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 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Photograph copyright, by Frederick Hollyer, Tendon
 
 SWINBURNE 
 
 BY 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 
 CONTEMPORARY 
 
 MEN OF 
 
 LETTERS 
 
 SERIES 
 
 LONDON 
 
 WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 MCMV
 
 I I 
 
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 Printed in the United States o( America, 
 by the McClure Press.
 
 The 'Publisher makes grateful acknowledgment 
 to cMr. Swinburne and to cMessrs. Chatto & 
 Windus for their courtesy in granting permission 
 to use the Extracts contained in this Volume.

 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
 
 I 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne, sprung of 
 the strength of English blood, was born in 
 London, April 5, 1837, the eldest son of 
 Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne, and 
 Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the third 
 earl of Ashburnham. His childhood was 
 summered in Northumberland and win- 
 tered in the Isle of Wight, so that the an- 
 cestry of his senses as well as of his blood 
 was of the sea. He was bred at Eton and 
 Oxford, where though not undistinguish- 
 ed in scholarship he took no degree. He 
 became acquainted with Italy and France 
 
 [3]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 by travel. From his boyhood and in college 
 days he was devoted to the literary life, 
 and thereafter literature was his sole ca- 
 reer. A life secluded in friendships and 
 studies has been his portion, as a man; 
 and the fruits of it, by which he lives to 
 the public, are an abundance of prose and 
 verse which has come forth unintermit- 
 tently for nearly forty years ; he stands now 
 alone, the last of the great English poets of 
 the nineteenth century, with a fame never 
 to be forgotten in the annals of that time 
 thronged though it be with poetic names 
 and voices of matchless splendor and music. 
 
 II 
 
 The gift of Swinburne is to be capable of 
 
 passion. Enthusiasm is inseparable from 
 
 [4]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 him. Perhaps the simplest aspect of his gen- 
 ius lies in his revolutionary songs. The old 
 French fire burns its last in his torch. It is 
 the flame that descended for an hour upon 
 Coleridge, that wrapped Shelley life-long 
 and in death, that by tradition now belongs 
 to the English race of poets from Milton to 
 Landor with every well-loved name to aid ; 
 and in his generation Swinburne will ever 
 be remembered as its herald, a figure sole 
 and supereminent, the poet-republican 
 
 "I am the trumpet at thy lips, thy clarion 
 Full of thy cry, sonorous with thy breath," 
 
 that is his attitude, in the modern battle 
 for liberty, like Taillefer at Hastings. It 
 began with his songs for Italy, in the great 
 days of her patriots, the first-fruits of his 
 [5]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 sympathies with the land and of his per- 
 sonal admiration for Mazzini. He does not 
 state the grounds of his faith, for it is not 
 an intellectual passion that seizes on him ; 
 it is a fervour that burns, an exaltation that 
 lifts and heightens, a flood of feeling that 
 pours forth and inundates with light and 
 music and with the confluence of many 
 strengths in one superb moral force the 
 revolutionary cause. Its monotone, though 
 in part due to the quality of the resonance 
 and to the sameness of the imagery, is es- 
 sentially emotional, the monotone of pro- 
 found and unchangeable depth in the feel- 
 ing itself which is a constituent of the eternal 
 nature of man. The passion is a capacity to 
 hate as well as to love. There is no such 
 master of the curse, in modern days. He 
 [6]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 strikes home and to the pit with it, and 
 with a mien and phrase and a volleying 
 after of fire and wrath fit to hurl Satan 
 down to the abyss. These are curses to 
 rejoice the heart. They mark their vic- 
 tims indelibly for hell. Vice versa his 
 hymns to Landor, Victor Hugo and Maz- 
 zini are adorations. These three were the 
 living hands that had fed him in youth 
 with their touch, their words, their pres- 
 ence on earth. The fire they nursed 
 though they did not kindle, had long life 
 in it, a deep core of heat; and whether the 
 year was '66 or yesterday, whether the 
 scene was Rome or Paris, Crete or Mus- 
 covy, the poet still brooded there the pas- 
 sion-bolts of his invective or paeans for 
 victor and martyr. In his own land Swin- 
 [7]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 burne's revolutionary ardour changed and 
 took a new form in an illimitable patriot- 
 ism, a pride in England, an Elizabethan 
 might of land-love that carried the fate of 
 the Armada in its bosom as its dearest 
 memory and expressed itself in an exu- 
 berance of panegyric and delight that 
 makes his verse seem contemporaneous 
 with English liberty and the ocean-rhythm 
 of England's empire. This love of liberty 
 and dedication to mankind had, too, its 
 far fount, under dark centuries, in Athens, 
 
 "Dear city of men without master or lord ; " 
 
 thence the poet had drank, most truly, the 
 draught of his inspiration, the intoxica- 
 tion of his faith in man. The stream of his 
 revolutionary song is unmatched in vol- 
 
 [8]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 ume, splendour and force; it has flowed 
 life-long, and still wells; it is blended of 
 many loves of persons and histories and 
 memories, of time and of eternity; it is a 
 great passion, great in personal intensity, 
 great in its human outreaching and up- 
 lifting aspiration, great in sincerity. Here 
 is immense manhood-strength, seeking, by 
 the poet's right, to pour itself through the 
 impoverished veins of miserable men." 
 
 Ill 
 
 Even in so brief an opening glance at 
 Swinburne's work the fact of his scholar- 
 ship, his provenience from literature, 
 stands prominently forth. I suppose that 
 no English poet has ever had so wide and 
 familiar acquaintance with the poetry of 
 
 [9]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 foreign climes. He began with a felicitous 
 command of the classical and romance 
 languages. He took the Taylorian prize, 
 in his college days, for French and Italian, 
 and won other similar distinction in the 
 ancient tongues. He has written, as a poet, 
 in Greek, Latin and French with literary 
 mastery. In English his studies have been 
 prolonged and comprehensive, and not re- 
 stricted to poetry. Out of this varied 
 scholarship sprang his prose works, a long 
 series beginning with his elaborate expo- 
 sition of Blake's genius and including for 
 its bulk an examination of the Elizabethan 
 drama, together with the study of Victor 
 Hugo. To be grouped here, also, as de- 
 pendent on the critical activity of his mind 
 are the poems so many in number which, 
 [10]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 whether in the form of ode, elegy or son- 
 net, are dedicated to the literary fame of 
 those writers whom he had deeply stud- 
 ied. In this large body of verse his criticism 
 is condensed and, so far as the matter 
 permits, is put into the form of poetry 
 with a full heart of praise. He indulges 
 himself in this luxury of praise, in a 
 minute and lavish tribute to the writers of 
 many books and plays, to the nameless as 
 well as the famous dead. Swinburne truly 
 is nowhere more the poet than in this in- 
 exhaustible capacity to be moved to hero- 
 worship and the affectionate eulogy of 
 those who from Sappho and Catullus 
 down the long line seem to be in the inti- 
 macy of genius his own. His criticism is 
 woven of such noble recognitions.
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 This literary element, explicitly exposed 
 in his prose criticism and in the critical as 
 distinguished as from the imaginative 
 portions of his verse, is implicitly active in 
 the whole mass of his poetry. Its influence 
 is observed most plainly in the structural 
 form of his dramas. He had achieved such 
 familiarity with past literature that his 
 mind became capable of an attitude of 
 contemporaneity toward it; he was thus 
 led, in opposition to the usual attempt of a 
 literary poet to modernize what he de- 
 rives from the past and naturalize it in his 
 own age, rather to archaize his own forms. 
 Swinburne's detachment from his own 
 time was gradual, but he moved toward a 
 reproduction of both the Greek and the 
 English antique. "Atalanta in Calydon" 
 [12]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 was his first experiment in this way, but 
 " Erechtheus, " his second Greek play, was 
 more perfect in the success that it aimed 
 at. Similarly his earliest dramatic work 
 "The Queen Mother" and "Rosamond," 
 though Shaksperian in diction and remi- 
 niscence, was yet not a conscious reversion 
 in art; but the play of "Locrine," and the 
 trilogy of " Chastelard," "Bothwell" and 
 "Mary Stuart," a chronicle history as he 
 himself describes it, were attempts to write 
 anew in the Elizabethan manner of the 
 drama. The same may be said of "Ma- 
 rino Faliero," while "The Sisters" and 
 "Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards," the 
 other two dramas, stand somewhat apart. 
 In the trilogy of which Queen Mary is 
 the theme, the effort for contemporaneity 
 [13]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 with the past is also to be observed, other 
 than artistically, in the historical veracity 
 of the characters in themselves and of the 
 scene of events. Attentive and exhaustive 
 study of the facts of the record is notice- 
 able, the historian's fidelity; and it is 
 rather in obedience to the necessities of 
 history than of art that the poet has 
 swelled and lengthened the drama to such 
 a remarkable compass, and owns that 
 the work has such proportions and has 
 been so treated as to deserve the name of 
 an epic drama. He seems desirous that it 
 should be judged of as a history as well as 
 in its aspect as a work of imagination. This 
 indicates the depth in him of that feeling 
 for past fact, which has controlled the ar- 
 tistic form of the drama in his general use, 
 [14]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 both Greek and English. He disengages 
 himself from contemporary realities 
 standards, ideas, convictions but sub- 
 jects himself to the realities of another 
 place and time so far as he can re-embody 
 them; he thus by native aptitude and with 
 the aid of scholarship, does become in a 
 singular degree a citizen and freeman of 
 many literatures and at their different 
 periods, a poet in whom what would be 
 imitation and reminiscence in others be- 
 comes genuine because he plays the part 
 he assumes after due study and with deep 
 feeling ; he thus succeeds beyond all others 
 in writing literary drama that accords with 
 past principles of composition. 
 
 Such a power to free oneself from one's 
 own age and move in the guise and fash- 
 [15]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 ion of other times and places, illustrated 
 here by the use Swinburne makes of the 
 drama, involves aloofness from the world. 
 He is, in fact, in his greater work of the 
 imagination, remote from current life. He 
 lives, withdrawn in his own thoughts, in 
 that sphere of the poetic imagination 
 where there is a true timelessness, the 
 solitude thronged with figures that appear 
 at any moment from any age and drift 
 across the vision or play their mimic parts 
 before the mind's eye and disappear. It is 
 the world of the great artists. Locrine, 
 Erechtheus, Meleager are natural there; 
 so are the stormy passion of the Scotch 
 peers, the craft of English statesmen, the 
 spectacle of Venetian pride ; or Sappho or 
 Faustine. The world of Swinburne is well 
 [16]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 symbolized by that Zodiac of the burning 
 signs of love that he named in the prelude 
 to "Tristram of Lyonesse," -the signs 
 of Helen, Hero, Alcyone, Iseult, Rosa- 
 mond, Dido, Juliet, Cleopatra, Francesca, 
 Thisbe, Angelica, Guenevere; under the 
 heavens of these starry names the poet 
 moves in his place apart and sees his vis- 
 ions of woe and wrath and weaves his 
 dream of the loves and the fates of men. 
 He is a myth-lover, a dreamer, a com- 
 panion of the myths and the dreams of the 
 past, an artist of the imagination. The 
 aloofness that belongs to Swinburne's 
 verse is not due only to his effort to arch- 
 aize the forms of his art, but much more 
 to the fact that he reverts to great imagin- 
 ative themes which, in themselves, are 
 [17]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 remote from the modern world, and con- 
 ceives them in a spirit of poetry that now 
 seems to have its death-limit of a great 
 age in his sole surviving genius. 
 
 The artistic conservatism of Swinburne, 
 which disposed him in the rigidity of his 
 mind to the preservation and choice of 
 anterior poetic forms, and to the treatment 
 of antique and legendary themes or sub- 
 jects of historic grandeur, is also felt in his 
 desire that these themes should be kept in 
 their primitive state. He revolted against 
 moderization of the old in all its forms. 
 The dramatic bent of his own genius may 
 have predisposed him against idyllic treat- 
 ment by any transforming method; but, 
 apart from that, there was, deep in his na- 
 ture, a rooted abhorrence of any change in 
 [18]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 the essentials of the antique or mediaeval 
 matter, a feeling reflected in his care for 
 the accuracy of history in his trilogy. He 
 was a purist, in opposition to his contem- 
 poraries. This was exemplified, for the 
 Arthur Myth, in "The Tale of Balen," 
 and again in "Tristram of Lyonesse;" he 
 stood for the mediaeval, romantic narra- 
 tive in the one case, and for the naked 
 majesty of primitive love and fate in the 
 other. There is a truthfulness, an auster- 
 ity of truth, in all this which is tempera- 
 mental in the poet and marks the strength 
 of his individuality. In a certain way there 
 is the spirit of Pre-Raphselitism in it, a 
 formal reversion to severer artistic meth- 
 ods, to a primitive poetry, to a more stern 
 and bare figure of life, a reversion to art as 
 [19]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 opposed to mere manipulation of mater- 
 ial, a recognition of the truth that the great 
 themes of imagination are given to man, 
 not created by him in any passing genera- 
 tion, that they are of man but not of men. 
 This reverence of Swinburne for the past, 
 in form and matter, in the things of art, is 
 a part of that ritual of hero-worship to 
 which he gives such fervid and personal 
 expression and which is summed gener- 
 ally throughout his verse in his ever re- 
 curring hymn to Apollo, to the Sun-god, 
 the inspiration of all poetry. The poet's 
 faith is in this past of art, both form and 
 matter and personality, instrument and 
 theme and singer, and he sustains it 
 against the temporal hour by virtue of his 
 own enfranchisement in the mind from 
 [20]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 time, of his own liberty in the mastery of 
 many literatures and epochs, of his own 
 contemporaneity with poetry in a multi- 
 tude of its forms and moods. Swinburne's 
 conservatism is one with his hero-worship, 
 one with his scholarship, one with his life- 
 long passion for literature, a poet's pas- 
 sion for life in the imaginative world. The 
 love of literature, a scholar's love, is the 
 most fundamental thing in him ; it is a jeal- 
 ous and deep-hearted love and controls 
 him in his theories as well as in his prac- 
 tice, in his mental outlook as well as in his 
 secret inspiration ; it may make him aloof 
 in person, remote in theme, reversionary in 
 art, but it gives him a wide domain. The 
 revolutionary cause even was for him a lit- 
 erary heirloom from the poets. Swinburne 
 [21]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 is a poet of culture through whom flows the 
 broad stream of the many thoughts of men. 
 
 IV 
 
 Swinburne first took the world with mel- 
 ody. The opening chorus of "Atalanta in 
 Calydon" was, in the ears of men, a new 
 singing voice on earth. Its music stamps 
 the memory of whoever hears it beyond 
 any possible oblivion. The cadence and 
 the phrase are both characteristic of the 
 poet's original genius, and so is their in- 
 separability; they are one in the manifold 
 of their syllables and they flash out in 
 their fall what can only be called a colour 
 of sound. This is the peculiar and arrest- 
 ing poetic gift of Swinburne, the lyrical 
 iridescence of the verse like a mother-of- 
 [22]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 pearl sea, like a green wave breaking in 
 tempest, like a rainbow-spray before the 
 beak of his driving song; it is a marvel 
 that changes but fails not, a witchery of 
 language, a vocal incantation in the 
 rhymes, an enchantment in the mere 
 pour of sound and pause and elision, a 
 purely metrical gift. The chorus of the 
 "Atalanta" serves melodically as a pre- 
 lude to all this lyrical change, just as it 
 arises most spontaneously in the memory, 
 in the recall of his music. 
 
 " When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, 
 The mother of months in meadow or plain 
 
 Fills the shadows and windy places 
 With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain; 
 
 And the brown bright nightingale amorous 
 
 Is half assuaged for Itylus, 
 
 [23]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces, 
 The tongueless vigil, and all the pain. 
 
 Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers, 
 Maiden most perfect, lady of light, 
 
 With a noise of winds and many rivers, 
 With a clamour of waters, and with might; 
 
 Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet, 
 
 Over the splendour and speed of thy feet; 
 
 For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers, 
 Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night. 
 
 Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her, 
 Fold our hands round her knees, and cling ? 
 
 O that man's heart were as fire and could spring 
 
 to her, 
 Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring ! 
 
 For the stars and the winds are unto her 
 
 As raiment, as songs of the harp-player; 
 
 For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her, 
 And the southwest-wind and the west-wind 
 sing. 
 
 [24]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 For winter's rains and ruins are over, 
 And all the season of snows and sins; 
 
 The days dividing lover and lover, 
 
 The light that loses, the night that wins; 
 
 And time remembered is grief forgotten, 
 
 And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, 
 
 And in green underwood and cover 
 
 Blossom by blossom the spring begins. 
 
 The full streams feed on flower of rushes, 
 
 Ripe grasses trammel a travelling foot, 
 The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes 
 
 From leaf to flower and flower to fruit; 
 And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire, 
 And the oat is heard above the lyre, 
 And the hoofed heel of a satyr crushes 
 The chestnut-husk at the chestnut-root. 
 
 And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night, 
 Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid, 
 
 Follows with dancing and fills with delight 
 The Moenad and the Bassarid; 
 
 [25]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 And soft as lips that laugh and hide 
 The laughing leaves of the tree divide, 
 And screen from seeing the leave in sight 
 The god pursuing, the maiden hid. 
 
 The ivy falls with the Bacchanal's hair 
 
 Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes; 
 The wild vine slipping down leaves bare 
 Her bright breast shortening into sighs; 
 The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves, 
 But the berried ivy catches and cleaves 
 To the limbs that glitter, the feet that scare 
 The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies." 
 
 The lyrical vein here opened disclosed 
 richer ores in the succeeding choruses and 
 antiphonal arrangements of the plays. A 
 new master of song-craft was plain to see. 
 But there was that in the Hellenism of 
 this play which gave the quality of an 
 exotic to the verse, which shadowed and 
 [26]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 veiled the permanence of the gift and 
 made it appear more magical than real. 
 Its reality and permanence as the natural 
 gift of an English poet was first and sur- 
 prisingly established in men's minds by 
 the publication of the first series of 
 "Poems and Ballads" from which Swin- 
 burne's fame properly began. Here the 
 lyrical quality was pre-eminent, greater in 
 range and variety and in effect than in any 
 later volume ; here, there, were not only the 
 cadence and the phrase, the flow, the 
 colour of sound, the intermingling of 
 musical senses with the whole range of 
 emotion and thought, but such delicacy 
 and litheness and volume in the verses as 
 made them a new revelation of language 
 as a medium of expression. It was as if a 
 [27]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 new magical art had arisen, and Swin- 
 burne was its master. The verse was like 
 sword-play, for brilliancy and precision, 
 for short and long, for speed and glitter 
 and nerve. Familiarity with it has now 
 lessened the pleasures of surprise and 
 wonder; but as the poet has gone on 
 through later years, and from time to 
 time has put forth his strength in novel 
 ways, he has maintained and increased 
 his early fame as a metrical master per- 
 fecting a native gift with all the resources 
 of an exact and subtle scholarship in the 
 resources of his art, its aims and limits, as 
 a form of music in words. In all these 
 things he is accomplished. 
 
 Perfect, however, in metres, he is less 
 sensitive to purity in structural form. His 
 [28]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 lyrics are apt to be shortened dramas, his 
 dramas to be fragmentary epics, his nar- 
 rative to be a blend of lyric passion and 
 dramatic episode. "Tristram of Lyon- 
 esse" is his most characteristic poem in 
 this respect as in all others; it is the poem 
 most representative of his qualities, each 
 at its best. The poet's command of intel- 
 lectual form, of the proportion of matter 
 to expression, of the economic rendering 
 of character, event and thought, of that 
 logical condensation which is effected by 
 art, is less manifest. Form in all its modes, 
 and they are numerous, is essential to the 
 greatest poetry. Swinburne is eminent for 
 metrical form, in the highest degree; and 
 in this he is lyrically unrivalled, so far as 
 the form only is concerned. Of form in its 
 [29]
 
 GERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 structural and intellectual modes he has 
 less, but prefers complexity to singleness 
 and an ample fullness to economy. Blank 
 verse also does not take his imprint so 
 sympathetically as the lyrical measures, 
 though as studiously laboured as his rhym- 
 ed and lyric lines; it is rather by the mel- 
 ody with which he first captured men, and 
 by no other equal bond, that he holds the 
 world under the fascination of liquid ca- 
 dences and light lilts and choral harmonies 
 that first fell on human speech from his lips. 
 
 V 
 
 The second salient trait of Swinburne's 
 work, and one not less impressive and 
 individualistic than his lyricism, is its ren- 
 dering of the experience of passion. The 
 [30]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 theme is most pervasive in his earlier 
 verse, and is there so frequent and takes 
 on so many forms of imagination that a 
 misleading idea was fixed in the public 
 mind of the narrowness of his range in 
 poetry. The poetic fiction under which he 
 develops the theme is multifold, and ex- 
 hibits the various sources of his culture ; it 
 has three main phases, classical, mediae- 
 val and Pre-Raphaelite. The guise of Pre- 
 Raphaelitism is the earliest and most pal- 
 pable in the verse, and the fact is con- 
 nected with the poet's association in life 
 with the group of artists, Rossetti, Morris, 
 Burne-Jones and others, with whom he 
 had come in contact in college days and 
 later, and to whose art in painting and 
 cast of imagination generally Swinburne's 
 [31]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 was most cognate. His mind formed the 
 habit of allegorizing in human figures ab- 
 stractions, such as Love, Fear, Grief, and 
 presenting these pictorially and symbolic- 
 ally. They are figures essentially without 
 the motion of life, designated by attributes 
 of colour and wreath and wand, can- 
 vases or cameos in words; the poems in 
 which they are the human element of in- 
 terest are also highly conventionalized in 
 their literary art, generally under French 
 or Italian influences. Such are the open- 
 ing poems of his work, set first in the col- 
 lected edition, "A Ballad of Life" and "A 
 Ballad of Death." The initial note thus 
 struck often recurs, but as an artistic meth- 
 od it is diminishingly employed by the poet 
 in the progress of his works. The classical 
 [32]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 source of his song is a much deeper spring, 
 and from the moment when it blends 
 with the verse lifts it far away from sesthet- 
 icism, conventionalized art and any lim- 
 itation of narrow modes, peculiar fashion 
 and formalism. The theme at once takes 
 its great form as that of the everlasting 
 opposition inhuman nature which is histor- 
 ically summed up as the antithesis of class- 
 ical paganism to monkish Christianity, 
 or more broadly as the contrast of the bod- 
 ily with the spiritual element in life. Swin- 
 burne still farther defines the discord as 
 the opposition of the worship of Venus to 
 that of the Virgin Mary ; and thus begins 
 for him that denial of Christian symbol- 
 ism which he carried to the extreme of ex- 
 pression in the poem "Before a Crucifix. " 
 [33]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 The reversionary instinct, so notice- 
 able in all his art, is here at work un- 
 checked. He seems, like another Julian, to 
 bring back the worship of the Greek di- 
 vinities, affirming their permanence es- 
 sentially in human nature, and he takes 
 the traditionary dying words of Julian as 
 the motto, one may add the moth*, of 
 the poem in which he most eloquently 
 set forth his new paganism, the Hymn to 
 Proserpine : 
 
 " O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped 
 
 out in a day ! 
 From your wrath is the world released, redeemed 
 
 from your chains, men say. 
 New Gods are crowned in the city ; their flowers 
 
 have broken your rods ; 
 They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young 
 
 compassionate Gods. 
 
 [34]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 But for me their new device is barren, the days 
 
 are bare ; 
 Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten 
 
 that were. 
 Time and the Gods are at strife ; ye dwell in the 
 
 midst thereof, 
 Draining a little life from the barren breasts of 
 
 love. 
 I say to you, cease, take rest ; yea, I say to you 
 
 all, be at peace, 
 Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren 
 
 bosom shall cease. 
 Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean ? but these thou 
 
 shalt not take, 
 The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts 
 
 of the nymphs in the brake ; 
 Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with 
 
 tenderer breath ; 
 And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy 
 
 before death ; 
 
 All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre, 
 [35]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings 
 
 that flicker like fire. 
 More than these wilt thou give, things fairer 
 
 than all these things ? 
 
 Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings. 
 A little while and we die ; shall life not thrive as 
 
 it may ? 
 For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving 
 
 his day. 
 And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath 
 
 enough of his tears : 
 Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to 
 
 blacken his years ? 
 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. 
 Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for 
 
 a day ; 
 But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel 
 
 outlives not May. 
 
 [36]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Sleep, shall we sleep after all ? for the world is 
 
 not sweet in the end ; 
 For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years 
 
 ruin and rend. 
 Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock 
 
 that abides ; 
 But her ears are vexed with the roar and her 
 
 face with the foam of the tides. 
 O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings 
 
 of racks and rods I 
 
 ghastly stories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted gods 
 Though all men abase them before you in spirit, 
 
 and all knees bend, 
 
 1 kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look 
 
 to the end. 
 
 Though the feet of thine high priests tread where 
 thy lords and our forefathers trod, 
 
 Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou 
 being dead art a God, 
 
 [37]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Though before thee the throned Cytherean be 
 
 fallen, and hidden her head, 
 Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead 
 
 shall go down to thee dead. 
 Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess 
 
 with grace clad around ; 
 Thou art throned where another was king ; 
 
 where another was queen she is crowned. 
 Yea, once we had sight of another : but now she 
 
 is queen, say these. 
 
 Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blos- 
 som of flowering seas, 
 Clothed round with the world's desire as with 
 
 raiment as fair as the foam, 
 And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess and 
 
 mother of Rome. 
 For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to 
 
 sorrow ; but ours, 
 Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and 
 
 colour of flowers, 
 
 [38]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splen- 
 dour, a flame, 
 
 Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth 
 grew sweet with her name. 
 
 For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, 
 and rejected ; but she 
 
 Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and 
 imperial, her foot on the sea. 
 
 And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds 
 and the viewless ways, 
 
 And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea- 
 blue stream of the bays." 
 
 The essential elements of Swinburne's 
 imagination and method are all here pres- 
 ent in this delineation of opposed divini- 
 ties each powerful over human life. The 
 identical theme is set forth again under 
 the guise of mediaeval fiction in the poem 
 "Laus Veneris," where the knight of the 
 [39]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 Venusberg legend sets in antithesis the 
 pagan and the Christian scheme of life, 
 and embodies in himself the apostacy 
 from Christian ideals - 
 
 " For I was of Christ's choosing, I God's knight, 
 and his adhesion to the lady of the myth ; 
 
 " For till the thunder in the trumpet be, 
 Soul may divide from body, but not we 
 
 One from another ; I hold thee with my hand, 
 I let mine eyes have all their will of thee. " 
 
 Apart from the theory and the imagery, 
 these poems are also identical in the tone 
 of sad, dark farewell which converts each 
 of them into a lament for love, for life 
 itself. The protagonist of either poem has 
 finished with life. Both poems have the 
 motion of life, a vital breath in their lyrical 
 [40]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 expression of emotion profoundly modi- 
 fied by thought; but about the imagery, 
 the figures of Aphrodite, the Virgin, the 
 Lady of the Venusberg, and also the Cru- 
 cifix that defines the conception of Christ 
 in "Laus Veneris," about all these 
 there lingers the Pre-Raphselite habit of 
 imagination; the imagery has more affin- 
 ity with modes of sacerdotal art, with 
 symbolism and the attributive in imagin- 
 ative power than it has with the free vital- 
 ity that is more properly the sphere of 
 poetry. 
 
 The new paganism, of which these two 
 poems are elemental expressions receives a 
 widely varied illustration in the body of 
 poetry that is grouped about them. Several 
 of these are dramatic lyrics containing a 
 [41]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 situation or a slight story; others are 
 hardly more than exercises in verse, often 
 in French forms; still others are deeply 
 meditated or elaborately studied after the 
 sentiment, the phrasing and the thought- 
 movement of the Greek antique. The 
 whole spirit, however, is romantic in mood 
 and conduct and more nigh to the essen- 
 tially mediaeval than to the modern or to 
 the ancient. The dominant memories of 
 Swinburne, however, whether intellec- 
 tual or imaginative, lie in classical anti- 
 quity; and, so far as he has need of any 
 divine principle in his verse, in concrete 
 forms, he has found approach to the Greek 
 gods most facile. He achieves the most 
 genuine appearance of belief in the gods 
 that has fallen to the fortune of any Eng- 
 [42]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 lish poet, perhaps of any poet in any 
 modern literature. The recurring hymn to 
 the Sun, under its many forms, which has 
 already been alluded to, is a deep note of 
 his temperament. The classical immer- 
 sion of his mind had made clean work of 
 all Christian symbolism; it had swept it 
 away ; and in its place came, for imagina- 
 tive purposes, the Greek forms of old di- 
 vinity and myth, but less as idols of hope 
 than idols of memory. The close of the 
 "Hymn to Proserpine" gives his point 
 of faith with most precision ; death is the 
 end of all, but he chooses for his com- 
 panions in death the dead gods, he 
 will descend to Proserpine where all have 
 gone. His faith is a farewell; a Vale not 
 an Ave. 
 
 [43]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 The new paganism in which imagina- 
 tive reminiscence plays so great a part, 
 effecting this renascence of antique sym- 
 bolism in the poet's mind, also finds ex- 
 pression in a more direct and concrete 
 presentation of the experience as well as of 
 the theory of passion, both in the form of 
 dramatic incident or situation and in the 
 form of allegorized figuration in art. 
 Whether set forth under a classical or later 
 name, Sappho or Faustine or Felise, or 
 in the namelessness of a dream of pas- 
 sion, Swinburne delineates the moment 
 with vividness of sensation, with languid 
 hazes, with lights and shadows as of some 
 Venetian picture; or in his symbolical 
 poems he builds up a figure, a background, 
 a landscape as of some mythic painting, 
 [44]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 though using mainly cadence as his means 
 of evoking it. "Dolores" is a poem of this 
 last type, and characteristic of his genius, 
 in subject, handling and tone. In all these 
 poems which, in various ways, by dramat- 
 ic, lyric and meditative modes, set forth 
 the theme of the mortal ways of desire, the 
 accompaniment of the verse is a lament, 
 seldom light, usually profound and often 
 touched with bitterness. Pain is the 
 master-emotion in the verse, unconcealed, 
 rebellious, self-pitying. The knight of the 
 "Laus Veneris" is filled full of it; so are 
 the cadences of "Dolores;" so are some 
 of the lightest and most delicate of the 
 lyrics. 
 
 The poem which sets forth this as- 
 pect of the paganism of a modern spirit 
 [45]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 with nobleness of feeling is "Hesperia," 
 which after its fine nature-opening, goes 
 on with its human burden in these lines : 
 
 " From the bountiful infinite west, from the happy 
 
 memorial places 
 Full of the stately repose and the lordly delight 
 
 of the dead, 
 Where the fortunate islands are lit with the light 
 
 of ineffable faces, 
 And the sound of a sea without wind is about 
 
 them, and sunset is red, 
 Come back to redeem and release me from, love 
 
 that recalls and represses, 
 
 That cleaves to my flesh as a flame, till the ser- 
 pent has eaten his fill ; 
 From the bitter delights of the dark, and the 
 
 feverish, the furtive caresses 
 That murder the youth in a man or ever his 
 heart have its witt. 
 
 [46]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Thy lips cannot laugh and thine eyes cannot 
 
 weep ; thou art pale as a rose is, 
 Paler and sweeter than leaves that cover the 
 
 blush of the bud ; 
 And the heart of the flower is compassion, and 
 
 pity the core it encloses, 
 Pity, not love, that is born of the breath and 
 
 decays with the blood. 
 As the cross that a wild nun clasps till the edge 
 
 of it bruises her bosom, 
 So love wounds as we grasp it, and blackens and 
 
 burns as a flame ; 
 I have loved overmuch in my life; when 
 
 the live bud bursts with the blossom, 
 Bitter as ashes or tears is the fruit, and the wine 
 
 thereof shame. 
 As a heart that its anguish divides is the green 
 
 bud cloven asunder ; 
 
 As the blood of a man self -slain is the flush of 
 the leaves that allure ; 
 
 [47]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 And the perfume as poison and wine to the brain, 
 
 a delight and a wonder ; 
 And the thorns are too sharp for a boy, too slight 
 
 for a man to endure, 
 Too soon did I love it, and lost love's rose ; and 
 
 I cared not for glory's ; 
 Only the blossoms of sleep and of pleasure were 
 
 mixed in my hair. 
 Was it myrtle or poppy thy garland was woven 
 
 with, O my Dolores ? 
 Was it pallor of slumber, or blush as of blood, 
 
 that I found in thee fair ? 
 For desire is a respite from love, and the flesh 
 
 not the Jieart is her fuel ; 
 She was sweet to me once, who am fled 
 and escaped from the range of her 
 reign ; 
 Who behold as of old time at hand as I turn, 
 
 with her mouth growing cruel, 
 And flushed as with wine with the blood of her 
 lovers, Our Lady of Pain. 
 
 [48]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Low down where the thicket is thicker with thorns 
 
 than with leaves in the summer, 
 In the brake is a gleaming of eyes and a hissing 
 
 of tongues that I knew ; 
 And the lithe long throats of her snakes reach 
 
 round her, their mouths overcome her, 
 And her lips grow cool with their foam, made 
 
 moist as a desert with dew. 
 With the thirst and the hunger of lust though 
 
 her beautiful lips be so bitter, 
 With the cold foul foam of the snakes they soften 
 
 and redden and- smile ; 
 And her fierce mouth sweetens, her eyes wax 
 
 wide and her eyelashes glitter, 
 And she laughs with a savour of blood in her 
 
 face, and a savour of guile. 
 She laughs, and her hands reach hither, her hair 
 
 blows hither and hisses, 
 
 As a lowlit flame in a wind, back-blown till it 
 shudder and leap ; 
 
 [49]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 Let her lips not again lay hold on my soul, nor 
 
 her poisonous kisses, 
 To consume it alive and divide from thy bosom, 
 
 Our Lady of Sleep. 
 Ah daughter of sunset and slumber, if now it 
 
 return into prison, 
 Who shall redeem it anew ? But we, if thou wilt, 
 
 let us fly ; 
 Let us take to us, now that the white skies thrill 
 
 with a moon unarisen, 
 Swift horses of fear or of love, take flight and 
 
 depart and not die. 
 
 They are swifter than dreams, they are stronger 
 than death ; there is none that hath rid- 
 den, 
 None that shall ride in the dim strange ways of 
 
 his life as we ride ; 
 By the meadows of memory, the highlands of hope, 
 
 and the shore that is hidden, 
 Where life breaks loud and unseen, a sonorous 
 invisible tide ; 
 
 [50]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 By the sands where sorrow has trodden, the salt 
 
 pools bitter and sterile, 
 By the thundering reef and the low sea-wall and 
 
 the channel of years, 
 Our wild steeds press on the night, strain hard 
 
 through pleasure and peril, 
 Labour and listen and pant not or pause for the 
 
 peril that nears ; 
 And the sound of them trampling the way 
 
 cleaves night as an arrow asunder, 
 And slow by the sand-hill and swift by the 
 
 down with its glimpses of grass, 
 Sudden and steady the music, as eight hoofs 
 
 trample and thunder, 
 Rings in the ear of the low blind wind of the 
 
 night as we pass ; 
 Shrill shrieks in our faces the blind bland air that 
 
 was mute as a maiden, 
 
 Stung into storm by the speed of our passage, 
 and deaf where we past ; 
 
 [51]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 And our spirits too burn as we bound, thine holy 
 
 but mine heavy-laden, 
 
 As we burn with the fire of our flight ; ah love, 
 shall we win at the last ? " 
 
 The procession of Swinburne's studies 
 of passion, highly composite in artistic ma- 
 terial and method as they are and diversi- 
 fied by their kinship with many moods and 
 periods of the spirit of poetry, have, to- 
 gether with their vividness of sensation 
 and their sad meditative burden of the 
 emptiness of mortal things, a monotone 
 that is unmistakable, as omnipresent and 
 profound as the monotone in his revolu- 
 tionary verses. It is the monotone of fun- 
 damental emotion in the one as in the 
 other, and springs from a depth of habit- 
 ual feeling that is a part of the poet's tern- 
 [52]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 perament. The experience of passion is not 
 seized dramatically in the true sense, it is 
 seized lyrically, and the ultimate mood is 
 that of the weariness of life which in place 
 of a dramatic exhaustion of the action in 
 tragic catastrophe, issues only in an ex- 
 hausted emotion; it belongs to the type 
 that it should end in weakness. The 
 end of the feeling is a transformation 
 into thought; into meditation; in this 
 intellectual climax the mood takes on the 
 appearance of philosophy, of a surrender 
 of life to death, of the prayer to Proser- 
 pine before the descent of the poet to the 
 shades of the under- world. This philos- 
 ophy in which the lyrical mood of Swin- 
 burne under these impulses evaporates is 
 most beautifully and winningly given in 
 [53]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 the verses so well known by their melody 
 alone, "The Garden of Proserpine." 
 They contain the summary of his verse of 
 life-experience for the individual, of emo- 
 tional experience properly, and are the 
 death-song of the pagan ideal, not in its 
 historic but its aesthetic sense, as it was 
 conceived and presented by him : 
 
 " Here, where the world is quiet, 
 
 Here, where all trouble seems 
 Dead winds' and spent waves' riot 
 
 In doubtful dreams of dreams ; 
 I watch the green field growing 
 For reaping folk and sowing, 
 For harvest-time and mowing, 
 
 A sleepy world of streams. 
 
 I am tired of tears and laughter, 
 And men that laugh and weep, 
 
 [54]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Of what may come hereafter 
 
 For men that sow to reap : 
 I am weary of days and hours, 
 Blown buds of barren flowers, 
 Desires and dreams and powers 
 
 And everything but sleep. 
 
 Here life has death for neighbour, 
 
 And far from eye or ear 
 Wan waves and wet winds labour, 
 
 Weak ships and spirits steer ; 
 They drive adrift, and whither 
 They wot not who make thither ; 
 But no such winds blow hither ; 
 
 And no such things grow here. 
 
 No growth of moor or coppice, 
 
 No heather-flower or vine, 
 But bloomless buds of poppies, 
 
 Green grapes of Proserpine, 
 Pale beds of blowing rushes 
 Where no leaf blooms or blushes 
 
 [55]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Save this whereout she crushes 
 For dead men deadly wine. 
 
 Pale, without name or number, 
 
 In fruitless fields of corn, 
 They bow themselves and slumber 
 
 All night till light is born ; 
 And like a soul belated, 
 In hell and heaven unmated, 
 By cloud and mist abated 
 
 Comes out of darkness morn. 
 
 Though one were strong as seven, 
 He too with death shall dwell, 
 
 Nor wake with wings in heaven t 
 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. 
 
 Pale, beyond porch and portal, 
 
 Crowned with calm leaves, she stands 
 
 [56]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Who gathers all things mortal 
 
 With cold immortal hands ; 
 Her languid lips are sweeter 
 Than love's who fears to greet her 
 To men that mix and meet her 
 
 From many times and lands. 
 
 She waits for each and other, 
 She waits for all men born ; 
 
 Forgets the earth her mother, 
 The life of fruits and corn ; 
 
 And spring and seed and swallow 
 
 Take wing for her and follow 
 
 Where summer song rings hollow 
 And flowers are put to scorn. 
 
 There go the loves that wither, 
 
 The old loves with wearier wings ; 
 
 And all dead years draw thither, 
 And all disastrous things ; 
 
 Dead dreams of days forsaken, 
 
 Blind buds that snows have shaken, 
 
 [57]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Wild leaves that winds have taken, 
 Red strays of ruined springs. 
 
 We are not sure of sorrow, 
 
 And joy was never sure ; 
 To-day will die to-morrow ; 
 
 Time stoops to no man's lure ; 
 And love, grown faint and fretful 
 With lips but half regretful 
 Sighs, and with eyes forgetful 
 
 Weeps that no loves endure. 
 
 From too much love of living, 
 From hope and fear set free, 
 
 We thank with brief thanksgiving 
 Whatever gods may be 
 
 That no life lives for ever ; 
 
 That dead men rise up never ; 
 
 That even the weariest river 
 Winds somewhere safe to sea. 
 
 Then star nor sun shall waken t 
 Nor any change of light : 
 
 [58]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Nor sound of waters shaken, 
 
 Nor any sound or sight : 
 Nor wintry leaves nor vernal 
 Nor days nor things diurnal t 
 Only the sleep eternal 
 
 In an eternal night." 
 
 In his later work the theme of passion 
 was less brilliantly treated than in these 
 first poems, and few of the passages in 
 which he reverts to the subject are so sig- 
 nificant, characteristic or successful. Pas- 
 sion as an element in human life attracted 
 him rather in more dramatic ways, as it 
 exists in the great trilogy of Queen Mary 
 felt in diverse modes by those about the 
 Queen from the tender and noble figure 
 of Chastelard to the weakness of Darnley 
 and the strength of Both well; or it at- 
 [59]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 traded him as the life-element of the myth 
 of Tristram and Iseult, that in which they 
 had the perfection of their being and the 
 completion of their fate. In both cases 
 this is the drama of passion, not its lyric- 
 ism; and in both cases, too, it is divorced 
 from the after-sickliness of thought that 
 attends it in the youthful poems, and is 
 free from the envelopment of the pagan 
 world, from dead gods and past time; it 
 stands by itself, in its own right, a part of 
 nature and life universal, a reality. No 
 English poem surpasses "Tristram of 
 Lyonesse" in the quality of passion; it is 
 great as a representation of passion, pri- 
 marily, and equal to the fame of its theme. 
 Yet it is rather upon the younger verse, in 
 the early passionate efflorescence of his 
 [60]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 poetic nature, that the fame of Swinburne 
 as an original, unique and powerful expo- 
 nent of the passion of life in the ways of 
 desire, brilliantly illustrating the multi- 
 form romantic spirit, must rest. 
 
 VI 
 
 The meditative power of Swinburne's 
 mind gradually displaced the passionate 
 impulse of the senses, in his verse. He is a 
 very thoughtful poet. The intellectual 
 burden of his poetry first appeared in the 
 vigour with which he seized and held to the 
 idea of fate; fate is as elemental in his 
 work as passion and is its true comple- 
 ment. The conception at the beginning 
 may have been only a part of his Greek 
 legacy, made familiar to him in his study 
 [61]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 of Greek drama and adopted from it into 
 his own literary scheme of art and phil- 
 osophy of life. In " Atalanta of Calydon", 
 fate is set forth in the choruses ; it is associ- 
 ated there with the feeling of bitter hos- 
 tility to the gods. There is a Lucretian 
 sternness and fierceness in all of Swin- 
 burne's invective against those aspects of 
 religion which were to him what supersti- 
 tion was to the old Roman; and he uses 
 violence of phrase in the expression of his 
 mood. It is thus that he comes to a climax 
 of thought in the attack on the supernal 
 powers which ends in the words, "the 
 supreme evil, God." The thought is 
 arrived at through the spectacle of the 
 suffering of the human race, and applies, 
 as it were, to the Zeus of Prometheus. 
 [62]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 " Thou hast fed one rose with dust of many men; 
 
 Thou fiast marred one face with fire of many tears; 
 Thou hast taken love, and given us sorrow again; 
 
 With pain thou hast filled us full to the eyes 
 
 and ears. 
 Therefore because thou art strong, our father, and we 
 
 Feeble ; and thou art against us, and thine hand 
 Constrains us in the shallows of the sea 
 
 And breaks us at the limits of the land ; 
 Because thou hast bent thy lightnings as a bow, 
 
 And loosed the hours like arrows ; and let fall 
 Sins and wild words and many a winged woe 
 
 And wars among us, and one end of all ; 
 Because thou hast made the thunder, and thy feet 
 
 Are as a rushing water when the skies 
 Break, and thy face as an exceeding heat 
 
 And flames of fire the eyelids of thine eyes ; 
 Because thou art over all who are over us ; 
 
 Because thy name is life and our name death ; 
 Because thou art cruel and men are piteous, 
 
 And our hands labour and thine hand scatter eth ; 
 
 [63]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Lo, with hearts rent and knees made tremulous, 
 Lo, with ephemeral lips and casual breath, 
 At least we witness of thee ere we die 
 That these things are not otherwise, but thus ; 
 That each man in his heart sigheth, and saith, 
 
 That all men even as I, 
 
 All we are against thee, against thee, O God most 
 high." 
 
 In such passages, of which this was the 
 earliest, the life-weariness that belongs to 
 exhausted passion is extended over the 
 whole of life, and the philosophy set forth 
 is frankly atheistic. The passing away of 
 the successive hierarchies of gods that 
 have been exalted in the heavens, includ- 
 ing the entire symbolism of Christianity, 
 is as constant a theme of Swinburne's im- 
 agination and meditation as is the transi- 
 [64]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 toriness of the generations of men and 
 their works ; nor is there only this denial of 
 the gods, but with it goes that implacable 
 hostility to them and their ways, which 
 has been alluded to, giving often to the 
 verse an edge of scorn and hate. Swin- 
 burne derived from Greek literature the 
 point of view, so far as the history of man 
 under the Olympian dispensation was 
 concerned; he derived from the revolu- 
 tionary poets an attitude toward histori- 
 cal Christianity in its mediaeval forms and 
 in its institutional power, which was a 
 practical repetition of the same point of 
 view; however he approached super- 
 natural religion he collided with the eter- 
 nal mystery of God's dealing with man- 
 kind, and also with the temporal dis- 
 [65]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 pensation of the professional ministers of 
 God, the priesthood wherever found. 
 The anti- Christian verse is, of course, in- 
 cidental to and a part of the great mass of 
 revolutionary verse, and belongs to the 
 poet's crusade against the social powers 
 that be, to his ranking himself with the 
 spirit of Burns and the later upholders of 
 the powers of light, that is of human in- 
 tellect, liberty and love. But, besides this 
 aspect of it, there is a philosophical side to 
 his thought, apart from its revolutionary 
 intention, by virtue of which it must be re- 
 garded abstractly as his own poetic atti- 
 tude to the mystery of life itself. Fate is the 
 simplest word to describe the power in 
 whose dark and infinite grasp Swin- 
 burne habitually sees the universe of man. 
 [66]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 Deeply impressed as the poet is by the 
 conception of fate in life and in the uni- 
 verse, he does not embody it in either his 
 dramas or his dramatic narrative with 
 great power; he rather describes it than 
 presents its operation; it is a presence 
 rather than a force in his verse. The story 
 of Atalanta, and also that of Erechtheus 
 contain fate, in piteous and cruel forms, but 
 the will of the gods in either case seems 
 arbitrary rather than fatal. In the Trilogy 
 of Queen Mary the element of fate is dis- 
 cernible in the constant reminiscence, 
 though the play, of Chastelard's execu- 
 tion and in Mary Beaton who is the em- 
 bodiment of that memory and shall re- 
 main with the Queen until the latter's 
 death at the block expiates the original 
 [67]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 wrong, or at least crowns it as a consumma- 
 tion; but the linking of fate which should 
 connect one with the other directly and 
 impressively, and as a law of necessity is 
 not shown. In the other dramas there is a 
 similar laxity in the causal operation of 
 fate, the fatal necessity of the action is 
 not felt as power, but is described as 
 story. In "Tristram of Lyonesse, " it is 
 the passion, not the fate of the lovers' love 
 that is in the foreground of interest. In the 
 shorter poems the method of presenting 
 the general subject-matter is more ab- 
 stract and by means of passages of in- 
 vective. " Anactoria" is the best example, 
 where the outcry against the divine power 
 is repeatedly raised, with a fierce vin- 
 dictiveness : 
 
 [68]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 " 7* not his incense bitterness, his meat 
 Murder ? his hidden face and iron feet 
 Hath not man known, and felt them on their way 
 Threaten and trample all things and every day ? 
 Hath he not sent us hunger ? who hath cursed 
 Spirit and flesh with longing ? filled with thirst 
 Their lips who cried unto him ? who bade exceed 
 The fervid will, fall short the feeble deed, 
 Bade sink the spirit and the flesh aspire, 
 Pain animate the dust of dead desire, 
 And life yield up her flower to violent fate ? 
 Him would I reach, him smite, him desecrate, 
 Pierce the cold lips of God with human breath, 
 And mix his immortality with death." 
 
 At the conclusion of this poem is the first 
 expression of any possible human victory 
 in the strife with the gods. It takes form in 
 the thought that, whatever misfortune 
 may be visited upon Sappho in life, yet 
 after death she will have an immortality in 
 [69]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 her words still breathing on the lips of 
 
 men: " Albeit I die indeed 
 
 And hide myself and sleep and no man heed, 
 Of me the high God hath not all his will. 
 Blossom of branches, and on each high hill 
 Clear air and wind, and under in clamorous vales 
 Fierce noises of the fiery nightingales, 
 Buds burning in the sudden spring like fire, 
 The wan washed sand and the waves' vain desire, 
 Sails seen like blown white flowers at sea, and 
 
 words 
 
 That bring tears swiftest, and long notes of birds 
 Violently singing till the whole world sings 
 I Sappho, shall be one with all these things, 
 With all high things for ever ; and my face 
 Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place, 
 Cleave to men's lives, and waste the days thereof 
 With gladness and much sadness and long love." 
 
 This hope of immortality in the mind and 
 
 for the service of man is the prelude to 
 
 [70]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 Swinburne's later exposition of man's 
 faith in himself. 
 
 The earlier attitude of hostility to the 
 gods yields in the poet's maturer years to a 
 prevailing mood of high-spirited indif- 
 ference, which is felt rather toward fate 
 under the forms of the imagery of nature 
 than under those of divine beings. The 
 passage which best concentrates it is the 
 speech of Tristram, concerning fate which 
 is described only by negatives as the un- 
 known infinite in the universe: 
 
 " How should it turn from its great way to give 
 Man that must die a clearer space to live ? 
 Why should the waters of the sea be cleft, 
 The hills be molten to his right and left, 
 That he from deep to deep might pass dry-shod 
 Or look between the viewless heights on God ? 
 Hath he such eyes as, when the shadows flee, 
 
 [71]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 The sun looks out with to salute the sea ? 
 Is his hand bounteous as the morning's hand ? 
 Or where the night stands hath he feet to stand ? 
 Will the storm cry not when he bids it cease ? 
 Is it his voice that saith to the east wind, Peace ? 
 Is his breath mightier than the west wind's 
 
 breath ? 
 
 Doth his heart know the things of life and death ? 
 Can his face bring forth sunshine and give rain, 
 Or his weak will that dies and lives again 
 Make one thing certain or bind one thing fast, 
 That, as he willed, it shall be at the last ? 
 How should the storms of heaven and kindled 
 
 lights 
 
 And all the depths of things and topless heights 
 And air and earth and fire and water change 
 Their likeness, and the natural world grow strange, 
 And all the limits of their life undone 
 Lose count of time and conscience of the sun, 
 And that fall under which was fixed above, 
 That man might have a larger hour for love?" 
 
 [72]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 It is in this identification of fate with the 
 universe of greater being, in a form of ap- 
 prehension which hovers between pan- 
 theism in its aspect of nature-force and in 
 its aspect of humanity, that Swinburne's 
 mind rests in its final meditation. The 
 hymn entitled "Hertha" sets forth the 
 matter in full and at great length, with a 
 principal dependence in the imagery on 
 Igdrasil, the tree of life. In its main phil- 
 osophic intention the poem is hardly to be 
 distinguished from Emerson's "Brahma", 
 which is the type of such poetic thought; 
 but Swinburne gives it a new turn and 
 transforms its meaning by grafting into it 
 the idea that mankind is the highest per- 
 sonification of the divine known to man 
 and hence that true worship and religion 
 [73]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 is in the energy of man's self-expression, 
 in the apotheosis of himself that is self- 
 achieved. The key stanza is this : 
 
 " A creed is a rod, 
 
 And a crown is of night ; 
 But this thing is God, 
 
 To be man with thy might, 
 To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and 
 live out thy life as the light." 
 
 The poem in its last line makes the identifi- 
 cation of man with the infinite spirit plain : 
 
 " Man, equal and one with me, man that w made 
 of me, man that is I." 
 
 The same doctrine is more elaborately 
 stated and with a more comprehensive in- 
 clusion of many past elements of Swin- 
 burne's thought, especially with relation 
 to the passing away of the gods and to the 
 [74]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 history of superstition, in the "Hymn of 
 Man," which Swinburne himself de- 
 scribes as "the birth-song of spiritual 
 renascence" and which concludes its 
 Miriam-like outburst of triumph over the 
 fall of old religion with the exultant cry : 
 
 " Glory to man in the highest! for Man is the 
 master of things." 
 
 This is the French apotheosis of Reason in 
 its most modern form, and may be regard- 
 ed, perhaps, as essentially a hymn of posi- 
 tivism. 
 
 It thus appears that Swinburne's mind, 
 guided by the preconceptions of his Greek 
 studies and the revolutionary impetus of 
 his native genius, has been deeply con- 
 cerned with reaching an intellectual faith 
 [75]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 with regard to the scheme of man's life as 
 it has been seen by him in history. In this 
 attempt he has clung most tenaciously to 
 the idea of fate, a vague conception di- 
 versely seized by his mind and set forth in 
 a variety of ways. The denial of the gods 
 was inherent in his intellectual position; 
 and the gods having passed away, there 
 remained only such an adjustment of 
 mind to the world emptied of old divinity 
 as is possible to many a modern brooder 
 over thought besides the poet himself who 
 may be, somewhat at least, a type of such 
 sceptical men. On the one hand there was 
 the resource of the conception of the un- 
 known infinite which is approached by 
 human thought most commonly through 
 the majestic phenomena of nature, and of 
 [76]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 which the nature-poetry of the book of 
 Job, whence come the imaginative method 
 and scriptural cadences of that speech of 
 Tristram that has been quoted, is the 
 ritual of expression. On the other hand 
 there was the resource of positivistic and 
 humanitarian insistence on the religion of 
 Humanity, the creed of doing as the other 
 is the creed of knowing. The apotheosis of 
 human energy is natural in any greatly 
 progressive or violently active age of the 
 world ; and in the nineteenth century, with 
 its unmeasured pride in itself and its in- 
 contestable greatness of achievement in 
 both the realms of knowledge and action, 
 faith in man sprang up and has flourished 
 as if it were the ancient Igdrasil itself; it 
 has seemed as if man were a god of nature 
 [77]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 and a providence for the future, at 
 least that has been the tendency of man's 
 late ideals in science and philanthropy. 
 Man at least thinks himself - - what Swin- 
 burne says the gods were not piteous. 
 Swinburne has caught the infection of both 
 of these intellectual moods ; he has on one 
 hand accepted imaginatively the theory of 
 the unknown natural infinite and on the 
 other the doctrine of the greatness as he 
 frankly says, the godhead of man ; not, it 
 should be observed , of men in their parcelled 
 and particular individuality, but of the race, 
 the apotheosis is a thing of collectivity, 
 and without such collectivity would not ex- 
 ist. Perhaps his own words should be given : 
 
 " We men, the multiform features of man, what- 
 soever we be 
 
 [78]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Recreate him of whom we are creatures, and all we 
 
 only are he. 
 For each man of all men is God, but God is the 
 
 fruit of the whole; 
 Indivisible spirit and blood, indiscernible body 
 
 from soul. 
 Not men's but man's is the glory of godhead, " 
 
 In working out this side of the theory, it 
 follows of necessity that the poet should 
 find himself in a midmost ethical stream, 
 that he should end less as a philosopher 
 than as a moralist ; he would finally be ab- 
 sorbed in the vindication of that law of 
 life which is humanly discerned and ap- 
 plied as the will of "righteousness" from 
 age to age. The gods pass like leaves of the 
 forest, in their generations, even as men 
 do; but righteousness is an abiding thing. 
 It is this that is stated, very nobly and 
 [79]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 magnificently indeed, in the chief poem of 
 Swinburne's later years, "The Altar of 
 Righteousness." This poem is the climax 
 of his intellectual attempt in solving the 
 universe, or in reaching at least a working 
 relation with respect to it; it is the ulti- 
 mate conviction, the last word, this of 
 the majestic permanence of righteousness. 
 Does it seem singular to any that the 
 poet of passion should be one with the 
 poet of righteousness ? There is really no 
 discord in the case; the two elements, at 
 least, never cross in the verse. A poet gives 
 a representation of life, and the variety of 
 his representation depends on the richness 
 and complexity of his nature. Swinburne 
 was endowed with power to render with 
 unrivalled vividness, with brilliance of 
 [80]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 word and melody of cadence the exper- 
 ience of man's life in passion ; he was also 
 endowed with intellectual curiosity and 
 restlessness, with mental vigour, with ir- 
 repressible and inexhaustible sympathies 
 with the public causes of mankind in po- 
 litical and religious social life, and he had 
 thence his power to interest himself in the 
 ideas that lie back of all life, in the phil- 
 osophy of the divine element appearing in 
 the history of the race and in its changes 
 under the shaping of time from Greek to 
 Christian, and so on to the last results of 
 modern speculation. He expressed himself 
 from year to year, according to the faith 
 that was in him, and he reached in his 
 maturity the clear position which needs no 
 plainer definition than his own lines con- 
 [81]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 tain. The original idea of adverse fate has 
 faded in his mind, it would appear, to that 
 of the immanence of the unknown in na- 
 ture, indifferent and kindless to man, but 
 not consciously cruel and deliberately 
 scornful like the old gods ; and this in turn 
 yields to the prominence in his later 
 thought of the essential necessity that 
 mankind is under to know no god except his 
 own spirit, to advance that spirit as the life 
 of the race itself, and to find the conscious 
 law of righteousness in its bosom age after 
 age its only oracle and guide to destiny. 
 
 VII 
 
 The third great monochord of Swin- 
 burne's verse, after passion and fate, is 
 nature. The poet's genius is one of singu- 
 [82]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 lar directness, though the fact is masked 
 and obscured by the conventionalized, 
 curious and classically reminiscent char- 
 acter that so much of his work super- 
 ficially bears. The same directness that 
 appears in his dealing with the experience 
 of passion, and with the theory of the di- 
 vine element in the universe, marks also 
 his treatment of nature. He is a nature- 
 poet, but rather in the energetic than the 
 aesthetic sense. The reminiscence of his 
 boyhood upbringing by the seas of the 
 Northumberland coast and of the Isle of 
 Wight is always present in his verse of 
 every kind. His description is not deficient 
 in either abundance or beauty of detail; 
 but he seizes the landscape mainly as a 
 whole, he feels the forces abiding in it as 
 [83]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 power, he is exalted by its effluence in him 
 as an emotion ; in a word, his treatment is 
 ample. Here, too, that extraordinary 
 trait of primitiveness, that love of the 
 primordial things in thought and life, of 
 which much illustration has already been 
 afforded in the preceding pages, breaks 
 out with great force. It seems often that 
 his mind is absorbed, not so much in nat- 
 ural objects in their individuality as in 
 natural elements, in their larger life of the 
 constitution, the whirl, the vast spec- 
 tacle of nature. Fire, air, earth and water 
 are the four elements from which his very 
 vocabulary seems made up; flame, wind 
 and foam, and all the forms of light are so 
 much a part of his colour- rhythm that they 
 become an opaline of verse peculiarly his 
 [84]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 own ; his mannerism in diction and style is 
 chiefly a thing of his fascination with 
 these elemental phases of matter and sen- 
 sation which are more abstractions of 
 motion, hue and luminousness than simple 
 objects of sight and hearing. The blurring 
 effect of this mass of indefinable sensation, 
 especially when metaphorically employed, 
 even more than the overcharge of vocal 
 sound in the verse, accounts for that im- 
 pression of vacuity of meaning that Swin- 
 burne's poetry in general makes on read- 
 ers not habituated to his manner. The 
 main fact is that in the sphere of natural 
 imagery his mind tends constantly to es- 
 cape from the limited and particular ob- 
 ject into the more abstract primary ele- 
 ments of nature, and to use these meta- 
 [85]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 phorically without definition to colour his 
 verse with sensation that is rather emo- 
 tional than perceptive; it is thus that he 
 produces these effects by virtue of which 
 his poetry is generally thought to have 
 more affinity with the art of music than 
 has been achieved by other poets. Colour- 
 tones of nature have as much to do with 
 this as simple sound-tones of rhyme, al- 
 literation and cadence ; all the senses, and 
 not the ear alone, are occupied with this 
 music which lulls and dazzles the mind 
 with a magical and exquisite pleasure. 
 
 The nature poems of Swinburne in the 
 precise sense, however, are many and 
 various and among them some rise higher 
 than others. He has himself, in his own re- 
 view of his poetic work, named those which 
 [86]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 to himself seem most significant, and his 
 own choice coincides with that of his read- 
 ers. He dwells there upon his closeness 
 to the scene and repeats the same traits 
 of the general landscape that he has de- 
 scribed in verse. No summary can equal 
 this in justice, brevity and breadth. The 
 poems he selects are the four poems of the 
 West Undercliff, "In the Bay," "On the 
 Cliffs," " A Forsaken Garden," the dedica- 
 tion to "The Sisters," "Off Shore," "An 
 Autumn Vision, " " A Swimmer's Dream," 
 "On the South Coast," "Neap-Tide." It 
 will be found on examination that primi- 
 tive nature is at the heart of all of these 
 poems as plainly as it is in the last class 
 he names - " such as try to render the 
 effect of inland or woodland solitude - 
 [87]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 the splendid oppression of nature at noon 
 which found utterance of old in words of 
 such singular and everlasting significance 
 as panic and nympholepsy. " The terror of 
 noon is precisely one of those primordial 
 things the fascination of which not to 
 speak of the wonder of his merely knowing 
 it stamps Swinburne's genius, in its ap- 
 proach to nature, with the aboriginal mark 
 of the race. With this capacity to feel the 
 old mood belongs the general largeness of 
 his outlook and horizon, and through both 
 these traits he comes into sympathy with 
 polytheistic habitudes ; at that moment of 
 noon his genius hovers between the Sun- 
 god in heaven and Pan on earth with an 
 equal possession of mythologizing mind; 
 and, in general, it is the grand features 
 [88]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE , 
 and glomeration of things that holds him 
 - heaven with all its stars, its winds and 
 clouds; earth in great tracts of barren 
 places or of "cliff and crag, lawn and 
 woodland, garden and lea;" and most of 
 all the sea. 
 
 Swinburne's ocean-poetry is the crown 
 of his nature verse; in it he is not only 
 most exalted and fluent and vivid, but he 
 winds the sea-voices truly into his song. 
 He was the child of a sailor-race, and in 
 his boyhood the sea was his open highway 
 of dream, imagination and sentiment, of 
 the vision that comes to great poets in 
 their youth. It was the thing of nature 
 most clung about by his spirit ; the sun 
 so he represents it had his adoration, 
 but the sea his love. The sea, too, had 
 [89]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 other imaginative values to him. It was his 
 nature-symbol of England. The thought of 
 England as the oceanic power was natural 
 ever after the Armada and the Elizabethan 
 poets, and in later days is supported by 
 the imperial dominion spread and based 
 in all directions upon the waters ; to Swin- 
 burne, the singer of the Armada and the 
 patriot for whom the greatness of England 
 lay in that quality of race of which her sea 
 greatness is the memorial in time, Eng- 
 land is, as it were, the emanation of the 
 sea in humanity, one thing with it and, 
 one may say, the spiritual form of it; so it 
 seems to his eyes. The sea, too, is his 
 nature-symbol of liberty, of that in the 
 spirit of all mankind which is the greatest 
 object of human effort, the condition and 
 [90]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 the consummation of greatness in nations 
 or men, the state of being in which alone 
 they truly are at all. The historic associ- 
 ation of liberty with the sea-races, from 
 Athens down, helps in this idealization, 
 which, in itself is natural to the thoughts 
 of all men and universal in poetry. And 
 again, through the operation of his own 
 poetizing revery and fancy and the famil- 
 iar growth of his spirit in conjunction 
 with and through an environment of sea- 
 experience, the sea became in Swinburne's 
 secret thoughts the nature-symbol of his 
 own genius, a thing of untameable and 
 primitive nature blending with the cause 
 of liberty and the glory of England and the 
 universal hope and life of mankind ; he 
 thought of himself, mythically, as the 
 [91]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 child of the sea, and he repeatedly praises 
 a sea-death as the appropriate end of such 
 a child. 
 
 This fancy, which is more genuine in 
 feeling than might seem possible, is ex- 
 pressed in many passages of his poems, but 
 it is the formative idea in one distinctive 
 poem, which may fairly be regarded as an 
 autobiographical myth of the idealizing 
 sort, such as Shelley's " Epipsychidion , " 
 that entitled "Thalassius." It is a delicate 
 and highly-finished work, and is also per- 
 haps the most broadly instructive, the 
 most comprehensive of his experience and 
 theory, of any of his poems. Thalas- 
 sius is the child of the Sea and of the Sun, 
 and the verse relates his history from 
 birth to the moment of his perfecting in 
 [92]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 life, under the symbolism of classical 
 mythic imagery. He is educated by a 
 foster-father, and fed. 
 
 " For bread with wisdom and with song for wine," 
 
 after the antique manner familiar to us in 
 Shelley's verse of Laon and Prince Atha- 
 nase; the identification with the poet is 
 made plain in the details of this in- 
 struction : 
 
 " High things the high song taught him ; 
 
 How he that loves life overmuch shall die 
 
 The dog's death, utterly : 
 
 And he that much less loves it than he hates 
 
 All wrongdoing that is done 
 
 Anywhere always underneath the sun 
 
 Shall live a mightier life than time's or fate's. 
 
 [93]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 One fairer thing he shewed him, and in might 
 More strong than day and night 
 Whose strengths build up time's towering period : 
 Yea, one thing stronger and more high than God, 
 Which if man had not, then should God not be : 
 And that was Liberty. 
 
 And gladly should man die to gain, he said, 
 Freedom ; and gladlier, having lost, lie dead. 
 
 And hate the song too taught him : hate of all 
 
 That brings or Iwlds in thrall 
 
 Of spirit or flesh, free-born ere God began, 
 
 The holy body and sacred soul of man. 
 
 And wheresoever a curse was or a chain, 
 
 A throne for torment or a crown for bane 
 
 Rose, moulded out of poor men's molten pain, 
 
 There, said he, should man's heaviest hate be set 
 
 Inexorably, to faint not or forget 
 
 Till the last warmth bled forth of the last vein 
 
 In flesh that none should call a king's again, 
 
 [94]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Seeing wolves and dogs and birds that plague- 
 strike air 
 Leave the last bone of all the carrion bare. 
 
 And hope the high song taught him : hope whose 
 
 eyes 
 
 Can sound the seas unsoundable, the skies 
 Inaccessible of eyesight ; that can see 
 What earth beholds not, hear what wind and sea 
 Hear not, and speak what all these crying in one 
 Can speak not to the sun. 
 For in her sovereign eyelight all things are 
 Clear as the closest seen and kindlier star 
 That marries morn and even and winter and spring 
 With one love's golden ring. 
 For she can see the days of man, the birth 
 Of good and death of evil things on earth 
 Inevitable and infinite, and sure 
 As present pain is, or herself is pure. 
 Yea, she can hear and see, beyond all things 
 That lighten from before Time's thunderous wings 
 
 [95]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 Through the awful circle of wheel-winged periods, 
 The tempest of the twilight of all Gods : 
 And higher than all the circling course they ran 
 The sundawn of the spirit that was man." 
 
 The body of the poem continues with the 
 life experience of the hero, and at the end, 
 at the moment of his perfecting, the Sun- 
 god blesses him with words that may be 
 taken as the ideal of the poet's life : 
 
 " Child of my sunlight and the sea, from birth 
 A fosterling and fugitive on earth ; 
 Sleepless of soul as wind or wave or fire, 
 A manchild with an ungrown God's desire ; 
 Because thou hast loved nought mortal more than me, 
 Thy father, and thy mother-hearted sea ; 
 Because thou hast set thine heart to sing, and sold 
 Life and life's love for song, God's living gold ; 
 Because thou hast given thy flower and fire of 
 youth 
 
 [96]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 To feed men's hearts with visions, truer than truth ; 
 Because thou hast kept in those world-wandering 
 
 eyes 
 
 The light that makes me music of the skies ; 
 Because thou hast heard with world-unwearied ears 
 The music that puts light into the spheres ; 
 Have therefore in thine heart and in thy mouth 
 The sound of song that mingles north and south, 
 The song of all the winds that sing of me, 
 And in thy soul the sense of all the sea." 
 
 In this poem the nature-poetry of Swin- 
 burne finds its highest and most beauti- 
 ful idealization in human life; it is, in fact, 
 the crowning work of his hand, in so far as 
 he drew his inspiration from the life of his 
 spirit with nature. 
 
 Admirable in portraiture as the pure 
 nature-poems of Swinburne are, in their 
 mere rendering of scene, atmosphere and 
 [97]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 landscape mood, they gain in poetic power 
 in proportion as the element of human life 
 is brought into them in any form, whether 
 as a personal tone of the poet or as inci- 
 dent, memory or vision, or as a main ac- 
 tion. In " Thalassius, " the idealization of 
 nature is superfine and places the poem in 
 the highest rank of those few imaginative 
 and spiritualized allegories of life which 
 can appeal deeply only to a narrow cir- 
 cle of readers in any generation, men who 
 are numbered by two's and three's rather 
 than by scores. In numerous poems, how- 
 ever, Swinburne has blended description 
 with autobiography in the most charming 
 way, especially in those coast poems which 
 he has associated with the name of his 
 friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton, himself 
 [98]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 a nature-lover with the primitive bases of 
 feeling in him belonging to earlier ages and 
 a more earthly generation of men; and 
 also, and peculiarly, in the poems of swim- 
 ming the blend of nature with life is ac- 
 complished with a fine effect. The great 
 instance of such a description in which 
 nature is not only the scene but the giver 
 of the action is the swim of Tristram in 
 the dawn of the Sun just before the battle 
 in which he receives his death-wounds. 
 The passage is long, and fuller of pure 
 natural beauty than any other scene in 
 the poet's verse, and it is besides unique in 
 literature, sole by itself in its saturation 
 with the sea and the dawn and the joy of 
 the swimmer, made one joy of all; but 
 no presentation of Swinburne's nature- 
 [99]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 verse can spare the concluding lines, with 
 the glory of their physical delight: 
 
 " Till the sweet change that bids the sense grow sure 
 Of deeper depth and purity more pure 
 Wrapped him and lapped him round with clearer 
 
 cold, 
 
 And all the rippling green grew royal gold 
 Between him and the Jar sun's rising rim. 
 And like the sun his heart rejoiced in him, 
 And brightened with a broadening flame of mirth ; 
 And hardly seemed its life a part of earth, 
 But the life kindled of a fiery birth 
 And passion of a new-begotten son 
 Between the live sea and the living sun. 
 And mightier grew the joy to meet full-faced 
 Each wave, and mount with upward plunge, and 
 
 taste 
 
 The rapture of its rolling strength, and cross 
 Its flickering crown of snows that flash and toss 
 Like plumes in battles' blithest charge, and thence 
 
 [ 100 ]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
 To watch the next with yet more strenuous sense ; 
 
 Till on his eyes the light beat hard and bade 
 
 His face turn west and shoreward through the glad 
 
 Swift revel of the waters golden-clad 
 
 And back with light reluctant heart he bore 
 
 Across the broad-backed rollers in to shore." 
 
 Such poetry brings back that early world 
 in which old Triton blew his wreathed 
 horn, and not in a vision only, but as the 
 everlasting life of nature and man. 
 
 Swinburne is at heart a nature- wor- 
 shipper, and it is through the symbolism 
 of nature that his religious instincts find 
 their fullest and unimpeded flow. His 
 classically reminiscent and anti- Christian 
 poems alike contain a literary alloy and 
 belong in substance to scholarship, to 
 progress, to things of civilization, to so- 
 [101]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 ciety ; in proportion as he lays these things 
 aside and reverts in primitive freedom to 
 the world of nature, to awe of the sun and 
 delight in the waves and indefinable 
 moods of the moors, the barrens and the 
 glens, he recaptures the original soul, be- 
 comes himself purely, pours out his spirit 
 directly, intensely, overflowingly, - - he 
 lives the poetic life. The deepest sympa- 
 thies of his genius are with force, with 
 things of power everywhere, with the ener- 
 gies of life. The truth about him is the 
 exact opposite of what has been widely 
 and popularly thought; weakness, affec- 
 tation, exotic foreignness, the traits of 
 sestheticism in the debased sense of that 
 word, are far from him ; he is strong, he is 
 genuine, he is English, bred with an Eu- 
 [102]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 ropean mind it is true like Shelley, like 
 Gray and Milton, but in his own genius, 
 temperament and the paths of his flight 
 charged with the strength of England. In 
 his nature-verse there is sympathy with 
 power, grandeur, energy, marking the 
 verse unmistakably as that of a strong 
 soul ; in his social verse of all kinds, politi- 
 cal and religious, there is the same sym- 
 pathy marking it, making it clarion-like, to 
 use his own metaphor, for liberty, prog- 
 ress, man, for the truth and love of the 
 Revolution, for the ideal of the Republic 
 as the great and single aim of the race. 
 In his passion-verse there is the same 
 breath of the power of life; and that fare- 
 well to life in which the pagan mood ends, 
 by its insistency, its poignancy, its plan- 
 [103]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 gency, the sweetness of its regret, the bit- 
 terness of its despair, is the death-recoil of 
 a great power of life, of joy and dream and 
 aspiration in youth, of a power to seize the 
 things of nature and of the spirit, to live 
 over again the experience, to think over 
 again the thoughts of man, to have man's 
 life. It belonged to so strong a nature and 
 genius that the larger note should be ever 
 increasing in the song, blending in widening 
 harmonies, to rest in the unities of nature, 
 of man, and of man's hope in society. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Swinburne's nature poetry has the added 
 charm of affording some access to his per- 
 sonality, since it is closely connected with 
 his habits of life, his friendships and the 
 [104]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 loved and familiar places where he has 
 passed his years. Memory and compan- 
 ionship have a large share in their inspira- 
 tion, and the trace of French and Italian 
 travel and of holidays along English 
 shores is a trodden trail in the verse. He 
 will remain a figure of the Northumbrian 
 headlands and the South Coast forever in 
 the imaginative memory of literature; 
 there he is seen in the verse, alone or with 
 a friend, on horseback or a-foot or a-swim, 
 in his habit as he lived in his own country 
 and with a love for the soil and the break- 
 ing sea, his English birth. Such a back- 
 ground of personality, of the human life of 
 a man, is deeply desired by a poet's lovers 
 who thus reach an unnoticed share in his 
 privacy; it is the craving and the due of 
 [105]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 their gratitude and answers to his un- 
 known intimacy with their own spirits. 
 A finer approach, however, is given by 
 Swinburne in the numerous poems which 
 he has dedicated to childhood, all of an 
 intimate personal tone, and revealing his 
 heart and mood and speech in the gen- 
 tlest part of household privacy, in his love 
 of children. The verse, as is usual with 
 him, has a monotone, the permanence and 
 depth of an unchangeable emotion that 
 wells always from the same spring; it is 
 made up of pure affection, repeated over 
 and over, of kin to a child's kisses, for 
 which it calls, to which it answers and 
 through which it exists, a delicate, inti- 
 mate, worshipping poesy, of which the like 
 in English is not to be found. There is here 
 [106]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 the Delphic christening of the babe, one 
 after another, the birthday ode to the boy 
 faithful with each revolving year, the 
 death-rite of the little life in sad cadences 
 of brief refrains; and unique among even 
 these records of life is that rosary of daily 
 song which counts the month of absence 
 and gives the weariness of the child- 
 emptied house through the lengthening 
 hours of summer bereft of its soul. To be 
 capable of such a series shows the man's 
 heart better than all else in his verse ; and 
 happy was the boy's head that drew this 
 light to shine upon it and flash out the gold 
 of the poet's affection like sunshine falling 
 there in far absence, in memory, in pres- 
 ence as the two heads bent together over 
 the legend and the picture by the fire. The 
 [107]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 sense of the household is as intimate and 
 private here as in Cowper's verse ; the house 
 and the garden and the hours are pure 
 English; all is native to the soil, the flower- 
 age, the home of England. In this verse the 
 solitary and secluded figure of the scholarly 
 poet is familiarly seen in the gentlest 
 associations and the happiest acts of life. 
 The nature of Swinburne's personal 
 life is also, though less plainly and un- 
 reservedly, shown in the large number of 
 poems addressed to his companions, on 
 one or another occasion, but naturally 
 most of these are memorial verses. He 
 has been "fortunate in friendships," and 
 the hold of love in them was strong. The 
 most of the friends to whom he dedicates 
 verse are naturally in the group of artists 
 [108]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 and men of letters with which his own 
 fame is associated, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, 
 William Bell Scott, Morris, Watts, Mad- 
 dox-Brown, Watts-Dunton, and others, 
 with whom he found his principal com- 
 panionship in literary and artistic sym- 
 pathy; but the list includes many besides 
 these, distinguished or eminent or mem- 
 orable for old association with Landor or 
 Shelley or some other. A life which 
 leaves so rich a personal memorial of its 
 human loves, however secluded, has won 
 for itself or received by its own grace one 
 of the true felicities and happiest rewards 
 found by man. Hardly less near than these 
 attachments, the verse discloses the ties, 
 as of student and master, with Landor, 
 Hugo and Mazzini, which Swinburne re- 
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 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 garded as the highest honour and greatest 
 blessing upon his younger head; and in a 
 degree yet further removed the verse con- 
 tinues to show, with an ever greater vol- 
 ume and widening range, his tribute to the 
 dead masters of literature, not conven- 
 tionally or perfunctorily or affectedly, but 
 in a genuine and deeply-felt outpouring of 
 admiration and gratitude and that strange, 
 mighty love that only the dead can 
 arouse, a thing of the pure and untram- 
 melled soul. He was ever a lover of heroes, 
 of great deeds and famous works ; for him 
 the heavens of fame were constellated 
 more with poetic and spiritual names than 
 is the case with other men ; he was faithful 
 to the pure fires there and saw the eternity 
 of poetry as a flame outburning all others 
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 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 in beauty and everlastingness ; he wor- 
 shipped in his verse poetry, freedom, 
 truth, and the fames that are indestruc- 
 tible names of these in human memory. 
 "On the Cliffs" is a poem in which there 
 is both the vision and the rhapsody of this, 
 in very noble and unusual imaginative 
 forms, and stands as the type of his mood 
 toward fame, which for him more truly 
 than for men at large was what Shelley 
 called it "love disguised." In all this vol- 
 ume of human appreciation, for the great 
 fames of the past, for the elder masters 
 who touched him with their hands, for the 
 company of familiar friends in private life, 
 there is to be observed the same strength 
 of soul, the same affluence of response to 
 life, the same capacity for the passion of
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 life in its largeness which has already 
 been spoken of as the fundamental thing 
 in the poet's nature, but here seen in its 
 noblest phase as a power to love. 
 
 IX 
 
 Liberty, melody, passion, fate, nature, 
 love and fame are the seven chords which 
 the poet's hand, from its first almost boy- 
 hood touch upon the lyre, has swept now 
 for two score years with music that has 
 been blown through the world. He sang in 
 the lines of his earliest dedication, in the 
 opening lines of it, 
 
 " The sea gives her shells to the shingle, 
 The earth gives her streams to the sea ; 
 
 They are many, but my gift is single, 
 My verses, the first fruits of me." 
 
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 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 and a certain singleness has abided in the 
 gift to the end. He has been faithful to his 
 early lights, his first loves, and has served 
 the ideal of his life with an unswerving 
 rectitude, a tireless industry and an un- 
 flinching courage. He has been the lau- 
 reate of the Republic in Europe as the 
 continental cause of liberty in every ty- 
 rannic or partially enfranchised land; he 
 has been a national poet of England, and 
 has besides enriched English literature 
 with a music never heard before, with the 
 most stately tragedies of his time, and with 
 its most imaginative romantic poem of 
 passion and with a multitude of noble 
 single poems of great variety of theme, 
 mood and art. He has supplemented this 
 poetic gift with a large body of prose 
 [113]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 which contains the wealth of a poet's ap- 
 preciation of a main portion of the most 
 famous English literature as well as of the 
 greatest modern poetic mind of France, 
 a treasure of intuitive criticism such as no 
 other English poet has left. This is the 
 fruit of a long labour of life. Strength is 
 dominant in his genius; the things of 
 strength are in his verse ; it is English gen- 
 ius and English strength, racial in lyric 
 power, in free intellect, in bold speech, 
 none more so and English also in its 
 poetic scholarly tradition. The reversionary 
 tendency of his art, the imaginative re- 
 moteness of his themes, the primitive pre- 
 dilection of his temperament have been 
 pointed out, with the resulting detachment 
 of his genius in important ways from his 
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 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 own age and generation; but if a certain 
 aloofness has come into his work from 
 these causes, he has been thereby with- 
 drawn into what is most primary in art 
 and most elemental in nature and life. He 
 has been genuine, as only high genius can 
 be, in all that he has done. In private life 
 he has lived in seclusion; but he has been 
 one of a company of sympathetic friends, 
 and has besides numbered among his 
 companions many others of the men of 
 distinction of his times. He has never 
 failed in public sympathy with great oc- 
 casions and events. As a poet, notwith- 
 standing his genius and labour, it must be 
 said he found the world inhospitable. The 
 measure of praise that he won has gone no 
 further than the acknowledgment of the 
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 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 victory of a poetic power that could not be 
 denied; it has not much increased with 
 years; it has never been adequate, just or 
 intelligent. There is, perhaps, the con- 
 sciousness of this in the concluding words 
 of his remarks on his collected verse, 
 which he addresses to his friend and 
 house- mate through these latter years: 
 "It is nothing to me that what I write 
 should find immediate or general accep- 
 tance; it is much to know that, on the 
 whole, it has won for me the right to ad- 
 dress this dedication and inscribe this 
 edition to you." The poet, like all men of 
 simple greatness, is free, it would seem, 
 from the desire for applause, but not from 
 the human want of some loving comrade- 
 ship in his art. There are, in the wide 
 [116]
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 world, here and there a few a number 
 that will increase ever with passing gener- 
 ations and is even now perhaps manyfold 
 greater than the poet knows in whose 
 hearts his poetry is lodged with power. 
 
 THE END 
 
 THE MoCLCRE PRESS, NEW YORK 
 
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 A 000 675 754 6