A study of Swinburne
Welby, T. Earle (Thomas Earle), 1881-1933
B Welby •«p<»* Study of Swinburne Sw63w 171550 M.L.. 4 PUBLIC LIBRARY FORT WAYNE AND ALLEN COUNTY, IND. |8 erg o i- 2^ CO O ^ \ ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY r3 1833 6a3«S376 AWN A STUDY OF SWINBURNE T. EARLE WELBY -^n ..^ -^ m---' -y i . . . r» u © EiiH'ry Walker Ltd. London SWIXIHJRN]-: inT,V'l-.Vj'»-ii''^ AUribHLed To Simeon Solomon. in the iMlzwilIirim ATuscnni. Cimbridire A STUDY OF SWINBURNE T. Earle Wei by NEW YORK GEORGE H.DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY A STUDY OF SWINBURNE — B — PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA To MY BROTHER i-'?i.550 ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author desires to make cordial acknowl- edgment of the generosity with which Mr. T. J. Wise has thrown open to him that incom- parable Swinburne collection which is the chief glory of the Ashley Library. He desires also to acknowledge his obligations to Sir Edmund Gosse's Lifey a book which, as an official indica- tion of a great poet to his place among his peers, is without rival in critical tact. TABLE OF DATES 1837. Born, 5th April, in Chester Street, Belgrave Square, London. 1849. Eton. Holidays spent at his parents' house in the Isle of Wight and Sir John Swinburne's seat, Capheaton, Northumberland. 1853. Leaves Eton. ^^1856. Balliol. 1857. Meets Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones. 1858. Friendship with Pauline, Lady Trevelyan. 1 860. Leaves Oxford. The Queen Mother and Rosa- mund, 1862. Refused by Jane Faulkner, niece and adopted daughter of Sir John Simon. "The Triumph of Time." 1864. Visits Landor in Florence. 1865. Atalanta in Calydon. Chastelard. 1866. Poems and Ballads. 1867. Meeting with Mazzini. "Ave atque Vale." 1868. Escape from drowning off Etretat. William Blake. 1869. "Hertha." 1 8 7 1 . Songs before Sunrise. 1872. Meeting with Watts (-Dunton). vii TABLE OF DATES 1874. BothwelL 1875. Essays and Studies. 1876. Erechtheus, 1878. Poems and Ballads j second series. 1 879. Removed by Watts to Putney. 1880. A Study of Shakespeare, 1882. Tristram of Lyonesse, 1889. Poems and Ballads y third series, 1896. The Tale of Balen, Death of his mother. 1903. Attacked by pneumonia. 1909. Death, loth April. Vlll CONTENTS CHAPTEK I Introduction i 7 II Apparition 30 III Antecedents 50 IV Laus Veneris 86 V Songs Before Sunrise iio VI The Troubled Years i 35 VII Pan and Thalassius i 50 VIII In Shelter 164 IX The Lyrical Dramas i 77 X The Tragedies 192 XI The Poet as Critic 204 XII Last Days 226 XIII Conclusion 230 XIV A Bibliographical Note zi. ILLUSTRATIONS Swinburne Frontispiece Swinburne and His Sisters 52 Holograph MS. of "A Vigil" 60 Portrait of Swinburne by G. F. Watts 74 Holograph MS. of "At a Month's End" 92 Caricature of Swinburne and Adah Isaacs Menken 100 Swinburne IN 1869 120 Holograph MS. of "A Record of Friend- ship" 138 Holograph MS. of "To a Seamew" 160 Landor's Last Letter to Swinburne 214 Tennyson's Last Letter to Swinburne 222 Last and Best Photograph of Swinburne 270 A STUDY OF SWINBURNE CHAPTER ONE Introduction IT is sixty-one years since, with the publication of Atalanta in Calydofiy Swinburne was revealed as one of the great poets of England j sixty years since, on grounds far more literary than those on which Byron's notoriety was based, he became, with the publication of the first series of Poems and Ballads^ more notorious than any poet subsequent to Byron had beenj perhaps fifty years since criticism attained to a lamentable ease about him. From time to time within the last quarter of a century the general verdict on Swinburne has been explicitly or implicitly challenged with reference to some finding. There have appeared, in that order, Mr. Wratislaw's book, Mr. MackaiPs brief and suggestive lecture, the acute criticism by the late Edward Thomas, Mr. Drink- water's book, my own small volume of 19 14, Sir Edmund Gosse's authoritative biography, the thought- ful book by M. Paul de Reul, Mr. Harold Nicolson's volume in the series once edited by Swinburne's severest critic and stauhchest journalistic supporter. But the general verdict stands. To write another book on Swinburne, I am assured, is either superfluously to restate it or to argue against it in sheer perversity. There is no Swinburne problem; there is nothing to elucidate. He is the simplest, the most readily and completely understood of our ^reat poets. His appeal is obvious and ephemeral. He is an intoxicant for 17 A STUDY OF SWINBURNE adolescence, rapidly outgrown. Three-fourths, or per- haps only two-thirds, of his poetry, for certain spokes- men of the public are disposed to be generous, is of no interest except to students of prosody. As for the man, never was there a simpler case. The confident summarizing intelligence need not for a moment be exercised by the questions how so very English, and more narrowly so very Northumbrian, a creature was so French, so Italianate, so Greek 5 how one so very definitely an aristocrat was a revolutionary j how the innovator was reversionary^ how one of the most mutinous of men was also one of the most sub- missive where he deemed submission to be due 3 how one of the most chameleonic of men was also so rigid and persistent that in essentials he may seem to have been at seventy what he was at twenty j how so spas- modic and anarchical a nature was yet dedicate to pur- y poses pursued over decades j how one in general so absorbed in aesthetic interests and so aloof from ordinary life was yet so acutely aware of the human comedy as the one novel he published proves him to have been; how the Sadist, as he may seem, could yet be our second laureate of the charms of childhood; how he who was incapacitated for love in action could be imaginatively one of our supreme amorists. . .. I refrain from indicating the further complexities of the problem that is said not to exist. I cannot pretend, though I came under the enchantment of this poet at fourteen, as so very many have done, and have remained under it to forty-four, which is uncommon, Swinburne, by hypothesis, being a poet whom one outgrows, that I have found, in all those years, any one solvent for- mula to apply to every part of the problem. I take leave to doubt whether any great poet can be made to yield up all his secrets by the use of a ready-made key. 18 CHAPTER ONE My business, for which I claim no qualifications beyond those which the humblest student may acquire in thirty years of constant brooding over the subject, is simply to suggest that we have not attained to finality about Swinburne, and to expose, as far as I can, those qualities in him which I believe to be most characteristic. The practice of labelling poets, as poets of nature, of love, or what not, is in general to be deprecated, for even if there should be considerable excuse for it in the facts of a poet's production, the significance of his dealings with a preferred subject cannot be discerned without due heed to the whole background against which that subject is made to stand out. Every great poet makes a whole world of his own, and however much emphasis we may rightly choose to lay on some salient feature of it, we must take account of that world in its totality. Or, in a more modest metaphor, our map of this country of the mind must accurately exhibit the level stretches and minor prominences as well as the major contours. But there are poets whose various energies are co-ordinated in some one creative task, whose various experiences cohere in one supreme experience 5 and to these, with caution and with reserva- tions, we may usefully apply a title. To Swinburne, at any rate, if we can conceive of that title in the most liberal sense, we may accord, without injury and with some advantage, the designation of the poet of liberty. Not because in a particular volume, on the whole the greatest volume of lyrical verse he ever produced, he devoted himself to passionate commentary on con- temporary struggles towards political liberty, or because from boyhood to old age he was ready, on the slightest stimulation, to shriek out incitements to mutiny and tyrannicide 5 but because liberty, sensual and aesthetic as well as political, was his natural element, because only 19 A STUDY OF SWINBURNE under that conception of him is he seen to attain to completeness of emotional and imaginative life. To segregate what are called his political poems from the general body of his work is an error disastrous to understanding of Swinburne. There can be but one error more fatal, that of supposing them to be, except in incidentals, simply the response of a dependent, derivative poet to the influence of Landor, of Hugo, of Mazzini, and to the impact on him of Mentana and Aspromonte and the halt before Rome, the coup d^etat and the miserable end of Napoleon III. Some of them are occasional, some are derivative, but the ceaseless and vehement aspiration to liberty is no accident, nothing learned from the masters he chose in a proud humility; liberty is the vital principle of Swinburne, animating not only the obviously political verse but all of his work that is truly alive. Not in one way only did Swinburne live for liberty. He brought to her, in her many manifestations, her splendid or perilous embodiments, all that it was in him to give. She would not have been his liberty if she could have been served more restrictedly, if she could have been contented with a peculiar tribute. He brought her his rebelliousness, which thus ceased to be the random thing it is often taken for; he brought her his singular humility, bowing before her a head else so defiant; the learning that enabled him to enter into the life of her chosen and ancient city of Athens; the ardour with which he entered into the life of her supreme symbol, the sea, and the unhuman ecstasy through which he identified himself with those other symbols of freedom, the sea-birds, "the others" as he called them from boyhood, and his feeling for fire, for light, for all the modes of swift motion. Something else he offered to her also, directly in a mystical sense, as well as in a 20 CHAPTER ONE shattering of conventions which impeded her in one department of life. It is a regret to me that I wasted the hour of the only long talk I ever had with the late W. H. Mallock in politico-economic discussion for some journalistic pur- pose, without asking him whether he was wholly aware of what he had suggested in his brilliant parody of Swinburne. For in that parody, whether in mere burlesque of a kind of phrase common in Swinburne, or with a flash of insight, the poet was made to announce to liberty that he would "do unto thee diverse and disgusting things." Had Mallock divined what has remained hidden from so many, that even Swinburne's sensuality was offered directly to liberty, that her son, her servant, her prophet, was also her lover, not only in the pure, chivalrous ways of certain of his great poems, but also in the ways in which he was the lover of Dolores and Fragoletta and those other "daughters of dreams and of stories," with a thrilled appreciation, too, of her wounds, and of the blood shed for her? Swinburne's work, then, is a multiple, many-mooded offering to liberty apprehended in very many ways: in her antique revelation to Greece ^ in her workings in contemporary Italy; in the dimly descried and exciting future; in her several attitudes of defeat and victory as "mater dolorosa," "mater triumphalis"; in her candid virginal grace and strength, as of Atalanta issuing to the destruction of incarnate evil; in her maternal solicitude for her martyred sons; in the implacability of her demands for sacrifice; and also in her wild urgings to the freedom of sensual impulses; and in her great natural symbols of sea and wind and fire and light. An offering, it has often enough been said, to a chimaera. The most fitting reply is silently to hand the adversary the poems of Swinburne, for no poet ever 21 A STUDY OF SWINBURNE made real poetry out of unreal experience. But there are other replies, to be made here and hereafter. Free- dom for Swinburne is not a riot of impulses in a vacuum. It is that condition in which man becomes the conscious, voluntarily dedicated, unimpeded instrument of the supreme purpose, which is not the hastening of some divine far-off event decreed by a power external to man, for there is no such power acknowledged by him, but complete self-realization for man in obedience to the common human will, in satisfaction of the general aspiration of humanity. By its very nature, this process demands both the utmost freedom and the utmost co- operation. It demands a united and comprehensive republic of free men, but one bearing to the ordinary republic of history or political theory such a relation as the Kingdom of God may be thought to bear to an ordinary kingdom. It is a conception much less political than religious 3 and because Swinburne says "dear city of man," instead of "dear city of Zeus," the re- ligious character is not thereby taken away from his thought. Indeed, it is because he is, in his own mode, religious that it becomes so urgently necessary for him, besides being very entertaining to him, though not always to his readers, to assail not merely conventional Christianity but every theology which postulates a divinity exterior to man. It is essential to his theology that divinity should be regarded as existent only in man, not that "each man of all men is God," but that "God is the fruit of the whole." Denial of this is a blasphemy, against the divinity of man; and refusal of co-operation in working towards the realization of it is sin, a thwarting of the sole divine purpose operative in the world. The conception, though it transcends politics, includes political life; with this effect, that offences against the State, in the degree to which it may 22 CHAPTER ONE have approached the ideal, become opposition to the sacred will, to be denounced, as by Swinburne they are, in terms which would be preposterous if directed against purely political oflFences, Napoleon III, for instance, being to Swinburne, as Sir Edmund Gosse has sug- gested, what Nero was to the early Christian Church. Aspiration towards such an ordering of mankind in the illimitable republic can look for no satisfaction be- yond that of a sense of progress towards the infinitely remote objective. But images in little of that perfection may be, as they have been, fashioned in the impatient mind of man, with some warrant from the history of actual States j and Swinburne, after writing the Songs before Sunrise, created his ideal State, after the his- torical model of Athens, in Erechtheus, that great and severe lyrical drama in which every action and emotion arises from patriotism held as a religious faith. Given a chimerical idea of liberty such as has been ascribed to Swinburne, it would have been the vaguest and most unreal of his works. It is, in fact, the most thoroughly organized and evenly wrought work that ever came from him. And it is not only in this way, subsidiary to the world- wide movement of his desire, that man may experience liberty. Granted such a temperament and nervous sys- tem as were Swinburne's, he may have the sensations of freedom, of escape from the clogged and enclosed existence of the average human being into a life incom- parably more spacious and vivid and unhampered, far more frequently and completely than most of us sup- pose. The liberation of sensual energy, which with Swinburne was apt to be wholly a mental affair, that too is a mode of escape into freedom j and identification of the self with the released energies of nature, with the movement of great waters, with the wind, with fire, 23 A STUDY OF SWINBURNE with light, with the gull flashing in sunshine over the waves, is an experience of liberty. Swinburne was end- lessly responsive to these things. It has been thought strange that one so very lavish with imagery should have drawn it from so few sources, winds and waves, fire and light, and little else, and should so often have neglected to co-ordinate it j but inevitably he relied on images of the life of liberty, and it was in their refer- ence to that life that they were related. It has been thought strange that he was so undefined, but in his constant pressing towards freedom he would have no limiting outline, and far from wishing to "station" him- self was eager for speed and the space in which it might have scope. We need not, and must not, suppose that the mutinous workings in his mind and his blood were always directed against conditions and institutions necessarily to be destroyed in the interests of liberty. He was a virtuoso in revolution as well as a passionately convinced and aspiring revolutionary. In his weaker moments, he enjoyed revolt for its own sake j just as, again in his weaker moments, he enjoyed submission, yielding him- self to it with a sensuality of the mind. He found it great fun sometimes to set his little heel on the neck of the tyrant or of some representative of respectability without any particular object except enjoyment of the process 3 and there were times when he prostrated his arrogant little body before Landor or Hugo or Mazzini or some other of his heroes for the sheer luxury of collapse. But this, though to be noted, does not abolish the truth that in the main his rebellions and blasphemies and acts of adoration were expressive of a profound, essentially original, life-long devotion to a liberty which he had clearly conceived, and which, whether or not to our minds it be wholly desirable or capable of com- 24 CHAPTER ONE plete realization, is among the noblest ideals set up in even our poetry. I will go farther, and since I propose to deal with what was morbid or eccentric in him rather more plainly than has hitherto been done, I am anxious to say this as soon as possible. I do not know any- where in our literature a body of poetry, comparable in poetical excellence and in bulk, which breathes out a purer air than the Songs before Sunrise or any drama that maintains a loftier ethical temper than Erechtheus. And I will add that, with a considerable knowledge of what he could be in certain relations, and after perusal of letters and verses far too liberally inlaid with irreverence and smut ever to be printed, I cannot feel that there is any poetical personality produced by our country more deserving of reverence, of at least the reverence due to courage, intellectual generosity, chivalry, chastity of honour, the high patrician way of conferring and accepting obligations, of facing enemies and supporting friends. With all his childishness, imp- ishness, extravagance, all his freakishness and weak- nesses, he was a very great man and a very great gentleman. The brandy, the flagellation, the frustrate orgies, the excessively naughty schoolboyish rhymes, the absurd violences, the epileptic fits, the beautiful voice raised to a scream of rage, while the little body twitches with an almost excuseless passion, have their place in the record of what he was, but only their place. Nor can Putney, that opening for cheap irony, be allowed the prominence which it assumes with those who find Swinburne still a great poet so long as he is in the cab, apparently a dying man, but a nonentity the moment he has arrived at an address not poetical enough for the unpoetical. Without denying that his house- mate, in a sense his proprietor, Watts-Dunton, gradu- ally exercised over him an influence in several respects 25 A STUDY OF SWINBURNE rather harmful to his genius, I must deny that, except for the Post Office, he was living merely at Putney. During those last thirty years he lived less in Putney than in Athens, in Elizabethan London, in his native Northumberland, on the wind-swept spaces of the sea. Age, an isolation from general society consequent on increasing deafness, separation from the stimulating, though in certain instances detrimental, friends of early days, certainly told on his mind after 18795 and even before that date he had become somewhat in- hospitable to new ideas and emotional experiences. But the language usually employed about the last thirty years seems to me rather misleading. Except in de- gree, there was nothing strange in his inaccessibility to what was novel; few men are truly receptive after forty, and if, on the whole, he was much serener and much less self-willed at Putney than he had been in his tumultuous youth, he remained highly responsive to all the old stimulations. The flame of excitement still leaped in him, only it now seldom communicated its heat to others. It is not so much, except in certain per- sonal and, after all, rather petty matters, a tamed Swin- burne that I see at Putney as a Sv/inburne who has largely lost the power of reaching his public. The case is one of the most remarkable presented to us by literary history, and with deference to my pred- ecessors I doubt whether it has been carefully enough considered. Here is a man to whom expression is an urgent necessity, who is master of one of the vastest, though most monotonously used, of vocabularies, and who is unrivalled in his command of the metrical instrument. Yet from time to time, between 1879 ^^^ 1896, when he suddenly recovered the full power of communication in The Tale of Balen, though only to 26 CHAPTER ONE lose it again, he is found to be addressing a public to v/hich he communicates hardly anything. The loss of ability or inclination to establish a sympathetic relation with readers was by no means so nearly total as is hastily assumed. There is not a volume of verse issued by Swinburne in his last thirty years, unless it be A Mid- summer Holiday, in which there are not certain suc- cesses in communication, and even A Midsummer Holiday contains the "Ballad of Appeal" to Christina Rossetti. But the failures are frequent, sometimes very irritating. For we feel of such a writer as the author of the elaborate and breathless "Word with the Wind" that he is a poet, that there is something fine in his experience if we could only get at it, and we cannot turn away as placidly as we do from, say, Wordsworth's worst failures, certain that we are missing nothing of the smallest value. What, we ask in dismay, has happened to him or to us? What has happened to him it is extremely difficult to say. We may reflect, however, that in other ways and from an earlier period Swinburne had occasionally shown a curious inability to understand the mind of the reader. I will return to this later, when noticing the unhappy constitution and sequence of his publications, which seriously affected contemporary regard for him, though that will matter very little to posterity. For my immediate purpose it is enough to point to his invariable assumption, from the early and most admirable essay on Ford to the latest of his posthumously published studies of Elizabeth and Jacobean dramatists, that the average intelligent reader would be intimately ac- quainted with the obscurest writers of that age. In Swinburne's belief, every adult in this country carried in his head the text of Arden of Fever sham and was as 27 A STUDY OF SWINBURNE cognizant of the humour of Lingua ^ as of Pickwick. It was not only knowledge that he assumed. He quite seriously supposed that a natural and effective method of persuading more readers to approach Landor and Hugo was to eulogize them in enormous and cryptic odes, each strophe and antistrophe of which would be packed with circumlocutory references to the least generally studied of their works. Now, as it seems to me, it was, on the whole, less a decline in sheer poetical energy than a growth of this incapacity for judging what would and what would not get through to his readers that resulted in the least enjoyable of his later poetry. / Naturally not well qualified at any time for reaching the public, Swinburne, if he was to reach it, needed some very strong motive. In no unworthy sense, he needed a propagandist purpose, an additional motive for desir- ing his readers to share his experience. In the earlier years he had such motives. There was the desire to shock the public by making it a sharer of his imaginative sensual experiences, sometimes merely an impish desire to shock, sometimes a serious passion for sensual liberty. There was also the desire to secure sympathy for an Italy aspiring to freedom in unity, for a France ruled by Napoleon III, and above all that, for the sublime idea of universal liberty. When these desires had been worked out, Swinburne, I suppose, no longer felt the compulsion to make his readers sharers of his expe- riences. The gods, giving him in so lavish a measure every gift for the making of great lyrical poetry, had denied him the instinctive desire to communicate experi- ence simply because he had had it. Born to isolation, Swinburne had come out of it when tempted by Mrs. 1 Was not Swinburne justified in rejecting on grounds of style the persistent attribution of Lingua to the author of Alhumazarf 28 CHAPTER ONE Grundy or inspired by Italy, or to speak more to the level of the argument, in the service of liberty, of that which can be established only by co-operation. He retired into his natural isolation when there was no longer a special motive for intimacy of relation to other minds, and his raptures became solitary. It seems to me, then, that the later poems, though the exceptions are fairly numerous, should be regarded simply as impassioned soliloquies, not addressed to the reader. They must have meant much to Swinburne, though they do not mean much to most of us. Yet even to us they can mean something, if we will take them in the spirit in which we listen to the sea and watch the swift movements of sea-birds. Though, as I began by saying, I neither offer nor trust any single formula in dealing with a great poet, it does seem to me that by regarding Swinburne as pri- marily the poet of liberty we attain to two things, a sense of the coherence of his finer work and a partial explanation of the difficulty of his less fine work. So far as it does cohere, it is chiefly in service, various as that IS, to the ideal of liberty 5 so far as it is, as in later years it often was, deficient in the power of communi- cating real enough experiences to us, that is largely be- cause he is without a compelling motive to effect full communication. But a guiding principle is only a guid- ing principle. God has not been so concerned for the convenience of critics as to make any of His poets in simple and exact illustration of any principle that they can discern. The facts of Swinburne's production are the facts, where they contradict any theory of mine or another's as well as where they corroborate it, and I hope to recognize his best whenever I encounter it. 29 CHAPTER TWO Apparition HE broke in on that rather agreeably tedious Victorian tea-party with the eflFect of some pagan creature, at once impish and divine, leaping on to the sleek lawn, to stamp its goat-foot in challenge, to de- ride with its screech of laughter the admirable decorum of the conversation. The disorder that followed re- mains indescribable j and, knowing what we do of the real character of many of the startled company, it is not now quite easy to understand. Few of them were really so tame as they seemed, in that August of 1866, when the summer was so suddenly smitten with strange air, and keen, wild scents and hot, artificial odours of the alcove overwhelmed the temperate perfumes of the insular garden. Even their typical poet, Tennyson, if you considered him closely, when he was off duty, had in him, at any rate as a man, something farouche and acrid, a reminder that, if he now wrote Enoch Arden and the like, he had been, not so long ago. In his lucky, unguarded hour, the author of Maud. But, for the time being, he was complacent, and rather somnolent, and a trifle official. There was rather too much suavity in the setting he and they had contrived for themselves, too even a gloss on that cultured society. It had genius and talent in abundance, and was con- cerned with many high matters, of which, however, it now spoke with the emphasis of habit rather than of constantly renewed conviction; but it had become inhospitable to new ideas, suspicious of all instincts which did not bring with them a certificate from some 30 CHAPTER TWO reputable authority. Admirably, it had decided, with the Laureate, to let the ape and tiger die, at any rate as subjects of discussion, but it had fallen into a cer- tain zoological confusion, whereby many permanent, if you like deplorable, human characteristics have been as- sumed to be simian or feline, and it was sure they could be eradicated by a conspiracy of silence. The intrusion startled them so much partly because they were unprepared. A few, and in particular Rus- kin, had been aware for some time that some invasion was possible. For several years Ruskin had been on terms of friendship with Rossetti and most of his circle, and he had known Swinburne since they met in 1858 at the house of Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, the young poet's wisest and most devoted protector. But even to Ruskin the literary intentions of the group were still rather obscure, and most of the others knew hardly anything of its ardent poetic activities. True, years earlier there had appeared the Gertriy containing, with other significant things, so consummate a piece of work in the new temper as Rossetti's "The Blessed Damo zel"j that poem, revised, together with "The Burden of Nineveh'' and "The Staff and the Scrip" had been printed in 1856 in the Oxford and Cambridge Maga- ziney to which William Morris had contributed his early romantic tales in prose and one of the most beau- tiful of all his shorter poems. Morris had issued his wonderful first volume of verse, The Defence of Gueneverey in 1 858 3 Swinburne had put forth his two early plays in 1 860. But the Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine had been short-lived coterie periodicals; Morris had attracted very little attention from his general public with Guenevere, though it con- tained some of the very finest, and certainly the most intense, poetry he was ever to produce 3 and Swinburne's 31 A STUDY OF SWINBURNE first book, after some twenty copies had been given away to reviewers and friends, had become, what for half a decade it remained, lumber in the publisher's stock room. Rossetti's one volume had not fared so very much better, and in any event was translation from the early Italian poets, to whom might be referred certain peculiarities of sentiment and style: his volume of original poems was to be delayed till 1870 by his impulsive burial of the manuscripts in his wife's grave. The proceedings immediately after the sudden, deeply tragic death of that beautiful, gifted woman assist us to realize how incurious the general public was about members of the group. On the evening of the 1 0th of February 1862 D. G. Rossetti, his wife, and Swinburne had dined together at the Sabloniere Hotel, Leicester Square. Rossetti had taken her home, gone out again, and returned to find her dying of an over- dose of laudanum. An inquest was necessary, and Swinburne was a witness of great importance, not only because he had been the last person except her husband to see her alive, but because he had been for the two years since their marriage her closest friend and the most frequent visitor to their home. For many months before this, as Lord Houghton's guest at gatherings frequented by almost every distinguished writer and by many people of fashion, he had been a figure con- spicuous by his extraordinary appearance and a talker the most stimulating that most of the company had ever heard. Yet not one paper reported his evi- dence. In 1862 Swinburne was nobody. Almost as much might be said of other poets in the group, with one exception, though Pre-Raphaelite painting, so far as it was still represented by the accommodating Millais, had begun to secure some favour. Christina Rossetti 32 CHAPTER TWO alone had managed, or rather chanced, to make a stir with her poetry. But her exquisite first work, though definitely related to her brother's, won its way by qualities altogether its own. It did not prepare the public, to any considerable extent, for the poetry of Dante Gabriel, and still less for the poetry of Swin- burne. And Swinburne himself had done very little to fit the public mind for the reception of the first series of Poems and Ballads. Success with the general body of readers, but by no means to the extent suggested in most accounts of his career, had been achieved by him in 1865, with Atalanta in Calydony on which had fol- lowed the much earlier conceived Chastelard; not by any volume of lyrics which, revealing personal emotion and the several facets of his character, might have enabled readers to anticipate the nature of those new poems which threw literary England into paroxysms. The first that most people learned of the Poems and Ballads was from the very lengthy and extremely hostile criticism in the most influential literary periodi- cal of the period, the Saturday Review y a criticism which appeared before copies of the book were readily obtainable, which at once fixed the general attitude to- wards Swinburne, and which continued to be echoed, often no doubt unconsciously, for at least thirty years. This notorious, and in its consequences very impor- tant, criticism was anonymous, but, as has long been known, the work of John Morley. It was the more damaging because here and there it showed, and still oftener seemed to show, willingness to leave the artist a reasonable liberty in choice of subject and method. "It is mere waste of time," it began, "and shows a curiously mistaken conception of human character, to blame an artist of any kind for working at a certain set of subjects, rather than at some other set which the 33 A STUDY OF SWINBURNE critic may prefer. An artist, at all events an artist of such power and individuality as Mr. Swinburne, works as his character compels him. If the character of his genius drives him pretty exclusively in the direction of libidinous song, we may be very sorry, but it is of no use to advise him and to preach to him.'^ Such as Swinburne's bent is, he follows it, and in the eyes of this critic he at least "deserves credit for the audacious courage with which he has revealed to the world a mind all aflame with the feverish carnality of a schoolboy over the dirtiest passages in Lempriere." Not everyone would so readily avow interest in "the practices of the great island of the i^gean, in the habits of Messalina, of Faustina, of Pasiphae." Were he simply a rebel against the "fat-headed Philistines and thin-blooded Puritans" who insist that all poetry should be fit for perusal by girls of eighteen, he would have all generous minds on his side. But there is a vast difference be- tween a healthy paganism and "an attempt to glorify all the bestial delights that the subtleness of Greek de- pravity was able to contrive." No condemnation could be too strong for "the mixed vileness and childishness" which presents "the spurious passion of a putrescent imagination" as the chief glory of life. This poet, certainly, has power of imagination and mastery of the music of verse j he is capable of "variety and rapidity and sustention," of music if not of thought 5 he can achieve sometimes, as in the hendecasyllabics, "perfect delicacy and beauty," and he is deeply poetical in such a piece as "The Sundew" (certainly one of the most charming of his minor successes, the present writer would say, but also one of the least characteristic). But for the most part, in Morley's view, he is addicted to "the most violent colours and the most intoxicated ideas and images." Even his best work is excessively pessi- 34 CHAPTER TWO mistic. "The bottomless pit encompasses us on one side and stews and bagnios on the other. A very just view of the intruder, it was pretty gen- erally agreed on the desecrated lawn, though here and there some mild dissent revealed itself. Ruskin, for one, declined to join the general and furious re- monstrance. But it is easy to make too much of that. For one thing, he had been persuaded to countenance the Poems and Ballads before they appeared, and could hardly withdraw from the position he had taken up. For another, if he would say nothing against the peccant volume in public, he adopted in private a tone of mel- ancholy wonder at the perversity of his young and gifted friend. To one who had urged him to denounce Swinburne he could write: "He is infinitely above me in all knowledge and power, and I should no more think of advising him or criticizing him than of venturing to do it to Turner if he were alive again. . . . I'm righter than he is — so are the lambs and the swallows, but they're not his match." To Swinburne himself he wrote in the month after the appearance of the book: i7T550 "For the matter of it — I consent to much — I regret much — I blame or reject nothing. I should as soon think of finding fault with you as with a thunder-cloud or a nightshade blossom. All I can say of you, or them, is that God made you, and that you are very wonderful and beautiful. . . . There is assuredly something wrong with you — awful in proportion to the great power it effects, and renders [you] (nationally) at present useless. So it was with Turner, so with Byron. 35 A STUDY OF SWINBURNE It seems to be the peculiar judgment-curse of modern days that all their greatest men shall be plague-struck." Maintaining this attitude, modest, generous, affec- tionate, Ruskin could only refrain from condemnation, could not champion the volume or its author. Among literary journalists Swinburne had backing from Joseph Knight, whose friendship he had won a year earlier, whose wide reading in dramatic literature made him congenial company, and with whom he remained intimate for another seven years, when there was an unfortunate quarrel, one of the quarrels of Swin- burne's worst and least characteristic period. Socially, since Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, whose shrewd, amused maternal interest in him had been so helpful, died shortly after the publication of the Poems and Ballads y and Lord Houghton now showed signs of an only moderately benevolent ^neutrality, and moreover was out of England at the most critical moment, Swin- burne was in need of support. For, inevitably, with the notoriety of the Poems and Ballads stories began to circulate. Gossip that was contemptible when fresh is not less so when stale, but the baser part of the Swinburne legend cannot be ignored, for it provided in the middle 'sixties reasons for discounting his work. Setting aside stories of another kind, it was passed about, correctly, that Swin- burne from time to time was the victim of a singular kind of seizure, epileptic no doubt, but unlike anything recorded of anyone else. Then, inaccurately but with excuse, it was passed about that he drank heavily, the truth being that with his high-strung, indeed abnormal, nervous system, he was overcome or frenzied by what for the normal man would have been a very moderate amount of wine. Evidently a maladive, disordered 36 CHAPTER TWO creature, whose impulses and opinions might to some extent at least be referred to disease and drink, though the real Swinburne, when he was himself, was full of vitality, tireless in walking and swimming, free from all the usual minor ailments, and as radiant, witty, courteous, and dignified a companion and conversation- alist as could be desired, the best talker of sense and nonsense to be found in any company. 