 
 20 SWINBURNE 
 
 personalities other than that of the artist, being of 
 a natural and consistent growth, we are not only 
 able to do this as well as share the poet's delight 
 in the actual embodiment in language, but we can 
 also retain the mood in our consciousness when 
 the words themselves are forgotten. In reading 
 Michael^ for example, we not only rejoice in the 
 beautiful ministry of words to Wordsworth's emo- 
 tion and thought, but we can also throw our minds 
 back to the moment of fusion in the poet's own 
 mind, when the emotion and thought were as yet 
 no more than seeking expression; and when we can 
 no longer remember a single line of the poem, we 
 can yet re-create its mood within ourselves quite 
 definitely. But none of this can be said of that 
 part of Swinburne's work of which the opening 
 of Hesperia is an example. In reading it we 
 experience the pleasure that nothing but poetry 
 can give, but its effect upon us does not reach 
 beyond this immediate delight. We cannot cap- 
 ture the mood that preceded the shaping of words, 
 simply because there was no such mood. The 
 mood grew of the actual writing, the language 
 making sudden proof of unsuspected virtue within 
 itself, depending upon no contributory impulse 
 from the poet's spirit. And, as a natural conse- 
 quence, this virtue has no existence apart from the 
 words. Forgetting them we forget everything,
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 21 
 
 however attractive it may be, the abnormal not 
 being some new manifestation of the eternal prin- 
 ciples but a manifestation which is demonstrably 
 independent of those principles if not a denial of 
 them. And yet we cannot but admire this issue, 
 abnormal though it be, of Swinburne's passionate 
 control of language, allowing it to stand in com- 
 pensation for the failures that words imposed upon 
 his less fortunate hours. His joy in speech some- 
 times led him into the artistic folly of mistaking 
 it for a diviner thing than it was; but sometimes 
 it discovered for him a new source of poetry, one 
 that he alone knew, supplying from its own nature 
 the impulse that must commonly be bestowed from 
 without, from the poet's vision. This aspect of 
 Swinburne's art is one that does not add greatly 
 to his achievement, being of less vitality than 
 that achievement's finest expression, but it is 
 nevertheless an aspect too important to be 
 overlooked. 
 
 When Swinburne wrote most truly as a poet, 
 giving form to a mood sprung from his spiritual 
 adventure, his valuation of language reacted upon 
 his work, as was to be expected, with quite unusual 
 intensity. The life that was in the words them- 
 selves was then, indeed, subdued in some measure 
 to its proper service, but it was of too strong a 
 growth not to assert itself, sometimes in conflict
 
 22 SWINBURNE 
 
 with the radical design. Swinburne's finest work 
 isj in consequence, tremendously vigorous and 
 elastic, but it is scarcely ever subtle. It is an 
 extremely rare thing in his poetry to meet with the 
 wholly unexpected turn of phrase, the sudden sur- 
 prise in the disposition of words or in the words 
 themselves that is the poet's answer to some new 
 phase of emotional experience. The vitality of 
 the language would take no denial, would allow 
 nothing to threaten it, and all emotion had, there- 
 fore, to accept the prescribed form. When these 
 instances of profound simplicity, of utter surrender 
 of the word in service to feeling, are found in Swin- 
 burne, they are even more exhilarating than else- 
 where because of their very rarity. 
 
 You have chosen and clung to the chance they sent you, 
 
 Life sweet as perfume and pure as prayer. 
 But will it not one day in heaven repent you ? 
 
 Will they solace you whoUy, the days that were ? 
 Will you hft up your eyes between sadness and bliss, 
 
 Meet mine, and see where the great love is, 
 And tremble and turn and be changed ? Content you ; 
 
 The gate is strait ; I shall not he there. 
 
 There is a magic in those last words that would be 
 unexpected in any case, but least of all is it expected 
 in Swinburne. And if this enchanted simplicity of 
 statement is rare even in his best works, that other 
 enchantment which comes of an inspired naivetS 
 in the disposition of words is still rarer ; it may,
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 23 
 
 Indeed, be said to be altogether lacking. We 
 may look in vain for the lordly economy of — 
 
 Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, 
 But sad mortality o'ersways their power . . . 
 
 as we may so look for the indefinable cunning of — 
 
 Thistle and darnel and dock grew there, 
 And a bush, in the corner, of may ^ . , . 
 
 Exceptions to this general circumstance of Swin- 
 burne's poetry should, perhaps, be allowed in the 
 group of ballads containing, among others. The 
 Weary Weddings A Reiver'' s Neck Song and The 
 Witch Mother. When he was directly inspired 
 by a literary model Swinburne was at all times 
 likely to catch up and intensify the virtues of his 
 original, as in the beautiful Interlude written for 
 Mrs. Disney Leith's '' Children of the Chapel," 
 and in these ballads he does reproduce, with all the 
 conviction of personal impulse, the wistful uncer- 
 tainty and iteration, as of words trying themselves 
 on the verge of some poignant discovery, that are 
 the familiar devices of the early poets. But in 
 these poems the method differs essentially from 
 that ordinarily employed by Swinburne. They take 
 a place among his most memorable works, but they 
 are governed by principles that were not the usual 
 motive of his technique. 
 
 ^ From " Nicholas Nye," one of Mr. Walter de la Mare's 
 cxquiiitely tender rhymes.
 
 24 SWINBURNE 
 
 By summarising the poetic qualities that are lack- 
 ing in a poet's work, or at least so rare as not to be 
 characteristic, we may consider his excellence the 
 more closely. A further result of Swinburne's con- 
 I ception and use of language was that he was seldom 
 f master of imaginative co-relation, the intensification 
 \ of vision by means of metaphor. Words became 
 invested with a great range of poetic meaning and 
 suggestion; love and hate, man, the sea, pity, death, 
 the gods, reason and passion — all such words as 
 these became in themselves symbols of the rich 
 accumulations of experience, and he was generally 
 content to rely on direct statement through the 
 medium of these symbols, regarding them as having 
 a universal significance in addition to the needs of 
 the particular moment, and sought no further 
 elaboration. The elaboration was, indeed, there, 
 but it was implied in the words themselves and 
 not explicit in complementary images. 
 
 Before the beginning of years 
 
 There came to the making of man 
 
 Time, with a gift of tears; 
 
 Grief, with a glass that ran . . . 
 
 There is a meaning in these lines of wider range 
 than that of the actual statement. The horizons 
 are thrown back across a larger world by some 
 secret property of the words. Time and Grief are 
 here no abstract personifications, but definitely
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 25 
 
 moulded symbols corresponding to the poet's medi- 
 tation over two universal and eternal problems of 
 existence. Realising this condition of Swinburne's 
 art, we are conscious always in his best poetry of a 
 general significance presiding over the particular 
 occasion of the word's use. The method fitted his 
 purpose exactly. We can only judge artistic inten- 
 tion in its result, and however clearly we may recog- 
 nise that Swinburne made but scant use of one of 
 the highest principles of poetry, we realise none the 
 less definitely that his way of working gave mar- 
 vellously full expression in a great number of 
 poems to one of the rarest lyric faculties in our 
 literature. It is curious that when he did seek to 
 add to the clarity and richness of his utterance by 
 imaginative parallel, he nearly always brought con- 
 fusion into his verse, suspending instead of quick- 
 ening the vision. The statement is not strength- 
 ened by the simile, and he will even entangle simile 
 with simile, till at last we have an image that is 
 related to its original only by an indirect succession 
 of connecting images. 
 
 Tell him this; 
 Though thrice his might were mustered for our scathe 
 And thicker set with fence of thorn-edged spears 
 ^han sands are whirled about the wintering beach, 
 When storms have swoln the rivers, and their blasts 
 Have reached the broad sea-banks with stress of sea, 
 T^hat waves of inland and the main make war 
 As men that mix and grapple . . .
 
 26 SWINBURNE 
 
 This is arbitrary and ineffective decoration, not a 
 heightening of impression. After the second line 
 we do not really learn anything about the thorn- 
 edged spears, nor, in turn, is our vision of the 
 waves making war helped by hearing that they are 
 as " men that mix and grapple." And we are con- 
 scious of an artistic inconsequence in the elaboration 
 that wanders from the subject upon which our 
 attention is supposed to be fixed. Lapses such as 
 these are but another manifestation of the insistent 
 self-assertion of Swinburne's language. Once he 
 leaves the subject itself with the purpose of illus- 
 trating it by poetic parallel, the language becomes 
 eager to its new task and the parallel becomes more 
 important than the subject. Another example of 
 this characteristic may be seen in — 
 
 And the song lightened, as the wind at morn 
 Flashes, and even with lightening of the wind 
 Night's thick-spun web is thinned, 
 And its weft unwoven and overworn 
 Shrinks, as might love from scorn. 
 
 Consideration of these defects in Swinburne's 
 lyric art, and the aspects in which it is not notably 
 successful, itself suggests the qualities in which it 
 is supreme. We find that the surprise that comes 
 of the poet's readiness to allow utterance to answer 
 immediately to the impulse of the moment is sacri-
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 27 
 
 ficed to a pre-considered mastery of language. But 
 we find, too, that this mastery Is absolute. We 
 find that subtlety and suggestion are not commonly 
 within this poet's province, and that just instinct 
 for imaginative analogy is replaced by the power of 
 associating words with great reserves of experience. 
 But we know that power to be finely persuasive. 
 To speak persuasively, with force — that was Swin- 
 burne's most splendid gift, and one with which he 
 was, perhaps, more continuously endowed than any 
 other English poet. The greatest could equal him 
 at moments even in this, but considering his 
 achievement as a whole and rejecting the failures 
 in spite of their external attractiveness, Swinburne 
 is the supreme English poet of eloquence. There 
 were things that his language was essentially in- 
 capable of doing, but the things that in its most 
 ordered moments it attempted to do it did incom- 
 parably well. And It did things that had not been 
 done before. Eloquence, finding Its master-poet, 
 took on a new beauty and dignity, and rejoiced In 
 a quickening of spirit. The hard lines were 
 smoothed away and new atmospheric values were 
 found. Swinburne's mental and spiritual attitude 
 towards the world was not new save In so far as that 
 of all poets is new, but the expression that he 
 found for it had In it strangely new qualities, the 
 nature of which we have examined.
 
 28 SWINBURNE 
 
 Though one were strong as seven, 
 He too with death shall dwell, 
 
 Nor wake with wings in heaven, 
 Nor weep for pains in hell; 
 
 Though one were fair as roses, 
 
 His beauty clouds and closes; 
 
 And well though love reposes. 
 In the end it is not well. 
 
 Never before has eloquence, the unelaborated use 
 of words that are yet not simple, absorbing as they 
 do every shade of poetic significance to which they 
 can reach, produced such poetry. There is nothing 
 wayward in the language, no engaging wilfulness, 
 nor is lowliness accounted for a virtue. No token 
 of authority is neglected. We have the formal 
 passage of language in full ceremonials, the closely 
 considered pageantry of eloquence. And, like all 
 well-planned pageantry, it is finely impressive. 
 There is no veil between us and the spectacle; 
 everything is magnificently clear. There are no 
 vague or elusive figures, suggesting without state- 
 ment; everything is rounded, complete, emphasising 
 the full arc of its being. And, again as in a pageant, 
 nothing looks for external amplification, being its 
 own self-contained history, and yet there is nothing 
 but is rich with association, gathering up old 
 momentous histories into its own. 
 
 Within the limits of these conditions, Swinburne 
 managed words with an almost incredible deftness
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 29 
 
 and sense of beauty. Only Milton is his equal in 
 habitual mastery and range of consonantal and 
 vowel music, and even he made no such exploration 
 as Swinburne in applying that music to lyrical 
 measures. One has only to consider such lines as — 
 
 Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown 
 
 grey from thy breath; 
 We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fulness 
 
 of death . . . 
 
 or — 
 
 Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble, 
 Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink. 
 
 Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble 
 The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink, 
 
 Here now in his triumph where all things falter. 
 
 Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, 
 
 As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, 
 Death lies dead . . . 
 
 to realise that here, apart altogether from metrical 
 qualities, there is a strangely distinctive verbal 
 music. It is something quite definitely removed 
 from rhetorical declamation, such as may be found 
 in the opening of the ninth section of Tristram of 
 Lyonesse, beginning — 
 
 Fate, that was born ere spirit and flesh were made . . . 
 
 which is the riot of eloquence, nor is it at all the 
 mere piling up of resonant words as in — 
 
 The adorable sweet living marvellous 
 Strange light that lightens us.
 
 30 SWINBURNE 
 
 which is eloquence spun into foam. It is the 
 ordered music of eloquence, commanded by this 
 poet into unexampled beauty. Very rarely is there 
 any weakening in this control. There is an occa- 
 sional confusion in the words between strength and 
 violence — "hissing snakes" and "tortuous teeth 
 of serpents"; an occasional defect of humour as 
 in — 
 
 And let the dove's beak fret and peck within 
 My lips in vain . . . 
 
 and phrases such as " What should such fellows as 
 I do? " and " wiped out in a day " are not admir- 
 able in their daring. But these and such other 
 momentary lapses as errant internal rhymes are of 
 small importance. Swinburne's control of that 
 particular province of words that he made his own 
 was, normally, as certain as it was lovely in result. 
 In a note to his rendering of a chorus from 
 Aristophanes, Swinburne speaks of English as " a 
 language to which all variations and combinations 
 of anapasstic, iambic, or trochaic metre are as 
 natural and pliable as all dactylic and spondaic 
 forms of verse are unnatural and abhorrent." His 
 rejection of the dactyl and spondic as generally 
 unsuited for English verse is as sound as is his 
 acceptance of the iamb and trochee, although, 
 of course, practice has discovered many notable 
 departures from the principle. But his explicit 
 sanction of the anapaest is of peculiar significance
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 31 
 
 in the consideration of his own work. He himself 
 used this measure more freely, probably, than any 
 poet of his own rank. At his best he made it into 
 a supremely beautiful instrument, but an instinctive 
 feeling that the foot is one in no way comparable to 
 the iamb or trochee for habitual use in English is 
 intensified by the fact that this poet who used it 
 with so great a mastery was unable at times to keep 
 it above a certain mechanical monotony, even when 
 he seemed to be managing it with the most un- 
 erring precision. Another English poet, writing 
 of Swinburne,^ says, " Swinburne's anapaests are 
 far too delicate for swagger or strut; but for all 
 their dance, all their spring, all their flight, all their 
 flutter, we are compelled to perceive that, as it were, 
 they perform. I love to see English poetry move 
 to many measures, to many numbers, but always 
 with the simple iambic and the simple trochaic 
 foot." There is, as one expects from Mrs. Mey- 
 nell, wisdom and just poetic instinct in the general 
 principle here stated, and the words applied to 
 Swinburne are true of certain of his work in ana- 
 paestic measures. But the example given in sup- 
 port of the argument is unfortunate — 
 
 When the hounds of spring are on winter traces, 
 The mother of months in meadow or plain, 
 
 Fills the shadows and windy places 
 With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain. 
 
 * Alice Meynell, in The Dublin Review, July 1909.
 
 32 SWINBURNE 
 
 We may, with reason, be distrustful of anapaests 
 in theory, but no theory or principle can discount 
 the manifest beauty of those lines, anapaests though 
 they be. And innumerable instances may be found 
 in Swinburne's poetry of magnificent use of the 
 measure. We may continue to disallow the 
 measure high abstract virtue, but it is unavailing 
 to question the splendour of its application at 
 times. But against these successes must be set 
 poems like Dolores. This poem is in fifty-five 
 eight-line stanzas, and before we have read ten of 
 them the metrical scheme begins to cloy, and by the 
 time we reach the end of the poem our rhythmic 
 instinct is in a state very like revolt. Here, as 
 usual, Swinburne's control of his medium is abso- 
 lute, so wonderful indeed as to carry us, perhaps, 
 through the whole poem at a first reading in a 
 state of aesthetic excitement at least, and to impart 
 a sense of buoyancy to the second or even tenth 
 reading — for a stanza or two. But there can be 
 few people who return again and again to Dolores 
 to delight in its cumulative effect. It is strange 
 that we should feel a poem of less than five hundred 
 lines, passionate, of great verbal richness, sustained 
 in its emotion, to be too long. Yet we do feel this, 
 and the reason is that the measure is too sweet and 
 unresisting, too purely melodic, to bear constant 
 repetition. The fact that some not unintelligent
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 33 
 
 people find themselves reading certain of Swin- 
 burne's poems responding only to the metrical beat 
 without any reference to the explicit meaning of 
 the words, is less negligible to criticism than might 
 at first appear. A long succession of anapaestic 
 lines in English inevitably has this numbing ten- 
 dency. For short flights, directed by a master, the 
 measure may move with as large a beauty as any, 
 but it would seem that no skill can adapt it success- 
 fully to sustained effort. The common charge, 
 which does not make distinction between his good 
 work and his bad, that Swinburne is deficient in the 
 requisite intellectual stiffening for his poetry, may 
 be traced to this characteristic of one of his favour- 
 ite forms. Dolores is as good an instance as any. 
 Swinburne had as much thought as most poets, as 
 much, perhaps, as a poet should have. And this 
 thought is not lacking in Dolores; but the metrical 
 music after a time dulls our faculty, even our 
 desire, for apprehending thought, and we blame 
 the poet, justly, perhaps, but for a wrong reason. 
 Considering this problem from another point of 
 view, it might be said that if, from the body of 
 Swinburne's good work, all the poems written in 
 anapaestic measures were to be set aside, nothing 
 would ever be heard of his poverty of thought. 
 
 Beyond this reservation which, while it affects 
 much of his work, is made as to the essential
 
 34 SWINBURNE 
 
 character of the measure and not Swinburne's rarely 
 equalled use of it, criticism can do little more than 
 wonder before his metrical music, as distinguished 
 from the verbal music that has already been con- 
 sidered. Here again, as in his use of language, 
 subtlety is rare, but subtlety in metrical music only 
 becomes a virtue when it is rare. The beauty that 
 irregularity bestows on verse, the delicacy of elision 
 and syllabic variety and unexpectedness of beat, is 
 beautiful only by contrast with a strictly ordered 
 permanence, like a cloud-shadow passing across a 
 sunlit landscape. Swinburne understood fully the 
 secret of this beauty — 
 
 Let us go hence, go hence; she will not see. 
 Sing all once more together; surely she, 
 She too, remembering days and words that were. 
 Will turn a little toward us, sighing; but we, 
 We are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there. 
 Nay, and though all men seeing had pity on me, 
 She would not see. 
 
 He proved himself in some of his odes, moreover, 
 to be a master of extraordinarily elaborate metrical 
 schemes, and his lyrical work throughout is marked 
 by an astonishing variety of stanzaic structure. 
 * But his supreme triumph as a lyric poet is the range 
 and suppleness that he brought to the common 
 English measures, the infallible instinct with which 
 he ordered and re-combined them. Genius can 
 be no common thief, but it absorbs everything.
 
 LYRIC TECHNIQUE 35 
 
 It is possible that if Philip Sidney had not 
 written — 
 
 Ring out your bells, let mourning shows be spread; 
 For Love is dead : 
 
 All Love is dead, infected 
 With plague of deep disdain : 
 
 Worth, as naught worth, rejected. 
 And Faith fain scorn doth gain. 
 
 From so ungrateful fancy, 
 
 From such a female frenzy, 
 
 From them that use men thus, 
 
 Good Lord, deliver us ! 
 
 we might never have heard — 
 
 Then star nor sun shall waken, 
 
 Nor any change of light : 
 Nor sound of waters shaken, 
 
 Nor any sound or sight : 
 Nor wintry leaves nor vernal. 
 Nor days nor things diurnal; 
 Only the sleep eternal 
 
 In an eternal night . . . 
 
 but the music of The Garden of Proserpine is as 
 definitely Swinburne's creation as is the drama of j 
 Othello Shakespeare's. 
 
 Swinburne's use of words may be said to be the 
 sublimation of our common tongue. It is, perhaps, 
 not fantastic to say that if the man of ordinarily • 
 limited speech could by natural growth from his ^' 
 own estate become a great poet, he might more 
 readily write like Swinburne than any other of the 
 masters. And Swinburne's metrical music is 
 
 D2
 
 36 SWINBURNE 
 
 similarly the sublimation of the common poetic 
 beauty of that tongue. His management of the 
 blank verse line may be considered more conveni- 
 ently in examining his dramatic technique, but in 
 his exercise of lyrical language and measures he 
 sums up, as it were, the energy that bore its first- 
 fruits in the poets far back beyond Marlowe, in 
 Surrey and Wyatt, even in Chaucer. It is a superb 
 achievement. After Swinburne poetry is finding 
 for itself new channels of expression, new distribu- 
 tion and application of the eternal principles. It 
 will sing of the recurring and elemental manifesta- 
 tions which are life, but it will sing with a differ- 
 ence. In the remote future a day will call for 
 another Swinburne to sing the glorious summary of 
 the poetic succession now at its birth. It can hope 
 for nothing better than to be answered by a poet so 
 fitly chosen.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 
 
 Truth, in art, is merely conviction. Browning 
 sang for many years with fine lustiness that all 
 was right with the world, whilst James Thomson 
 sang with equal certainty that all was decidedly 
 wrong. And they both sang a true thing, for 
 they both sang with conviction. No man can 
 prophesy for the world; he can prophesy for 
 himself alone. If the artist has this essential sin- 
 cerity, if, that is to say, he does express his own 
 conviction without subservience to any kind of 
 external expediency, and if we, his audience, 
 approach his art eager for experience and not for 
 mere support of our own meditations and con- 
 clusions, there can be no question of agreement or 
 disagreement in our relations. It is the business 
 of the artist to make us accept his pronouncement, 
 without debate, as the only one possible to him. 
 It should not matter in the least whether his view 
 coincides with our own or not, and from this dis- 
 interested concern on the part of the audience in 
 
 37
 
 38 SWINBURNE 
 
 the substance of the artist's work spring certain 
 principles by which all art is governed. It pre- 
 supposes a capacity in the artist for lucid and 
 adventurous thought, a determination within him 
 that in whatever manifestation life shall appear to 
 . him, so will he record it without fear, twisting 
 ;' nothing to his desire. He may suspect grievously 
 that his vision is not so strong as he would have 
 it, but he must be content with its revelation, 
 adding nothing from rumour and the assurances 
 of more fortunate men. He may know that his 
 vision reaches out into undiscovered ways, that 
 he can hope for but little credence of his report if 
 he relies in any measure on the experience of the 
 men to whom he speaks, but he must fear no 
 derisive gossip of travellers' tales. But in either 
 case the artist must, by the subtle process of his 
 art, make us for the moment identify ourselves 
 with him, and so assure us that his vision, be it 
 narrowly confined or of infinite range, is turned 
 upon actuality, a life that convinces him of its 
 existence, truth. And the way in which his art 
 is to achieve this is not by the exposition of the 
 stages through which his thought has passed to 
 * its issue, but by a fiery passion of statement far 
 more cogent than any reasoned logic. It is not the 
 business of art to bandy words; it argues, but it 
 argues with authority. The legislation of the
 
 J 
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 39 
 
 poets may be unacknowledged, but it is a legisla- 
 tion from which there is no appeal, being founded 
 on the unflinching acceptance of truth. Truth, we 
 may not tire of telling ourselves, has no absolute 
 existence, but is myriad-coloured, the endless 
 creation of a myriad visions. And when a man, 
 moved by the intensity of his vision, becomes a 
 poet and cries out that thus or thus is truth, we 
 either do not hear him, being deaf, or we are com- 
 pelled to glad and instant assent. To demand 
 corroborative proof, to ask that he should submit 
 to us his system of evidence, would be inconsistent 
 with artistic sanity. His proof must flame out in 
 the conviction of his utterance, or it cannot exist 
 at all. The colder statements of reason need logical 
 argument for their proof, but the burning moment 
 of poetry is its own argument and proof in one. 
 If one comes to me saying that he is conscious of 
 pre-natal influences, that he is assured of continu- 
 ous states of existence, either I am not interested 
 or I demand reasons in evidence of his assertion, 
 and, even so, it is unlikely that I shall be able to 
 do more than accept his assurance with emotionless 
 civility. But if he says — 
 
 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : 
 The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 And Cometh from afar :
 
 40 SWINBURNE 
 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 
 From God, who is our home . . . 
 
 my emotion is stirred, and it does not occur to me 
 to ask for proof or reason, my perception becoming 
 momentarily identified with the poet's. Seeing 
 with his vision, I can no longer question the verity 
 of the discovery; truth has the sure witness of 
 poetry. 
 
 Thus it comes about that it is a matter of 
 extreme difficulty to detach a poet's thought from 
 the formal expression to which it attains in his 
 poetry. It seems clear that Swinburne's free use 
 of anapaestic measures has reacted in a rather 
 curious way upon his reputation. It results, as I 
 have suggested, in a number of poems, some of 
 considerable length, that do make it very difficult 
 for the reader to follow the poet's thought, which 
 is as much as to say that they make it very difficult 
 for the reader himself to think. And so a problem, 
 which would not ordinarily arise at all, is forced 
 into his mind. "What, he asks himself, is Swin- 
 burne's thought ? And finding the question almost 
 impossible to answer, he decides that here is a poet 
 in whom an essential quality is lacking. But let 
 us ask ourselves the same question about, say, 
 Milton or Shelley. Is it easier to answer.'' It is,
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 41 
 
 indeed, quite easy to determine the general temper 
 of those poets, but can we strictly say more than 
 this, or need we in honesty say less of Swinburne ? 
 We know that Milton, by the witness of his 
 poetry, lived in an atmosphere of austere faith, 
 hating disorder and tyranny, dreaming of heroic 
 sins and supreme justice; that Shelley too hated 
 tyranny with an even fiercer loathing, that he 
 ardently desired and encompassed some visionary 
 enjoyment of a faith that he could not define, and 
 so forth. We share the discoveries of these poets, 
 even the moods in which the discoveries are made, 
 but we should be at a loss to define the mental 
 processes that preceded the moods and became, at 
 the moment of fusion, both material upon which 
 ecstasy should work and an influence upon the 
 manner of working. Within the poet's mind is 
 conducted a continuous criticism of life, as de- 
 tailed and rigid as any scientific investigation. But 
 this detail and labour are no more than the dis- 
 cipline tTiat makes his poetry possible. In the 
 poetry itself these causes will be woven up into the 
 effect, but they will no longer be distinguishable 
 as separate products of his consciousness. In 
 poetry all reasons are transferred into authoritative 
 pronouncements, and although we must be con- 
 vinced — if we are to be sure that the poetry is not 
 spurious — that perfectly logical reason underlies
 
 42 SWINBURNE 
 
 the formal statement, the nature of the statement 
 is such as to make it impossible for us even to 
 wish to subject the reason to examination. In 
 other words, a poet's art is a symbol of his meta- 
 physic, not the metaphysic itself. This is true 
 even of the most direct lyric poetry. For the 
 poet's authority of statement, the integrity of his 
 conclusions, cannot depend upon the mere explicit 
 significance of his words. If that were possible, 
 then we should equally be forced to allow the 
 logician's deductions without hearing his premises. 
 The authority is manifest only when the statement 
 is crystallised in the metrical and verbal music that 
 is the product of intense emotional conviction, 
 when, in fact, it becomes poetry. It does not 
 matter in the least whether the explicit statement 
 is immediate or remote. It may be locked up in 
 the most obscure enchantment, shining darkly 
 behind veils that can be pierced by no arrogance 
 of inquiry, but only by complete imaginative 
 surrender — 
 
 There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st 
 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins; 
 
 Such harmony is in immortal souls, 
 
 But whilst his muddy vesture of decay 
 
 Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. . . . 
 
 or it may be quite clearly defined, as in —
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 43 
 
 The glories of our blood and state 
 
 Are shadows, not substantial things; 
 There is no armour against fate : 
 Death lays his icy hand on kings. 
 Sceptre and crown 
 Must tumble down, 
 And in the dust be equal made 
 With the poor crooked scythe and spade. 
 
 Examining these instances, we find Shakespeare's 
 lines are full of subtle elaborations which can be 
 apprehended, but measured only in the words 
 actually used, and that whilst the thought which 
 lies behind the statement could not possibly have 
 been otherwise expressed, yet the whole passage 
 becomes somethincy more than the embodiment of 
 the thought itself, it becomes a poetic symbol of 
 the thought. In Shirley's lines the thought is quite 
 obvious, and can be reduced to a matter-of-fact 
 assertion — all are subject to death. But here, 
 again, the poetry is more than this plain statement, 
 which in itself is merely commonplace. The 
 thought is transfused with a new energy and is 
 projected into an enhanced significance. The lines 
 are a symbol, lending the statement the dignity of 
 spiritual authority. 
 
 All these things may be said with perfect justice 
 of Swinburne, and in allowing this we allow that 
 he fulfilled the function of what is rather loosely 
 called the poet's thought. It has sometimes been
 
 \/ 
 
 %■ 
 
 44 SWINBURNE 
 
 suggested that he could claim greatness because of 
 his superb technical mastery in spite of a radical 
 deficiency in this other matter. This is, of course, 
 ' to be confused as to the nature of technique. 
 Extreme metrical and verbal cleverness may exist 
 f by itself, signifying nothing. But technique is 
 1 expression, and must signify something. If Swin- 
 I burne's marvellous beauty of manner could be 
 shown to be inspired by no vision, then his work 
 would merely be an incomprehensible miracle; 
 rather a disgusting miracle, indeed, since it would 
 i strike at the very roots and sanity of poetry. But 
 nothing of the kind can be shown. His poetry, 
 with those reservations that have already been 
 made, is as definitely a symbol of his metaphysic 
 as is that of any other poet. What that meta- 
 physic was we may consider here by the guidance 
 of his lyrical work; its manifestations in the dramas 
 will be examined later. 
 
 The most insistent motive in Swinburne's art is 
 the exultant acceptance of the tragic significance 
 of life. He sings delightedly the eternal opposi- 
 tion of beauty to change and defeat and death, not 
 desiring at all that this conflict should be quelled, 
 knowing that without it man's most heroic faculty 
 would stale. Resistance, in man as he at present 
 stands, is a thing greatly desirable for its own 
 joyous virtue and not for any end to be achieved 

 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 45 
 
 by its exercise. It is, indeed, by the tragic opposi- 
 tion alone that beauty is seen. For Swinburne, all 
 quickening of perception comes from a conscious- 
 ness of the undercurrent of destruction that con- 
 tinually threatens the ordered loveliness of life. '^< 
 The knowledge that destruction of beauty, as we 
 see it, will come is set above fear because of its 
 certainty, but it nevertheless rouses him to a pas- 
 sionate adoration impossible to unassailed posses- 
 sion. And so we find resistance, but no resentment. 
 He will denounce and chastise the instrument of 
 the power that sooner or later takes from him all 
 that he cherishes, but he has no wish to settle his 
 quarrel with the power itself. There is behind this | 
 attitude a very profound philosophical instinct. ' 
 Swinburne, one might say, is the least likely of all 
 poets to pronounce this to be the best of all pos- 
 sible worlds. And yet, by a strange inversion, this 
 is the spiritual conclusion at which he arrives, but 
 with a qualification that makes it the fruit not of 
 a noisy optimism, but of an almost divine reason. 
 This is the best of all possible worlds, for man as 1 | , 
 he is. Of other states he pretends to no know- | / 
 ledge; he is not even interested in the speculation. 
 But of man here upon earth he is clear as to one 
 thing above all others. There is in us this instinct 
 for resistance, for loving beauty not only because f | 
 it is ours, but also because it cannot be ours for 1 1
 
 46 SWINBURNE 
 
 ever, for dreaming of a perfection that we know 
 cannot be realised. And Swinburne finds in the 
 orderinfr of life as he knows it the exact necessities 
 that compel the constant liberation of this instinct 
 in emotional experience, and he desires no modifi- 
 cation of these conditions. 
 
 The poet, examining experience and arranging 
 phenomena in the light of his imagination and 
 reflecting them back to us through the mirror of 
 his temperament, himself becomes a subject for 
 our contemplation. We are interested not only in 
 the phases of life which he convinces us that he 
 has seen clearly, but also in his manner of seeing. 
 If he gives us a number of poems, each will have 
 the confined interest of its immediate occasion and 
 purpose, but over all there will be a common 
 temper, a unity of spiritual outlook. And this 
 general attitude of the poet towards life is a gift 
 of poetry no less valuable than the delight and 
 invigoration which we derive from the separate 
 and self-contained expressions of his art. One is 
 almost tempted to say that it is more valuable, as 
 being the essential spirit of his art as a whole, but 
 to do so would be to lead wilfully to confusion. 
 The important thing is that however much we may 
 care for isolated poems in a poet's work, we cannot 
 exhaust the measure of his bounty until we have 
 also absorbed this controlling temper, which
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 47 
 
 eludes us until we can consider his complete 
 achievement without too close a reference to its 
 individual parts. In Swinburne's poetry we find 
 such a temper, sharply distinguished, and having 
 precisely that independence which is one of the 
 surest tokens of o-reatness in art. 
 
 Whilst tragedy, or, more exactly, tragic art, 
 should exalt the spectator into a condition of 
 imaginative delight, the protagonists contained 
 within the art may be subjected to extreme distress, 
 even, conceivably, to despair. But it is not so 
 commonly realised that the protagonists may pass 
 through the complete arc of their being in a state 
 of joyousness, and still remain strictly tragic. 
 Hamlet is a great tragic figure, and he exists, 
 normally, in a state of profound dejection; but 
 Sigurd also is a great tragic figure, and his whole 
 life is one of supreme elation. The difference 
 arises from the addition of an heroic quality in 
 Sigurd's nature. The distinction does not radically 
 affect the exultation that we, the spectators, derive 
 from the two presentments. That is essentially the 
 same in both cases. Both Hamlet and Sigurd are 
 pitted against inscrutable circumstance, and both 
 are crushed, yet we do not feel that they have suc- 
 cumbed to a malign destiny, but that they have 
 been caught up, with all their accidents of will 
 and distractions, into the universal energy and
 
 48 SWINBURNE 
 
 virtue of life, adding definitely and permanently 
 to the significance of those things and extending 
 the boundaries of our own experience. But to 
 Hamlet and Sigurd themselves this distinction in 
 their natures is a matter of supreme importance. 
 Whatever else he may be, Hamlet is not heroic. 
 Thrown into tragic conflict, he is not braced by it, 
 and would gladly escape from it if he could. He 
 exclaims against his fate, and there is bitterness 
 and dejection in his cry. The resistance that he 
 offers to circumstance has no determination in it, 
 no gladness; it is only less irksome than surrender 
 to fate,^ and when at length he does force himself 
 to the achievement of its particular design there is 
 no joy in the consummation. He has not even 
 the desire to speak or think of it; the utter weari- 
 ness of his last moments is not the effect of mere 
 physical pain, but of the absence of any heroic 
 quality from his act of resistance. And so we have 
 the tragic figure, fulfilling the necessities of art 
 from our point of view and not in any way con- 
 temptible, but, in its own subjective existence, 
 desolate. But with Sigurd the nature of the tragic 
 figure is completely changed. His resistance to 
 
 ^ Although it is not pertinent to the present purpose, it 
 may be pointed out that in the tragedy of Hamlet's mind the 
 surrender to circumstance is in his reluctance to carry out the 
 bidding of his father's ghost, and the resistance to circumstance, 
 of course, in the actual avenging of the murder.
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 49 
 
 circumstance is one joyous adventure from begin- 
 ning to end, and the conception of surrender to 
 circumstance is impossible to him. The conflict 
 will, it may be, end in his defeat, but he would not 
 escape one blow. Neither the desire that is in his 
 heart, nor the struggle that his desire demands, can 
 be the controlling passion of his life. Being 
 Sigurd, the supremely fortunate thing for him is 
 to have to struggle greatly towards a noble end. 
 He could neither battle for the sake of battling, 
 nor would any miraculous attainment of his end 
 satisfy his nature. He needs, before all else, the 
 just distribution of these two things in his con- 
 sciousness, and when he bows to the final stroke, 
 and the Volsung name for which he has striven 
 has passed to its eclipse, he can cry out gloriously — 
 
 this stroke is the last of ill; 
 Nought now is left to repent of, and the tale abides to tell. 
 
 And thus we have the tragic figure, again respond- 
 ing to the demands that we make upon it from 
 the outside, but now in its own subjective existence 
 not desolate, but exultant and strong. 
 
 It is exactly this tragic joy that presides over 
 Swinburne's lyric impulse. The general temper 
 that emerges from the particular opinions and pas- 
 sions into which occasion resolves it, is of revolt 
 
 £
 
 50 SWINBURNE 
 
 '" and resistance always, never of dejection. Without 
 the sense of coming loss, present possession would 
 lose much, for man as he is, perhaps, everything, 
 of poignancy and intensity of beauty; so that 
 although the inexorable power of change, which is 
 destruction, is to be resisted with every possible 
 energy, even denounced, it can call forth the nobil- 
 Nr ity only, never the misery of lamentation. That 
 other minds would reject the foundation of this 
 attitude is nothing to the point. A certain kind 
 of faith would refuse, for example, to identify 
 change with destruction, but Swinburne's concern 
 here, as always, was with the limited and not the 
 speculative vision of man. Death, the supreme 
 manifestation of the power against which his 
 resistance was exercised, might prove to a less 
 obscured understanding to be change : he would 
 have been the last to deny such a possibility; but 
 his understanding as it was could interpret death 
 as nothing but destruction, and that was the con- 
 dition that must govern his poetry. Only by this 
 could he prove all the virtues in him, and the 
 spiritual heroism which he conceived to be the first 
 dignity of man find its perfect consummation. 
 And it followed that, for the satisfaction of his 
 art, this opposing power must always have its own 
 great worthiness, with nothing mean or common 
 in its texture; it must be hated, but hated always
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 51 
 
 heroically. And it happens, inevitably, that 
 whenever this heroism goes out of his hatred, 
 whenever the opponent power is thrown from its 
 high and remote austerity, Swinburne becomes 
 merely vituperative and his poetry is quelled. 
 Man in opposition to tyrannous gods is a noble 
 spectacle, but man crushing insects under his heel 
 is of no account to our imagination. I have said 
 that Swinburne denounced and chastised the in- 
 struments of the power with which he still sought 
 no reconciliation. As long as he did this his anger 
 was worthy and moving, but his perception in this 
 matter was not always certain. When he recog- 
 nised that the subjects of his denunciation were, 
 hateful as they might be, nevertheless the instru- 
 ments of a controlling: force that exercised his 
 nobility in anger, his quarrel with the immediate 
 agent took on something of the dignity that 
 marked his attitude towards the pervading cause. 
 But there were times when, by some philosophic 
 flaw, he seemed to lose sight of the governing 
 power and to think of the instrument as in itself 
 a self-contained and contemptible source of wrong, 
 and his anger lost its nobility in consequence, 
 becoming fretful, the unpleasing garrulousness of 
 a scold. Resistance no longer has a worthy object, 
 and it loses all its virtue; it is, rightly speaking, 
 no longer resistance at all. 
 
 E 2
 
 52 SWINBURNE 
 
 Iscariot, thou grey-grown beast of blood, 
 
 Stand forth to plead; stand, while red drops run here 
 And there down fingers shaken with foul fear, 
 
 Down the sick shivering chin that stooped and sued, 
 
 Bowed to the bosom, for a little food 
 At Herod's hand. 
 
 That does not speak well for the " damned and 
 dead " Peter, certainly, but it really speaks very 
 little better for the poet. The raucous words strike 
 nothing; they are fury without the fine control of 
 passion. But the balance of Swinburne's spiritual 
 attitude is, fortunately, very rarely disturbed in 
 this manner, and such occasions are important only 
 as suggesting, by a negative process, the real pur- 
 port of that attitude in its normal working. He 
 would seem to have realised that these lapses were 
 not worthy of his art, and framed an apology for 
 them. But the Apologia does not answer its con- 
 fessed purpose; it does something vastly more 
 memorable by summing up into one direct state- 
 ment the nature of the governing temper which we 
 have found behind the body of his poetry — 
 
 If wrath embitter the sweet mouth of song, 
 And make the sunlight fire before those eyes 
 That would drink draughts of peace from the unsoiled skies , 
 
 The wrongdoing is not ours, but ours the wrong. 
 
 Who hear too loud on earth and see too long 
 The grief that dies not with the groan that dies, 
 Till the strong bitterness of pity cries 
 
 Within us, that our anger should be strong.
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 53 
 
 For chill is known by heat and heat by chill, 
 And the desire that hope makes love to still 
 By the fear flying beside it or above, 
 A falcon fledged to follow a fledgling dove. 
 And by the fume and flame of hate and ill 
 
 The exuberant light and burning bloom of love. 
 
 The danger that besets Swinburne's emotional 
 and philosophic reading of life is that the poignancy 
 that is begotten of the conflict shall become diluted 
 into sentimentality. That the danger never for a 
 moment grew into disaster — for disaster of the 
 least tolerable kind it would have been — or any- 
 thing resembling it is, perhaps, the clearest witness 
 we have of his spiritual stability. His instinctive 
 interpretation of man's relation to life might at 
 times betray him into minor confusions, as in the 
 misdirection of his hate, but never into this capital 
 confusion. But it is more than a privilege, it is 
 one of the distinctions of art to take great risks 
 and win through not only unscathed, but with 
 brightened honour. The adage of the sublime and 
 the ridiculous realises this fact, and we speak nothing 
 but praise of Swinburne when we say that with the 
 least loosening of his emotional moorings he would 
 have been adrift. I have suggested that Swinburne's 
 expression was the extreme artistic development 
 of the common genius of our tongue; that could 
 the ordinary man become by direct growth a great 
 poet it is not unreasonable to think that his manner
 
 54 SWINBURNE 
 
 would resemble Swinburne's more closely than any 
 other's. The same thing may be said, not neces- 
 ■^ sarily of his particular views, but of his general 
 spiritual temper. If the ordinary minor poet, or 
 even the ordinary man who is not a poet at all, 
 could purge his metaphysic of its imaginative dull- 
 ness and narrowness, and so allow its nobler parts 
 their full expansion, we should, again, find in 
 Swinburne the most notable exemplar of the new 
 growth. And, inversely, the danger that threat- 
 ened Swinburne's art was one that always threatens 
 the minor poet and very rarely the master. When 
 Wordsworth and Shelley and Browning write badly 
 they commonly do so being troubled overmuch 
 with intellectual subtleties; when the smaller poet 
 writes badly he does so because his passion ravels 
 out into emotional insincerity and becomes senti- 
 mentality. Swinburne's perception was as little 
 troubled with intellectual subtleties as is that of 
 the normal man who moves between his two 
 obscure visions of heaven and earth. Swinburne, 
 too, moved between these same visions, but he was 
 a great poet because they were, for him, not in any 
 way obscure. And his vision being, in effect, the 
 common one of humanity, the utmost clarity was 
 necessary to save him from the commonest spirit- 
 ual vice of humanity. For sentimentality is an 
 inability to apply the essential virtue of resistance
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 55 
 
 to emotional conflict; it is regret without revolt. 
 It is, perhaps, the only real pessimism, and 
 although we are all inevitably subject to it at 
 moments in the conduct of life, it is the business 
 of the poet to keep it out of his art. The great 
 poet is usually free from any temptation to do 
 otherwise because, although like Swinburne his 
 emotions are the common emotions of humanity 
 purged of confusion and driven by a larger im- 
 pulse, yet he has them under a certain intellectual 
 control. The control is, of course, powerless so long 
 as they move strongly along their proper channel. 
 A river is, indeed, a tolerable parallel, the stream 
 being the emotions, unimpeded by the banks, 
 which are the intellectual control, gaining its 
 volume and force from them and prevented from 
 dissipating itself in thin and feeble flood. It is 
 impossible to think of, say, Chaucer as being senti- 
 mental, because we feel that however intense his 
 emotion may become, his intellectual sense of fit- 
 ness will yet restrain it from neglecting the — or, 
 rather, a — universal significance of life in its own 
 immediate concern, and this although Chaucer 
 would appear to be one of the least intellectual of 
 the poets. In other words, we feel that however 
 much Chaucer may exercise the quality of pity, it 
 will never be in self-pity, because he knows that 
 self-pity is, in effect, regret without revolt, the
 
 S6 SWINBURNE 
 
 vice of sentimentality. But we are conscious of 
 nothing of this intellectual control in Swinburne. 
 His emotions are not only the common ones of 
 humanity, but they seem as little subject to any 
 but their own governance as those of the minor 
 poet or the man who is no poet. It must be 
 remembered that this does not affect the question 
 that has already been considered, that of the pre- 
 siding thought or temper which is discoverable 
 behind his work as a whole; the intellectual con- 
 trol of emotions is a thing quite distinct from the 
 general attitude that informs the poet's impulse in 
 all its operations. But in feeling the intensity of 
 Swinburne's emotions, his passionate love for 
 beauty opposed always to the powers of destruc- 
 tion, we feel, too, that, if this intensity threatens 
 to dissipate itself instead of retaining its heroic 
 . passion, there is no consciously intellectual reserve 
 l*^ to restrain it. Now and again, indeed, he is 
 saved from sentimentality only by the merest 
 *' chance. Lines such as those about the Iscariot- 
 nJ^ Peter escape only, if they escape at all, by reason 
 •^ of the very boisterousness of their fury. They 
 certainly have in them the elements of sentiment- 
 ality. But these occasions are so rare as to be 
 almost negligible. By sheer instinct Swinburne 
 does keep his emotion, even at its fiercest, firmly 
 driven along its proper course, and there are no
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 57 
 
 intellectual banks. The phenomenon is as strik- 
 ing to the imagination as would its natural parallel 
 be to the outward sense. 
 
 And yet the phenomenon invests Swinburne's 
 achievement with remarkable unity. To discover 
 this unity in a poet's work is to discover his central 
 secret; the unity must exist if the poet be of any 
 greatness, but we have to approach from many 
 sides and with a mind eager for discovery before 
 we can hope to determine its nature. It is not 
 easy to think of the man of normal limitation 
 becoming a great poet merely by direct develop- 
 ment; we inevitably associate the great poet not 
 only with the common qualities of humanity, but 
 also with certain distinctive qualities of his own. 
 It would seem that something more than growth 
 would be needed : that there must be some new 
 grace gathered from without. And yet Swinburne 
 does seem to be, as I have said, both in his gift of 
 speech and his controlling spiritual temper, the 
 normal man magnified into the master-poet, and, 
 further, threatened by, but triumphantly escaping 
 from, precisely the emotional dangers by which 
 average humanity is most closely beset. And the 
 explanation, I think, is that Swinburne derived 
 from the common English speech and temper, but 
 through the great succession of English poets. 
 We are right in conceiving the great poet to be
 
 58 SWINBURNE 
 
 the concentrated articulation of the masses, plus 
 some qualities peculiar to himself. But Swin- 
 burne, in absorbing the poetic tradition that had 
 grown in strength and beauty from Chaucer down 
 to his own day and shaping it to its marvellous 
 consummation, naturally could not absorb the par- 
 ticular qualities that each poet had woven into his 
 song together with the staple texture which was 
 the ever-expanding tradition itself. The material 
 that Swinburne took was that element in English 
 poetry that through five centuries had corresponded 
 with the general characteristics of the English 
 tongue and metaphysic. And so his achievement 
 became in a curious degree representative of the 
 English people. We have greater poets; we have 
 none of whom it can be said with such finality that 
 we alone could have produced him. 
 
 These epochal and national distinctions rightly 
 involve a good many qualifications when we come 
 to examine them in detail. In saying that Swin- 
 burne was, shortly, the greatest common factor of 
 English poetry from Chaucer down to the mid- 
 nineteenth century, it is necessary to observe that 
 his source contained many properties introduced 
 from other races and tongues. But this does not 
 affect our central position; not does the fact that 
 his own direct sympathies were very largely with 
 foreign art and activity. Art that is uninfluenced
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 59 
 
 by external energies is not national, but merely 
 primitive. It cannot attain to a wholesome 
 nationalism until there is a strong strain of the 
 cosmopolitan in its nature, whilst a poet's use of a 
 French verse-form or enthusiasm for an Italian 
 cause do but, as it were, modify the manners — 
 not the manner — of his art. Chaucer, Shakespeare, 
 Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth and the rest of them 
 could never have written as they did had England 
 been isolated intellectually as well as geographic- 
 ally, and Swinburne in summarising the mean of 
 past achievement caught up the external influences 
 no less than the native product upon which they 
 had worked. To sift these two things would be 
 scarcely possible at this time of day, nor would it 
 lead to any valuable end. The point is that Swin- 
 burne, in the way that I have suggested, stands as 
 the consummation of the chief texture of a par- 
 ticular cycle in English art, but that that art is 
 itself our particular expression of universal in- 
 fluences and energies. Seeking any radical dis- 
 tinction between the dreams that are shaped in the 
 Indias and those of our own northern islands, we 
 seek a vain thing, but it is of manifest profit and 
 interest to us to observe the profoundly distinctive 
 methods by which these widely sundered dreamers 
 give form and utterance to their imaginings. To^i 
 say that Swinburne was more essentially English i
 
 6o SWINBURNE 
 
 than, perhaps, any other poet, is not to challenge 
 his universal significance. 
 
 Before passing in natural order from this con- 
 sideration of the controlling temper of Swinburne's 
 poetry to a more detailed review of his attitude 
 towards particular aspects of life, it may be well 
 to mention briefly a circumstance of his work that 
 has been somewhat freely criticised. It is said that 
 Swinburne drew his inspiration too readily from 
 literature rather than from life. The charge is 
 supported by no less an authority than Morris, 
 who says, " Swinburne's work . . . always seemed 
 to me to be founded on literature, not on nature. 
 . . . Now I believe that Swinburne's sympathy 
 with literature is most genuine and complete." 
 But, surely, the charge refutes itself in Morris's 
 own words. ^ If Swinburne's sympathy with litera- 
 ■ ture was, truly, "genuine and complete," there is 
 nothing more to be said. Whether a man may or 
 may not turn safely to literature for inspiration in 
 his own work depends entirely upon what literature 
 
 ^ Morris at the moment had been reading Tristram of Lyonesse; 
 " nothing," he says, " would lay hold of me at all." We know 
 that it was not for lack of good-will, and that there was a genuine 
 disability on his part to respond to Swinburne's artistic method. 
 But that his confessed reason was the real secret of this disability 
 is not likely. Or, to speak more exactly, he tried to find some 
 formal explanation of what was a deeply rooted difference of 
 temperament, and failed.
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 6i 
 
 means to him. If he neo-lects life and his own 
 
 D 
 
 subjective and objective experience, and seeks to 
 supply his need from literature without the strict 
 discipline of thought and feeling, he comes to in- 
 evitable disaster. But Swinburne inflicted no such 
 indignity upon literature or himself. He contem- 
 plated life without sparing his mental power, and 
 he felt with all the intensity and directness of a 
 great poet. And by the knowledge so gained he 
 was able to test literature. In much of it he found 
 the manifest and most complete expression of other 
 men who had thought and felt as fiercely as he. 
 He accepted it not by faith, but by the exacting 
 witness of his own meditation. Literature was, 
 for him, the supreme history of mankind, and to 
 have neglected it would have been to neglect great 
 and fertile tracts of experience. He could dis- 
 tinguish readily, subject to inevitable idiosyncrasies, 
 between the rich and the worthless, bringing his 
 own judgment, founded upon life, to the trial. 
 We surely cannot deny him wisdom in this matter. 
 For to be inspired by literature, if our understand- 
 ing of literature is rightly built, is to be inspired 
 by life. 
 
 As is the manner of artists, Swinburne rarely 
 gives any evidence that he was conscious of the 
 spirit that moved through his work, lending it its 
 general distinction. It was an instinctive habit of
 
 62 SWINBURNE 
 
 the mind rather than a deliberately formed philo- 
 sophy, and as such it was, normally, a pervading 
 influence in, and not a subject for, his poetry. 
 There are occasions when he does formulate it into 
 a concrete statement; the joy of conflict, the sense 
 that man's nature demands some tragic opposition 
 to resist, that freedom of soul is not to be found 
 in finality of attainment, but in heroic revolt, that 
 the unending quarrel is the salt of existence here 
 upon earth, could find no more explicit utterance 
 
 than — 
 
 But we, our master, we 
 
 Whose hearts, uplift to thee, 
 Ache with the pulse of thy remembered song, ^^ 
 
 We ask not nor await ^, fi/T^ 
 
 From the clenched hands of fate, > }V 
 
 As thou, remission of the world's old wrong; ^ *' ' 
 
 Respite we ask not, nor release; - 
 
 Freedom a man may have, he shall not peace. 
 
 But such occasions are few, and that they should be 
 so is a sign of health in the poet's art. For the 
 controlling temper, which we take to be of so great 
 importance in discovering to us the whole nature 
 of his revelation, shapes itself to our understanding 
 / as a luminous atmosphere enclosing the infinitely ■ 
 various units that together make up the system of 
 his work. And the greater and more vigorous the 
 poet, the greater will be the diversity of these 
 units, the less will there be any obvious correspond- 
 ence between his dominant mood and the succes-
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 63 
 
 sive adventures of his imaginative thought. These 
 adventures themselves should, further, have no 
 manifest relation to each other. A great poet's 
 work, when we come to examine it in detail, should 
 be rich in variety, even in apparent contradictions, 
 of form, thought, feeling. It should be like a 
 great many-coloured and many-featured landscape, 
 proud in beauties utterly distinct one from another, 
 yet controlled by a pervading spirit into a pro- 
 foundly harmonious whole. Emotional unity in 
 poetry is not at all the same thing as emotional 
 monotony. The poet wears always the same spirit- 
 ual armour, but, if he be whole in health, he will 
 be eager to undergo innumerable experiences, to 
 report innumerable visions. In creating them into 
 the form of his art he will impress each in turn 
 with the sign of his own temperament, but he will 
 receive one as readily as another. The poet who is 
 concerned only with those aspects of life that have 
 a superficial kinship with his own brooding con- 
 sciousness falls inevitably into the deadly habit of 
 introspection, and what should be a noble spiritual 
 governance becomes a wearisome spiritual manner- 
 ism. He himself is but half his poetry, the fixed 
 half; the perfect whole is attained only when he is 
 daily open to all external influences of life, seeking 
 the essential virtue of each. He is the singer, with 
 his distinctive tones and judgment of values, but
 
 64 SWINBURNE 
 
 his function is to sing the changing world. At best 
 he can but hope to fulfil a tithe of the possibilities 
 of his faculty, no matter how alert he may be; but 
 the alertness he must have if he is to make his art, 
 considered as a whole, anything but a dull business. 
 
 It follows that to examine a great poet's thought 
 in detail means to pass a very large number of his 
 poems separately in review, which, since the poems 
 themselves are there to be read, would be a profit- 
 less occupation. But certain characteristics emerge 
 from this detail, and it is worth while to attempt 
 to define these. In this sense of adventurousness 
 Swinburne was quite clearly of the masters. Spirit- 
 ual love and physical passion, heroes and tyrants, 
 law-giving and battles, children, friendship, the 
 achievement of poets and the story of religions, the 
 seasons, the glory of limbs, pain and the sea — he 
 celebrates all these and a thousand other things. 
 And in celebrating them he does not make them 
 mere stalking-horses for the gratification of his own 
 predisposition. He sees each as it is presented to 
 him in his own manner, but he allows it its own 
 independent existence and value. 
 
 One of the most sio-nificant of the characteristics 
 
 o 
 
 that find varied expression in his work is his rela- 
 tion to the natural world. I have suggested that a 
 distinction of his general metaphysic was that he 
 accepted the tragic opposition of evil to man'^
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 65 
 
 desire not as a pitiful event that can be endured 
 only by the exercise' of a severely disciplined faith, 
 but as a positive benefaction satisfying certain 
 direct and instinctive demands of his nature. 
 Faithj in the ordinary meaning of the word, was 
 a thing outside his comprehension. It might 
 almost be said that the sense that made him rejoice 
 in this opposition was physical rather than spiritual. 
 It was akin to the sense that made Sigurd rejoice 
 in the sweep of his sword. And his relation to the 
 natural world was governed by much the same 
 inspiration. It is notable that of all natural forces 
 the one most dearly loved in his poetry is the sea, 
 and that a great part of his delight in it comes 
 from the actual physical conflict of swimming. 
 His exultation in the sea has a far deeper source 
 than mere visual satisfaction, or even reflective 
 perception of its beauty. It is a passion exercising 
 his whole physical no less than his spiritual nature, 
 a passion that embraces worship and conflict and 
 the desire for possession. 
 
 So Tristram one brief breathing space apart 
 Hung, and gazed down; then with exulting heart 
 Plunged : and the fleet foam round a joyous head 
 Flashed, that shot under, and ere a shaft had sped 
 Rose again radiant, a rejoicing star. 
 And high along the water-ways afar 
 Triumphed : and all they deemed he needs must die; 
 But Gouvernayle his squire, that watched hard by,
 
 66 SWINBURNE 
 
 Sought where perchance a man might win ashore, 
 Striving, with strong limbs labouring long and sore, 
 And there abode an hour : till as from fight 
 Crowned with hard conquest won by mastering might. 
 Hardly, but happier for the imperious toil. 
 Swam the knight in forth of the close waves' coil. 
 Sea-satiate, bruised with buffets of the brine, 
 Laughing, and flushed as one afire with wine. 
 
 Elsewhere he calls the tumult of the sea the " strife 
 more sweet than peace," and in the magnificent 
 Triumph of Time he turns with joyous defiance 
 from woman to the sea, directing anew the passion 
 that has been neither satisfied nor subdued, know- 
 ing that now it will find fulfilment. This redirec- 
 tion of an unchanged energy, with its explicit 
 surrender to nature as a force responsive not to his 
 aesthetic sense or spiritual inquiry, but to the need 
 of his whole corporate being, is one of the most 
 striking moments in Swinburne's poetry or, indeed, 
 in any poetry — 
 
 There are fairer women, I hear; that may be; 
 
 But I, that I love you and find you fair. 
 Who are more than fair in my eyes if they be. 
 
 Do the high gods know or the great gods care ? 
 Though the swords in my heart for one were seven, 
 Would the iron hollow of doubtful heaven. 
 That knows not itself whether night-time or day be, 
 
 Reverberate words and a foolish prayer ? 
 
 I will go back to the great sweet mother, 
 
 Mother and lover of men, the sea. 
 I will go down to her, I and none other. 
 
 Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me;
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 67 
 
 Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast : 
 O fair white mother, in days long past 
 Born without sister, born without brother. 
 Set free my soul as thy soul is free. 
 
 O fair green-girdled mother of mine, 
 
 Sea, that art clothed with the sun and the rain. 
 
 Thy sweet hard kisses are strong like wine, 
 Thy large embraces are keen like pain. 
 
 There is a profound kinship between Swinburne 
 and the Shelley of that passionate cry — 
 
 If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; 
 If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; 
 A wave to pant beneath they power, and share 
 The impulse of thy strength, only less free 
 Than thou, O uncontrollable ! 
 
 The spiritual energy is in each case inseparable from 
 a tremendous physical impulse. There is nothing 
 of Wordsworth's reverential and affectionate de- 
 tachment, nor of the sense of discipleship that is in 
 Meredith. The Shelley of certain poems, and 
 Swinburne always, reached out towards nature not 
 only with spiritual surrender, but with every sense 
 aquiver. A good deal has been heard about 
 Swinburne's paganism, but it is clearly a mistake to -^ 
 see paganism in his opposition to malign gods. 
 For the gods that he denounced were obviously 
 no more than the instruments of the destructive $ 
 power that worked through man. They were \ 
 fashioned by man in his darker moods, and were . 
 
 F 2
 
 68 SWINBURNE 
 
 not in themselves a prime source at all. These 
 gods were not God. Them he would cast out, but 
 he had no desire to dethrone the power behind 
 them. It was essential to his scheme of things, 
 exciting him as it did to the divine conflict that his 
 being demanded. This was not pagan, but a quite 
 modern mysticism. It differed from paganism at 
 one essential point, in that it substituted an active 
 joy for a terrified, though not ignoble, acceptance. 
 But in his attitude towards nature there was a clear 
 strain of pure paganism. The passion for identifica- 
 tion with the natural beauty of earth that was so 
 strong in Swinburne differed only in its manifesta- 
 tion from certain aspects of the passion of the Bac- 
 chanals. It is in the sea-poems that this desire of 
 the senses finds its most complete expression, but 
 the whole earth stirred him in like manner. Tris- 
 tram being near to death, his soul — 
 
 desired the dewy sense of leaves, 
 The soft green smell of thickets drenched with dawn. 
 The faint slot kindling on the fiery lawn 
 As day's first hour made keen the spirit again 
 That lured and spurred on quest his hound Hodain, 
 The breeze, the bloom, the splendour and the sound, 
 That stung like fire the hunter and the hound. 
 The pulse of wind, the passion of the sea, 
 The rapture of the woodland . . . 
 
 The soul of Tristram desired these things, but it 
 was the soul calling passionately through the 
 physical senses. With fine unity this Pantheistic
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 69 
 
 strain of temper colours his general metaphysic and 
 the more particular phases of his perception. Mind 
 and body shared alike the controlling delight in the 
 tragic conflict of life, and they shared too the 
 adoration for the natural world in which life moved. 
 The result of this passion working through his 
 corporate being of body and spirit was that he in- 
 stinctively sought to find for all his spiritual ecsta- 
 sies some definite manifestation of the idea exciting 
 such ecstasy upon which he could direct the full 
 faculty of his senses. In nature he particularises 
 the object of his song; he worships not only the 
 earth and the sea, but known countrysides and 
 known seascapes. It is not, indeed, always or even 
 often possible to identify them, but that is not 
 pertinent to the question; we feel always that he is 
 writing with the vision physically embodied before 
 his eyes. And so it is with that other theme, 
 liberty, that recurs so persistently in his poetry. 
 Now and again he secludes himself in the quiet 
 places of abstract thought, and we get an austerity 
 of utterance coming strangely from his lips — 
 
 Unto each man his handiwork, unto each his crown, 
 
 The just Fate gives; 
 Whoso takes the world's Ufe on him and his own lays down. 
 
 He, dying so, lives. 
 Whoso bears the whole heaviness of the wronged world's weight 
 
 And puts it by 
 It is well with him suffering, though he face man's fate; 
 
 How should he die ?
 
 70 SWINBURNE 
 
 Seeing death has no part in him any more, no power 
 
 Upon his head; 
 He has bought his eternity in a little hour, 
 
 And is not dead. 
 
 For an hour, if ye look for him, he is no more found, 
 
 For one hour's space; 
 Then ye lift up your eyes to him and behold him crowned, 
 
 A deathless face. 
 
 On the mountains of memory, by the world's well-springs, 
 
 In all men's eyes, 
 Where the light of the hfe of him is on all past things, ^ 
 
 Death only dies. >^.^Jl^/^ 
 
 We have here the abstract idea that commonly 
 shaped for its complete development some objective 
 that could be seen and heard and known in the 
 flesh. Freedom and the hero, the poet celebrating 
 them and tyranny destroying them, all exercised his 
 mind, but before they could pass wholly into his 
 art they must become Italy and Mazzini, Landor 
 and Victor Hugo, Ferdinand and the White Czar, 
 and all the rest of the brave or errant company. 
 Until it could find this definite impact his passion 
 was not satisfied; and in finding it, it took on a new 
 exuberance, an exuberance that was at times un- 
 governed. There are occasions when the intensity 
 of the passion subdues everything to its own 
 moment — reason, experience, past utterance. It 
 was at once the weakness and the glory of this 
 necessity in Swinburne's nature that judgment 
 constantly became a positive and not a relative 
 thing. To the measured demands of reason it is
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 71 
 
 a little disturbing to know that the man who is 
 acclaiming one as likest to superbly imagined gods 
 to-day will displace him, acclaiming another, to- 
 morrow. But the spirit that can so praise, not 
 fearing a fine immoderation, is a splendid and 
 generous one. If we can but surrender ourselves to 
 the poet's own intensity, we understand that this 
 kind of poetry can no more be controlled by the 
 logical requirements of reason than a young man's ^ 
 love passion in its fiercest moments. He too may 
 swear faith to many mistresses and break it or keep 
 it with them all, but each has her immortal moment. "4* 
 But he has no word with which to record the high ^' 
 passion of the moment save the secret word of the 
 moment itself; and we, unaided by him in any 
 imaginative realisation of his adventure, are likely 
 to measure it by our reason only, and we either 
 laugh at or blame him, unless we too are young 
 men, or poets. But Swinburne recorded his high 
 moments of passionate allegiance in fitly chosen 
 words, and the loss and blame are ours if we cannot 
 project ourselves into his reckless fervour. Yester- 
 day it was Shakespeare who of all men was nearest 
 the stars, to-day it is Landor and to-morrow it will 
 be, perhaps, some friend scarcely known to fame. 
 Critical balance may be disturbed, but a finer quality 
 ' in us than that rejoices that for Swinburne, at 
 certain moments which he has fixed for us in his 
 art, these men all were in truth very near the stars.
 
 72 SWINBURNE 
 
 To understand this is necessary to the enjoyment 
 of a great part of Swinburne's poetry. If we insist 
 on the satisfaction of our critical reason, then many 
 of the poems sprung from his great zest are no 
 more than rather meaningless hyperbole. But if 
 we are content with the poet to surrender reason 
 to the higher things of passion, then they become 
 divine praise. If we do this we feel that no man 
 has ever praised so well in poetry as Swinburne, 
 just as no man has denounced with such heroic 
 fierceness. He loved the particular virtues of his 
 heroes greatly, as he loathed the particular sins of 
 his tyrants, but hero and tyrant alike stood to him 
 as something more than themselves. They were 
 the objectives through which he could express his 
 own essential temper, its passions of desire and 
 hate. And so it came about that there were times 
 when, with his impulse untainted, he sought to 
 express it in terms of a particular case that he had 
 not closely examined. The most regrettable in- 
 stance of this haste was his attitude towards the 
 last Boer War. Whatever may have been the 
 rights and wrongs of that venture, it is clear that if 
 the root idea of liberty inspired either side it did 
 not inspire us. If we consider the actual case and 
 Swinburne's pronouncement concerning it, we have 
 to admit that he was false to the gospel that he had 
 proclaimed so often and so earnestly. But it is 
 clear from the poems that he wrote at this time that
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 73 
 
 he is wrong in his facts. This is not creditable to 
 a poet, it is not even defensible, but it does not 
 warrant us in impugning his spirit. He conceived 
 England to be at war with " a ruthless and a truth- 
 less foe," one 
 
 Whose war is waged where none may fight or flee — 
 With women and with weanlings . . . 
 
 and he called upon his land in the names of Crom- 
 well and Milton and Wordsworth to avenge a 
 tyranny none the less iniquitous because it hap- 
 pened to be exercised by a small state. He read 
 into his country's cause a virtue that was not there 
 in fact, and in doing so committed a grave intel- 
 lectual blunder. But the blunder itself vindicated 
 his position as a poet. He was still singing what 
 he supposed, falsely, but quite sincerely, to be the 
 cause of freedom. The South African poems are 
 written in honour not of that political England that 
 will be known to the histories of the event, but of 
 a fictitious England that existed only in the poet's 
 mind, an England that served as other states and 
 men had served before to release the zeal for 
 liberty that was in him. The confusion as to facts 
 was, perhaps, more than unfortunate, but the charge 
 against Swinburne that he who had so often de- 
 nounced tyranny turned at last to applaud it will 
 not bear examination. We might as well call 
 in question the poetic virtue of " Epipsychidion "
 
 74 SWINBURNE 
 
 because Emilia Viviani was rather a dull woman. 
 She probably was, until she was re-fashioned in 
 Shelley's imagination. The case of Swinburne and 
 the Transvaal involved an unhappy injustice in an 
 actual opposition of states, and when the poet con- 
 cerns himself with particular and contemporary 
 affairs we expect him to be sure of his facts; but in 
 the essential matter of motive Swinburne is here in 
 the same position as Shelley. 
 
 This curiously practical symbolism by means of 
 which Swinburne marshalled the world of his ex- 
 perience in his art was constantly suggesting to 
 him spiritual discoveries that he would never have 
 made save through its agency. The concrete phe- 
 nomena through which he realised his innate vision 
 of life in turn directed that vision to phases of 
 experience of which he had been unaware. He 
 celebrated his chosen poets, for example, primarily 
 because they stood for the things for which he also 
 stood; the will for liberty that was in him became 
 more tangible to his senses when he could shape it 
 through his adoration for Victor Hugo, his passion 
 reached nearer to fulfilment and its whole signifi- 
 cance when he could find in Sappho a symbol for 
 its expression. But Hugo and Sappho meant 
 something to him besides this. He called them 
 up to satisfy a deep need of his spirit, but once 
 present they could also teach him of things un- 
 known. Through them secrets were revealed and
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 75 
 
 he perceived glories that only came into being by 
 virtue of their interpretation. That he was him- 
 self conscious of this circumstance he tells us in 
 The Interpreters. 
 
 I 
 
 Days dawn on us that make amends for many 
 
 Sometimes, 
 When heaven and earth seem sweeter even than any 
 
 Man's rhymes. 
 Light had not all been quenched in France, or quelled 
 
 In Greece, 
 Had Homer sung not, or had Hugo held 
 
 His peace. 
 Had Sappho's self not left her word thus long 
 
 For token, 
 The sea round Lesbos yet in waves of song 
 
 Had spoken. 
 
 n 
 
 And yet these days of subtler air and finer 
 
 Delight, 
 When lovelier looks the darkness, and diviner 
 
 The light— 
 The gift they give of all these golden hours, 
 
 Whose urn 
 Pours forth reverberate rays or shadowing showers 
 
 In turn — 
 Clouds, beams, and winds that make the live day's track 
 
 Seem living — 
 What were they did no spirit give them back 
 
 Thanksgiving f 
 
 HI 
 
 Dead air, dead fire, dead shapes and shadows, telling 
 
 Time nought; 
 Man gives them sense and soul by song, and dwelling 
 
 In thought.
 
 76 SWINBURNE 
 
 But it is not the poets alone who are his interpreters. 
 Revelation may come from whatever he uses for 
 his symbolic purpose. The poem In memory of 
 John William Inchbold records the poet's love for 
 his friend, remembered and happy days spent with 
 him, adventures that cannot be known again and 
 other things of elegiac fitness. In other words its 
 first inspiration is the desire to celebrate the poet's 
 own emotional experience at his friend's death, not 
 merely to set out that friend's virtues. There is, 
 however, one stanza that bears directly upon this 
 question of Swinburne's access to a new spiritual 
 experience through his symbol. It is interesting 
 to compare his attitude here with that of Milton 
 and of Shelley. Milton's belief in the survival of 
 Lycidas' spirit springs wholly from within himself; 
 it is pure Christian faith — 
 
 So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high 
 
 Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves. 
 
 Lycidas himself neither weakens nor strengthens 
 
 the poet's certainty. And so it is with Shelley, 
 
 save that his faith springs from his particular phase 
 
 of monistic religion. His assurance, like Milton's, 
 
 is the birth of his own spiritual ardour, and quite 
 
 independent of any quickening coming from the 
 
 dead Adonais, so that he can assert, as with 
 
 authority — 
 
 He is made one with Nature : there is heard 
 His voice in all her music . . .
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 77 
 
 But with Swinburne it is different. Such self- 
 existent faith, as I have suggested, was not part of 
 his spiritual possession. Whatever new beginning 
 might come after. Death was for him an end, a 
 darkening of experience beyond which he could not 
 see. And yet, his thought being fixed, not upon 
 life and death in the abstract, but upon the dead 
 man his friend and the full life that he had left, he 
 does acquire a faith that would have been impos- 
 sible to his own spiritual nature without this 
 external influence. 
 
 Peace, rest, and sleep are all we know of death, 
 And all we dream of comfort : yet for thee, 
 
 Whose breath of life was bright and strenuous breath, 
 We think the change is other than we see. 
 
 Those four lines contain the key to much in Swin- 
 burne's philosophy. His life as a poet was a series 
 of intense and adventurous moments. A govern- 
 ing temper was over all, and directed his choice of 
 occasion for song, selecting those that most freely 
 liberated his own spirit. But the occasions them- 
 selves might each bring some new and precious 
 experience, urgent for the moment, and not less 
 valuable in that it had no obvious permanence in 
 his spiritual equipment. It found its permanence 
 in its one station in his poetry. 
 
 In his one great abstract statement of creed, 
 Swinburne discovers for us the central strength of 
 his thought. The Hymn of Man is not a complete
 
 78 SWINBURNE 
 
 statement, because it necessarily cannot embody the 
 manifold subsidiary beliefs that came to him from 
 without at intervals throughout his life. Nor is it 
 strictly abstract; for Man of the hymn is quite 
 clearly a sublimation of the poet's historical know- 
 ledge and his own personal being. But the con- 
 fession reveals the essential temper that was behind 
 all his work. The tyrant God of Man's fashioning 
 has failed; he "gives not aid." 
 
 " But God, if a God there be, is the substance of men which 
 is man " — 
 
 the Man of whom " men are the heartbeats . . . 
 the plumes that feather his wings." It follows that 
 this Man, who is the essential and common spirit 
 of men, is the one true God, and the false God is to 
 be cast out — 
 
 By thy name that in hell-fire was written, and burned at the 
 
 point of thy sword, 
 Thou art smitten, thou God, thou art smitten; thy death 
 
 is upon thee, O Lord. 
 And the love-song of earth as thou diest resounds through the 
 
 wind of her wings — 
 Glory to Man in the highest ! for Man is the master of things. 
 
 If the poet went no farther than that, his creed 
 would not be a particularly inspiriting one, what- 
 ever it might have of rhetorical bravery. But it 
 does go a great deal farther. 
 
 Men perish, but man shall endure; Hves die, but the life is 
 not dead. 
 
 If that pointed merely, as belief is sometimes
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 79 
 
 known to point, to the heroic virtue of living for 
 posterity, it would be but poor comfort. Of all the ' 
 pitiful creeds with which men have flattered them- 
 selves, perhaps this has least of bread. The notion 
 that this life is a very poor business, but that if we 
 make the best of it some remote generation may 
 discover a life that is worthy, makes for madness as 
 soon as it passes from intellectual pattern-making 
 and is applied to any emotional crisis. It is stone- 
 cold. Whilst it is clear, however, that Swinburne 
 does not subject himself or us to mockery of this , 
 kind, it is equally clear that he has nothing to | 
 promise men, as apart from Man, after death. | 
 " Men perish, lives die." But the identification 
 of Man with God implies the identification of 
 earth with heaven, of the fundamental nature of 
 this life with that of whatever life may yet be. j 
 And in this circumstance lies the hope and consola- * 
 tion of Swinburne's creed. We do not live for 
 posterity, nor do we live for our yet unfashioned 
 selves. We live for the glory that is here and now. 
 That glory is part of divinity; it is, in fact, God. 
 We, being men, may yet know, here upon earth, 
 the wonder and beauty that are Man. The nobler 
 and more generous part of men becomes the real 
 Lord of the world, and we can all share in the lord- 
 ship. The belief, like all beliefs, has its manifest 
 limitations. It leaves death a terrible thing, but 
 then death is always a terrible thing, and the terror
 
 8o SWINBURNE 
 
 can be subdued only by a faith that is entirely 
 beyond intellectual and even emotional command, 
 if, indeed, it can be subdued at all. But if Swin- 
 burne's creed does not supply this faith, it offers 
 marvellous compensations. It invests each man 
 with a tremendous dignity, and it makes it possible 
 for him to say when death comes, happen what may, 
 he is glad to have lived. It considers life not as, 
 a probation but as a joyous achievement. And, 
 finally, it has a profound aesthetic value in Swin- 
 burne's art, giving it a strange and admirable unity. 
 The life that Swinburne contemplates in his poetry 
 becomes radiantly self-contained, a complete experi- 
 ence enclosed between birth and death. That it 
 may be one of a series of experiences does not 
 matter; that it is a thing of divine worth in itself 
 does matter supremely. It is to be noticed that 
 this philosophy is infinitely removed from that 
 commonly attributed to, say, FitzGerald's Omar. 
 There is no suggestion that since the ultimate 
 reward of spiritual endeavour is very doubtful we 
 may reasonably spare ourselves all such endeavour. 
 To Swinburne the reward is certain and immediate; 
 to-day for him, as for Omar, is the time to be con- 
 sidered and not to-morrow, but to-day is to be a 
 conscious triumph, not a desperate if voluptuous 
 forgetting. It is striking to see how all greatly 
 imagined religions come together at one point or 
 another. Swinburne's opportunism is akin to that
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 8i 
 
 of Christ, who said to his disciples, " Take there- 
 fore no thought for the morrow." It is an elabora- 
 tion, too, of the first phase of Arnold's thought in 
 his sonnet on " Immortality," without reference to 
 its conclusion — 
 
 No, no ! the energy of life may be 
 Kept on after the grave, but not begun; 
 And he who flagged not in the earthly strife. 
 From strength to strength advancing — only he, 
 His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, 
 Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life. 
 
 Of eternity Swinburne had no tidings, but he knew 
 with fiery consciousness that the energy of life must 
 be begun before the grave. More, it must here 
 achieve completeness, in whatever new manifesta- 
 tion it may achieve completeness hereafter. Sat 
 ad diem diet malum est. 
 
 It is a faith that cannot be held without a great- 
 hearted enthusiasm for life, and, perhaps, exemp- 
 tion from any very poignant personal sorrows. 
 With some men the imposition of grief is too 
 insistent to leave unscathed any fine zest for things 
 as they are. The two extremes of sullen despair 
 and rigid faith must have their companies. But to 
 most men no more of sorrow is given than can 
 be borne unbowed, no more than will brace 
 without breaking. And it is them that the vision 
 shining throughout Swinburne's poetry calls to the 
 realisation of their most splendid possibilities.
 
 1^1 
 
 
 A.^ 
 
 i^ 82 «?^^' SWINBURNE 
 
 \ Again we see this poet as the sublimation of the 
 I normal man. Most men working among us, living 
 earnestly from day to day, embracing those things 
 of delight and beauty that are not too far to seek, 
 if they could but cleanse their workaday philosophy 
 of all its meanness and jealousy, if they could but 
 enlarge it so that the inessential trifles that are 
 now important became negligible, if, in short, they 
 could breathe into it the spirit of greatness, would 
 stand nearer to Swinburne, perhaps, than to any 
 other of the prophets. 
 
 It is, of course, necessary to distinguish clearly 
 between a poet's governing temper on the one hand 
 and its excesses and his transitory moods on the 
 other. Swinburne's early inspiration especially 
 betrayed him at moments into these excesses, but 
 we need not pay too much attention when he 
 invokes " the raptures and roses of vice." Some- 
 times he is but allowing the enthusiasms of a young 
 man their full bent, now admirably, now a little 
 grotesquely, and sometimes, again, he doubtless 
 writes for the benefit of the comfortably righteous. 
 He turns out phrases that quickly become current, 
 and to many people his only report. But acquaint- 
 ance with the body of his work teaches us that, 
 relatively speaking, they are of but small import- 
 ance either to him or to us. And whilst the poet 
 of all men is subject to an infinite variety of moods.
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 83 
 
 and may commit himself to what is at least apparent 
 contradiction, and Swinburne both by nature and 
 the circumstance of external influence that has been 
 discussed knew as great a variety as any, it is 
 almost impossible to find a word in the whole of 
 his work that does violence to his creed or is in 
 any way a denial of himself. In A Ballad of 
 Dreamland there is a momentary retreat from his 
 habitual fulness of life, but even then the mood is 
 not undisturbed, though the call from without is 
 light as the fancy that begets the seclusion itself. 
 
 I hid my heart in a nest of roses, 
 
 Out of the sun's way hidden apart; 
 In a softer bed than the soft white snow's is, 
 
 Under the roses I hid my heart. 
 Why would it sleep not ? why should it start, 
 
 When never a leaf of the rose-tree stirred ? 
 What made sleep flutter his wings and part ? 
 
 Only the song of a secret bird. 
 
 There are, too, those poems wherein no mood at all 
 has been the inspiration, but only a technical rest- 
 lessness. Apart from these, the worship of abun- 
 dant life which was Swinburne's high distinction 
 can be found in one shape or another in everything 
 that he wrote. 
 
 It is, I think, not fanciful to find in Swinburne's 
 vision the complement of that of his great contem- 
 porary, Morris. Other great poets of the same 
 epoch saw life here as a reaching out towards 
 
 G 2
 
 84 SWINBURNE 
 
 something else. Both these men saw it as a unit : 
 " a watch or a vision between a sleep and a sleep." 
 Morris conceived an earthly paradise that should 
 transform the bodily state of men and all the con- 
 ditions that are attendant upon the bodily state. 
 He peopled his earth with men and women sound 
 in body and mind; that was the clear-cut purpose 
 of his poetry up to the " Sigurd " period. Having 
 done this, he was content to leave to themselves the 
 finding of spiritual greatness, and it is this spiritual 
 greatness, precisely fitted to the needs of such 
 people, that Swinburne supplies. If we can 
 imagine a race of men inspired by Swinburne's 
 magnificent spiritual intensity, living in Morris's 
 conditions of labour and bodily well-being and 
 joyous human relationship, we imagine an ideal 
 which may well stand as the chief glory of the age 
 that shaped it, even though the conception needed 
 not one poet, but two. It is interesting, signifi- 
 cant perhaps, to notice, further, that on the rare 
 occasions when Swinburne thinks definitely in 
 terms of a community, instead of those of an indi- 
 vidual soul or a cause or principle, he does so very 
 much in the same way as Morris. The note is a 
 rare one in his poetry, but it is unmistakable when 
 it comes. There is a fine correspondence between 
 the last chorus of The Litany of Nations and some 
 of the " Poems By the Way."
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 85 
 
 By the sloth of men that all too long endure men 
 
 On man to tread; 
 By the cry of men, the bitter cry of poor men 
 
 That faint for bread; 
 By the blood-sweat of the people in the garden 
 
 Inwalled of kings; 
 By his passion interceding for their pardon 
 
 Who do these things; 
 By the sightless souls and fleshless limbs that labour 
 
 For not their fruit; 
 By the foodless mouth with foodless heart for neighbour, 
 
 That, mad, is mute; 
 
 We thy children, that arraign not nor impeach thee 
 
 Though no star steer us. 
 By the waves that wash the morning we beseech thee, 
 
 O mother, hear us. 
 
 Of all comparisons, unnecessary ones between poet 
 and poet are the most odious, but there is some- 
 thing exhilarating in the discovery of so splendid 
 a kinship between men who laboured so well, in 
 their widely divergent courses, for poetry and for 
 life upon earth. 
 
 Critics have sometimes amused themselves, I 
 dare say not unprofitably, by classifying their poets 
 in terms of sex. This one, they tell us, is mascu- 
 line in his art, that one feminine. What they 
 would make of Swinburne I do not know. For 
 with an enormously masculine assertion of the life 
 that was in him he combined a curiously feminine 
 faculty of self-surrender. Not only was his spiritual 
 perception at all times readily impressed and
 
 86 SWINBURNE 
 
 widened by external influences as we have seen, 
 but he would on occasion identify himself in a quite 
 unexpected way with the object of his contempla- 
 tion, catching up not only experience but also quali- 
 ties from without. There is surely the very spirit 
 of Chaucer himself in these lines — 
 
 Along these low pleached lanes, on such a day, 
 So soft a day as this, through shade and sun. 
 With grave glad eyes that scanned the glad wild way, 
 And heart still hovering o'er a song begun, 
 And smile that warmed the world with benison. 
 Our father, lord long since of lordly rhyme. 
 Long since hath haply ridden, when the lime 
 Bloomed broad above him, flowering where he came. 
 Because thy passage once made warm this clime, 
 Our father Chaucer, here we praise thy name — 
 
 as the tenderness and wistfulness of babyhood itself 
 are in the lines on A Baby^s Death and his other 
 exquisite poems on children. 
 
 A little soul scarce fledged for earth 
 Takes wing with heaven again for goal 
 Even while we hailed as fresh from birth 
 A little soul 
 
 The little feet that never trod 
 Earth, never strayed in field or street, 
 What hand leads upward back to God 
 The little feet ? 
 
 Was life so strange, so sad the sky, 
 So strait the wild world's range, 
 
 He would not stay to wonder why 
 Was life so strange ?
 
 LYRIC THOUGHT 87 
 
 And yet this quality was not really accidental to his 
 nature, but characteristic of it. His eagerness for 
 life did not express itself exhaustively in his art. 
 He passed over great tracts of vicarious experience, 
 and was content at the end to record the fact of his 
 travel without setting down the detail of its nature. 
 But the very fact that he was moved to record the 
 experience at all is testimony to its intensity, and 
 that he should frequently do so in the manner of 
 the country through which he had passed is further 
 evidence of an alert and generous receptivity. He 
 was too great a poet to lose anything of his own 
 dignity in doing this, just as he was too liberal a 
 nature to be confined in his reflections. It was 
 Swinburne's distinction not only to praise splen- 
 didly but also to be richly catholic in his enthu- 
 siasms. Wherever he found nobility of life he 
 was ready to worship, no matter what the mani- 
 festation might be. Shakespeare and Chaucer, 
 Browning and Dickens, Tennyson and Villon, 
 Baudelaire and Christina Rossetti, Cromwell and 
 Nell Gwynne, Darwin and Dumas, Burns and 
 Grace Darling, all struck his spirit to fire. He 
 might or might not explain the precise nature of 
 his delight in these manifold adventures, but it was 
 not of vital importance that he should do so. The 
 inspiriting and admirable thing was the exuberant 
 zest for life in all its changing forms. And as it 
 was with men and women, so it was with every-
 
 88 SWINBURNE 
 
 thing. Italy, Greece, republican France, the Eng- 
 land of Drake and Nelson and Sidney, noble 
 rebellion anywhere and everywhere, infancy and 
 honourable age, Russia in subjection and Charles 
 Lamb acclaiming his dramatic poets, — there was 
 instant and ungrudging response to all these. Of 
 nothing but this life was he sure — 
 
 Death, if thou be or be not, as was said. 
 Immortal; if thou make us nought, or we 
 Survive : thy power is made but of our dread. 
 Death, if thou be. 
 
 Thy might is made out of our fear of thee : 
 
 Who fears thee not, hath plucked from off thy head 
 
 The crown of cloud that darkens earth and sea. 
 
 Earth, sea, and sky, as rain or vapour shed, 
 Shall vanish; all the shows of them shall flee : 
 Then shall we know full surely, quick or dead, 
 Death, if thou be. 
 
 But his certainty of this life was full and fearless. 
 His own spirit was heroically active and poured 
 itself out in a new and unforgettable music, and 
 he was eager always to recognise and celebrate a 
 kindred activity in whatever shape or place he 
 might find it. It was no mere occasional fancy 
 but the deep conviction of his nature that made 
 him say, " All singing souls are as one sounding 
 sea."
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 LYRIC ART 
 
 Having examined Swinburne's thought and 
 temper and the nature of his faculty of expression, 
 there remains to be considered the manner, the art, 
 with which he embodied his vision in the material 
 under his control. It is notable that in his lyrical 
 work his most certain successes are achieved in 
 what we may call poems of middle-length. His 
 very short lyrics, though often proving the facility 
 with which he could equal and even excel the 
 shapeliness of a model are not commonly marked 
 by the extreme concentration that is essential to 
 the best of their kind. It is, perhaps, not the least 
 remarkable thing in our literature that the eight- 
 eenth century poets did not write more very short 
 poems of high excellence, for while they were 
 strangely deficient in the imaginative power to carry 
 them to success in the long flights to which they 
 were so often tempted, they had, and freely wasted, 
 another quality that might have produced memor- 
 able results in another direction. They had wit, 
 and it will be found that a certain aristocracy of wit 
 is characteristic of nearly every quite short poem 
 
 89
 
 90 SWINBURNE 
 
 that defies time. It need hardly be said that wit 
 in this sense has nothing to do with humour. It 
 is a quality in life that enables a man to conduct 
 some momentary action with perfect precision, 
 grace, and finality. And so it is in poetry; there 
 are times when the poet receives some swift intui- 
 tive perception, and endeavours to record it without 
 analysis or reference to preceding or subsequent 
 experience. It is then that he may almost be said 
 to stand or fall by the measure of his wit, his ability 
 to enclose the moment in a strictly self-contained 
 yet pregnant and easily authoritative utterance. 
 Herrick, who wrote more exquisite poems of very 
 small compass than any other poet in the language, 
 claims this quality as his chief distinction, and the 
 same quality peculiarly inspires the structure of 
 the sonnet, the form which Rossetti called with 
 such admirable insight a moment's monument. It 
 is the secret of all such poems as " The Lost Mis- 
 tress," " She dwelt among the untrodden ways," 
 and the two or three lyrics by which Lovelace is 
 remembered — 
 
 Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind 
 
 That from the nunnery 
 Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind, 
 
 To wars and arms I f[y. 
 
 True, a new mistress now I chase, 
 
 The first foe in the field; 
 And with a larger faith embrace 
 
 A sword, a horse, a shield.
 
 LYRIC ART 91 
 
 Yet this inconstancy is such 
 
 As you too shall adore; 
 I could not love thee, Dear, so much, 
 
 Loved I not honour more. 
 
 It is not a quality that makes for greatness, but it 
 makes for immortality, and a very short poem 
 can with difficulty, if at all, achieve distinction 
 without it. Lacking it a poet may possess yet 
 more admirable powers, but he will need a wider 
 range for their exercise. Occasionally in a sonnet 
 and in one or two poems of childhood Swinburne 
 approached this precision of style, but he never, 
 I think, fully encompassed it. Even his roundels, 
 deftly and often beautifully wrought as they are 
 in technique, do, in spite of their strictly formal 
 manner, lack this light yet full authority of wit. 
 The craftsman builds the structure with unerring 
 skill, but the poet's spirit is not happily contained 
 within it. These poems affect us not as finely 
 finished jewels of expression and temper, but as 
 fragments of a wider experience arbitrarily im- 
 pressed at any point by the artificer's seal. 
 
 It was when he was free of this, for him, artificial 
 limitation and could freely relate the impulse of the 
 moment to the horizons of his experience that 
 Swinburne found the most natural medium for his 
 genius. Poems such as The Garden of Proserpine^ 
 the choruses of Atalanta, In Memory of Walter 
 Savage Landor, beginning '' Back to the flower-
 
 92 SWINBURNE 
 
 turn, side by side," A Forsaken Garden^ Ave atque 
 Vale, Evening on the Broads and A Swimmer^s 
 Dream, to name a few indifferently, are, if we con- 
 sider the full proportions of poetic art and not par- 
 ticular qualities, his most satisfying achievements. 
 They are neither so short as to curb the desire of 
 his nature to assemble many experiences at the 
 court of one, nor long enough to discover a defect 
 which he could never quite escape when working 
 to more elaborate designs. The poems of which 
 these are instances give us, more fully than work 
 wherein he may at times reach further in some par- 
 ticular directions, the sense of structural rhythm 
 and balance that comes of the superb continence 
 which is the over-soul of art. It is of these poems 
 that we can most confidently say that here Swin- 
 burne achieved that of which the whole is infinitely 
 greater than any part, a claim that he himself hesi- 
 tated to make even for Atalanta in Calydon^ one of 
 the most strictly controlled among his longer works. 
 Writing of his Tristram of Lyonesse Swinburne 
 says, " Even had I ever felt the same impulse to 
 attempt and the same ambition to achieve the 
 enterprise of epic or narrative that I had always felt 
 with regard to lyric or dramatic work, I could never 
 have proposed to myself the lowly and unambitious 
 aim of competition with the work of so notable a 
 contemporary workman in the humbler branch of
 
 LYRIC ART 93 
 
 that line as William Morris." Thus did two 
 poets, between whom to the end existed generous 
 admiration, cry quits, each having challenged the 
 other's art, and each doing so, it would appear, 
 without any profound understanding. For if 
 Morris's regret that Swinburne's art was not more 
 directly related to life was ill-considered, Swin- 
 burne here certainly underrated the value of his 
 friend's chief faculty, one the lack of which troubled 
 so much of his own work. The difficulty with 
 which Swinburne had to contend, not only in poems 
 like Tristram of Lyonesse and The Tale of Balerty 
 but also in many of his longer lyrics, was that he 
 had no real sense of narrative continuity. This 
 sense is not alone the first requirement of the purely 
 narrative poet and an essential requirement of the 
 epic poet; it is a subsidiary but highly important 
 requirement of the dramatic poet always and of the 
 lyrist when he works at any length. That it is 
 necessary to the right conduct of a story is self- 
 evident, but although in drama and the longer 
 forms of lyric it is not the first or even the second 
 quality for which we look, it cannot there be neg- 
 lected without a sacrifice of artistic proportion. It 
 is one and the same sense that inspires the poet to 
 the swift and direct telling of a story and the even 
 chiming between character and action in drama or 
 the consistent development and operation of a
 
 94 SWINBURNE 
 
 mood in a lyric. Swinburne's deficiency in this 
 sense was one of his greatest difficulties in the 
 creation of his plays, as we shall see, but it was 
 ready to assert itself always in his work in poems 
 of more than the middle-length which is a con- 
 venient if not a very precise term. Tristram of 
 Lyonesse and The Tale of Balen are both rich in 
 the qualities that have already been indicated as the 
 poet's general characteristics. They have passion, 
 many passages of magnificent poetry, a deep delight 
 in heroic life and natural beauty and a profound 
 tragic sense, but they do not come to us from Swin- 
 burne as well-told tales. We do not read a great 
 narrative poem simply for the story that it contains; 
 we read it for all those poetic qualities with which 
 Swinburne was so well-endowed, but we do demand 
 that these qualities shall be presented to us through 
 and in terms of the narrative and not independently 
 of it. It is true, moreover, that our memory of 
 such a poem is of these essential characteristics and 
 not of the ordered sequence of events, but at the 
 time of reading this narrative continuity is the 
 reagent whereby the virtues of the poetry are 
 revealed to and fixed in our mind. We remember 
 the rude-witted Carpenter and Alison his wife, the 
 " povre scoler " Nicholas and the " joly Absolon " 
 long after we have forgotten the details of their 
 faring so gaily told by the Miller. The actual
 
 LYRIC ART 95 
 
 story fades away, but we possess for ever the 
 memory of the lusty, jolly humours of these people, 
 the fresh laughter with which Chaucer sets them 
 before us, the mellow tenderness of his observation, 
 the poetry of such things as — 
 
 But of hir song, it was as loude and yerne 
 As any swalwe sittinge on a berne. 
 Thereto she coude skippe and make game, 
 As any kide or calf folwinge his dame. 
 Hir mouth was swete as bragot or the meeth 
 Or hord of apples leyd in hey or heeth. 
 
 But the poetry, the character, and the charity of 
 temper are indelibly written on our consciousness 
 because in the first place they come to us through 
 the flawlessly constructed narrative art of " The 
 Miller's Tale." These things are not presented 
 to us arbitrarily because of their intrinsic worth and 
 beauty, a medley of lovely but unrelated treasures; 
 the story is the common soil out of which they 
 spring to a natural and perfect flowering. Life is 
 so difficult of comprehension because its appearance 
 is such a perplexing assortment of shapes and 
 colours, confused outlines and ravelled threads; it 
 is for this reason that art is the truest of all teachers, 
 for art is life transfigured into form. 
 
 It is just this final authority of form that Swin- 
 burne's longer poems lack, full of enchanting beauty 
 as they are. Tristram of Lyonesse opens with pas- 
 sionately felt descriptions of Iseult and Tristram,
 
 96 SWINBURNE 
 
 an account of the circumstances leading up to 
 Iseult's sailing for Cornwall, and of Brangwain's 
 holding of the love-potion. Although even here 
 the descriptions contain much that might more fitly 
 have arisen from the course of the narrative itself, 
 our interest is, nevertheless, centred upon the 
 people with whom we are to travel and the first 
 movements of their story. But Swinburne then 
 wants to show Tristram and Iseult moving uncon- 
 sciously on the borderland of the love to which they 
 are to become servants; later on he returns to the 
 motive in the lines — 
 
 And the soft speech between them grew again 
 With questionings and records with what men 
 Rose mightiest, and what names for love or fight 
 Shone starriest overhead of queen or knight: 
 
 but he is neither then nor here in the first instance 
 content to leave it at that, or such elaboration of 
 the statement as might add directly to its force. 
 When Tristram, looking on Iseult's beauty, says — 
 
 As this day raises daylight from the dead 
 Might not this face the life of a dead man ? 
 
 and she answers him — 
 
 I pray you not 
 Praise me, but tell me there in Camelot, 
 Saving the queen, who hath most name of fair ? 
 
 we respond at once to the poet's purpose. But the 
 purpose miscarries. Instead of determining that
 
 LYRIC ART 97 
 
 their ensuing speech shall be directly related to the 
 one thing with which we are concerned at the time, 
 the dawning love between these two, he becomes 
 interested in Tristram's record of Morgause and 
 Arthur for its own sake, and there is no more of 
 Tristram and Iseult for five pages. That those 
 five pages are full of splendour does not help us; 
 violence is done to the form which should by the 
 unobtrusive shapeliness of its proportions so attune 
 our understanding as to make it receive the essential 
 qualities of the poem without any conscious adjust- 
 ment. The rhythm of our intelligence is disturbed, 
 and what should be a natural growth of perception 
 becomes an unrelated series of experiences. Such 
 instances recur throughout the poem, and the result 
 is that our memory of Tristram of Lyonesse is of 
 isolated pictures and a pervading intensity of pas- 
 sion rather than of clear-cut presentments of 
 Tristram and the two Iseults. The art has not 
 insinuated the characters into our being, and many 
 of the particular beauties that we remember are 
 independent alike of them and of their tale. 
 
 Swinburne said that he would be content to have 
 his " station as a lyric poet in the higher sense of 
 the term " determined by his ode to Athens and 
 The Armada^ but these two lyrics, each approach- 
 ing four hundred lines — most of which are the 
 equivalent of two — in length, really have the same
 
 98 SWINBURNE 
 
 looseness of intellectual, as apart from technical, 
 structure that marks his poems that are definitely 
 narrative in intention. Here again there is much 
 that none but a great poet could have written, but 
 the effect upon us is not a unity of impression, but 
 a multiplicity of impressions. These longer poems, 
 failing as they do to comply with one of the most 
 vital conditions of art, are yet of real imaginative 
 value to us since they do still liberate our sense of 
 beauty; but they leave that sense uncontrolled, and 
 so partly unsatisfied. They quicken all our finest 
 faculties, but they are not generous in providing 
 material upon which these faculties may be 
 exercised, and so we undergo spiritual expansion 
 without the necessary complement of spiritual 
 discipline. 
 
 It should here be noticed that in Swinburne's 
 plays although, as will presently be seen, this de- 
 fective apprehension of the nature of form is appar- 
 ent, it does not operate in quite the same way. 
 Tristram and Iseult, to continue the argument 
 from the same poem, have a being that is primarily 
 lyric and only secondarily dramatic. That is to 
 say that if we expel from our minds all the pas- 
 sages in the poem not related to the central narra- 
 tive, and link up the essential parts into some 
 unity, we shall still find that the protagonists live 
 chiefly as separate and unrelated entities, and only
 
 LYRIC ART 99 
 
 accidentally in conflict with each other, and thus 
 do not prove themselves in terms which we most 
 readily remember. A chain is an easier thing to 
 keep than a number of disconnected links, and 
 self-existent character is as difficult to realise as the 
 disconnected narrative itself. But in the plays, and 
 especially in the great trilogy, the case is different. 
 The continuity is as uncertain there as here, but if / 
 we detach the central drama from its impediments ^ 
 we find that the protagonists, although they are 
 still too prone to lyric independence, do primarily 
 exist in terms of conflict with each other, and it is 
 precisely this conflict that acts as acid on the grav- 
 ing-plate. Tristram of Lyonesse and the trilogy, 
 taking these as the principal examples of the longer 
 poems and the plays, have a common defect, but 
 through this other circumstance Mary Stuart re- 
 mains with us in memorable individuality whilst 
 Iseult is no more than the shadow cast of many 
 beauties. 
 
 It was in this matter that there was always a 
 danger of Swinburne's deep enthusiasm for and 
 wide knowledge of literature betraying instead of 
 profiting him. He rightly considered the work of 
 his poets as a rich and living source of experience, 
 being scornful of the " dullard's distinction be- 
 tween books and life." But whilst the poet who 
 refuses to recognise that all past discovery is open 
 
 H 2
 
 loo SWINBURNE 
 
 territory wilfully limits his experience, the poet 
 who allows the inspiration of example to pass 
 beyond the resources of language and the scope of 
 vision into the region of actual form is in imminent 
 danger of impairing his authority. It is not neces- 
 sary, indeed it is impossible, that he should con- 
 stantly be inventing new forms, but in adopting an 
 old form he must do so for the sole reason that his 
 instinct chimes with the instinct of generations. 
 For this reason a poet may still write without 
 loss of dignity in, say, heroic couplets, whilst the 
 reproduction of a newly invented form will almost 
 inevitably betray itself as an imitation. All experi- 
 ence, even all language, is common property, and 
 may fitly become the content of art, but form is the 
 art itself, and it must spring directly of the poet's 
 own adventure, whether it be adventure into wholly 
 unknown ways or into the not less exciting ways of 
 traditional instinct; mere acceptance it must not be. 
 His own impulse may — in the case of nearly every 
 great poet it has done so — lead him to the use of 
 forms of which he is the heir : which have received 
 the approval of the long succession of his forebears. 
 However little or much he may modify them to 
 his own needs they will, if he use them through 
 impulse and not through will, be as distinctively 
 his own as, say, the manner of his gait. Or he 
 may seek to create forms quite new; they will
 
 LYRIC ART loi 
 
 almost certainly be imperfect, but they may be far 
 from valueless, being the seed of much rich 
 growth. However this may be, they can never, in 
 themselves, serve his successors as models with any 
 fitness. The poet writing heroic couplets is not 
 writing from a model, but in the natural manner 
 of his birthright, whilst Swinburne could hardly 
 have written the last scenes of Marino Falter o 
 without the bad example of Chapman's dramatic 
 construction in his mind, nor would he, if his sense 
 of form had been as great as his other poetic 
 faculties, have defended Tristram of Lyonesse so 
 successfully where it needed no defence, and so 
 ineffectually where it was weakest. It had been 
 objected that there was " an irreconcilable incon- 
 gruity between the incidents of the old legend and 
 the meditations on man and nature, life and death, 
 chance and destiny, assigned to a typical hero of 
 chivalrous romance." But, argues the poet — 
 
 " The age when these romances actually lived and flourished 
 side by side by the reviving legends of Thebes and Troy, not 
 in the crude and bloodless forms of Celtic and archaic fancy 
 but in the ampler and manlier developments of Teutonic and 
 mediaeval imagination, w^as the age of Dante and of Chaucer : 
 an age in which men were only too prone to waste their time 
 on the twin sciences of astrology and theology, to expend their 
 energies in the jingle of pseudosophy or the morass of meta- 
 physics. There is surely nothing more incongruous or anachronic 
 in the soliloquy of Tristram after his separation from Iseult 
 than in the lecture of Theseus after the obsequies of Arcite."
 
 I02 SWINBURNE 
 
 It is difficult to see the pertinence of the actual 
 habit of men in that age to the question of art, but 
 otherwise Swinburne in this passage pleads con- 
 vincingly the poet's right — he might have called it 
 a necessity — of choral comment and elaboration 
 through the mouths of his characters or in any way 
 that he may choose. But his poem needed no de- 
 fence on this ground. Anachronism may moment- 
 arily set the reason agog to the derangement of 
 an imaginative perception that is not quite sound, 
 but it has never in itself been an offence against 
 art. Whether Theseus could or could not in fact 
 have thought and spoken of life as Chaucer makes 
 him does not matter in the least; the only import- 
 ant thing is that his oration over the dead Arcite 
 is related by natural artistic growth to the pre- 
 ceding development of the poem, albeit the voice 
 is Chaucer's. But Swinburne need not have 
 advanced Theseus in vindication of Tristram, for 
 the test of unity remains the only one that we 
 can make. Nor does Tristram on this occasion 
 need any vindication; his passionate and heroic 
 lament after leaving Iseult is full of the stuff of 
 Swinburne's own reading of love, but it is still 
 strictly knit up with the story, and in that it is 
 finally justified; Swinburne's defence is sound but 
 unnecessary. When, however, he turns to defend 
 the real defects of his poem, defence is equally
 
 LYRIC ART 103 
 
 unnecessary because it is impossible from the out- 
 set that it should succeed. He sought to write, he 
 tells us, " not in the epic or romantic form of sus- 
 tained or continuous narrative, but mainly through 
 a succession of dramatic scenes or pictures with 
 descriptive settings or backgrounds. ... It is 
 only in our native northern form of narrative 
 poetry, on the old and unrivalled model of the 
 English ballad, that I can claim to have done any 
 work of the kind worth reference." If Swinburne 
 thought that the aim of any considerable poet in 
 "continuous narrative" was to present a succes- 
 sion of events without any choral or reflective 
 interludes, he was as surely mistaken as in sup- 
 posing that an English ballad-maker could have 
 tolerated such digressions as that of Tristram tell- 
 ing the story of Morgause. The choice of method 
 is of comparative unimportance, but the observance 
 of unity is as essential in one form as another. 
 
 I't was in this way that Swinburne's wide literary 
 knowledge was his danger. His innate sense of 
 form was not such as to achieve the quality of 
 flawless proportion in a poem of more than middle- 
 length, and he was apt to content himself in this 
 failure by a rather vague reference to models that 
 he approached deliberately rather than by inherited 
 instinct. Whether the model was 2:ood or bad he 
 was, by reason of his own defective impulse in this
 
 I04 SWINBURNE 
 
 one matter, in equal danger. He could instance 
 the ballad, violate its most obvious virtues of 
 cohesion and directness, and remain quite uncon- 
 scious of the transgression; or he could instance 
 Chapman, work truly and deftly to a bad example, 
 and suppose that to err in company with a poet of 
 great parts was to achieve. This is not to forget 
 that in a great number of his shorter poems Swin- 
 burne enclosed his memorable vision and mastery 
 of language within a form that satisfies and leaves 
 the critical faculty unstirred, nor to fail in gratitude 
 for the loveliness that is not so enclosed, remaining 
 as it does beyond reach of any but a poet whose 
 claims to greatness are manifest even in his failures. 
 It is, perhaps, but to assert that in the greater 
 designs of his genius Swinburne's work, richly 
 dowered as it is in so many ways, does not attain 
 to the perfect poise and almost incredible beauty 
 of controlled sufficiency that upon a large scale 
 have been encompassed only by the few supreme 
 imaginations of the world.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE DRAMAS 
 
 Swinburne's work began and ended with the 
 drama. His first volume of poetry, published in 
 i86oj was The ^ueen Mother and Rosamund^ his 
 last, published in 1908, was The Duke of Gandia. 
 His measureless enthusiasm for and profound know- 
 ledge of Elizabethan literature naturally enough 
 turned the poet in him to the desire of worthy 
 emulation. His earliest work, as he himself tells 
 us, bore evidence in every line of an ambition to do 
 something " not utterly unworthy of a young 
 countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster 
 the pupil of Shakespeare, in a line of work which 
 those three poets had left as a possibly unattainable 
 example for ambitious Englishmen." The ambi- 
 tion was spirited, but the conditions under which 
 it worked were such as to make fulness of success 
 impossible. That Swinburne could plumb the 
 depths of Shakespeare's poetry is clear, but that he 
 grasped the principles of his master's dramatic con- 
 struction there is no evidence in his own work. It 
 
 105
 
 io6 SWINBURNE 
 
 is, indeed, scarcely conceivable that there could 
 have been, for however readily he may have been 
 able to reconstruct in his mind the performance of 
 an Elizabethan masterpiece at the Globe or the 
 Black Friars, this was a very different thing from 
 shaping his own genius to a like pattern. Had he 
 been a lesser poet and retained his masterly critical 
 sympathy, he might have achieved tolerable, even 
 striking imitations of his models. But mere 
 imitation was too lowly an aim to excite a poetic 
 impulse so individual as his, and that he should be 
 able to recapture the mood that created the Eliza- 
 bethan form was impossible, since the conditions 
 inseparable from the mood were no longer realis- 
 able to the creative part of his intelligence. And 
 the drama is more radically affected by conditions 
 than, perhaps, any other art. It is of far more 
 importance that a poet should realise the poet in 
 Shakespeare and the men who were only less than 
 his peers than that he should re-imagine, as a 
 creator, their constructive impulse, supposing that 
 to be possible, for whilst a play containing fine 
 dramatic poetry and yet being deficient in form 
 may miss complete achievement and at the same 
 time have qualities of permanent value, a play 
 having no merit save deft constructive imitation is 
 valueless from the first. But drama great at all 
 points is great both in the printed page and in the
 
 THE DRAMAS 107 
 
 theatre, and it is its greatness in the theatre which 
 is governed by constantly changing conditions. If 
 it greatly satisfies the conditions of the theatre 
 at the time of its creation, later ages can adapt their 
 own conditions to its needs without serious loss, or, 
 in other words, if its form is essentially right at the 
 outset it will be essentially right for ever. But this 
 essential rightness at the beginning implies a com- 
 plete correspondence with the conditions of the 
 moment. Shakespeare's theatre contributed largely 
 to the formative excellence of his plays, and the 
 excellence remains, but it is futile to seek any help 
 in formative excellence to-day from the conditions 
 that Shakespeare knew, because our poets neither 
 know with any precision nor, as poets, want to 
 know what those conditions were. We can learn 
 much from Shakespeare, humbly contemplating his 
 salty imagination of life, but we can find a living 
 dramatic form that shall be great in the theatre only 
 by shaping and absorbing the conditions of the 
 theatre that we know. Swinburne, like Tennyson 
 and other poets of his age, confessed that his plays 
 were not intended for the modern stage, but the 
 confession was not one of serene detachment but 
 of weakness, and, incidentally, a severe indictment 
 of the modern stage. It is, perhaps, possible that 
 a poet should write great poetic drama, answering 
 at all points to the requirements of the art, and yet
 
 io8 SWINBURNE 
 
 find no theatre ready for him, and have to leave it 
 to his readers to give his plays visual performance, 
 unexampled though such an achievement would 
 be. But the test of such visual performance would 
 be as complete as that of the theatre, if the percep- 
 tions of his readers were truly quick. However 
 this might be, the fact remains that the dramatists 
 who have given to their work greatness of imagina- 
 tion in substance and also greatness of formative 
 design have had a close knowledge of the conditions 
 of the theatre in their day. Shakespeare, Jonson, 
 Moliere, Ibsen, Synge, to come no nearer to our 
 own day, have all known the theatre as the weaver 
 knows his loom. The simile is not without its 
 significance. For the loom is essential only while 
 the fabric is being woven, and the theatre is only 
 essential until the play is made. Once created, the 
 play will find its audience most aptly in the theatre, 
 but its greatness is no longer dependent upon the 
 stage. The central point of the whole matter is 
 that one aspect of the greatness in the first place 
 can be achieved only by an observance of the con- 
 ditions of the theatre, and although it would not 
 seem to be a radical necessity that the poet should 
 have an actual knowledge of the stage to ensure 
 the fulfilment of these conditions, the evidence of 
 dramatic literature shows us that he has almost 
 invariably done so.
 
 THE DRAMAS 109 
 
 When Swinburne was writing the theatre that 
 we associate with great dramatic literature did not 
 exist in England. Had he and his fellow-poets 
 chosen to create it they might have done so and 
 seen a new race of dramatists, for at least four of 
 them, Browning, Tennyson, Morris and Swin- 
 burne himself, had in them elements of dramatic 
 poetry that united with this other element of great 
 drama might have made — or shall we say hastened ? 
 — a new golden age to be set, with its own dis- 
 tinction, beside the Elizabethan. But, save for a 
 few desultory excursions with fashionable and 
 famous actors as their guides, they were wholly 
 incurious about a stage that, as it then was, had 
 nothing to attract a poet. So they attempted the 
 hopeless task of substituting a model, shaped under 
 conditions of which their creative impulse knew 
 next to nothing, for the discipline of direct experi- 
 ence, and partial failure at least was the inevitable 
 penalty. 
 
 The besetting fault of both The Queen Mother 
 and Rosamund is that the subsidiary characters 
 and action, which should bear constantly upon the 
 main characters and action, continually extend the 
 boundaries of the scheme entirely on their own 
 account. Swinburne's diverse and remote his- 
 torical knowledge enabled him to introduce a great 
 variety of colour into his lyrical poetry, but it is
 
 no 
 
 SWINBURNE 
 
 merely a snare to him as a dramatic poet. In Rosa- 
 mundy for example, a great deal of the scenes 
 between Eleanor and Bouchard must be unintelli- 
 gible to nine readers out of ten, and even if it is 
 intelligible it has the even graver fault of being 
 wholly uninteresting because wholly unrelated to 
 the central drama. It was, presumably, Swinburne's 
 intention to intensify Eleanor's character, but the 
 only intensification of character that we can admit 
 in drama is that arising out of the conduct of the 
 drama itself. Eleanor concerns us solely in her 
 relation to Henry and Rosamund, and we must 
 learn what manner of woman she is from the course 
 of that relation, not from Bouchard's arbitrary 
 reminiscences about Guerrat of Sallieres, who has 
 nothing whatever to do with the play. Again, in 
 The Queen Mother the central drama is the inter- 
 relation of Charles, Catherine and Denise. The 
 subsidiary characters all contribute in some measure 
 to the essential conflict between these three, but 
 they also have innumerable little affairs of their 
 own to settle. Fabian and Rosencrantz and Bar- 
 dolph exist only in terms of the great tragic or 
 comic figures round whom they revolve; they are 
 really implied or reflected attributes of those 
 figures, touchstones by which they reveal them- 
 selves. But Yolande and La Rochefoucauld and 
 Guise exist sometimes in these justly imagined
 
 THE DRAMAS iii 
 
 terms, sometimes in the terms of a being that does 
 not pass from them within to the central drama but 
 outwards to a world of their own independent 
 experience. We can never be sure of their not 
 denying their prime artistic purpose; they may at 
 any moment disown their strict subjection to the 
 main design, and so disturb the dramatic balance. 
 That the central figures themselves and their action 
 are or are not in turn subjected to a classically con- 
 ceived plot is another matter altogether. Jonson 
 did so subject them. Shakespeare did not. But 
 it is clearly an essential of all drama, whether the 
 aim of the dramatist be to give perfect shape to his 
 central fable or to give uncurbed expansion to his 
 central characters, that all contributory forces shall 
 be directed to a single end and not to their own 
 individual concerns. The dramatist in creation 
 should know nothing of his characters but their 
 development in relation to the immediate dramatic 
 design. If he becomes reminiscent about some 
 irrelevant historical past, or allows them to develop 
 interests which deflect them from the purpose in 
 hand, he destroys the formative excellence of his 
 work, as Swinburne did in these plays. This 
 restriction does not in any way interfere with the 
 poet's right of choric commentary upon the pro- 
 gress of his drama; it merely ensures that this 
 commentary, however general it may be in its
 
 112 SWINBURNE 
 
 scope, shall, like the manifestation of character and 
 the sequence of event, arise definitely from the 
 nature of the chief design and be a corporate part 
 of it. 
 
 Swinburne's reputation as a lyrist has been, and 
 is likely to be, far wider than that of Swinburne 
 the dramatic poet. And yet his plays from the 
 beginning have great qualities, and it will be a 
 misfortune for poetry if time neglects these because 
 of their attendant defects of art. In these first 
 plays the verse is often worthy of " a countryman 
 of Marlowe," vigorous and of the right heroic 
 volume. There are passages where the poet's lyric 
 instinct so subdues the nature of the blank verse 
 line as to make the absence of rhyme seem a strange 
 omission — 
 
 King Henry. 
 
 I will go now that both our lips are sweet 
 And lips most peaceable; so shall we sleep 
 Till next the honey please them, with a touch 
 Soft in our mouths; sing once and I am gone. 
 
 Rosamund. 
 
 I will sing something heavy in the word 
 That it may serve us; help me to such words. 
 The marigolds have put me in my song, 
 They shine yet redly where you made me it. 
 
 That has a flavour either too sweet or not sweet 
 enough, but we find the master in many passages 
 such as this —
 
 THE DRAMAS 113 
 
 But this Bartholomew shall be inscribed 
 Beyond the first; the latter speech of time 
 Shall quench and make oblivious war upon 
 The former and defeated memories, 
 New histories teaching it. For there will be 
 Blood on the moist untimely lip of death, 
 And in the dusty hunger of his bones 
 A sudden marrow shall refresh itself 
 And spread to perfect sinew. 
 
 And there is something of the formal and rather 
 fantastic wisdom that is to be found in all the great 
 dramatic poets in such lines as — 
 
 It is the custom and grey note of age 
 To turn consideration wrong way out 
 Until it show like fear — 
 
 as there is profound and strictly dramatic poignancy 
 in — 
 
 Why, I have slain 
 The chiefest pearl o' the world, the perfect rule 
 To measure all sweet things; now even to unseat God 
 Were a slight work; 
 
 and this admirable restraint can be matched on 
 occasion by an equally admirable prodigality, as 
 where Eleanor tells Henry that she has 
 
 Enriched the ragged ruin of your plans 
 With purple patched into the serge and thread 
 Of your low state; you were my pensioner; 
 There's not a taste of England in your breath 
 But I did pay for. 
 
 Swinburne, in short, even in his first plays, if he 
 could not achieve great drama, frequently encom- 
 passed the manner of the great dramatic poet. 
 There is, too, in these plays, an instinct for 
 I
 
 114 SWINBURNE 
 
 character for which, naturally enough, the lyrical 
 work does not prepare us. The objects of his lyric 
 song were the abstract qualities of men and women 
 corresponding either positively or negatively to 
 qualities of his own nature. Heroism and hate 
 in men, voluptuous passion and unfaith and physical 
 delight in women, his lyrics are of such things as 
 these. But Charles is not weakness nor madness 
 nor affection, but a king who is at once weak, 
 affectionate and mad; nor is Denise passion or ten- 
 derness or lightness, but a light, passionate, tender 
 woman. Catherine, too, with one or two lapses 
 which are inconsistent because they are not con- 
 vincing, as where she wishes the woman in the 
 massacre " might get safe," being '' some poor 
 man's wife," lives in her abominable cruelty. And 
 many of the smaller characters, although their 
 development comes of a wrong purpose, do grow 
 into distinctive personalities. Cino is rather a 
 contrived eccentricity than a personality, but 
 Yolande, Coligny, and one or two of the others 
 have breath. It is not always so, even with the 
 central people of the drama. Rosamund, for 
 example, who in spite of her tendency to lyrical 
 diffuseness interests and moves us as a lover, 
 becomes an unintelligible shadow in her death 
 scene with Eleanor. That she should then speak 
 and act in a way for which the earlier part of the
 
 THE DRAMAS 115 
 
 play has not at all prepared us is a fault against art, 
 but not necessarily against character; but that the 
 new aspect should be inconsistent and uncertain 
 within itself is a fault against both. But Rosa- 
 mund is an exception, not characteristic of these 
 plays. The people are generally conceived with 
 definiteness of being, and we remember what 
 manner of men they were when we have forgotten 
 the details of their conduct. Swinburne's failure 
 at some points as a dramatist has done much to 
 divert attention from his merits, but this is a 
 highly important aspect of his genius for which 
 we must turn to the plays, and one with which he 
 is not commonly credited. 
 
 His sense of drama in the conduct of his work, 
 as apart from his sense of drama in character, is 
 curiously uneven. We do not ask for continuous 
 tension in the action of drama, which cancels itself 
 and becomes no tension at all. But relaxation is not 
 at all the same thing as dissipation, and Swinburne's 
 action frequently frays into thin threads that curl 
 backward or outward or in any direction but for- 
 ward. It is one thing to show us that La Roche- 
 foucauld can be a garrulous bore, but quite another 
 to make him bore us, and when Teligny cries out 
 " This will outlive all patience " we agree with 
 him, nor can we be quite without sympathy for 
 the attendant who says to Denise — 
 12
 
 ii6 SWINBURNE 
 
 I cannot taste the purpose of your speech. 
 Pray you lie down. 
 
 But against these must be set such magnificently 
 contrived moments as the assault on Coligny's 
 room — 
 
 CoLIGNY. 
 
 What noise is there ? 
 
 (Firing outside). 
 Give me a light. 
 
 Guise (within). 
 
 Nay, but get you first in : 
 Throw the knave out at window. 
 
 COLIGNY. 
 
 Yea, my Guise ? 
 Then are the sickles in this corn, I doubt. 
 
 Guise (within). 
 This way, men, this ! 
 
 CoLIGNY. 
 
 Not so; the right hand, sirs. 
 
 It was no common dramatic sense that knew this 
 to be the exact note and moment on which to close 
 the scene. The dramatic and verbal economy is 
 perfectly balanced, and suggests the heights of con- 
 structive excellence that might have been possible 
 to Swinburne with more fortunate discipline. 
 Sometimes the conduct of a whole scene is scarcely 
 less admirable. The one leading up to Cino's 
 death could hardly move with a stricter or more
 
 THE DRAMAS 117 
 
 powerful art. From this point, indeed, a new life 
 comes into the whole play. It is as though the 
 accomplishment of one definite action had riveted 
 the poet's attention to the central course of his 
 drama, and although the control is not perfectly 
 sustained to the end, the quickening of intention 
 from this point interests us as the earlier part of 
 the play has failed to do save in its accidental 
 qualities. 
 
 But over all particular defects and merits in 
 The Queen Mother and Rosamund there is already 
 the general stamp of greatness. The art is often 
 strangely errant, but it is never the art of a small 
 poet; the moods sometimes lack a right strictness 
 of discipline, but they are never the moods of a 
 small man. There is authority always in the 
 manner, and confident if restless strength in the 
 spirit. If Swinburne's achievement as a dramatist 
 was less a fulfilment of his aim than his achieve- 
 ment as a lyrist, or if the aim was less happily 
 conceived, his first appearance as a poet shows, 
 nevertheless, that zest for strong life that pervaded 
 all his dramatic work and was even more naturally 
 a part of it than of his lyrical mastery. The 
 faults of these first plays are manifest and not to 
 be defended, but equally manifest are the delight in 
 fierce and unbridled nature and the profound con- 
 tempt alike for flippancy and expedient morality,
 
 ii8 SWINBURNE 
 
 that so distinguished the poets whom he emu- 
 lated. However impatient we may be at times 
 with the artist, we can never fail in respect for the 
 material in which he is working; our complaint is 
 that the material is so often unshaped into the just 
 proportions of art. And if this greatness is evident 
 in The Queen Mother and Rosamund, it is so 
 much more in the trilogy begun with Chastelard 
 in his undergraduate days and passing through 
 Bothwell to its completion in Mary Stuart nearly 
 twenty years later. Whatever may be the flaws 
 and failures of this monumental eff^ort, it is quite 
 clearly the work of a very great poet. To dismiss 
 it merely as an unfortunate waste of labour, as has 
 been done, seems to me to be an idle impertinence. 
 It is quite reasonable for him who so feels to assert 
 that he is content to accept the lyrist and neglect 
 the dramatist, not finding in the plays adequate 
 compensation for their defects. But this is some- 
 thing other than criticism; if criticism concerns 
 itself with the plays at all, it must define for us 
 what those defects are, and it must at least be 
 willing to acknowledge excellence if it be there. 
 And excellence there is, of a rare, in some direc- 
 tions, perhaps, of an incomparable kind. To the 
 writing of this trilogy Swinburne gave some of the 
 best years of his poetic energy. It was the product 
 not of a momentary aberration of his artistic dis-
 
 THE DRAMAS 119 
 
 cretion, but of a design deliberately conceived and 
 ungrudgingly fulfilled. Considered as a whole it 
 is, perhaps, a failure; certainly it is far from being 
 complete in success. But it is a failure in spite of 
 many splendid and memorable qualities. 
 
 His plays, said Swinburne, were written for per- 
 formance in the Elizabethan theatres. It is just 
 possible that Chastelard would have survived the 
 ordeal, though improbable; Bothwell and Mary 
 Stuartj apart from fragments, certainly would not 
 have done so. The first superficial objection to 
 be made to the trilogy is that it is too long as a 
 whole and in its parts. A great audience is eager 
 for poetry, but not for speech after speech varying 
 from fifty to four hundred lines. The reason why 
 it will not accept these will be considered later, but 
 it may be said here that this is the chief manifesta- 
 tion of the defect that does destroy the fitness 
 of these plays for the theatre, even our imagined 
 Elizabethan or mid-twentieth century theatre, and 
 so destroys their final artistic integrity. In examin- 
 ing these plays we shall find, I think, that all their 
 imperfections converge to this result, and that their ^ 
 admirable qualities are such as to hold us even 
 though not controlled to their proper end. 
 
 At the beginning of Chastelard Swinburne trans- 
 cribed this passage from Maundevile : "Another 
 Yle is there toward the Northe, in the See Ocean,
 
 I20 SWINBURNE 
 
 where that ben fulle cruele and ful evele Wommen 
 of Nature : and thei hau precious Stones in hire 
 Eyen; and thei ben of that kynde, that zif they 
 beholden ony man, thei sleu him anon with the 
 beholdynge, as dothe the Basilisk." That was the 
 text of the poet's conception, with Mary Stuart as 
 its exemplar. But Swinburne was a fine historical 
 scholar as well as poet, and he appends to the last 
 play of his trilogy a brilliant essay that displays not 
 only the poet's understanding of his protagonist's 
 character but also the scholar's exact knowledge of 
 her history. The conflict between these two in- 
 stincts was evident in The Queen Mother, disturb- 
 ing the dramatic art at moments, but in the trilogy 
 it becomes a constant and frequently disastrous 
 element. The poet's intention of showing us, in 
 a cycle of plays, a beautiful and generous but 
 terrible woman, whom to love was to be destroyed, 
 was full of promise. His work succeeds just so 
 far as this design is achieved, and its failure is, at 
 every point, a departure from this design to another. 
 If Swinburne had but sung with single purpose 
 from the impulse for which he found so apt a word 
 in Maundevile,and brought into the terrible beauty 
 of one central light the successive tragedies of 
 Chastelard and Rizzio, Darnley and Bothwell and 
 Anthony Babington, with the passive and rather 
 sinister figure of Mary Beaton passing from the
 
 THE DRAMAS 121 
 
 first bitterness through years of lightly sullen 
 service to the final act of revenge, and the tragic 
 retribution of Mary Stuart herself at the end of all, 
 he would, with the mastery that in other respects 
 he showed in this work, have produced a master- 
 piece unexampled for three centuries. But over 
 this design he spread an immense diffusion of 
 wholly irrelevant embellishment, or, more exactly, 
 he let his artistic design become inextricably con- 
 fused with another design that was not artistic at 
 all. He developed, with consummate power and 
 fulness, the tragic story of the woman whose eyes 
 " slew with their beholding," but he could not 
 refrain from developing at the same time the precise 
 political history of Mary Stuart, and not only of 
 Mary Stuart herself, but also of large concurrent 
 interests that were more or less directed by her 
 influence. It cannot be held that Swinburne's 
 purpose was to continue the tradition of the Eliza- 
 bethan chronicle-plays. The intention of Swin- 
 burne the poet was quite clearly, not only by the 
 curiously suggestive testimony of that foreword 
 from Maundevile, but by the far weightier evidence 
 of the position of the strength in the plays them- 
 selves, to write the tragedy of Mary Stuart and 
 her lovers. Those parts of the trilogy that are 
 not concerned with this central intention are not 
 the work of Swinburne the poet at all, but of
 
 122 SWINBURNE 
 
 Swinburne the exact student of history. There is 
 not a trace of the chronicle-poet in the whole work. 
 The great chronicle-plays use history for many 
 purposes, but never for its own. As in tragedy 
 the poet shows his men and women moving through 
 the vast spaces of spiritual conflict and the gloom 
 of spiritual bewilderment, so in chronicle he may 
 find in history an epic massiveness of circumstance 
 against which to try them; or as in tragedy, again, 
 he may show men triumphing over fierce spiritual 
 sorrows, so in chronicle he may draw from history 
 the spectacle of men daring and enduring greatly 
 against all the forces of tyranny, and he may, of 
 course, equally in the spiritual circumstance of 
 tragedy or the historical circumstance of chronicle, 
 find opportunity for realising the mean in character 
 as well as the heroic. But in either case the poet 
 uses history solely as a reagent for the creations of 
 his art, shaping it to this end and having no other 
 interest in it. Richard the Second is a tragic 
 figure, but tragic definitely in his relation to the 
 history of which he is the centre. Mary Stuart, as 
 we see her in these plays, is also a tragic figure, 
 but tragic in her relation to her lovers and Mary 
 Beaton. The life of the poet's tragedy is urgent 
 enough to break through all the historian's restric- 
 tions, but the mass of historical detail that is im- 
 posed upon it is constantly tending to choke instead
 
 THE DRAMAS 123 
 
 of quickening it. The history is there for its own 
 sake, not at the bidding of art. So long as the 
 tragic interest is maintained we can struggle 
 through the history for its splendid sake, but once 
 it is set aside the work becomes a weariness. 
 Chastelard holds us to the end in spite of all dis- 
 tractions, as does Bothwell through the destruction 
 of Rizzio and Darnley up to the subjection of 
 Bothwell in the third scene of the fourth act, when 
 the rest of the play is under the historian's control, 
 the poet asserting himself at occasional moments 
 only. In Mary Stuart it is the same; the last faint 
 but deadly flame of Mary's enchantment, destroy- 
 ing Babington as it had destroyed so many before, 
 and the relentless consummation of Mary Beaton's 
 jealousy are tragic issues; but the whole process of 
 the Queen's intrigues with her friends and foreign 
 courts and her political duel with Ehzabeth is not 
 tragic in the terms of art at all. There are inevit- 
 ably scenes, such as the trial in Fotheringhay Castle, 
 that have a different kind of interest by reason of 
 their familiar historic association, and there are, 
 also, continually echoes of the tragic interest sound- 
 ing through the superfluous history of the play. 
 But the history in the trilogy, save in so far as it 
 influences the tragedy of passion, does not interest 
 us, because it is in conflict with the art. In Swin- 
 burne's essay it does interest us greatly, but he
 
 124 SWINBURNE 
 
 committed the grave artistic error of supposing 
 that the faculty which he there displayed so bril- 
 liantly could be fitly directed to his art as a dramatic 
 poet. The result may be looked at from another 
 angle : no one could reconstruct the facts of history 
 from Richard 11 with any certainty of design or 
 completeness, but it would only be a matter of 
 labour to set out from Swinburne's trilogy, with 
 the utmost precision of detail, Mary Stuart's per- 
 sonal and political history from the date when 
 Chastelard opens to her death and during much of 
 her earlier life. 
 
 It is this ill-considered extension in the scope of 
 the work that results in the defects obvious to the 
 most superficial observation. When a character 
 speaks he has not only to think of the utterance 
 pertinent to the dramatic moment, which may need 
 two lines, but also of the conduct of history to its 
 next point, which may need twenty. And this 
 historical method becomes a habit, respected often 
 even when it is not necessary to the occasion. It 
 is the duty as well as the privilege of the dramatic 
 poet to express, on occasion, not only what the lips 
 would say but also what the spirit would experi- 
 ence, but it is equally his duty to substitute com- 
 pression for elaboration, to embody all detail in one 
 swift and essential word. Mary sends a message 
 to Bothwell; she wishes to reassure him of her
 
 THE DRAMAS 125 
 
 loyalty and to encourage his and to send him news 
 of her dealings with Darnley. The essential 
 matter of her speech might, at a liberal estimate, 
 take twenty lines, but Swinburne with an amazing 
 catalogue of detail and repetition, extends it to a 
 hundred and seventy-five. This diffuseness is not 
 one with the diffuseness that marks some of his 
 lyrical work; it is not the ceremonious unfolding 
 of a large metrical scheme nor the delighted sur- 
 render to the mere seduction of his more vivacious 
 lyric forms. It is simply a bad habit, the reflection 
 of a necessity that he imposed upon himself with 
 as strange a laxity of artistic judgment as ever beset 
 a great poet. His sense of humour should have 
 saved the situation when at the end of that speech 
 of Mary's he found himself making the messenger 
 say — 
 
 Shall I say nothing of Lord Darnley more ? 
 
 Swinburne in these plays, then, makes upon us 
 the apparently unreasonable demand that we should 
 sift the tragic art, which is the work of the poet, 
 from the records of a historical scholar who in- 
 truded himself where he had no business. Unrea- 
 sonable it may be, but since the gain is ours more 
 than Swinburne's, complaint is scarcely to the point. 
 Our critical intelligence tells us that the artistic 
 perfection of his trilogy has been irremediably
 
 126 SWINBURNE 
 
 destroyed, and by what means, but our love 
 for poetry may induce us to rescue what may be 
 from the ruins. If so, it will be well rewarded, 
 for it is unlikely that any great artistic design 
 which in its complete form must unhesitatingly be 
 pronounced a failure ever has contained within that 
 failure so rich and lovely an achievement. The 
 sifting is not difficult; that it really needs no effort 
 of will at all, any one who has read the plays 
 through will know, as he will also know that the 
 experiment is beyond question worth while. The 
 actual reading is, much of it, a wearisome labour, 
 but the memory is a pure delight. For in the 
 memory art comes into its undivided supremacy, 
 ' and nothing else remains. The mass of irrelevant 
 ■ and perplexing detail falls away, leaving the shapely 
 and radiant creation of a great tragic poet. It still 
 has flaws, but they are tolerable flaws, native to the 
 art and, save for that unfortunate habit of detailed 
 expansion, not forced upon it by contact with some- 
 thing alien. Chief of these flaws, perhaps, is a 
 tendency in the poet to mistake dramatic perception 
 of character for dramatic presentation of character. 
 It is one of the most} necessary as it is one of the most 
 difficult of the dramatic poet's duties to remember 
 that the impression that a character makes upon his 
 audience should not necessarily be the same as that 
 made on a conflicting character within the play, and
 
 THE DRAMAS 127 
 
 yet that he must in the first place allow himself no 
 other means of thus admitting us into his con- 
 fidence beyond the actual conflict itself. What he 
 may do through some choric element of the play 
 after the conflict, or much less fitly before the 
 conflict, is another matter; but during the conflict 
 he may be under the dual necessity of creating two 
 distinct impressions by means of one strictly con- 
 sistent course of speech and action. It is not by 
 any means always so; Andrew seems a numskull 
 to Toby and he seems a numskull to us, and we 
 share Stockmann's anger when Hovstad announces 
 that he will not print his article; but lago deceiving 
 Othello does not deceive us, quite apart from our 
 special knowledge of his character, and although 
 Fergus will not doubt Conchubar's faith — Conchu- 
 bar being for this purpose a character in the play 
 even though we have not yet seen him — yet we, 
 who have no more reason for mistrust than he, 
 know that Deirdre's fears will be justified. We 
 have noticed some uncertainty in Swinburne's per- 
 ception of a principle akin to this in The Queen 
 MotheTy instancing La Rochefoucauld, who bores 
 us as well as Teligny, but the cases are not exactly 
 parallel. La Rochefoucauld convinces Teligny that 
 he is a bore, and, although he does it in the wrong 
 way, he convinces us of the same thing, which is 
 the poet's intention unhappily achieved. But
 
 128 SWINBURNE 
 
 when, after the murder of Rizzio, the Queen has 
 a long interview with Darnley and uses every wile 
 to snare him and subdue him to her own purposes, 
 the case is different. Were it not that we knew 
 pretty clearly the poet's conception of her character 
 the wiles would be almost as effective with us as 
 they are with Darnley, and even with the assur- 
 ance of our knowledge it is not until her husband 
 leaves her and she says — 
 
 So much is done ; go thou then first to death ; 
 For from this hour I have thee . . . 
 
 that we are quite certain of our ground. Swin- 
 burne's errors in this matter are not serious enough 
 to be of great importance, but his dramatic instinct 
 here is not quite perfectly equipped. Another 
 flaw, again not serious, perhaps, yet not negligible, 
 is his fondness for exercising the function of the 
 messenger of Greek drama to excess. The Greeks 
 invented the messenger to describe some necessary 
 dramatic link or conclusion which they did not 
 wish to present directly on the stage. His office 
 was distinct from that of the chorus, who com- 
 mented in general terms upon the particular in- 
 stance arising from the action both seen and unseen. 
 But Swinburne introduces a number of scenes 
 where characters outside the conduct of the drama 
 — generally the Shakespearian first, second and third
 
 THE DRAMAS 129 
 
 citizens — not only act in some measure as chorus, 
 but also as messenger; and instead of relating to us 
 some necessary part of action of which we have not 
 heard they reproduce tiresomely in their talk action 
 that has been clearly indicated by foregoing events 
 if indeed we have not actually seen it. And, 
 finally, although the high convention of poetry 
 rightly demands the symbol in drama and not veri- 
 similitude, it is well not to make too wanton a 
 departure from probability, when the definite action 
 is moving through a crisis. Mary in flight reach- 
 ing the shores of Loch Leven, her supporters 
 eagerly awaiting her and the horses ready, stays to 
 address her newly found freedom and the night in 
 a speech of some fifty lines that must be more than 
 exasperating to her ardent rescuers. 
 
 Of the development in the trilogy of Swinburne's 
 power of writing dramatic verse one example 
 will leave no doubt. The false courage and half- 
 witted anger of the weakling Darnley's jealousy 
 could not well find fitter expression than this — 
 
 I saw it, I first — I knew her — who knew her but I, 
 That swore — at least I swore to mine own soul, 
 Would not for shame's sake swear out wide to the world, 
 But in myself swore with my heart to hear — 
 There was more in it, in all their commerce, more 
 Than the mere music — he is warped, worn through. 
 Bow-bent, uncomely in wholesome eyes that see 
 Straight, seeing him crooked — but she seeing awry 
 Sees the man straight enough for paramour. 
 
 K
 
 I30 SWINBURNE 
 
 This I saw, this I swore to — silently, 
 
 Not loud but sure, till time should be to speak 
 
 Sword's language, no fool's jargon like his tongue, 
 
 But plain broad steel speech and intelligible. 
 
 Though not to the ear, Italian's be it or Scot's, 
 
 But to the very Hfe intelligible. 
 
 To the loosed soul, to the shed blood — for blood 
 
 There must be — one must slay him — you are sure — as I am ? 
 
 For I was sure of it always — while you said. 
 
 All you, 'twas council-stuflf, state handicraft, 
 
 Cunning of card-play between here and there, 
 
 I knew 'twas this and more, sir, I kept sight. 
 
 Kept heed of her, what thing she was, what wife, 
 
 What manner of stateswoman and governess — 
 
 More than you all saw — did you see it or I ? 
 
 This is a level to which Swinburne can reach, when 
 occasion is, with ease, and his lyrical quality intrudes 
 upon the blank verse far less than was the case in 
 the earlier plays. He discovers, too, now and 
 again an inventiveness, as apart from his usual ease, 
 of similitude that is the more striking in that it is 
 rather rare in his work, as, for example, when 
 Darnley goes out shortly after the above speech and 
 Morton says — 
 
 Had God but plagued Egypt with fools for flies, 
 His Jews had sped the quicker. 
 
 In one other direction Swinburne, as in this we 
 should have expected, equalled his models in 
 manner, and excelled all but one or two. When he 
 introduces songs into his plays he nearly always
 
 THE DRAMAS 131 
 
 does so with his most faultless lyric faculty. The 
 device of the song in drama, when properly used, 
 has in itself something admirably satisfying, and 
 Swinburne's instinct in this matter was true; but 
 it is not often that in addition to this dramatic 
 fitness we get lyrics of such intrinsic loveliness as 
 "Between the sunset and the sea" and "Love 
 with shut wings, a little ungrown love," nor are we 
 ungrateful when we do. These songs are an added 
 grace to a manner which in his trilogy shows Swin- 
 burne under a new discipline, achieving austerity 
 and precision when they are needed and he is not 
 distracted by that other design, as certainly as 
 voluptuousness and just elaboration. Separating 
 in our minds the tragic poet's work from its unfor- 
 tunate company we find that its manner still has 
 flaws, but that its many and high excellences 
 are such as can be obtained only by a great master 
 of his art. 
 
 In the trilogy Swinburne again shows that his 
 sense for swiftness in dramatic action, though rarely 
 used, was strong. The scene where Chastelard 
 mistakes Mary Beaton for the Queen, the last pas- 
 sionate interview between the poet and his royal 
 mistress where Mary finds that the reprieve which 
 she has come to reclaim has already been destroyed 
 by the man of whom Swinburne himself says " in 
 extenuation of his perverse and insuppressible 
 
 K 2
 
 132 SWINBURNE 
 
 persistency in thrusting himself upon the compassion 
 or endurance of a woman ^ who possibly was weary 
 of his homage, it may doubtless be alleged that 
 Mary Stuart was hardly such a mistress as a man 
 could be expected readily to resign, or perhaps, at 
 Chastelard's age, to forgo with much less reluct- 
 ance than life itself," and the death of Rizzio, to 
 mention three instances only, are always strictly 
 governed by character, or at least related to it, and 
 are contrived with wholly admirable directness and 
 certainty. These are qualities that must be con- 
 sidered in Swinburne's achievement, even though 
 they are not common enough to be characteristic 
 of him. 
 
 But the true greatness of the trilogy lies in its 
 profound sense of the workings and tragic conflict 
 of character, which here reaches its most complete 
 expression to be found in Swinburne's art, and 
 makes us wonder what he might have done had it 
 been controlled by a truer form. The chief figures 
 of the tragedy, Mary Stuart, Chastelard, Darnley, 
 Bothwell, Rizzio and Mary Beaton, even Babing- 
 ton who is nearly as much a report as a figure, are 
 drawn with a firmness of characterisation that any 
 but the very greatest dramatists might envy. This 
 
 ^ It will be remembered that he demands a continuance of 
 her favours or death ; pardon with banishment he rejects 
 uncompromisingly.
 
 THE DRAMAS 133 
 
 characterisation has nothing to do with the super- 
 ficial qualities by which we most readily distinguish 
 the people of our daily contact, Swinburne's con- 
 cern being only with the spiritual significance of 
 circumstance and the way in which event unseals 
 the primal springs of emotion and conduct, and not 
 at all with the accidents of condition or the trap- 
 pings of personality. These things have their 
 rightful if lowly place in certain admirable types 
 of comedy, but they do not belong to the method 
 of the tragic poet. It is notable that even in those 
 parts of his trilogy where Swinburne's interest is 
 most clearly in the exact chronicle of history he is 
 yet sufficiently a poet to be true to this impulse. 
 It is scarcely conceivable that his instinct in this 
 matter should have failed him when he was work- 
 ing as an artist, but we might have expected lapses 
 when a less exacting interest was uppermost. And 
 yet it would be difficult, at the risk of being con- 
 fronted with some stray and unimportant word of 
 conflicting evidence, one might say impossible to 
 find a single passage in the whole work that throws 
 any light either upon the manners of an individual 
 or the customs of the period. There is nothing 
 of what the dramaturge of bad dramatic ages knows, 
 in a hateful phrase, as being " in character." Time, 
 place, the tricks of personality, local and ephemeral 
 conditions, nationality — everything that a photo-
 
 134 SWINBURNE 
 
 graphic artistry might reflect are burnt out in the 
 central flame of the spirit. Rizzio is not a sixteenth- 
 century Italian, or how should I who do not care 
 a straw for the peculiarities of sixteenth-century 
 Italy know him ? Who knows, or wants to know, 
 whether Bothwell's overbearing fierceness of temper 
 allowed him to enter the presence-chamber at Holy- 
 rood with the mud wet on his boots ? Chastelard's 
 last declaration is not made in the Tolbooth, but 
 " In Prison," nor does Mary Beaton know a less 
 kingly speech than Mary Stuart. The only degrees 
 and distinction that these people know are those 
 of naked and eternal character. We remember 
 them not as the discreet counterparts of circum- 
 stance but for their power to live passionately for 
 good or evil, nobly or meanly. Darnley is too 
 weak a creature for villainy or heroism; he would 
 be despised alike by lago and Vincentio, yet, in 
 the poet's imagination, his very weakness itself is 
 a passionate thing. 
 
 In a second essay at the end of the trilogy Swin- 
 burne defines for us in explicit terms his conception 
 of his chief protagonist's character. To consider 
 this in reference to the dramas would be useless 
 unless there were full correspondence between the 
 Mary Stuart of the trilogy and the Mary Stuart 
 of the essay. But there is such correspondence. 
 The essay might have been written by some in- 
 spired critic after reading the plays. It is of a kind
 
 THE DRAMAS 135 
 
 quite distinct from that on her historical career, and 
 is bright with the poet's vision and understanding. 
 The touchstone of its temper is given at the outset; 
 speaking of her historians he says, " they who came 
 to curse the memory of Mary Stuart have blessed 
 it with the blessing of a Balaam, and they who came 
 to bless it, with tribute of panegyric or with testi- 
 mony in defence, have inevitably and invariably 
 cursed it altogether. To vindicate her from the 
 imputations of her vindicators would be the truest 
 service that could now be done by the most loyal 
 devotion to her name and fame." That a girl 
 brought up in the court of Catherine de' Medici, a 
 court whose " virtues were homicide and adultery," 
 should, even if she remained innocent, be ignorant 
 of evil could only be explained by an idiocy with 
 which he was not disposed to credit Mary Stuart. 
 But that her great passionate nature, her loyalty 
 to friends, her generous delight in beauty and her 
 untameable love of freedom should be confounded 
 as evil with the readiness for cunning and intrigue 
 and the resolute defiance of all ethics save those of 
 her emotions when they opposed her ends, with the 
 dark and even abominable parts that had been bred 
 into her blood, he took to be a mere denial of life. 
 His opinion that "whatever was evil and ignoble 
 (in her character) was the work of education or of 
 circumstance; whatever was good and noble, the gift 
 of nature or of God," is important in its recognition
 
 136 SWINBURNE 
 
 of the great conflicting elements in her character, 
 whatever their source. And it is this concep- 
 tion that he translates into the terms of art in his 
 trilogy, with unsparing reference to truth. Her 
 nobility moved him to the deepest admiration and 
 affection, her lapses from that nobility excited his 
 pity if not his scorn, but both are set down with the 
 strictest fidelity of the poet. Vindication, praise 
 and accusation are alike beyond his purpose save in 
 so far as they are implied by the presentation of 
 character. She was a bad woman, said Froude; 
 she was a good woman, says another. To the poet 
 she is neither, but a superb manifestation of pas- 
 sionate life. 
 
 And so it is with all the people throughout the 
 trilogy who are there for the sake of the poet's art. 
 Chastelard, for all his lyric fervour, is, as his creator 
 called him, a suicidal young monomaniac, Darnley 
 is a weak fool. Both well a lusty and ambitious 
 boor, and Babington a hare-brained and not very 
 brave fanatic, while Mary Beaton's sacrifice of all 
 delighted zest for twenty years to the memory of 
 one fierce moment is a tribute rather to her emo- 
 tional epicureanism than to her love; yet they all 
 add to their other qualities, or defects, the supreme 
 quality of intensity. They are creatures not of 
 compromise but of that character which is fate. 
 The character sometimes is perverted and leads to 
 disaster, but even so disaster is a more desirable
 
 THE DRAMAS 137 
 
 thing than bland inertia. Chastelard in a kind of 
 subjective chivalry and Mary Stuart in her gener- 
 osity and passionate courage are the only two 
 among the central figures who attain or approach 
 nobility. Considering our comfort we should, 
 perhaps, choose none of them for our fellows in the 
 conduct of daily affairs. But with our better ima- 
 gination we desire not comfort but life, and con- 
 templating these men and women our imagination 
 quickens and becomes adventurous. We may wish 
 that Swinburne could have leavened his work with 
 a few figures more passionately gracious; an Imogen 
 or a Prospero would have flattered some not un- 
 worthy instinct in us. But the graciousness could 
 have been no more than an adornment of the 
 abundant life that would remain the poet's chief 
 benefaction and honour. 
 
 It was at this point that Swinburne proved his 
 true affinity with his Elizabethan masters. Skilled 
 craftsman as he was, he could not hope to infuse 
 breath and responsiveness into a form that he did 
 not create by impulse, but took up in admiration. 
 However successful brief experiments made in the 
 play-time of the imagination may be, great artistic 
 structures cannot be built by imitation, the finest 
 enthusiasm and sincerity — if it can strictly be called 
 sincerity — notwithstanding. But the energy that 
 Swinburne enclosed within this form was his own, 
 and a re-birth of one great splendour of the Eliza-
 
 138 SWINBURNE 
 
 bethan spirit. It may, perhaps, be suggested that 
 a reappearance of the spirit might have reasonably 
 been expected to impel the poet in whom it was 
 found to reproduce its original form. It is just 
 conceivable that it might have done so. Had 
 Swinburne explored the theatre and created his 
 plays in the process, it is remotely possible that he 
 would have rediscovered the Globe and its tech- 
 nique. But the point is that he did not explore 
 the theatre and that he did not discover the Globe 
 at all, but merely accepted it. But this does not 
 invalidate his claim to kinship with his models in 
 his conception of the meaning and value of char- 
 acter. It was a conception that many other great 
 tragic poets did not share; it saw character, for 
 example, as far more self-contained and inevitable 
 in its operation than did the Greek dramatists. And 
 the understanding that he shared with the Eliza- 
 bethans in this matter was finer than that of the 
 Greeks, finer, perhaps, than that of the poets of 
 any other epoch. When all the faults of his trilogy 
 have been considered, there remain the secondary 
 but rare beauties that we have examined, and above 
 all the one supreme quality in which he rivalled 
 the greatest dramatic poets of, at least, his own 
 language. His desire to do something worthy of 
 a young countryman of Marlowe and Webster, 
 even of Shakespeare, was in one very important 
 respect fulfilled. Morris, when he complained that
 
 THE DRAMAS 139 
 
 Swinburne's work was divorced from life, clearly 
 had not read his plays. The lyrics have their own 
 life : life in the terms of abstract emotion and idea. 
 The plays proved him a master also of life in the 
 terms of character. 
 
 Locrine is likely to remain the most astonishing 
 technical tour de force in our dramatic literature. 
 In his dedication Swinburne calls it " a ninefold 
 garland wrought of song-flowers nine." There are 
 ten scenes in the play, the first and last of which are 
 in heroic couplets, the second in Petrarchian sonnets, 
 the third in a nine-line stanza, for the rhyme 
 arrangement of which I can recall no example, the 
 fourth in the eight-line stanza used by Keats in 
 " Isabella," the fifth in an elaborate, but not quite 
 regular, interlacing of rhymes each occurring four 
 times thus, (a a) b (a) b b c b c c d c — , the sixth 
 in Chaucerian seven-lined stanzas, the seventh in 
 quatrains of alternate rhyme with concluding 
 couplets, the eighth in terza rima and the ninth in 
 Shakespearean sonnets. The story of Locrine is 
 that of Henry and Rosamund with certain elabora- 
 tions, and Swinburne is much more concerned with 
 the swift unfolding of his plot and less attentive 
 to character here than was his custom. Incident is 
 of much more importance for its own sake than in 
 the trilogy or even his first plays, and in its conduct 
 Swinburne does contrive some suggestion of tragic 
 gloom. But any real dramatic qualities that may
 
 I40 SWINBURNE 
 
 be inherent in the work are subdued almost to 
 complete ineffectiveness by the extraordinary form. 
 It is, indeed, impossible to speak of the play strictly 
 as having any technical form at all, the parts being 
 quite arbitrarily planned and having not the least 
 relation one to another. It would require rare 
 ingenuity to discover any special fitness in the 
 sonnet for the scenes in which it is used as distinct 
 from any other scene, or to plead anything more 
 than a poet's holiday waywardness in the change 
 from one scheme to another. The value of the 
 whole is less than the value of any of the parts, or, 
 in other words, the parts do not combine into a 
 whole at all. Nor are the parts themselves gener- 
 ally successful. The scenes in heroic couplets and 
 perhaps the one in six-line stanzas have some fit 
 conformity between matter and manner, but in the 
 rest even Swinburne's deftness could not justify 
 his daring. His failure to achieve greatness of 
 form in the other plays arose chiefly from limita- 
 tions of circumstance which I have tried to define, 
 and is related to a far deeper problem than that of 
 actual technical efficiency, but Locrine affords, I 
 think, the one instance in the whole of Swinburne's 
 work of definite misjudgment in craftmanship. 
 The stanza in poetry has a unity of its own which 
 may quite rightly, for the sake of variety within 
 the general uniformity of design, yield to a judi- 
 cious flexibility of treatment, but beyond this it
 
 THE DRAMAS 141 
 
 cannot be disrespected with impunity, if its cumu- 
 lative effect in recurrence is to be preserved. A 
 poet may use an eight-line stanza in such a way 
 that at intervals, say, the units will not be eight 
 and eight, but nine and seven, but this licence 
 within law cannot, without disaster, become law- 
 lessness. If a definite stanzaic pattern is chosen, 
 then that pattern must, with a latitude that is only 
 tolerable when it is occasional, be preserved. 
 Variety may be, indeed must be, endless in the 
 massing of content within the outline of the stanza 
 itself, but to break the outline by habit instead of 
 occasional privilege is to substitute disorder for an 
 added grace. This is not to defend stanzaic struc- 
 ture against a free rhythm, nor is it necessary to 
 discuss their respective merits, but choice of the 
 stanza implies a respect for its nature without 
 servility. It need hardly be said that no poet ever 
 understood this better than Swinburne. He 
 brought freely to his work whatever value the 
 unity of the stanza may contribute to the presiding 
 unity of the complete poem, and the fact makes 
 his lapses in Locrine the more unaccountable. Our 
 difficulty is not merely the mechanical one of 
 having to read stanzas printed without their 
 normal divisions, but the essential one of having 
 constantly to sacrifice the stanzaic form to the 
 exigences of dramatic dialogue. Since the stanza 
 is there we are forced instinctively to watch for its
 
 142 SWINBURNE 
 
 development, but since the development is scarcely 
 ever within its proper outline we are confused 
 rather than satisfied. Stanza and line alike are 
 broken at all points by the sequence of speeches 
 and the dramatic opposition of ideas, and we have 
 all the artifice and labour of regularity in rhyme- 
 scheme with none of its aesthetic value. Licence 
 has become the only law, and the stanza, instead 
 of being a norm from which departures may be 
 made at widely chosen moments, is no more than 
 an arbitrary design carefully drawn over the sub- 
 stance of the ordinary decasyllabic verse of drama. 
 That Swinburne should have experimented in 
 drama with forms usually associated with lyric 
 work might have been a highly fortunate circum- 
 stance, for there are enormous possibilities in this 
 direction yet to be explored, and he of all poets 
 might have been happy in the venture. But if 
 lyric forms are to be used as the main texture of 
 drama, the unity of those forms must be substi- 
 tuted for the unity that governs all the elasticity 
 of the blank verse line. When we have made full 
 allowance for paragraphic values, the base of heroic 
 unrhymed verse remains the line, whilst the base 
 of regular lyric forms is the stanza. This being 
 so, it follows that it is impossible for dramatic 
 speech to disturb the unity of its customary form 
 — in English — more than momentarily, or than is 
 desirable as fitting variety, since the line will
 
 THE DRAMAS 143 
 
 commonly remain intact. And it is for the poet 
 to contrive, if he uses another form, that the unity 
 of the new base, whatever it may be, shall not 
 suffer greater violence. This naturally does not 
 mean that he is to measure every speech to one or 
 more complete stanzas, but it does mean that the 
 pattern of the stanza must be easily discoverable 
 to the ear if not to the eye. The simpler the 
 stanzaic structure, therefore, the easier will be his 
 task, because the greater the freedom he can allow 
 himself whilst observing this necessary condition. 
 In so simple a device as the rhymed couplet, the 
 allocation of consecutive lines, or even half-lines, 
 to different characters may be admirably effective, 
 as Professor Gilbert Murray, for example, has 
 shown us in his translations from Euripides. And 
 even in a more elaborate form the same method 
 may be successful, as Swinburne himself shows in 
 the scene between Sabrina and Estrild — 
 
 EsTRILD. 
 
 and with thee 
 His mood that plays is blither than a boy's.) 
 
 Sabrina, 
 I would the boy would give the maid her will. 
 
 Estrild. 
 Has not thine heart as mine has here its fill ? 
 
 Sabrina. 
 So have our hearts while sleeping — till they wake.
 
 144 SWINBURNE 
 
 EsTRILD. 
 
 Too soon is this for waking : sleep thou still. 
 
 Sabrina. 
 Bid then the dawn sleep, and the world lie chill. 
 
 ESTRILD. 
 
 This nest is warm for one more wood-dove's sake. 
 
 Sabrina. 
 And warm the world that feels the sundawn break. 
 
 EsTRILD. 
 
 But hath my fledgling cushat here slept ill ? 
 
 Sabrina. 
 No plaint is this, but pleading that I make. 
 
 Regularity may, indeed, at times with justice suffer 
 less respect than in here shown, though with so 
 intricate a form any latitude is dangerous, so 
 dangerous perhaps as to disqualify the form alto- 
 gether. But there can be no defence of such sub- 
 stitution of chaos for form as is found in the 
 following sonnet — 
 
 Debon. 
 
 Hast thou not heard, king, that a true man's trust 
 Is king for him of life and death ? Locrine 
 Hath sealed with trust my Hps — nay, prince, not mine — 
 His are they now. 
 
 Camber. 
 
 Thou art wise as he, and just, 
 And secret. God requite thee ! yea, he must, 
 For man shall never. If my sword here shine 
 Sunward — God guard that reverend head of thine !
 
 THE DRAMAS 145 
 
 Debon. 
 My blood should make thy sword the sooner rust, 
 And rot thy fame for ever. Strike. 
 
 Camber. 
 
 Thou knowest 
 I will not. Am I Scythian born, or Greek, 
 That I should take thy bloodshed on my hand ? 
 
 Debon. 
 
 Nay — if thou seest me soul to soul and showest 
 Mercy — 
 
 Camber. 
 Thou think'st I would have slain thee ? Speak. 
 
 Debon. 
 Nay, then I will, for love of all this land . . . 
 
 This clearly is experiment run riot, and it is a 
 licence freely indulged throughout the play. Swin- 
 burne subdued his superb mastery of lyric forms 
 to an extraordinary virtuosity in Locrine^ and so 
 missed an achievement for which he was peculiarly 
 gifted. 
 
 If Swinburne's sense of technical fitness failed 
 him in Locrine^ there was, it seems to me, a yet 
 more radical confusion of artistic purpose in his 
 later tragedy. The Sisters. The eighteenth-century 
 influence on the stage was in many ways a bad one, 
 betraying itself, for instance, in such monstrous 
 notions as that of Garrick bravely holding Shake- 
 speare from oblivion, but sometimes its most seem- 
 ing perversities made for virtue. When an actor 
 
 L
 
 146 SWINBURNE 
 
 played Hamlet in powder and ruffles he flouted 
 expediency, perhaps a little wantonly, but he was 
 also proving a strangely right instinct as to the 
 nature of the tragic poet's art. Since the function 
 of poetry in drama was to invest the particular 
 with general significance, he must have concluded, 
 that general significance could in turn be applied 
 to any particular that differed from the original 
 only in environment and superficial circumstance. 
 And so, Shakespeare's tragedy moving on the 
 universal plane of poetry, Hamlet might as fitly 
 come from St. James's as Elsinore : an inference 
 showing a surprisingly sound artistic judgment. 
 The method was, perhaps, not artistically expedi- 
 ent, because the audience might be distracted by its 
 knowledge of the particular chosen by the actor, 
 and so confuse the main issues in its mind with 
 strays of irrelevant experience, but at worst the 
 error was one of expediency only, and the method 
 itself remained striking witness to a profound 
 artistic principle. But the reason why the method 
 was not only possible, but just, was that the poetry 
 itself had purged the tragedy of inessentials, and, 
 by giving people a speech that was both concen- 
 trated and symbolic, had emphasised the common 
 factors of humanity, and made all else negligible. 
 Since Hamlet had to wear clothes, let him wear the 
 first that came to hand; it did not matter. The
 
 THE DRAMAS 147 
 
 poetry of speech and tragic conflict were independ- 
 ent of all such considerations, and it was for the 
 audience to discover that the poetry was every- 
 thing. In The Sisters, however, Swinburne de- 
 liberately set aside this principle. The poet's 
 concern is still with universal emotion, but he 
 neglects the first conditions necessary to its expres- 
 sion. We may accept Hamlet in familiar dress, 
 because the speech of Hamlet removes us at once 
 from all trivial associations; but we cannot respond 
 to a figure, even though he be completely cut off 
 from such associations by appearance, who 
 attempts to capture great and essential emotional 
 conflict in speech that stands in our minds for the 
 daily coin of accidental trafl!ic. Our modern prose 
 drama has done much, and its chief service has 
 been to remind the theatre that it cannot flourish 
 without the help of literature; that drama, to be 
 of permanent value, must have style as surely as it 
 must have its more obvious necessities. But our 
 new prose dramatists, with all their admirable 
 qualities, do yet fall short of the highest distinction 
 because their expression has not attained the con- 
 centrated force of poetry. They have made the 
 first step, we may believe, towards that consumma- 
 tion, but the end is yet to be. The best of them 
 have, however, stripped the current speech that 
 
 they use of threadbare word and phrase; they are 
 L 2
 
 148 SWINBURNE 
 
 able to make us feel that their naturalism is intact, 
 that this or that familiar type would really speak 
 precisely so, and this without resort to the stock 
 of conversational cliches that we know, in fact, 
 forms the staple of such a man's expression. There 
 is already a purging of manner, a sense that even 
 in the most naturalistic drama the terms of art 
 are not the terms of specific reproduction of ex- 
 ternals. The language of Mrs. Jones in Mr. 
 Galsworthy's Silver BoXy for example, is the 
 essential spirit of the language of the Mrs. Jones 
 that we meet every day. This concentration is a 
 step towards the yet more heightened expression of 
 poetry which in turn ascends from the achievement 
 of the essential spirit of daily speech to the last 
 achievement of the embodied language of the 
 spirit. Swinburne in The Sisters attempted, in his 
 own words, " realism in the reproduction of natural 
 dialogue, and accuracy in the representation of 
 natural intercourse between men and women of 
 gentle birth and breeding." The intention would 
 have been a false one even for a prose dramatist, 
 but for a poet determined to retain the outward 
 shape of poetry it inevitably meant disaster. The 
 fact that the station of the characters is closely par- 
 ticularised does not so greatly matter, but the fact 
 that for the expression of a great tragic issue they 
 use a speech that forces us at every turn to recall 
 the trivialities of our daily experience destroys the
 
 THE DRAMAS 149 
 
 artistic integrity of the whole play. It happens, 
 moreover, that of all poets Swinburne was the 
 least fitted for an experiment of this kind. There 
 are poets who, at times of revolt against a poetic 
 diction that has fallen from life to tradition, seek 
 to divest language of every ornamental grace lest 
 they should become subject to beauties outworn 
 with long use, and aim at a spare simplicity of 
 phrase that does at times attain to the sovereignty 
 of poetry. This was Wordsworth's intention more 
 notably, perhaps, than his general achievement : 
 " Michael " is alone in his poetry, as it is, indeed, 
 in literature; and there are poets writing to-day 
 who are making the same attempt, in some cases 
 with memorable success. But it was characteristic 
 of Swinburne that his genius absorbed all the poetic 
 significance into which language had crystallised 
 before him, and yet gave it the seal of a new 
 authority. To reject this accumulated value was, 
 for him, to deny his art one of its chief privileges. 
 The course that to many poets means nothing but 
 a danger to be avoided was the one along which 
 he moved naturally, without question. In The 
 Sisters he turned aside, and not only does he lose 
 his natural qualities, but his genius is true to itself, 
 and being deprived of its accustomed material it 
 seizes the new material that is offered and works 
 upon it in its habitual manner. Its tendency was 
 never to select, but always to absorb, and normally
 
 150 SWINBURNE 
 
 its attention was directed to the language that 
 poetry had shaped through five hundred years. It 
 was now concerned with the familiar speech of a 
 particular class at a particular time, and again it 
 absorbed without selection. Any commonplace 
 turn of the daily speech of conversation is taken 
 into the verse without discrimination, but the 
 genius no longer has the power of signing it with 
 its own pressure. The spoils that Swinburne 
 carried away so freely from the poetry of his pre- 
 decessors he made distinctively his own, but his 
 appropriations from " natural dialogue " were at 
 no time his own in any real sense. 
 
 Don't fret yourself. 
 No harm was meant or done. But if she does 
 Love you — if you can win her — as I think 
 (There !) — you're the happiest fellow ever born. 
 
 That has nothing whatever to do with Swinburne, 
 save that his pen happens to have written it. 
 When, moreover, he does attempt to reproduce 
 the spirit of this language instead of its actual 
 form, he generally does nothing but make his 
 characters speak like thoroughly unpleasant prigs. 
 It is not only that phrases like " No, my boy," 
 passing from one friend to another, come awk- 
 wardly off his lips; that is a defect only through 
 the accident of our knowledge of his usual manner. 
 But there are whole passages that, apart from their 
 ill assortment with the rest of his work, have a
 
 THE DRAMAS 151 
 
 flavour of mincing preciosity that we could not 
 
 believe Swinburne to have tolerated but for direct 
 
 evidence — 
 
 Sir Arthur. 
 Heaven help us, what a tragic day or night ! 
 It's well the drawing-room and the Hbraries 
 Are all rigged up ship-shape, with stage and box 
 Ready, and no such audience to be feared 
 As might — I don't say would, though, Reginald — 
 Hiss you from pit and gallery. 
 
 Reginald. 
 
 That they would ! 
 It's all a theft from Dodsley's great old plays, 
 I know you'll say — third rate and secondhand. 
 The book, you know, you lent me when a boy — 
 Or else I borrowed and you did not lend. 
 
 Sir Arthur. 
 That's possible, you bad young scamp. 
 
 That Swinburne should have so misunderstood his 
 own genius as to attempt the scheme of The Sisters 
 is strange enough, but that he should have written 
 like this is one of the most amazing things in 
 poetry. There are lyrics of his that we might be 
 willing to sacrifice because they did not exercise 
 his full faculty and achieved nothing that he did 
 not do infinitely better on other occasions. But 
 Locrine and The Sisters are the two expressions of 
 his energy that we might wish to forget because 
 of their positive as distinguished from negative 
 failure. They are the two definitely bad works of 
 art into which he was misled, the one offending in 
 its craftsmanship, the other in its artistic intention.
 
 152 SWINBURNE 
 
 For Marino F alter o Swinburne claimed that, 
 whatever might be its dramatic or other defects, it 
 bore " the same relation to previous plays (he is 
 speaking also of Locrine) or attempts at plays on 
 the same subjects as King Henry V to The 
 Famous Victories — if not as King Lear, a poem 
 beyond comparison with all other works of man 
 except possibly Prometheus and Othello, to 
 the primitive and infantile scrawl or drivel of 
 King heir and his three daughters.'''* He had, 
 of course, Byron's play in his mind, but the terms 
 of his challenge are not altogether happily set out, 
 and since in this case comparison was his own 
 deliberate choice, we cannot choose but follow him. 
 In many important ways Swinburne's Marino 
 Faliero does excel Byron's. Nowhere, perhaps, 
 does the insistent prose element in Byron's mind 
 show itself more clearly than in his blank verse, 
 a medium that Swinburne often handled as a 
 master and always — if we forget The Sisters — as 
 a poet. In poetic sense of character, again, Swin- 
 burne is as superior to Byron as in some measure 
 to justify the allusion to Shakespeare and his 
 sources. But Shakespeare not only outdistanced 
 his predecessors in these matters, he also replaced 
 formlessness by superb artistic form. This Swin- 
 burne wholly failed to do. Byron made no more 
 practical attempt than Swinburne to discover for 
 himself excellence of dramatic form, and the design
 
 THE DRAMAS 153 
 
 of his play is at best but a tolerable and careful 
 imitation; less even than this can be said for the 
 design of Swinburne's. The tendency to allow the 
 development of character to progress in terms of 
 adventitious experience instead of experience 
 arising from the drama, a tendency that always 
 threatened the balance of his dramatic work, be- 
 came in Marino Faliero an unquestioned habit. 
 Faliero himself is utterly uncontrolled by dramatic 
 conditions, and quickly ceases to be related to any- 
 thing but his own subjective experience which the 
 incidents of the play are contrived to liberate. 
 Once free, it breaks all bounds, and, passionately 
 adventurous though it may be, it makes formative 
 excellence impossible. The dramatic conflict that 
 is suggested at the outset between Faliero, the 
 Duchess and Bertuccio evaporates altogether, 
 Faliero gradually converting the play into a mono- 
 logue. Even the conspiracy and its effects are 
 chiefly fuel for his introspective elaborations, until 
 in the last scene of five hundred lines Faliero speaks 
 over four hundred. That the matter and manner 
 of his speech is often of high poetic worth does not 
 help us; it is, generally, of no dramatic worth, and 
 since the poet is aiming at dramatic art, we can but 
 judge him by its laws. If he had here invented 
 laws of his own, knowing that his dramatic vision 
 must find new expression and seeking a form from 
 impulse and not example, we could but have
 
 154 SWINBURNE 
 
 respected the result even if it had been a failure. But 
 he invented no laws in Marino Faliero; instead, he 
 openly quoted Chapman as his authority. That 
 Elizabethan audiences "endured and applauded 
 the magnificent monotony of Chapman's elo- 
 quence " does not show the poet of Bussy 
 D'Ambois to have been a good dramatist or any- 
 thing but a wholly bad model. He often wrote 
 vigorous and lovely verse, and his audience, being 
 " incredibly intelligent," would delight in that to 
 the extent of being " inconceivably tolerant " of 
 many grave defects, but Chapman's plays, con- 
 sidered as composite works of art, are bad, being 
 formless. For Chapman there was every excuse. 
 He was writing when the great dramatic poets 
 had discovered their form, but had not given 
 it authority for any save themselves or such as 
 could understand the nature of their impulse; 
 he shared the Elizabethan genius of poetry, but 
 he knew little or nothing of the Elizabethan 
 genius of drama. In reading him we are content 
 to recognise this, and offer thanks for his splen- 
 did gifts without complaining that he too was not 
 among the masters of the theatre. But it is 
 difficult to think of any later poet reading Chap- 
 man and not seeing in his chosen form a warning 
 rather than an example to be emulated. We are 
 far from wishing that Marino Faliero^ with Locrine 
 and The Sisters, had not been written. To love
 
 THE DRAMAS 155 
 
 poetry is to love many passages in this strangely 
 perverse play, and to respond to life is to add at 
 least the Doge himself to our memories, in spite of 
 a certain misjudgment in which Swinburne fol- 
 lowed Byron. ^ But that Swinburne should have 
 cast the play in the form he did, without any sense 
 that he was working amiss, is further proof of the 
 dramatic poet's dependence upon a knowledge of 
 the conditions of the theatre when he is creating. 
 Rosamundy ^ueen of the Lombards, is, perhaps, 
 the most disappointing of SwinlDurne's plays in 
 that of them all it comes nearest to complete suc- 
 cess, and fails only by reason of a defect that would 
 have been avoided by many much smaller artists. 
 The poet's aim here is not subtlety or breadth in 
 the presentation of character, nor the conduct of 
 complex circumstance and many conflicting inter- 
 ests to one issue; it is the swift and direct passage 
 of one woman's filial passion through all obstacles 
 to its end, the subordinate figures having only just 
 such life as is sufficient to accentuate this passion 
 and give it dramatic operation. The purpose is of 
 a kind not so lofty as that which inspired, say, the 
 
 ^ Both poets make Faliero's conspiracy, in deference to 
 history, relate — Swinburne more directly than Byron — to an 
 affront imposed upon him by the Council, thus giving it some- 
 thing of the nature of an act of personal revenge. Since, for 
 Swinburne in any case, Faliero stood for noble opposition to 
 tyranny, the circumstance is unfortunate ; the subject, indeed, 
 as it stands, is not quite fortunately chosen.
 
 156 SWINBURNE 
 
 more elaborate conception of the trilogy, but it was 
 full of artistic possibilities that Swinburne was 
 within a word of realising to the full. The play 
 moves from first to last with scarcely a line that 
 does not arise out of its own necessity; Rosamund 
 is quick, but her individuality is consistently stated 
 in terms of the dramatic action of which she is the 
 protagonist; the speech has pungency and beauty; 
 and there is tragic intensity in the swift progress 
 of the central passion through its short arc. But 
 with unfortunate perversity Swinburne makes us 
 question certain secondary phases of motive that 
 might easily have been so modified as to be wholly 
 convincing. In an earlier chapter it has been said 
 that he had no real sense of narrative continuity. 
 This defect generally expressed itself in his longer 
 work in a misapprehension of the principles that 
 govern form in the higher and more complex 
 meaning of the word, but in this play it discovered 
 itself as an inability to tell a perfectly simple story 
 with authority. Rosamund mated to her father's 
 destroyer, simulating any emotion and sacrificing 
 any interests to her single purpose of revenge, is 
 an admirably dramatic figure, and her purpose is 
 drawn with precision and conviction from its first 
 statement to its consummation. The poet sees his 
 end quite clearly, and enables us to see it; but the 
 means which he employs arc unconcerned with the 
 dramatic illusion which is truth. Rosamund's
 
 THE DRAMAS 157 
 
 juggling with Almachildes and Hildegard serves 
 her will excellently, but we are unable to believe 
 that her puppets, even being puppets, would have 
 allowed themselves to be so exploited. Swinburne 
 may possibly have been able to quote history to his 
 purpose; but there are many historical truths that 
 could never be true in art. Rosamund^ ^ueen of 
 the Lombards, is faithful to art in the major con- 
 siderations of the psychology of its protagonist and 
 of dramatic unity, but it is false in the minor con- 
 sideration of event. Swinburne here had the 
 mastery of the dramatic poet's art within his reach, 
 and he almost wantonly sacrificed it. 
 
 The Duke of Gandia, Swinburne's last play and 
 his last published work, is too slight in structure 
 materially to enhance or detract from his achieve- 
 ment; but it is not valueless. It is a common 
 superstition that after the first full impulse of his 
 youth Swinburne's powers steadily waned, and that 
 his poetry deteriorated. The foundations of the 
 belief become unreliable when we remember, for 
 example, that thirty years separated the third series 
 of Poems and Ballads from The ^ueen Mother, or 
 that A Channel Passage, published yet again fifteen 
 years later, whilst it contains — as all his volumes do 
 — some inferior work, the product of facility and 
 not of inspiration, also contains poems which he 
 scarcely excelled at any time. And The Duke of 
 Gandia, slight as it is, has qualities that entitle it
 
 158 SWINBURNE 
 
 to be received with more than the rather patron- 
 ising tolerance sometimes accorded to the decline 
 of great men. This short play might with some 
 justice be said to be an abstract and brief chronicle 
 of his dramatic work. Caesar Borgia, faintly real- 
 ised though he is, is yet conceived by a poet pos- 
 sessed of a profound sense of character; he has no 
 opportunity of proving himself in any far-reaching 
 conflict, but even by his own unsupported assertion 
 he does take on some urgency of life. The faculty 
 that with wider development gave their chief dis- 
 tinction to the trilogy and others of his plays is 
 employed here, though less fully. There is also 
 the poet's habitual indifference to excellence of 
 dramatic construction, an elaborate succession of 
 event in this instance being crowded into a space 
 that is quite inadequate because there is no real 
 concentration. And finally there is in many pas- 
 sages the old mastery of verse shining through an 
 unaccustomed, for Swinburne indeed an unnatural, 
 bareness and brevity. The Duke of Gandia is but 
 a suggestion of dramatic art and of little import- 
 ance in the body of Swinburne's work, but it could 
 not have been written by a small poet or even by a 
 great poet who had lost his cunning. Being no 
 more than a rumour, it is yet a rumour from the 
 true source. 
 
 The two occasions upon which Swinburne most 
 nearly reached complete achievement in sustained
 
 THE DRAMAS 159 
 
 efforts of creation produced the plays written with 
 the Green fashion in his mind, Atalanta in Calydon 
 and Erectheus. To discover the reason for his 
 success it is necessary briefly to consider the relation 
 of Greek to English drama. Both alike, in their 
 higher manifestations, aim at presenting life in the 
 symbolic intensification of poetry, but we find with 
 this kinship of intention no corresponding kinship 
 of manner. The Greek poet sees life in terms of 
 abstract idea arising from event, character being for 
 him of quite secondary importance, whilst in the 
 native English drama life is seen primarily through 
 character arising from event, abstract idea not being 
 excluded, but commonly finding an expression im- 
 plied rather than explicit. It follows that for the 
 Greek poet the personages of his play need have in 
 many cases no more distinctiveness than is given 
 by a name : that his rarest imagining may take 
 shape through the medium of some such purely 
 conventional medium as a Chorus of Maidens or 
 Elders, a Huntsman, a Messenger or a Herald, 
 and, further, that the protagonist himself may at 
 any moment become a generalised figure bearing 
 no peculiar tokens of his own identity. The pro- 
 gression of events may be simple, as in The Trojan 
 Women, or intricate, as in (Edipus Rex, but the 
 superstructure in either case is wrought chiefly of 
 ideas that are more or less complete in themselves 
 and separable from their surroundings. But the
 
 i6o SWINBURNE 
 
 English poet, seeing life through character, is de- 
 pendent upon personages that must be not only 
 distinctively presented, but also consistent in their 
 conflict with each other. Whilst, therefore, the 
 progression of event now, as before, may be simple 
 or intricate, the superstructure, which is of char- 
 acter, must be so knit up that the detachment of 
 one part imperils the stability of the whole. In 
 other words, the form in this case demands a much 
 stricter sense of imaginative continuity, the sense 
 in which Swinburne's limitations were most clearly 
 marked. It should be observed that this imagina- 
 tive continuity is distinct from the unities of place 
 and time so precisely observed by the Greeks, 
 giving the argument of their plays a directness and 
 cohesion that find no parallel in the poetic de- 
 duction. It is in the English drama that we see 
 directness and cohesion in the superstructure of 
 deduction, whilst in the whole plan there is often 
 apparent confusion because in the foundation of 
 event those unities of time and place are commonly 
 ignored. As we have seen, Swinburne shared with 
 the great English dramatists the instinct for life in 
 terms of character, and the failure of his plays 
 written in this manner was precisely a failure to 
 achieve the particular kind of cohesion or conti- 
 nuity essential to the nature of the form. 
 
 The poet himself, writing of Atalanta in Calydon 
 and Erectheus, says —
 
 THE DRAMAS i6i 
 
 " Either poem, by the natural necessity of its kind and 
 structure, has its crowning passage or passages which cannot, 
 however much they may lose by detachment from their context, 
 lose as much as the crowning scene or scenes of an English or 
 Shakespearean play, as opposed to an ^Eschylean or Sophoclean 
 tragedy." 
 
 It is because this pronouncement, although gener- 
 ally true, is not invariably so, that the Greek form 
 seems to be a more admirable one inherently than 
 the Elizabethan, which was carried through to its 
 superb triumphs only by the magnificent genius of 
 the men who used it. There are, for example, 
 passages in Shakespeare that can be detached from 
 their context and lose little, if anything, of their 
 value. That this should be so is a fault, because 
 every speech ought, in Shakespeare's form, to be 
 inseparably linked with a particular character under 
 stated circumstances. In the Greek form this is 
 not so, since the idea is itself the important thing, 
 but even with this natural privilege the Greek poet 
 took the further precaution of providing a separate 
 chorus. If this was a necessity to him, still more 
 so was it to the English manner. Choric com- 
 mentary is essential to drama of any considerable 
 rank. The Greeks knew it, and Shakespeare knew 
 it, but the Greeks who already had a natural free- 
 dom, by reason of their method, in the use of their 
 chief figures in this matter that was utterly alien 
 to the Elizabethan method, yet used other means 
 for this sole purpose, whilst Shakespeare, neglecting 
 
 M
 
 1 62 SWINBURNE 
 
 to do this, was forced to the artistic contradic- 
 tion of identifying chorus with character. That he 
 did it superbly does not establish the intrinsic 
 excellence of the form. It will be found that those 
 passages which can be isolated from his plays with- 
 out serious loss of significance are generally choric 
 utterances spoken by characters of whom they are 
 not an integral part. 
 
 The unity of the native English dramatic form 
 depends, then, upon the cohesion of the fabric of 
 character built above the foundations of event. 
 But to the Greeks this cohesion had not to be 
 considered, and since imaginative unity cannot be 
 evolved out of mere strictness in the ordering of 
 event alone, it was achieved by them in another 
 fashion, one blending perfectly with the whole 
 texture of their work. With the illusiveness that 
 the use of labels inevitably involves at times, it may 
 be said that the Greek drama was lyric in its 
 manner, and the unity of the Greek plays, and 
 especially of the iEschylean plays which Swinburne 
 most reverenced, was definitely akin to the lyric 
 unity of the stanza. Something has already been 
 said of the nature of this unity, but it may be 
 added that however different in kind it may be to, 
 say, the unity of Othello^ it yet has the same 
 capacity, if contrived with suflficient grandeur, for 
 satisfying the aesthetic sense. It is as absurd to 
 suppose that stanzaic structure in the hands of a
 
 THE DRAMAS 163 
 
 great poet Is something arbitrarily imposed upon 
 the content of his art as it would be to suppose that 
 the sense of proportion in the Parthenon came of a 
 happy whim, and not of the fundamental instinct of 
 Ictinus or Callicrates : that the temple lacking this 
 controlling unity might yet retain its essential 
 character and beauty. 
 
 The imaginative unity of Greek drama is to be 
 found in the noble control of this play and inter- 
 weaving of lyric pattern, and it was in the delighted 
 response of Swinburne's natural genius to this 
 condition that Atalanta in Calydon and Erechtheus 
 came into being. The faults of these plays are still 
 those that have been seen in his other dramatic 
 work, but they are now far less serious in result. 
 The Greek poet, for all his freedom in the elabora- 
 tion of idea unconnected with character, was yet 
 reasonably careful to keep idea not wholly unrelated 
 to the events of his argument. Swinburne is still 
 apt to break bounds and develop at length ideas 
 that come into his mind from altogether external 
 experience, as in the long dispute on custom 
 between Althea and Meleager, but since the ques- 
 tion of violation of the continuity of dramatic char- 
 acter no longer arises, we are more content to accept 
 these interludes at their own value. It seems prob- 
 able, too, that, in view of the accentuation which it 
 gives to the unity of lyric pattern, rhymed verse is 
 more suited to the form in English than blank 
 M 2
 
 1 64 SWINBURNE 
 
 verse, a view which is, I think, justified by the 
 example of Professor Gilbert Murray's translations 
 from Euripides. But, with these reservations, we 
 here find Swinburne's genius and our admiration 
 exercised freely and fully. His lyric vision, that 
 thought which has already been analysed, attains 
 an expression in these plays that is by its governing 
 principles exactly fitted to embody its richness and 
 intensity of idea in a great design, and at the same 
 time gives the poet continuous opportunity for the 
 employment of his highest and most natural faculty 
 of song. However we may question the essential 
 propriety of blank verse for the purpose, Swinburne 
 silences us by the exquisite use that he makes of 
 his chosen measure, the sustained lyric passion that 
 he weds to its natural weight and nobility. There 
 are mannerisms of word and pause, an occasional 
 magniloquence which, if it is unreasonable, is yet 
 splendid, but these things are as negligible as they 
 are obvious. We are not concerned with them, 
 remembering such passages as — 
 
 Moreover out of all the ^tolian land, 
 From the full-flowered Lelantian pasturage 
 To what of fruitful land the son of Zeus 
 Won from the roaring river and labouring sea 
 When the wild god shrank in his hour and fled 
 And foamed and lessened through his wrathful fords 
 Leaving clear lands that steamed with sudden sun,^ 
 
 ^ Lovely as this passage is, it affords another instance of 
 Swinburne's undiscipHned use of parenthesis, already discussed.
 
 THE DRAMAS 165 
 
 These virgins with the lightening of the day 
 Bring thee fresh wreaths and their own sweeter hair, 
 Luxurious locks and flower-like mixed with flowers, 
 Clean offering, and chaste hymns ; but me the time 
 Divides from these things; whom do thou not less 
 Help and give honour, and to mine hounds, good speed. 
 And edge to spears, and luck to each man's hand — 
 
 and — • 
 
 Come, therefore, I will make thee fit for death, 
 I that could give thee, dear, no gift at birth 
 Save of light life that breathes and bleeds, even I 
 Will help thee to this better gift than mine 
 And lead thee by this little living hand 
 That death shall make so strong, to that great end 
 Whence it shall lighten hke a God's, and strike 
 Dead the strong heart of battle that would break 
 Athens ; but ye, pray for this land, old men. 
 That it may bring forth never child on earth 
 To love it less, for none may more, than we. 
 
 Of the choruses throughout both plays no more 
 need be said than that they are among the best 
 examples of Swinburne's lyric mastery, and among 
 the supreme achievements of lyric poetry. And the 
 final praise of these plays is that, notwithstanding 
 an occasional indecision, they grow before us, as 
 by impulse and not example, into the excellence 
 and dignity of what may be called stanzaic form 
 that was the presiding beauty of the models that 
 helped to inspire them.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE CRITIC 
 
 The life of Algernon Charles Swinburne, who 
 died in 1909 at the age of seventy-two, has yet to 
 be written. There is but one who could under- 
 take the task with authority; Mr. Watts-Dunton, 
 with whom the poet lived for thirty years, alone 
 can decide what chronicle of the man is necessary 
 beyond his published work. No poet ever devoted 
 himself more wholly to his art, and whatever is to 
 be told must tell of that devotion. Many friends 
 have recorded their impressions of him, often with 
 admirable precision and judgment, and two of the 
 greatest painters of his time have told us of his 
 youth in their art. His life was as little eventful 
 as that of his most respectable neighbours on 
 Putney Hill, but it is bearing the inevitable crop of 
 fables, some less obviously fabulous than others, 
 some entertaining and some not, none of very much 
 value. The story, rightly told, of the daily enthu- 
 siasms, the never-wearying adventures among the 
 great company of books that he loved so well and 
 
 knew to be one with life, the eager interest with 
 
 166
 
 THE CRITIC 167 
 
 which he followed the movement of national and 
 international affairs, that should tell of the habitual 
 manner of the man, would be treasure-trove indeed, 
 for few great men can have been intimately known 
 to a smaller number of people or better known by 
 one. Failing this, the best that could be hoped for 
 would be that we should be left with the three or 
 four brief reports of friends and disciples, and 
 spared a compilation that would be largely apo- 
 cryphal or extremely dull, if not both. The poet in 
 Swinburne is for him to know who will; and it so 
 happens that, even should Mr. Watts-Dunton think 
 fit to tell us no more, we can form a clear supple- 
 mentary impression of the man from a long series 
 of essays and critical studies. 
 
 To dispute or endorse Swinburne's judgment 
 would in any case be outside the purpose of this 
 book, even were his critical method more provoca- 
 tive of argument, and less dependent for its appeal 
 upon a general temper rather than upon particular 
 conclusions. Criticism has many habits, any of 
 which may be of grace and dignity or mean and 
 unlovely; all depends upon the wearing. There 
 would seem to be two conditions common to all 
 criticism that is of durable value; that the critic 
 shall have some standard of excellence created out 
 of his own contemplation and that his subject shall, 
 on the whole, and with whatever margin there may
 
 1 68 SWINBURNE 
 
 be for reservations, satisfy that standard. In other 
 words, that he shall write only because his most 
 acute aesthetic perception has been delighted. Then, 
 and only then, may he decide whether he will do 
 more than record his delight; whether he will also 
 set the flaws beside the achievement for all to see. 
 To approach his subject from every point of view 
 is, unquestionably, to fulfil his office most com- 
 pletely, but that he should be attracted to his work 
 in the first instance by the gratification of his best 
 desires is a necessary predicate, otherwise he will be 
 more employed with the flaws than with the 
 achievement. To sweep away rubbish is, indeed, 
 a service, but one that does not demand exceptional 
 powers or produce memorable results. It is part 
 of the day's work for most men, but no very valid 
 claim to distinction. 
 
 In Notes on Poems and Reviews, a pamphlet, as 
 he himself asserted, of no great intrinsic importance 
 since the detractors whom he answered had already 
 answered themselves in their charges, Swinburne 
 says, '' I have never been able to see what should 
 attract men to the profession of criticism but the 
 noble pleasure of praising." The standard that had 
 to be satisfied before he could indulge this pleasure 
 was quite clearly defined — 
 
 " It is in fact only by innate and irrational perception that 
 we can apprehend and enjoy the supreme works of verse and
 
 THE CRITIC 169 
 
 colour; these ... are not things of the understanding; otherwise, 
 we may add, the whole human world would appreciate them 
 alike or nearly alike, and the high and subtle luxuries of excep- 
 tional temperaments would be made the daily bread of the 
 poor and hungry; the vinum deemonum which now only the 
 few can digest safely and relish ardently would be found medi- 
 cinal instead of poisonous, palatable instead of loathsome, by 
 the run of eaters and drinkers; all speciahties of spiritual office 
 would be abolished, and the whole congregation would com- 
 municate in both kinds. All the more, meantime, because this 
 ' bread of sweet thought and wine of delight ' is not broken 
 and shed for all, but for a few only — because the sacramental 
 elements of art and poetry are in no wise given for the sustenance 
 or the salvation of men in general, but reserved mainly for the 
 sublime profit and intense pleasure of an elect body or church — 
 all the more on that account should the ministering official 
 be careful that the paten and chalice be found wanting in no 
 one possible grace of work or perfection of material." 
 
 At a time when there is much clamorous and some 
 earnest talk about art being democratic the position 
 here stated will scarcely be unassailed. And yet, if 
 we care for truth more than glib and unconsidered 
 phrases, can we refute the statement.'' It is certain 
 that much work that is praised among us as noble 
 democratic art is praised not for its art but for its 
 democracy, a very admirable but a very different 
 thing. Without reference to statistics, I suppose 
 that there are ten million adult people in this 
 country of quick and nominally balanced intellect; 
 are there twenty thousand, one in five hundred, who 
 would unhesitatingly pronounce Kubla Khan to be 
 a better poem than The Psalm of Life, or " Autumn
 
 I70 SWINBURNE 
 
 Leaves " a better picture than " The Doctor " ? 
 Great drama and great music may gain a wider 
 hearing, though even here we have yet to learn that 
 popularity walks with greatness as with a familiar. 
 It is, moreover, impossible to measure the influence 
 that great art has through indirect channels, but 
 that the essential spirit which distinguishes art, and 
 especially poetry and painting, from all other forms 
 of human utterance may be detected alone by the 
 " elect body or church " is likely to remain the 
 truth. However this may be, Swinburne's con- 
 viction in the matter is clear, and it is elaborated 
 in another passage thus — 
 
 "... no chief artist or poet has ever been fit to hold rank 
 among the world's supreme benefactors in the way of doctrine, 
 philanthropy, reform, guidance, or example : what is called the 
 artistic faculty not being by any means the same thing as a general 
 capacity for doing good work, diverted into this one strait or 
 shallow in default of a better outlet. Even were this true, for 
 example, of a man so imperfect as Burns, it would remain false 
 of a man so perfect as Keats. The great men, on whichever 
 side one finds them, are never found trying to take truce or 
 patch up terms. Savonarola burnt Boccaccio; Cromwell 
 proscribed Shakespeare. The early Christians were not great 
 at verse or sculpture. Men of immense capacity and energy 
 who do seem to think or assert it possible to serve both masters — 
 a Dante, a Shelley, a Hugo — poets whose work is mixed with 
 and coloured by personal action or suffering for some cause moral 
 or political — these even are no real exceptions. The work 
 done may be, and in such high cases often must be, of supreme 
 value to art; but not the moral implied. Strip the sentiments 
 and re-clothe them in bad verse, what residue will be left of 
 the shghtest importance to art ? Invert them, retaining the
 
 THE CRITIC 171 
 
 manner or form (supposing this to be feasible, which it might 
 be), and art has lost nothing. Save the shape, and art will take 
 care of the soul for you. ... Of course, there can be no 
 question here of bad art : which indeed is a nonentity or con- 
 tradiction in terms. ... It is assumed, to begin with, that the 
 artist has something to say or do worth doing or saying in an 
 artistic form." 
 
 We must be careful to distinguish the poet's atti- 
 tude, not confusing it, for example, with Savona- 
 rola's. Swinburne does not say that art is antago- 
 nistic to morality; what he points out is that 
 Savonarola, who was not of " the elect body or 
 church," could not understand that a form which 
 was so alien to that of his own choice did neverthe- 
 less clothe truth, " take care of the soul," and so 
 would have nothing of Boccaccio. Cromwell pro- 
 scribed Shakespeare, but it is well to remember 
 that Shakespeare would have celebrated Cromwell. 
 It is merely that the poet knows his company better 
 than the hero. 
 
 Thus we have both Swinburne's purpose as a 
 critic and the standard by which this purpose was 
 to be guided. "Let us praise famous men and 
 our fathers who were before us," but praise them 
 only as they exercise in us that perception whereby 
 we know that we are of " the elect body or 
 church." It is worth while to add a complement- 
 ary clause that he affixed to his study of Blake, one 
 that is no less engaging in that it promises more
 
 172 SWINBURNE 
 
 of charity and enthusiasm than of analytic 
 certainty — 
 
 T " If it should now appear to any reader that too much has 
 been made of slight things, or too little said of grave errors, 
 this must be taken well into account : that praise enough has 
 not as yet been given, and blame enough can always be had for 
 the asking; that when full honour has been done and full thanks 
 rendered to those who have done great things, then and then 
 only will it be no longer an untimely and unseemly labour to 
 map out and mark down their shortcomings." 
 
 It is not for us to comment upon his attitude, but 
 to observe that he was splendidly true to his prin- 
 ciples. He was willing to record failure when he 
 found it in an artist whom he reverenced, but 
 nothing short of reverence could exercise his critical 
 faculty at the outset. He was, for example, fully 
 conscious of Byron's defects both in workmanship 
 and temper, but he wrote of Byron because he felt 
 that by his finer qualities he did prove himself of 
 the great company. There are times when in a 
 hasty reference he is less than just, as when he 
 speaks of " the teapot pieties of Cowper," but 
 amends are made elsewhere when the same poet is 
 spoken of with due respect. In his criticism, as 
 in his poetry, Swinburne was always apt to sur- 
 render himself wholly to the needs of the moment 
 without reference to external considerations; and 
 while this gives excellent variety to his creative art 
 it sometimes lends colour to the charge of incon-
 
 THE CRITIC 173 
 
 sistency in his judgments. When he set himself 
 to make a complete study of a subject he could, if 
 he pleased, see it if not from all at least from many 
 sides; the books on Blake and Ben Jonson are as 
 remarkable for their discrimination as they are 
 noble in appreciation. When he cared sufficiently 
 for a poet to set down the reasons for his affection, 
 his instinct was seldom at fault in deciding the 
 manner of approach. Bearing his opinions in mind 
 we feel that he chose as wisely in writing out 
 Wordsworth's debit and credit account as in using 
 but one side of the ledger for Shakespeare; the 
 question is not whether he explored every phase of 
 the matter in hand but whether a given expendi- 
 ture of energy produced the most profitable result 
 possible, and we must allow that it did in almost 
 every essay that he wrote. With his exhaustive 
 knowledge of Shakespeare and his poet's under- 
 standing Swinburne could have told us the secret 
 of many flaws that even the greatest could not 
 disclaim, but we would not sacrifice a page of 
 his high-hearted exposition in praise for much care- 
 ful sifting; on the other hand his tribute to Words- 
 worth had of necessity to be paid with far more 
 circumspection since his praise could not here be 
 given sincerely without qualification. His worship 
 of Shakespeare could be affected by no flaw, and he 
 rightly determined that his praise should not be
 
 174 SWINBURNE 
 
 clouded by more than an occasional and half- 
 apologetic reference to some scene or passage that 
 he could not accept with the rest of the master's 
 work; he recognised a great poet in Wordsworth in 
 spite of a great deal in that poet's genius which 
 seemed to him as much a denial as an assertion of 
 poetry, and in this case untempered praise would 
 have been as indefensible as his praise drawn 
 through the meshes of analysis was excellent. But 
 when he had reason to make casual allusions to 
 artists with whom he was only partially in sym- 
 pathy he was always inclined to direct his attention 
 not to men but to facets of men, with an inevitable 
 appearance of contradiction at times. The defect 
 was, perhaps, not unrelated to the defect in forma- 
 tive power that we have seen in his art. He would 
 not write directly of an artist unless after all reserva- 
 tions had been made his conclusion could be on the 
 side of praise : " my chief aim, as my chief pleasure, 
 in all such studies as these has been rather to 
 acknowledge and applaud what I found noble and 
 precious than to scrutinise or to stigmatise what I 
 might perceive to be worthless and base." But, 
 excellent as this principle may be in directing a 
 critic's choice of subjects, it does not make it less 
 desirable that he should at least do men whom in 
 the balance he cannot praise the justice of seeing 
 them whole and not in fragments. When Swin- 
 burne found in Carlyle a word that gave him an
 
 THE CRITIC 175 
 
 apt illustration of lago's character he could mo- 
 mentarily forget the conflict of opinion and call 
 him " the most profound and potent humourist of 
 his country in his century "; when at another time 
 he co-related Carlyle's lines — 
 
 Out of eternity 
 
 This new day is born, 
 Into eternity 
 
 This day shall return, 
 
 with his pretensions as a judge of poetry he was 
 justly scornful, but had he remembered the former 
 service he would have bridled his scorn before it 
 ran to " Diogenes Devilsdung." 
 
 Swinburne's prose style has certain vices which 
 are so obvious as to be more commonly realised 
 than its far more remarkable virtues. Most people 
 know that assonance and antithesis were too often 
 his masters instead of his servants, that repetition 
 too often meant diffusion rather than emphasis in 
 his hands, that his anger too easily lost its proper 
 dignity and became mere noisy, if rather entertain- 
 ing, scolding, as when he says of Middleton's 
 Family of Love — 
 
 " As a religious satire it is so utterly pointless as to leave no 
 impression of any definite folly or distinctive knavery in the 
 doctrine or the practice of the particular sect held up by name 
 to ridicule : an obscure body of feather-headed fanatics, con- 
 cerning whom we can only be certain that they were decent 
 and inoffensive in comparison with the yelling Yahoos whom 
 the scandalous and senseless licence of our own day allows to 
 run and roar about the country unmuzzled and unwhipped."
 
 176 SWINBURNE 
 
 But these excesses, unlovely as they are, are still 
 the excesses of a style which at its best is among 
 the great achievements of English prose. Force, 
 fulness and precision, tenderness, humour, beauty 
 and balance of phrase, lucidity and perfect ease of 
 transition are all within its compass, supported by 
 a rich and flexible vocabulary. These three pas- 
 sages, which need no apology for their length, are 
 not quoted as being especially remarkable in the 
 body of his work, but as normal examples of his 
 manner; they belong to the years 1868, 1889 and 
 1908 respectively : 
 
 " We have now the means of seeing what he (Blake) was like 
 as to face in the late years of his life : for his biography has at the 
 head of it a clearly faithful and valuable likeness. The face 
 is singular, one that strikes at a first sight and grows upon the 
 observer; a brilliant eager old face, keen and gentle, with a 
 preponderance of brow and head; clear bird-like eyes, eloquent 
 excitable mouth, with a look of nervous and fluent power; the 
 whole lighted through as it were from behind with a strange 
 and pure kind of smile, touched too with something of an im- 
 patient prospective rapture. The words clear and sweet seem 
 the best made for it; it has something of fire in its composition, 
 and something of music. If there is a want of balance, there is 
 abundance of melody in the features; melody rather than 
 harmony; for the mould of some is weaker and the look of them 
 vaguer than that of others. Thought and time have played 
 with it, and have nowhere pressed hard; it has the old devotion 
 and desire with which men set to their work at starting. It is 
 not the face of a man who could ever be cured of illusions; here 
 all the medicines of reason and experience must have been spent 
 in pure waste. We know also what sort of man he was at this 
 time by the evidence of living friends. No one, artist or poets
 
 THE CRITIC 177 
 
 of whatever school, who had any insight or any love of things 
 noble and lovable, ever passed by this man without taking away 
 some pleasant and exalted memory of him. Those with whom 
 he had nothing in common but a clear kind nature and sense of 
 what was sympathetic in men and acceptable in things — those 
 men whose work lay quite apart from his — speak of him still 
 with as ready affection and as full remembrance of his sweet or 
 great qualities as those nearest and likest him. There was a 
 noble attraction in him which came home to all people with 
 any fervour or candour of nature in themselves. One can see, 
 by the roughest draught or slightest glimpse of his face, the 
 look and manner it must have put on towards children. He 
 was about the hardest worker of his time; must have done in 
 his day some horseloads of work. One might almost pity the 
 poor age and poor men he came among for having such a fiery 
 energy cast unawares into the midst of their small customs and 
 competitions. Unlucky for them, their new prophet had not 
 one point they could lay hold of, not one organ or channel of 
 expression by which to make himself comprehensible to such 
 as they were. Shelley in his time gave enough of perplexity 
 and offence; but even he, mysterious and rebellious as he seemed 
 to most men, was less made up of mist and fiire than Blake." 
 
 " His spiritual father or theatrical sponsor is most copious 
 and most cordial in his commendations of the good man's 
 pastoral drama; he has not mentioned its one crowning ex- 
 cellence — the quality for which, having tried it every night 
 for upwards of six weeks running, I can confidently and con- 
 scientiously recommend it. Chloral is not only more dangerous 
 but very much less certain as a soporific : the sleeplessness 
 which could resist the influence of Mr. Rutter's verse can be 
 curable only by dissolution; the eyes which can keep open 
 through the perusal of six consecutive pages must never hope 
 to find rest but in the grave." 
 
 ###### 
 
 " The first great English poet was the father of English 
 tragedy and the creator of English blank verse. Chaucer 
 and Spenser were great writers and great men : they shared 
 
 N
 
 178 SWINBURNE 
 
 between them every gift which goes to the making of a poet 
 except the one which alone can make a poet, in the proper sense 
 of the word, great. Neither pathos nor humour nor fancy nor 
 invention will suffice for that : no poet is great as a poet whom 
 no one could ever pretend to recognise as sublime. Sublimity 
 is the test of imagination as distinguished from invention or 
 from fancy; and the first English poet whose powers can be 
 called sublime was Christopher Marlowe." 
 
 Swinburne's judgments here are not in question; 
 I have not tested his recommendation of Ben 
 Jonson's obscure protege as a purveyor of sleeping- 
 draughts, nor need we consider the claims of 
 Spenser and Chaucer to be ranked as great poets. 
 But there can be no question in the presence of 
 passages such as these that what Swinburne wanted 
 to say he could say with a mastery that has rarely 
 been excelled. It is quite easy to detect and expose 
 the faults of his prose; it is not at all easy to write 
 like that. 
 
 Knowing Swinburne's conception of the nature 
 of poetry we find throughout his essays a remark- 
 able consistency in the application of his standards. 
 The Elizabethans he loved and praised untiringly, 
 but always with a tendency to rate their purely 
 poetic achievement above their constructive facul- 
 ties, and he naturally placed Lamb at the head of 
 English criticism, finding in him an attitude that 
 corresponded to his own. vEschylus and Sophocles 
 were the Greeks whom he most reverenced, and 
 due measure was given to Aristophanes; Euripides, 
 for some strange reason, was the one great poet of
 
 THE CRITIC 179 
 
 whom he could never speak with the slightest 
 recognition of his greatness. In sheer lyric 
 imagination he found no English poet to surpass 
 Coleridge at his best, Kubla Khan being for him 
 " perhaps the most wonderful of all poems," but 
 when lyric passion was thrown into the balance he 
 placed Shelley as master in his line of poetic art as 
 definitely as Shakespeare in his, though the Keats 
 of the odes and a few other poems was in the com- 
 pany of Coleridge and Shelley. Milton's name was 
 sacred; Collins and Blake were apart in their 
 century, though there was an especial laurel for 
 Gray's elegiac gift. Byron and Wordsworth he 
 loved, with a difference; Hugo and Landor he 
 worshipped without. It is not my purpose to 
 make a catalogue of his literary opinions and affec- 
 tions, but to indicate roughly the lines along which 
 his enthusiasms worked. Nor must it be supposed 
 that he was in the habit of considering his poets 
 in their relation to each other instead of in their 
 relation to his own aesthetic perception; "to 
 wrangle for the precedence of this immortal or of 
 that," he says, "can be but futile and injurious." '^'^^'^^ 
 His pronouncements upon his contemporaries 
 afford some of the pleasantest reading in the history 
 of criticism. No poet has ever been more eager 
 to acclaim the men among whom he was working 
 when he felt that his art was being truly served, 
 no matter how dissimilar their methods might be 
 
 N 2
 
 i8o SWINBURNE 
 
 to his own. On Rossetti's Poems, Morris's Life 
 and Death of Jason and Matthew Arnold's New 
 Poems he spent his best critical energy and most 
 ungrudging praise; Tennyson, the Brownings and 
 Christina Rossetti found no more zealous prophet 
 for their best work. There are stray references 
 scattered through his critical work that one might 
 wish away, expressions as they are of momentary 
 irritation which, if it was just, as it generally was, 
 would have looked more comely under the control 
 of his more comprehensive experience. If a poet 
 whom he admired did what he felt to be bad work 
 he denounced it rightly enough, but often, in the 
 heat of resentment, in such a way as to give the 
 reader who knew nothing but that particular pas- 
 sage the impression that he considered the poet to 
 be altogether negligible. But this was an offence 
 against tact rather than against his innate generos- 
 ity of temper, and of no importance when we review 
 his critical work as a whole. That leaves us with 
 the memory of a critic who had austerely conceived 
 standards fashioned by an uncompromising per- 
 ception of the meaning of art, an unfailing cer- 
 tainty in applying them and a constant readiness 
 to accept any new manifestation that might satisfy 
 them, however unexampled it might be in his 
 experience. His equipment as a critic was far 
 from being corriplete. He ignored some great 
 issues altogether and he sometimes found himself
 
 THE CRITIC i8i 
 
 on the horns of a dilemma through his fondness for 
 critical labels. As an instance of the former de- 
 ficiency, we remember that he wrote copiously 
 about the Elizabethan dramatists without thinking 
 it necessary to consider the question of their dra- 
 matic construction; of the latter, that he wished 
 to state that " of all forms or kinds of poetry the 
 two highest are the lyric and the dramatic " and to 
 name Shelley and Shakespeare as the two English 
 leaders of these ranks, and so found himself with 
 Milton on his hands. But although he cannot be 
 placed with the great critics on this side of his 
 craft, on another side it is not easy to name more 
 than one or two men who are his equals. We 
 scarcely need to go to Coleridge and Arnold to find 
 men who speak of the full compass of poetic art 
 with greater authority than he, but not Lamb him- 
 self had a more perfect judgment as to what was 
 and what was not the essential flavour of poetry 
 than Swinburne. We find in this the poet's 
 strength and weakness working through from 
 creation to commentary with notable consistency. 
 There is nothing in these essays to show, for 
 example, that the dramatist of Bothwell even real- 
 ised that form was a considerable aspect of Shake- 
 speare's art, while there is everything to show that 
 he could recognise mastery in the delineation of 
 character and all degrees of attainment in loveliness 
 of verse with unerring instinct. Swinburne had
 
 1 82 SWINBURNE 
 
 not a critical faculty of the first rank, but he had an 
 almost infallible taste, and it is impossible to read 
 any of his studies without a quickening of our own 
 perceptions. And these prose books leave us, too, 
 with the memory of a poet who could strike fiercely 
 and without respect of persons or anything but the 
 art he served and was yet more catholic and gener- 
 ous in praise of the artists working with him than, 
 perhaps, any of his peers. It does not affect his 
 position as a poet, but nothing could have been 
 more honourable to him as a man than his com- 
 plete freedom alike from sycophancy and jealousy. 
 His character had its whimsies no doubt; it cer- 
 tainly had this greatness. 
 
 There is another quality that emerges from these 
 critical essays, having no direct relation to art, yet 
 very treasurable. To know Swinburne's work 
 throughout is not only to rejoice in his poetry and 
 to be grateful for his loyal advocacy and contempla- 
 tion of the spirit of art, it is also to love the man. 
 No one refused more nobly than he to recognise 
 the misalliance of art and morality, and to judge art 
 by any standards but its own was as unthinkable 
 to him as it must be to every artist worth his name. 
 It is true that the ultimate end of art as of moral 
 doctrine is the satisfaction of a healthy spiritual 
 appetite, and that Keats was just in his identifica- 
 tion of truth with beauty If we give his words their 
 widest interpretation. It is not necessary to discuss
 
 THE CRITIC 183 
 
 their relative values, but it is clear that the means 
 employed by art and morality are utterly and for 
 ever different, and that the moralist, assuming that 
 he is in fact moral and not merely a preacher of 
 conformity, is probably the best of men, but is cer- 
 tainly, as moralist, the worst possible judge of art. 
 And, inversely, the artist's normal life and conduct 
 may or may not be associated with his art, but it is 
 an absurdity to confuse the two things in our 
 minds, or to consider the art in any terms but its 
 own. The discovery of an exact chronicle of 
 Shakespeare's life, for example, could not alter by 
 a hair's breadth our judgment of the art of his 
 plays, any more than could the certainty that the 
 plays were written by Bacon or Titus Oates. We 
 should still know and honour the poet alone who 
 is revealed in the art, and him we know and honour 
 already in a degree that can be heightened only by 
 an increased knowledge of his work. An author- 
 ised Life of William Shakespeare might give us 
 a new and delightful companion and tell us of an 
 admirable man; it could teach us precisely nothing 
 of the artist. Artists will know that this statement 
 lends no support to the ridiculous talk about art 
 being separated from life, but that it means that 
 art has nothing whatever to do with the particular 
 company that explores life under the leadership of 
 the moralist. La Belle Dame Sans Merci is as 
 definitely related to life as is the Decalogue. Nor
 
 1 84 SWINBURNE 
 
 are these conclusions modified by the fact that the 
 artist uses the strictly moral emotion as material 
 for his art exactly as he uses all emotions. The 
 poet may denounce tyranny and exalt heroism, but 
 we still judge him not as to whether his opinions 
 may or may not be acceptable to us, but as to 
 whether he has found for them an expression that 
 satisfies our understanding of art. 
 
 But while the man apart from the artist is 
 nothing to us in the contemplation of his art, it is 
 none the less pleasant to find that an artist whom 
 we love is also a man whom we can love, one whom 
 we are glad to count among our friends, whose 
 homespun of conduct is as sweet and comely as his 
 purple of song is splendid. And it is such a man 
 that we find moving with the critic through Swin- 
 burne's essays. We see in him little indiscretions 
 of temper, an occasional compromise with himself, ^ 
 here and there a rather wilful disregard of plain 
 facts, all things which we may allow to be flaws in 
 a friend but will not permit to be flaws in a friend- 
 ship; but we see, too, a man for whom the common 
 decencies and charities of life were very precious. 
 The sophistry that makes dishonour honourable 
 and acquits disloyalty in the court of custom was 
 no more tolerable to him than the viciousness that 
 confuses morality with orthodoxy or justice with 
 law. For the Swinburne of these essays, conform- 
 ity in practice with the dictates of society was an
 
 THE CRITIC 185 
 
 expediency to be adopted or not as might be, but it 
 had nothing to do with morality. Yet no nature 
 could be richer in the power and eagerness to recog- 
 nise nobility, in tenderness, in loyalty and in frank- 
 ness. This is of Blake — 
 
 " To all the poor about him — and among the poor he had to 
 live out all his latter days of life — he showed all the supreme 
 charities of courtesy. From one or two things narrated of him, 
 we may all see and be assured that a more perfect and gentle 
 excellence of manner, a more royal civihty of spirit, was never 
 found in any man. Fearless, blameless, and laborious, he 
 had also all tender and exquisite qualities of breeding, all cour- 
 teous and gracious instincts of kindness. As there was nothing 
 base in him, so there was nothing harsh or weak. This old man, 
 whose hand academicians would not take because he had to 
 fetch his own porter, had the habit and spirit of the highest 
 training. He was born a knight and king among men, and had 
 the great and quiet way of such." 
 
 To suspect the sincerity of words like that is not 
 only an offence against probability but also against 
 decency; to allow it is to love the man who wrote 
 them. In his essays on the dramatists there is 
 always a profound sense of the operation and 
 conflict of character, which is the high sense of the 
 artist, but there is also a large and steady enthusiasm 
 for the noble in character and a hatred of if not re- 
 vulsion from the ignoble. After reading the great 
 vigorous pasan of strong and many-charactered life 
 in the Study of Shakespeare his must be a poor spirit 
 who can come unmoved upon these closing words — 
 
 " As in Cleopatra we found the incarnate sex, the woman 
 everlasting, so in Imogen we find half glorified already the
 
 1 86 SWINBURNE 
 
 immortal godhead of womanhood. I would fain have some 
 honey in my words at parting — with Shakespeare never, but 
 for ever with these notes on Shakespeare; and I am therefore 
 something more than fain to close my book upon the name of 
 the woman best beloved in all the world of song and all the tide 
 of time; upon the name of Shakespeare's Imogen." 
 
 This nobility of nature was flawed by no speck of 
 sentimentality. It loved beauty and courage and 
 it hated meanness, but it could be royally just to 
 greatness even when it was on the side of evil. 
 No one, for example, has written with more under- 
 standing of, with a saner zest of lago, that spirit 
 of " deep daemonic calm " — 
 
 " As though it were possible and necessary that in some one 
 point the extremities of all conceivable good and of all imagin- 
 able evil should meet and mix together in a new ' marriage 
 of heaven and hell,' the action in passion of the most devilish 
 among all the human damned could hardly be other than that 
 of the most godlike among all divine saviours — the figure of 
 lago than a reflection by hell-fire of the figure of Prometheus." ^ 
 
 The man who could write so of Imogen and lago 
 shared something of Chaucer's and Wordsworth's 
 tender simplicity and something of Milton's and 
 Blake's clear-sightedness of moral judgment. The 
 impetuosity of character to which every one who 
 knew him has borne witness could not but fall at 
 times into contradiction by the very intensity of 
 his afl^ections. An attack upon the art which he 
 served or upon his friends roused him at all times 
 
 1 Swinburne is referring, of course, to lago's attitude at 
 the end of the play.
 
 THE CRITIC 187 
 
 to a fury that knew nothing of restraint and little 
 of regard for circumstance, but we remember that, 
 whatever was swept aside at such moments, his 
 motive was always the generous vindication of the 
 things that he held most dear. He may have 
 struck a little wildly on one or two occasions; he 
 never once struck meanly or secretly. No great 
 man has suffered more or viler abuse than he, none 
 has been less careful to answer his detractors, but 
 defamation of the art or the men that he loved he 
 denounced fiercely and without pity, not caring 
 then whether or no he reversed former judgments 
 or cancelled earlier pledges. There can be no 
 question here of defence or blame. By the witness 
 of some dozen books we have a critic who never 
 fails to give us full measure for our care in reading 
 him, and it is pointless to object to the excesses that 
 are inseparable from his method. His generosity 
 at moments in its direct exercise leads him to over- 
 praise men whom closer analysis would have shown 
 him to be unworthy of his critical approval; and at 
 other moments of reaction it leads him to severities 
 that deliberation would have tempered. But these 
 excesses are negligible beside the steady strength 
 and continence of the main current of his critical 
 opinions. And so it is with the man himself; we 
 love the loyal eager temperament, and are content 
 to accept its stray humours with no more than a 
 word of dissent. There is something of most
 
 1 88 SWINBURNE 
 
 heartening irony in the fact that this poet whose 
 name has been flung as freely as Shelley's in vilifica- 
 tion through the suburbs of morality should be 
 among the few critics of authority whose attitude 
 to the whole life of art we value not only for its 
 acute perception of aesthetic values, but also, 
 whether in free enthusiasm as in the Study of 
 Shakespeare, or such close analysis of excellence and 
 defect as the Study of Ben Jonson, or in personal 
 reminiscence such as the essay on Jowett, for its 
 clean wholesomeness and its delight in honourable 
 things. 
 
 Lovers Cross Currents, an epistolary novel, was 
 published in the poet's later years and dedicated to 
 Mr. Watts-Dunton as a " bantling of your friend's 
 literary youth." It uses admirably the material 
 with which he failed in his play The Sisters. It is 
 in many ways a masterpiece of high comedy, full 
 of wise satire unspoiled by a breath of cynicism. 
 There is a lightness of touch both in the writing 
 and the delineation of character that Swinburne 
 nowhere else attempted, and to watch Lady Mid- 
 hurst presiding over the love-affairs of her per- 
 plexing company of nephews and nieces and grand- 
 children is to watch an exquisitely controlled essay 
 in delicate art. There is more than a prophecy of 
 Wilde's wit in such stray passages as, "One is 
 rather sorry for him, but it is really too much to be 
 expected to put up with that kind of young man
 
 THE CRITIC 189 
 
 because of his disadvantages," but wit is commonly 
 outside the scope of a manner that interweaves 
 humour so deftly with tenderness as to suggest that 
 if Swinburne had been of an age that had stimu- 
 lated instead of embarrassing his genius as a dra- 
 matic poet he might have added another laurel to 
 that bestowed on the tragic poet. As it is Love's 
 Cross Currents has to be considered rather as a 
 delightful grace separable from the body of his 
 work, yet not altogether uncharacteristic. Right 
 handling of the subject-matter needed the faculty 
 known to the Augustans as good sense, which is 
 admirable in its place but not the token of a poet. 
 In The Sisters Swinburne attempted to shape it by 
 the aid of strictly poetic art, and destroyed both 
 the art and the material, but in his single novel — 
 if novel it is — he used means exactly fitted to his 
 end. The forces of expediency and worldly wis- 
 dom are marshalled and their credentials examined 
 with a seriousness that is free of condescension and 
 pharisaism alike, and the style has a matter-of-fact 
 sagacity proper to the occasion. We do not look 
 for these qualities elsewhere in Swinburne, but 
 such things as Reginald's fiery devotion and revolt 
 and the tenderness of the slight sketch of Amicia 
 and her baby are treasurable if faint echoes from his 
 poetry. We find in this book new evidence of 
 the range of Swinburne's art, and we find again a 
 temper glad of life's charities.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 CONCLUSIONS 
 
 The detraction to which great poets are subjected 
 in the days following their first wide recognition is 
 a phenomenon that has long since ceased to have in 
 it anything of strangeness. It would seem almost 
 to be a law, a kind of tribute levied by the folly 
 that shares with wisdom the rule of men. When 
 accredited opinion has acclaimed a poet loudly and 
 long enough to tempt popular favour into echoing 
 its judgment, it inevitably follows that the poet is 
 praised for many things foolishly. To praise badly 
 is, perhaps, better than not to praise at all, but bad 
 praise from the foolish unfortunately results always 
 in a counterblast of equally ill-considered detrac- 
 tion, and this often from men who may at other 
 times speak with authority. When a poet is 
 praised for having no coat, quite good judges of 
 poetry are apt to be irritated into denying his 
 art any merit at all, without reference to the truth. 
 But though we may see the cause of these vapours, 
 they are not the more pleasant to contemplate. 
 
 190
 
 CONCLUSIONS 191 
 
 Whilst we might hesitate to place these detractors 
 in the company of those who, in Swinburne's words, 
 '' seek their single chance of notoriety by denying 
 or decrying the claim and station of the greatest 
 among all the sons of men," we cannot but remem- 
 ber, again with Swinburne, Blake's charge in The 
 Marriage of Heaven and Hell^ that " the worship 
 of God is. Honouring his gifts in other men each 
 according to his genius, and loving the greatest 
 men best : those who envy or calumniate great men ^ 
 hate God, for there is no other God." Swinburne's 
 great contemporaries, poets and others, acclaimed 
 him with sufficient conviction to win for him a fair 
 measure of popular applause. Popular misjudg- 
 ment followed with its usual certainty, and he was 
 reported as a poet deficient in thought, but pos- 
 sessed of an almost unparalleled mastery of lan- 
 guage. The new generation of critical opinion, or 
 many of its exponents, protested. Swinburne, they 
 said with some justice, had great metrical com- 
 mand, but he knew nothing in his art of the subtle 
 and mysterious beauties that come of the poet's 
 rarest use of words. But with this observation the 
 protest exhausted its claim to reason. It did not 
 trouble to find out whether popular opinion was 
 wrong too in its other aspect : whether, after all, 
 Swinburne's poetry had some thought worth dis- 
 covering and worthy of gratitude. It was angry.
 
 192 SWINBURNE 
 
 or peevish, and proceeded to deny him virtue 
 altogether. His metrical invention, lacking that 
 rarer grace, was really of no very great artistic 
 value; his thought was both second-hand and 
 second-rate; his professed love of liberty and heroic 
 life was a pose; his friendship had no true loyalty; 
 his enthusiasm for literature was narrow and un- 
 balanced; his frankness was credulity at one time, 
 egotism at another. These things, in part or whole, 
 are to be found in the confession of faith of more 
 than one of Swinburne's critics. As a saving clause 
 they admit that over his poetry there is a kind of 
 nebulous beauty, peculiar to him, defying analysis, 
 and his chief, if not his only claim to distinction. 
 That, in effect, he failed in all that a poet should 
 achieve, and is to be awarded not the crown of 
 laurels, but a halo of pseudo-poetic moonshine. 
 This subterfuge, quite clearly, will deceive nobody 
 but themselves and others of like distemper. 
 Denying Swinburne those other qualities, they 
 definitely deny his claim to any consideration what- 
 ever as a poet. If he did nothing but create a new 
 glamour above words, signifying nothing, but 
 itself, he did nothing that can properly exercise any 
 critical intelligence or command the affection; we 
 could but desire oblivion for an imposture that 
 had already deceived too many generous spirits. 
 It is useless categorically to divest him of all the
 
 CONCLUSIONS 193 
 
 qualities that we associate with the high office of 
 poetry, and then to allow him, by reason of a char- 
 acteristic that is striking chiefly in its novelty, to 
 creep into the company of his betters. This is to 
 play chuck-farthing with the devil; the devil wins, 
 and tells tales. To say that Swinburne is of quite 
 minor importance as a poet seems to me to argue 
 poverty of judgment; to dismiss one by one the 
 claims by which his greatness might be established 
 and yet to shirk the responsibility of saying in set 
 terms that he did not approach greatness, seems to 
 argue a far less tolerable poverty of spirit. The 
 necessities of our modern system of reviewing may 
 lead the most generous at times into unqualified 
 denunciation, but it is difficult to think of anything 
 but a clear enthusiasm tempting the more deliberate 
 moods of criticism. It may be said, without queru- 
 lousness, that to write by choice of a poet — since 
 it is of poets that we are speaking — without feeling 
 that in spite of all his defects and failures he is yet 
 great to quicken our homage and worthy of long 
 remembrance, is to take up work that should be 
 for other hands. 
 
 That the attempts to disprove Swinburne's title 
 have the least justification or will be upheld by the 
 judgment of posterity there is nothing in his work 
 to show. His control of language was, indeed, 
 not distinguished by the magic that, although it
 
 194 SWINBURNE 
 
 was within the compass of his peers, was so only 
 at the rarest intervals. This wizardry that visited 
 perhaps every great poet from, say, Chaucer down 
 to him of yesterday, was known to each but a few 
 times in his life. Those lines of almost inconceiv- 
 able beauty, lines commoner in Coleridge and Keats 
 than in poets whose collective achievement is even 
 greater than theirs, are, when all is said, but an 
 exquisite fragment of our poetry. They amount 
 to a hundred, a thousand perhaps : a mere handful 
 in any case. It has been the privilege of nearly 
 every great poet to shape a few; Swinburne made 
 scarcely one, and he loses one of the poet's rarest, 
 if not most commanding, distinctions in conse- 
 quence. But to recognise this limitation is not to 
 deny his manner excellence in other more generally 
 important ways. Language was, in the great 
 volume of his good work, definitely a vehicle for 
 crystallising his vision into poetry. The rarest 
 graces are beyond his reach, but to the high ex- 
 pression which is poetry he attains with superb ease. 
 It is, indeed, the chief triumph of his poetic style 
 that it proved a conception of language which knew 
 nothing of that quintessential magic to be yet 
 capable of bearing the unmistakable stamp of 
 poetry. It is well to wonder happily at the heights 
 which he achieved in spite of his limitations rather 
 than to assume that with such limitations no heights 
 were possible to him. It is of radical importance
 
 CONCLUSIONS 195 
 
 to insist that the achievement was the expression 
 of vision. It is true that there were times, as I 
 have said earlier, when his expression did achieve 
 a curious value of its own, apart from any prompt- 
 ing vision, the value, in fact, that his detractors 
 allow him whilst denying all others. But these 
 were not characteristic moments, and they are 
 interesting only as a by-product of his creative 
 energy. The work by which he will live is the use 
 of his metrical cunning to express an attitude 
 towards life that was consistent and bravely eager. 
 What there is in his undeviating championship of 
 freedom that savours of insincerity, what there is 
 in his lifelong loyalty to his heroes, even in its 
 most immoderate moments, that speaks of anything 
 but the most ardent generosity, what there is in 
 the passionate sense of character that, whatever their 
 defects, is burnt into many of his plays from surface 
 to core, that does not assert beyond refutation his 
 individual discovery of life, I do not pretend to 
 understand. Through nearly fifty years of service 
 to his art he professed, without any qualifications 
 save those of occasional lapses in artistic power and 
 such misreadings of fact as resulted in his attitude 
 towards the Transvaal in 1900, an adventurous and 
 intensely realised philosophy of life. The nature 
 of that philosophy I have attempted to examine. 
 To say that it left much that it questioned un- 
 answered, and that there were great tracts of 
 02
 
 196 SWINBURNE 
 
 experience which it^ did not explore at all is but to say 
 that Swinburne could not transcend his race, but 
 what precisely it was in its passionate love of the 
 earth and man, its profound sense of the tragic 
 dignity of life and its eager acceptance of every 
 conceivable and diverse manifestation of beauty, 
 that was second-rate, or second-hand in the unity 
 with which it brought the manifold objects of its 
 contemplation to the unvarying touchstone of its 
 own nature, again I do not pretend to know, nor 
 by what right we may impugn the sincerity of his 
 profession. To question the good faith of his best 
 poetry, whatever may be its flaws, seems to me to 
 be as gratuitous an insult as it would be to bite 
 one's thumb at the man who wrote — 
 
 " In my next work it should be superfluous to say that there 
 is no touch of dramatic impersonation or imaginary emotion. 
 The writer of Songs before Sunrise, from the first Hne to the last, 
 wrote simply in submissive obedience to Sir Philip Sidney's 
 precept — ' Look in thine heart, and write.' The dedication 
 of these poems, and the fact that the dedication was accepted, 
 must be sufficient evidence of this. They do not pretend and 
 they were never intended to be merely the metrical echoes, or 
 translations into lyric verse, of another man's doctrine. Mazzini 
 was no more a Pope or a Dictator than I was a parasite or a 
 papist. Dictation and inspiration are rather different things. 
 These poems, and others which followed or preceded them 
 in print, were inspired by such faith as is born of devotion and 
 reverence : not by such faith, if faith it may be called, as is 
 synonymous with servility or compatible with prostration of 
 an abject or wavering spirit and a submissive or dethroned 
 inteUigence."
 
 CONCLUSIONS 197 
 
 Compromise cannot live with honesty in this 
 matter; thumbs must be frankly up or down. Some 
 one once protested that Keats was talking nonsense 
 when he suggested that Ruth had heard the night- 
 ingale to which he was listening, because no night- 
 ingale could possibly live so long. We do not, of 
 course, presume to argue with lunatics who suppose 
 that imaginative truth has anything to do with 
 material fact, or that truth is any the less true 
 because it is imaginative. In speaking of truth 
 we mean the highest or poetic truth, imaginative 
 sincerity. And in considering a poet two courses, 
 and two only, are open to us. Either we can 
 accept his sincerity as proved beyond question and 
 then proceed to examine the nature of his vision 
 and weigh the excellence of the art in which it is 
 embodied, or we can deny his sincerity and, as a 
 necessary corollary of the denial, reject his claims 
 finally and beyond appeal and write him down 
 impostor. It is the merest sophistry and an intoler- 
 able affront to poetry to add that he may still be 
 acclaimed because he is an engaging impostor or 
 because, coxcomb though he be, he has the back- 
 trick simply as strong as any man in Illyria. To 
 attack what we take to be a misbegotten reputation 
 may be to make less than the best use of our time, 
 but it is honest, which cannot be said of this mal- 
 odorous trifling with the integrity of art. Since art
 
 198 SWINBURNE 
 
 for the artist Is synonymous with life, then art for 
 art's sake if you will, but no one under the degree 
 of a fool has yet supposed art to be life despoiled 
 of honour. Whatever the poet may lack and yet 
 keep his kingdom, it cannot be truth. To lie at 
 all is to be poor in spirit, but to lie in the name of 
 poetry is an offence for which a man may not be 
 forgiven. To say that a poet lied, but that he lied 
 with a grace, and therefore it is well, is to be an 
 accomplice in the most pitiful of treacheries. Swin- 
 burne meant what he said, spoke it not in self- 
 deception, mistaking acceptance for understanding, 
 but from deep spiritual conviction, or he was not 
 a poet. For whatever things poetry in the royalty 
 of its privilege may be, it cannot be feigning. 
 
 I have written amiss if I have left any doubt as 
 to my opinion concerning the integrity of Swin- 
 burne's utterance. He drifted too often into the 
 shallows of his faith, but when there is least spirit- 
 ual movement in his work it still answers surely, 
 however faintly, to the tides of the great sea beyond. 
 It was his especial delight when, in praising a poet, 
 he could liken him to the sea, and of him too may 
 this be said that he would have best liked. The 
 experience that he recorded in his poetry was as 
 powerful, as Invigorating and as mutable as the sea 
 itself. It knew as many moods and was responsive 
 to as many winds. Often It spun out Into a mere
 
 CONCLUSIONS 199 
 
 glitter of spray, or crawled almost lifeless above the 
 bright shingle of his words, but these moments are 
 no more than effusions or lapses from the deep 
 habitual strength of its being. It passes in our 
 vision from turbulence to profound peace, from 
 uncurbed anger to all imaginable calm and beauty 
 of benefaction, but variable it is not lawless, and 
 in change it is yet one. 
 
 This, then, considering his work as a whole, 
 seems to me to be Swinburne's achievement. In 
 the use of words he failed of that shy mystery which 
 many poets have caught at times, none by more 
 than a stray and happy chance; but in fulness and 
 resource and magnificence he is beyond challenge 
 among the masters of language. His speech has 
 nothing of the remote, almost intolerable, loveliness 
 of the glowing violet half-hidden among dew and 
 leaves, but it has always the regal splendour of the 
 sunflower standing proudly with no secret from the 
 sun. In his metrical manner, again, we do not look 
 for that delicate quality of surprise that distin- 
 guished so much sixteenth-century sacred verse, and 
 has been captured in our own day by more than 
 one of the Irish poets. The subtlety of structure 
 that at first sight seems to be disorder, but is in 
 truth most exquisite proportion, is, however, de- 
 lightful only when it is rare; when it does surprise 
 it enchants, but when it is expected it becomes no
 
 200 SWINBURNE 
 
 more than a distressing mannerism.^ Swinburne 
 did not seek to add this beauty to his store. He 
 was, indeed, prodigal in his use of all the devices 
 of elision and the double-stressed foot, and in his 
 habitual practice he brought a weight and fulness 
 to the lyric line that had been achieved by other 
 poets only at intervals in their work. But licence 
 of any other kind he was so little willing to allow 
 
 1 Vaughan's Death : A Dialogue will serve as an illustration 
 of my meaning, being a perfect example of normal metrical 
 structure branching out into irregularities that not only add 
 to our pleasure but also emphasise instead of destroying the 
 order of the whole : 
 
 Soul. 
 
 'Tis a sad land, that in one day 
 
 Hath dull'd thee thus ; when death shall freeze 
 
 Thy blood to ice, and thou must stay 
 
 Tenant for years, and centuries ; 
 
 How wilt thou brook 't ? 
 
 Body. 
 I cannot tell ; 
 
 But if all sense wings not with thee, 
 And something still be left the dead, 
 I'll wish my curtains off, to free 
 Me from so dark and sad a bed : 
 
 A nest of nights, a gloomy sphere, 
 Where shadows thicken, and the cloud 
 Sits on the sun's brow all the year, 
 And nothing moves without a shroud. 
 
 Soul. 
 'Tis so ; but as thou saw'st that night 
 We travelled in, our first attempts 
 Were dull and blind, but custom straight 
 Our fears and falls brought to contempt :
 
 CONCLUSIONS 20 1 
 
 as scarcely ever to avail himself of it even in cases 
 where it has become a recognised law, as in the use 
 of the redundant syllable in blank verse. A little 
 less severity of discipline in this might have 
 brought some profit, but since he willed it otherwise 
 it is not for us to complain; faults of commissioni 
 are the proper mark for censure, but no poet could 
 survive the ordeal of being confronted with a cata- 
 logue of the excellent things that he did not do. 
 A far more serious matter in Swinburne's metrical 
 habit is his use of the anapaest in poems so long that 
 the reason surrenders to the seduction of the 
 dancing measure; this, in general, is in my opinion 
 his one grave error as a metricist. For the rest, 
 he put our common English rhythms to uses as 
 new then as they were imperishable thenceforth in 
 
 Then, when the ghastly twelve was past, 
 We breath'd still for a blushing East, 
 And bade the lazy sun make haste, 
 And on sure hopes, though long, did feast. 
 
 But when we saw the clouds to crack. 
 And in those crannies light appear'd. 
 We thought the day then was not slack, 
 And pleas'd ourselves with what we fear'd. 
 
 Just so it is in death. But thou 
 Shalt in thy mother's bosom sleep, 
 Whilst I each minute groan to know 
 How near Redemption creeps. 
 
 Then shall we meet to mix again, and me^, 
 'Tis last good-night ; our Sun shall never set.
 
 202 SWINBURNE 
 
 his work. To the mystery of words and rhythms 
 he added nothing, but none had ever given them a 
 larger access of reverberate music. 
 
 Passing from his use of words and his metrical 
 music to his sense of form, we find the defect that 
 prevented much of his most ambitious work from 
 achieving that success which passes in our imperfect 
 understanding for perfection. In many lyrics and 
 the two plays inspired in part by Greek models, 
 where the unity to be attained was one of formal 
 pattern or, as it were, visible structure, he found 
 a form or forms to which his genius could respond 
 in all their demands. But the more strictly 
 romantic unities of narrative and character he was 
 never able to control with certainty, and a poem 
 such as Tristram of Lyonesse is, in consequence, a 
 casket of unstrung gems, while a man who, had it 
 been given to him to work in conditions favourable 
 to life in the theatre, would have been one of the 
 very great English dramatic poets has left no play 
 in which by the evidence of all the essential qualities 
 that title is more than half proved. 
 
 Of Swinburne's vision no more than a word 
 need be said in summary. Like that of all great 
 poets it was simple, depending for its authority not 
 upon its profound intellectual discovery, but upon 
 its intensity and passion. He himself once said 
 that no supremely great poet had ever been or
 
 CONCLUSIONS 203 
 
 could be a supremely great thinker, and there is no 
 voice from the masters against him. A poet may 
 be a philosopher, a metaphysician, a scientist, many 
 things as well as a poet, but these other selves can 
 add nothing to his stature in song. The poet's 
 function is not to think but to see, not to inquire 
 but to know. His fundamental brain-work goes 
 to keeping his craft in order, but his revelation 
 cannot come of much disputing. Truth for him 
 is not a breaking of seals, but the visitation of 
 devout charities and fervent ecstasies that were in 
 the beginning. He will tell you that the sun rose 
 this morning, that jealousy has tragic issues, that 
 there is terror in the wings of death, that autumn 
 prophesies the spring, that there is joy to the heroic 
 heart, that " love seeketh not itself to please," and 
 he will transmute these by-words among men into 
 annunciations, immortal and ageless. If we turn to 
 Swinburne, or to any poet, for what is new in his 
 thought, we shall but waste our time, being unfit 
 to pass into the presence of poetry; but if we turn 
 to him for great things greatly felt, for the old 
 passionate adventures of the spirit wrought into 
 new and lovely song, he will not fail us. That this 
 majestic simplicity of thought is common to all 
 high poetry we have the poets to prove; that high 
 poetry is not one whit easier to achieve in con- 
 sequence we have its rarity in witness. To give
 
 204 SWINBURNE 
 
 common things eternal shape is all that the poet 
 need do, but to do this he must be one man among 
 the multitude who is creator. That is the dis- 
 tinction of the poet from all others : he creates old 
 things anew. The man who, writing of these 
 things, lets us remember that they have been dis- 
 covered innumerable times before, creates nothing; 
 he may have thought, he may believe, but he 
 neither sees nor knows in the sense that poets only 
 see and know. 
 
 Whether or no a poet's art shows a steady growth 
 of power from book to book is a question of but 
 little importance, prompted by a pseudo-scientific 
 method of criticism that forgets the question of 
 real moment. While a poet is alive it is interesting 
 to his contemporaries to discuss his progress or 
 decline, but once his work is completed the only 
 matter worth considering- is the value to us of his 
 achievement taken in its entirety. If, indeed, we 
 find that after a first performance of some distinc- 
 tion he does nothing but repeat himself, we are 
 justified in denying his vitality, but if he continues 
 to express his vision by impulse and not by a trick 
 of his own perfecting, it matters nothing whether his 
 tenth book is better than his ninth, or his twentieth 
 not so good as his first. If he works always truly 
 from impulse there will inevitably be the freshness 
 and variety that are of infinitely more importance
 
 CONCLUSIONS 205 
 
 than growth, for life will continually present some 
 new aspect to his contemplation, or liberate his 
 passion through some new channel. It is pertinent 
 to criticism to observe the moments when the im- 
 pulse wanes, but there is no probability that such 
 moments will have any relation to chronological 
 sequence. Does the fact that Milton published 
 Paradise Lost after a silence of twenty years, or 
 that Wordsworth's genius suffered eclipse in his 
 later life, tell us anything worth knowing of these 
 poets' art? I find no new virtue in Shakespeare 
 when I am told that his plays form three or thirty 
 groups. There are some that we wish to put beside 
 others, but whether they were written together may 
 be decided — secretly — by those who like to juggle 
 with dates. These things may mean something to 
 the biographer, even to the psychologist; they 
 mean nothing to poetry. In thinking of a poet's 
 work we do our own tabulating, in terms of its 
 salient qualities and its general tendencies. When 
 we approach it closely we can but rejoice in its 
 beauty of detail, recording our delight if we will, 
 but refraining from tearing petal from stem in the 
 hope of discovering its secret. Whether Swin- 
 burne's later work was better than his first I do 
 not know, but I know that it was different and that 
 it was good; that neither his successes nor his 
 failures belong to any definite period or periods,
 
 2o6 SWINBURNE 
 
 and that over the long progress of lovely and shin- 
 ing change we are conscious of an unwavering 
 purpose and a great spiritual unity. As we watch 
 the brave pageant we see, here and there, uncomely 
 things; a man clad not in armour, but in tinsel, 
 perhaps, or one with no heart in his travels, or one 
 misshapen. We detect them, a word passes, and 
 they are forgotten, while the magnificent and 
 ordered revel delights and inspirits us still. W^e 
 quicken to the life and strength and beauty of it 
 all, and we are not to be persuaded against our 
 senses that it is after all but a mirage or coloured 
 vapour, nor do we believe that those to whom it is 
 passing will be so persuaded. 
 
 There would seem to be three stages in the 
 appreciation of Swinburne. There is the exultant 
 delight in the first discovery of his lyric music, 
 accepted for its own independent loveliness. A 
 time follows when this in itself, not having subtlety 
 among its many graces or attributes, is insufficient 
 for our needs, and our oesthetic appetite is jaded 
 and reaction comes. That most people do not 
 trouble to inquire whether the blame should be 
 laid upon the poet or upon themselves, whether, 
 in fact, they have not mistaken the coloured casket 
 for the treasure, accounts for the general unreadi- 
 ness to recognise Swinburne at his full stature. 
 The reaction of this second stage is almost inevit-
 
 CONCLUSIONS 207 
 
 able to a perception of any sensitiveness, and to 
 pass beyond it is as rare as it is bountifully re- 
 warded. If, instead of being content to cry out that 
 the first fragile ecstasy that we knew has left us, 
 that we can now at best but hope to recapture some- 
 thing of its evanescent virtue at favourable 
 moments, we remember that this poet wrote not a 
 few lyrics and choruses only, but that his work fills 
 over twenty volumes, that no man has ever brought 
 a more consistent excellence of workmanship to the 
 continuous embodiment of his vision, that what he 
 accomplished in fifty years with undivided loyalty, 
 to his art, and an unwearying determination to 
 serve that art at all costs, may be worth something 
 of our time to examine, we shall for the first time ] 
 discover that we are in the presence not of a 
 momentarily attractive maker of " light easy 
 rhymes," but of a great poet. If as critics we go, 
 forward in resentment, angry that the reaction has 
 cheated us of that first flush of pleasure, and carry- 
 ing with us the new philosopher's stone that turns 
 all the gold it touches into baser metal, we can \ 
 make a deft pretence of disproving his title alto- ; 
 gether; and as much could be done quite easily 
 with any poet. We may, further, after the most 
 impartial and exhaustive examination find Swin- 
 burne wanting in the greater qualities of poetry. 
 But if we do this knowing his work throughout
 
 2o8 SWINBURNE 
 
 and freely receiving what it can give, we are no 
 longer we, for I part company, finding in him much 
 that belongs to imperfection, even to failure, but 
 more that places him in the company of poets 
 whose names are among the holy things of earth.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Poetical and Dramatic Works : Early verses appeared in 
 Fraser's Magazine, six in 1849, o"^ '" 185 i ; contributed to 
 the Oxford Undergraduate Papers, 1857 and 1858 ; The Queen- 
 Mother, and Rosamond (two plays, in verse), i860 ; new ed., 
 1908 ; contributed seven poems, including After Death, and 
 Faustine, to the Spectator, 1862 ; The Pilgrimage of Pleasure, 
 a morality play for children added to Mrs. Disney Leith's 
 Children of the Chapel, 1864 ; new ed., 1910 ; Atalanta in 
 Calydon (a tragedy, in verse), 1865 ; new eds. 1875, 1894; 
 trans, into German by von Albrecht Graf Wickenburg, 
 1878 ; Chastelard (a tragedy, in verse), 1865 ; trans, into 
 German by O. Horn, 1873 ; into French by Mme. H. 
 du Pasquier, 1910 ; Laus Veneris, 1866 ; subsequently altered 
 and printed in Poems and Ballads ; trans, into French by 
 F. Viele-Griffin, 1895 ; Poems and Ballads, 1866; new ed., 
 1878 ; Cleopatra, 1866; Unpublished Verses (privately 
 printed), 1866; A Song of Italy, 1867; An Appeal to 
 England against the execution of the condemned Fenians (a 
 poem reprinted from the Morning Star), 1867 ; Siena, 1868 ; 
 another ed., 1868 ; trans, into Italian by S. Menasci, 
 1890 ; Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic, 
 1870 ; Songs before Sunrise, 1871; another ed., 1909; 
 Bothwell (a tragedy, in verse), 1 874; Songs of Two Nations, 
 1875 5 Erechtheus (a tragedy, in verse), 1876; Poems 
 and Ballads: Second Series, 1878; Studies in Song, 1880 ; 
 P 209
 
 210 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Heptalogia, or the Seven against Sense (a collection of parodies), 
 1880 ; another ed., 1898 ; Songs of the Springtides, 1880 ; 
 Mary Stuart (a tragedy, in verse), 1 88 1; Tristram of Lyon- 
 esse, and other poems, 1882 ; a Century of Roundels, 1883 ; 
 A Midsummer Holiday, and other poems, 1884; Marino 
 Faliero (a tragedy, in verse), 1885 ; A Word for the Navy, 
 
 1886 ; other eds., 1886, 1887; Locrine (a tragedy, in 
 verse), 1887 ; The Question, 1887 ; The Jubilee, mdccclxxxvii, 
 
 1887 ; Gathered Songs, 1887 ; Poems and Ballads : Third 
 Series, 1889 ; trans, into French prose by G. Mourey, with 
 notes on Swinburne by Maupassant, 1891 ; The Brothers, 
 1889 ; The Ballad of Dead Men's Bay (privately printed), 
 1889 ; The Bride's Tragedy (privately printed), 1889; A 
 Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning 
 (privately printed), 1890 ; Eton : an ode, 1891 ; The 
 Sisters (a tragedy, in verse), 1892 ; The Ballad of Bulgarie 
 (privately printed), 1893 ; Grace Darling (privately printed), 
 1893; Astrophel, and other poems, 1894; The Tale of 
 Balen, 1896 ; Robert Burns (privately printed), 1896 ; A 
 Channel Passage, 1885, 1899 ; another ed., 1904 ; Rosa- 
 mund, Queen of the Lombards (a tragedy, in verse), 1899 ; 
 The Duke of Gandia (a drama, in verse), 1908. 
 
 The Poetical Works of A. C. Swinburne, six vols. (New 
 York), 1884 (?); The Poems of A. C. S., 1904; The Tragedies 
 of A. C. S., five vols., 1905, 1906. Selections from the 
 Poetical Works of A. C. S., ed. by R. H. Stoddard [1884] ; 
 Selections, ed. by A. Symons (in Poets and Poetry of the 
 Century, Vol. 6), 1891. 
 
 Prose Works : Dead Love (a tale), appeared in Once a 
 Week, 1862 ; reprinted in book-form, 1864 ; A Year's Letters 
 (a novel), appeared in the Tatler, 1877 ; reprinted as Love's 
 Cross-Currents, 1905.
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 211 
 
 Essay on Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mai, published in the 
 spectator, 1862; Notes on Poems and Reviews, 1866; 
 William Blake : a critical essay, 1868 ; new ed., 1906 ; 
 Notes on the Royal Academy, 1868. Part I by W. M, 
 Rossetti, Part II by A. C. S., l868 ; Under the Microscope, 
 1872; Geo. Chapman: a crit. essay, 1874; Auguste 
 Vacquerie (reprinted from the Examiner), 1875 ; Essays and 
 Studies, 1875 ; The Devil's Due (under pseudonym), 1875 ; 
 Note of an English Republican on the Muscovite Crusade 
 1876; A Note on Charlotte Bronte, 1877; A Study of 
 Shakespeare, 1880 ; Miscellanies, 1886 ; A Study of Victor 
 Hugo, 1886; A Study of Ben Jonson, 1889 ; Studies in 
 Prose and Poetry, 1894; The Age of Shakespeare, 1908 ; 
 Shakespeare : a crit. essay (written in 1905, and published 
 posthumously), 1909 ; Charles Dickens, 191 3. 
 
 Translation of 11. 685-725 of the Parabasis in Fiere's trans- 
 lation of the Birds of Aristophanes, 1883. 
 
 Works Edited by A. C. S. : Selections from Works of 
 Lord Byron, 1866 ; another ed., 1885 ; Introduction to 
 Christabel, and the lyrical and imaginative poems of Coleridge, 
 1869; Introd. to the Works of Geo. Chapman, 1874; 
 Introd. to C. J. Wells's Joseph and his Brethren (World's 
 Classics), 1876; Preface to Shelley's Cenci, 1883 ; Note on 
 Shelley's Epipsychidion, 1887 ; Introd. to five plays of 
 Thos. Middleton (Mermaid Series), 1887 ; other eds., 1894, 
 1904 ; Preface to Herrick's Hesperides and Noble Numbers 
 (Muses' Library), 189 1; another ed., 1898; Prefatory note 
 to E. B. Browning's Aurora Leigh, 1898 ; Note on Herrick's 
 Flower Poems (Photogravure Series), 1905 ; Introd. to 
 \'ol. 13 of Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1906; Introd. 
 to Reade's Cloister and the Hearth (Everyman's Library), 1906. 
 P 2
 
 212 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Biography and Criticism : S.'s Poems and Ballads, by W. M. 
 Rossetti, 1866 ; Mr. S.'s "Flat Burglary " on Shakespeare, by 
 F. J. Furnivall, 1879 ; The Bibliography of S., by R. H. 
 Shepherd, 1883 ; other eds., 1884, 1887 ; Poetes modernes 
 de I'Angleterre, by G. Sarrazin, 1885 ; Bibliographical List 
 of the scarcer works and uncollected writings of S., by T. J, 
 Wise, 1897 ; A. C. Swinburne (English Writers of To-Day), 
 by T, Wratislaw, 1900 ; Studi e ritratti letterari, by G. 
 Chiarini, 1900 ; Bibliographical List of the Works of A. C. S., 
 by J. C. Thomson, 1905 ; Swinburne (Contemporary Men 
 of Letters Series), by G. E. Woodberry, 1905 ; another ed., 
 191 2; Rime as a Criterion of the Pronunciation of . . . S., by 
 A. Gabrielson, 1909 ; S. : en Studie, by H. Svanberg, 1909 ; 
 S. : a lecture, by J. W. Mackail, 1909 ; Memories of S,, by 
 W. G. B. Murdoch, 1910 ; The Boyhood of A. S. (in the 
 Contemporary Review), by Mrs. Disney Leith, 1910 ; S.'s 
 Verskunst, by Maria Kado, 191 1 ; S., by S. Gossaert, 191 1 ; 
 A. C. S. : a critical study, by Edward Thomas, 191 2 ; S. in 
 Studies and Portraits, by Edward Gosse, 191 2.
 
 INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 -^SCHYLUS, 162, 178 
 
 Drake, 88 
 
 
 Aristophanes, 30, 178 
 
 Dumas, 87 
 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 81, 180, 181 
 
 Euripides, 143, 178 
 
 
 Bacon, 183 
 
 
 
 Baudelaire, 87 
 
 FitzGerald, 80 
 
 
 Blake, 7, 171 seq.^ 185 seq. 
 
 
 
 Boccaccio, 171 
 
 Galsworthy, John, 1 
 
 [48 
 
 Browning, E. B., 180 
 
 Garrick, 145 
 
 
 Browning, Robert, 37, 54, 87- 
 
 Gray, 179 
 
 
 109, 180 
 
 Gwynne, Nell, 87 
 
 
 Burns, 87 
 
 
 
 Byron, 152, 172 
 
 Herrick, i, 90 
 Hugo, 70, 74, 179 
 
 
 Callicrates, 163 
 
 
 
 Carlyle, 174 
 
 Ibsen, 108 
 
 
 Chapman, loi, 104 
 
 Ictinus, 163 
 
 
 Chaucer, 36, 55, 58, 59, 86, 87, 
 
 
 
 95, 102, 139, 178, 186, 194 
 
 Jonson, I, III, 173, 
 
 178 
 
 Coleridge, 2, 179, 181, 194 
 
 Jowett, 188 
 
 
 Collins, William, 179 
 Cowper, 172 
 Cromwell, 73, 87, 171 
 
 Darling, Grace, 87 
 Darwin, 87 
 
 De la Mare, Walter, 23 
 Dickens, 87 
 
 Keats, I, 7, 139, 179, 182, 194, 
 197 
 
 Lamb, 88, 181 
 Landor, 70, 71, 91, 179 
 Leith, Mrs. Disney, 23 
 Lovelace, 90 
 
 213
 
 214 
 
 INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 Marlowe, 36, 105, 112, 138 
 
 Maundevile, 119, 120 
 
 Mazzini, 70 
 
 Meredith, George, 67 
 
 Meynell, Mrs. 31 
 
 Middleton, 175 
 
 Milton, 2, 29, 40, 59, 73, 76, 
 
 179, 181, 186, 205 
 Moli^re, 108 
 Morris, William, 60, 83, 93, 
 
 109, 138, 180 
 Murray, Gilbert, 143, 164 
 
 Nelson, 88 
 
 Petrarch, 139 
 
 Rossetti, Christina, 87, 180 
 Rossetti, D. G., 90, 180 
 
 Sappho, 74 
 
 Savonarola, 171 
 
 Shakespeare, i, 2, 3, 35, 59, 
 87, IDS, 108, III, 138, 139, 
 145, 171, 173. 179, 181, 183, 
 185 seq.^ 205 
 
 Shelley, i, 40, 54, 59, 67, 74, 
 76, 179, 181 
 
 Shirley, 43 
 
 Sidney, 35, 88 
 
 Spenser, 178 
 
 Sophocles, 178 
 
 Surrey, 36 
 
 Swinburne— control and use 
 of words, 2 ; the life of lan- 
 guage, 14 ; Sleeps 16 ; Hes- 
 peria^ 18 ; the effect of his 
 
 valuation of language, 21 ; 
 the significance of words to 
 him, 24 ; use of metaphor, 
 24 ; the poet of eloquence, 
 27 ; use of the anapaest, 30 ; 
 its effect on his poetry, 32 ; 
 his metrical music, 34 ; 
 metrical schemes, 34 ; the 
 sublimation of the common 
 genius of the English lan- 
 guage, 35 ; the consum- 
 mation of an epoch, 36 
 
 Poetry and thought, 37 ; 
 the nature of techinque, 44 ; 
 Swinburne's thought, 44 ; 
 tragic joy, 47 ; his general 
 spiritual temper, 53 ; its 
 strength and its dangers, 54- 
 55 ; his relation to poetic 
 tradition, 58 ; his view of 
 literature, 60 ; his receptiv- 
 ity, 64 ; his view of the 
 natural world, 64 ; physical 
 delight in nature, 67 ; par- 
 ticularisation in his poetry, 
 69 ; his surrender to the 
 moment, 70 ; his attitude 
 towards the last Boer War, 
 72 ; his debt to his symbols 
 — The Ittierpreters, 74 ; 
 Hymn of Man, 77 ; his 
 reading of life, 79 ; Swin- 
 burne and Morris, 83 ; Swin- 
 burne's power of self-sur- 
 render, 86 ; his catholicity, 87 
 
 Wit and the short poem, 89 ; 
 Swinburne's most satisfy-
 
 INDEX OF NAMES 
 
 215 
 
 ing achievements, 92 ; his 
 deficiency in the sense of 
 narrative continuity, 93 ; 
 the value of narrative, 94 ; 
 Tristram of Lyonesse, 95 ; 
 the relation of matter to 
 manner, 100 ; his sense of 
 form, 103 
 Swinburne's work as a drama- 
 tic poet, 105 scq. ; The 
 Queen Mother, 109 ; Rosa- 
 mund, 112; Chastelard^ 
 Bothwell, Mary Stuart, 119; 
 Locrine, 1 39 ; The Sisters, 
 145 ; Marino Faliero, 152 ; 
 Rosamund, Queen of the 
 Lombards, 155 ; The Duke 
 of Gandia, 157 ; Atalanta 
 in Calydon and Erectheus, 
 
 159 
 Swinburne's loyalty to his art, 
 166 ; his view of poetry, 168 ; 
 democracy and art, 169 ; his 
 standard of criticism, 171 ; 
 his limitations as a critic, 
 
 174 ; his prose style, 175 ; 
 his opinions, 178 ; his gene- 
 rosity, 179; his instinct for 
 excellence, 181 ; the man as 
 seen in his essays, 182 ; his 
 sincerity, 185 ; Lovers Cross 
 Ctirretits, 188 
 
 Summary, 190 seq. 
 
 Synge, J. M., 108 
 
 Tennyson, i, 13, 87, 107, 109, 
 
 180 
 Thompson, James (B.V.), 37 
 Tichborne, Chidiock, 3 
 
 Vaughan, 200 
 Villon, 87 
 
 Watts-Dunton, Theodore 166 
 
 seq.^ 188 
 Webster, 105, 138 
 Wordsworth, i, 13, 20, 54, 59, 
 
 67, 11, 149, 173. 179, 186, 
 
 205 
 Wyatt, 36
 
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