Olin 
 
 PR 
 S6I3 
 
 HO da. 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924077719908 
 
In compliance with current 
 
 copyright law, Cornell University 
 
 Library produced this 
 
 replacement volume on paper 
 
 that meets the ANSI Standard 
 
 Z39.48-1992 to replace the 
 
 irreparably deteriorated original. 
 
 1996 
 
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
 
al<;i-:k.m in (_ haki.ks s\\ immi hnk. 
 
ALGERNON CHARLES 
 SWINBURNE 
 
 a stubs 
 
 BY 
 
 THEODORE WRATISLAW 
 
 %onbon 
 
 GREENING & CO., LTD. 
 
 20 CECIL COURT, CHARING CROSS ROAD 
 
 1900 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 2 
 
|\>^^tA'S4- 
 
 Copyright in Great Britain, the Dominion of Canada and the 
 United States of America, October igoo. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PROLOGUE, . .1 
 
 Undergraduate Papers (1858), 7 
 
 The Queen-Mother and Rosamund (i860), . 8 
 
 Dead Love (1864), 11 
 
 THE POEMS 
 Atalanta in Calydon (1865), ... - IS 
 
 Chastelard (1865), 24 
 
 Poems and Ballads — First Series (1866), • . . 36 
 
 Songs before Sunrise (1871), 55 
 
 Bothwell (1874), . . . . 67 
 
 Songs of Two Nations (1875), . . .68 
 
 Erectheus (1876), ... .68 
 
 Poems and Ballads — Second Series (1878), . . 74 
 Songs of the Springtides (1880), ... 85 
 
 Studies in Song (1880), . . ... 89 
 
 Mary Stuart (1881), .... . . 94 
 
 Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), 97 
 
 A Century of Roundels (1882), . . .109 
 
via 
 
 Contents 
 
 A Midsummer Holiday (1884), 
 Marino Falibro (1885), ... 
 
 LocRiNE (1887), 
 
 Poems and Ballads — Third Series (1889), . 
 The Sisters (1892), ... 
 Astrophel and Other Poems (1894), . 
 The Tale of Balen (1896), . 
 Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards (1899), 
 
 THE PROSE WORKS 
 Notes on Poems and Reviews (1866), 
 William Blake (1868), . 
 Under the Microscope (1S72), 
 Essays and Studies (1875), . 
 George Chapman (1865), 
 Charlotte Bronte (1877), . 
 A Study of Shakespeare (1880), 
 A Study of Victor Hugo (1886), . 
 Miscellanies (1886), 
 A Study of Ben Jonson (18S9), . 
 Studies in Prose and Poetry (1894), 
 EPILOGUE, . ... 
 
 APPENDIX, 
 
 rAGE 
 112 
 
 'IS 
 
 122 
 
 I2S 
 
 142 
 148 
 
 IS3 
 154 
 154 
 15s 
 i6s 
 16S 
 166 
 173 
 174 
 187 
 191 
 200 
 209 
 
SWINBURNE 
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne, the eldest 
 child of Admiral Charles Henry Swinburne 
 and Lady Henrietta Jane, daughter of the 
 third Earl of Ashburnham, was born in 
 London on the 5 th April 1837. Admiral 
 Swinburne, who was the second son of Sir 
 John Edward Swinburne, Baronet, died in 
 1877, Lady Henrietta Jane Swinburne 
 within the last few years. 
 
 ' The very ancient family ' of Swinburne, 
 says Burke, ' derived its name from Swin- 
 burne Castle in Northumberland, which it 
 possessed from so remote a* period that 
 (although Sir William Dugdale notes them 
 not as such) the Swinburnes of Swinburne 
 Castle have been esteemed feudal lords.' 
 
 Swinburne Castle, however, passed away 
 from the family on the death of Adam de 
 Swinburne in the time of Edward II., with- 
 
 A 
 
2 Swinburne 
 
 out male issue. The present family is 
 descended from Sir William de Swinburne, 
 who Hved in the time of Henry III. The 
 present baronet, Sir John Swinburne, is a 
 first cousin of the poet. The family seat 
 is Capheaton Castle in Northumlaerland. 
 
 The Swinburne baronetcy dates back to 
 1660, the barony of Ashburnham to 1689 
 and the earldom to 1730. The family of 
 Ashburnham is, according to Nisbet, ' One 
 of the ancientest families of good account 
 before the Conquest.' 
 
 Of the personality and life of the poet 
 little is known, and such accounts as have 
 seen the light have been incorrect even 
 when they have not been false. He was 
 educated at Eton and Balliol, but he left 
 Oxford without taking his degree — for the 
 extraordinary reason, I understand, that, 
 although he knew more Greek than his 
 examiners, and more of most subjects than 
 his co-examinees, he was ' ploughed ' in 
 ' Scripture,' which he had not taken the 
 trouble to 'get up.' At Oxford he made 
 the acquaintance of Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
 
Prologue 3 
 
 — who was then engaged in painting frescoes 
 on the walls of the Union — and of Burne- 
 Jones and Morris. Shortly after leaving 
 Oxford, when he was staying with his 
 family in Italy, he called with a letter of 
 introduction on Walter Savage Landor, then 
 in his last years. The admiration of the 
 youngest for the oldest ' singer ' of that time 
 found expression in the dedication to Landor 
 of the Atalanta, in excellent Greek verses. 
 To the influence of his gifted mother, who 
 was educated in Italy and taught the poet 
 Italian, the affection of Swinburne for that 
 southern country is no doubt due. His 
 admiration for Victor Hugo began very 
 early in life, not improbably dating from 
 the time when he received a copy of Notre 
 Dame de Paris as a school prize. The first 
 time, however, that he saw Hugo was in 
 November 1882, on the occasion of the 
 revival in Paris of Le Rot S' Amuse. His 
 early life was divided between Capheaton 
 Castle in Northumberland, the seat of his 
 grandfather, and East Dene at Bonchurch 
 in the Isle of Wight, an estate which had 
 
4 Swinburne 
 
 been purchased by his father. Divided by 
 a stone wall from the hillside road which 
 runs northward past the old Bonchurch 
 Churchyard, backed by the magnificent St 
 Boniface Down, half enclosed by woods, but 
 open in front to the fine sweep of pasturage 
 which descends to the road overlooking the 
 cliffs and the sea, the white rambling house 
 of East Dene is a delightful pleasure-house 
 to gaze upon. In the new churchyard at 
 Bonchurch, a little higher on the cliff side, 
 are the simple graves of the poet's father 
 and mother. A few miles on the other 
 side of Ventnor is the house named The 
 Orchard, formerly the property of his uncle 
 by marriage, Sir Henry Gordon, who was 
 the husband of his aunt. Lady Mary Ash- 
 burnham. The road which leads from 
 Ventnor to St Catherine's Point and Black- 
 gang Chine runs below high downs and 
 cliffs, and above a gentler slope of land 
 descending to the sea, through a wooded 
 district known as the Undercliff. Below 
 this road in one spot is the estate and white 
 house of The Orchard, perhaps more delight- 
 
Prologue 5 
 
 fully placed even than East Dene. Here 
 also was the poet a frequent visitor. Many 
 of Swinburne's most beautiful poems — for 
 instance the Forsaken Garden — are inspired 
 by the scenery of the Isle of Wight, and 
 in the dedicatory verses to Lady Mary 
 Gordon of The Sisters he recalls his 
 early memories of The Orchard with its 
 terraces of flowers, its 'shadowed lawns' 
 and 'shadowing pines,' with its sun, its 
 cliffs and its sea. Probably no poet has 
 ever been so favoured by fortune in his 
 early life in the matter of beautiful sur- 
 roundings as well as the exemption from 
 the necessity of labour in other fields than 
 Art's. At a later date, after leaving Oxford 
 and after a short stay on the Continent, he 
 found the fascination of London. It was at 
 this time that he shared for a year a house 
 in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, with Rossetti and 
 Meredith. Thereafter he had chambers in 
 London — in North Crescent, Great James 
 Street and Guildford Street at various times. 
 East Dene was sold after the death of a 
 sister of the poet, and the headquarters of 
 
6 Swinburne 
 
 his nearest relatives then became Holmwood, 
 near Reading. For the last twenty years 
 the poet has lived on the edge of Wimbledon 
 Common, sharing a house with his ' best 
 friend,' Mr Theodore Watts- Dunton, and 
 making an annual excursion with his friend 
 to the seaside for his chief delight — 
 swimming. His love of the sea and 
 swimming is a prominent feature of his 
 poetry. The well-known incident of his 
 narrow escape from drowning, referred 
 to once by himself in a poem. Ex Voto, 
 occurred in his early manhood at Etretat 
 in Normandy. He was carried away by a 
 strong current and was luckily picked up by 
 some fishermen. 
 
 The portrait by Watts of Swinburne as a 
 young man is well known. The mass of 
 reddish hair, the high forehead, aquiline 
 nose and narrowing under face with a very 
 slight moustache on the upper lip, are 
 characteristics so often dwelt on that it may 
 be permissible to repeat them. The curious 
 resemblance between the early portraits of 
 Swinburne and of M. Paderewski has been 
 
Undergraduate Papers 7 
 
 often noticed. Perhaps the best likenesses of 
 the early Swinburne have been caught by 
 his friend Rossetti, but the best photograph 
 of the very few taken in recent years is re- 
 produced in the front of this volume. At 
 the present day Mr Swinburne, as he 
 appeared to the present writer at a chance 
 meeting, seems twenty years younger than 
 his actual age, possessing still the animation 
 which in his early manhood won him the 
 name of ' boy poet,' and a manner of perfect 
 courtesy. 
 
 The earliest known writings of Swinburne 
 consist of three articles and a poem 
 graduate which appeared in 1858, in an 
 apers, i 5 . Qj^^f-Qj-^j publication, entitled Under- 
 graduate Papers. They were entitled : — 
 
 'The Early English Dramatists. No. i. 
 Marlowe and Fletcher.' 
 
 ' The Monomaniac's Tragedy and other 
 poems.' By Ernest Wheldrake. Author of 
 ' Eve : a Mystery.' London 1858.' 
 
 ' Church Imperialism.' 
 
 ' Queen Yseult.' Canto i. Of the birth of 
 SirTristram and how he voyaged into Ireland.' 
 
8 Swinburne 
 
 Of this publication, Undergraduate Papers, 
 which was edited by Professor Nichol, only 
 four copies are known to exist. 
 
 The title of the first article explains itself. 
 The second was a (presumptively ironical) 
 review of an imaginary book of poems, 
 the quoted verses being by the hand of the 
 reviewer. The third was an attack on the 
 French Empire and its clerical supporters. 
 The poem has since been re-written by its 
 author. 
 
 In the titles and contents of these essays 
 and this poem, published at the age of 
 twenty-one, the beginning of the Swinburne 
 that we know is obvious. 
 
 Two years later, in i860, the poet, then 
 The Queen- aged twenty-three, published his 
 Mother and f^rst book. The Queen-M Other and 
 
 Rosamund, _ 
 
 i860. Rosamund, which has long been 
 out of print. Of the two plays which 
 make up the volume, the first, The Queen- 
 Mother, is the longer and the more 
 dramatic. It is, as it were, a prologue to 
 the three plays which Swinburne in later 
 years has devoted to the character of Mary 
 
The Queen-Mother and Rosamund 9 
 
 Queen of Scots. The Queen-Mother in 
 question is Catherine de Medici, and the 
 play is laid in the time of the Massacre 
 of St Bartholomew. Among its characters 
 are Charles IX. of France, Henry of 
 Navarre and his wife Margaret, the 
 authoress of the Heptameron, and Henry, 
 Duke of Guise. It was in the court of 
 Queen Catherine that Mary Stuart was 
 reared, ' in the atmosphere of a palace 
 which,' the dramatist wrote at a later date, 
 ' it would be flattery to call a brothel or a 
 slaughter-house.' The principal interest of 
 the play is historic, and the horror of the 
 time is well suggested. 
 
 The nascent cleverness of the writing of 
 the play is as clear as its immaturity. The 
 weakness of its immaturity, however, is as 
 strong as the strength of many a would- 
 be dramatist, and the undertone of its 
 writer's poetic temperament is evident. 
 The style appears to a certain extent 
 to be founded on Shakespeare, but 
 much of the later Swinburne is visible 
 here. 
 
lO Swinburne 
 
 Such a phrase as — 
 
 ' The sea's yellow and distempered foam,' 
 for instance, recalls both Shakespeare and 
 Swinburne. 
 
 The little play of Rosamund, the mistress 
 
 of Henry II. and of Woodstock, is written 
 
 in five short scenes. Its verbiage is more 
 
 elaborate, more designedly poetic, than that 
 
 of its predecessor. Here and there are 
 
 traces of the influence of Browning, but 
 
 there is much more in it of the Swinburne 
 
 of the later Chastelard and Poems and 
 
 Ballads than the critics of the poem would 
 
 have one believe. The play is curiously 
 
 uneven. At first Rosamund is represented 
 
 as a somewhat proud type of beauty. 
 
 ' I that have held a land between twin lips 
 And turned large England to a little kiss . . . 
 Yea, I am found the woman in all tales, 
 The face caught always in the story's face ; 
 I, Helen, holding Paris by the lips. 
 Smote Hector through the head ; I, Cressida, 
 So kissed men's mouths that they went sick and mad.' 
 
 But on the advent of Queen Eleanor with 
 her poisoned draught, the pride of Rosamund 
 falls verj- low. 
 
Dead Love 1 1 
 
 There are pleasant touches of description 
 
 of the gardens of Rosamund's Bower. 
 
 ' Hark, the rain begins, 
 Slips like a bird that feels among shut leaves ; 
 One — two ; it catches in the rose-branches 
 Like a bird caught. 
 
 I never loved white roses much ; but see 
 How the wind drenches the low lime-branches 
 With shaken silver in the rainiest leaves.' 
 
 The displaced accent of the word 'branches' 
 in each quotation may be due to the influence 
 of Rossetti, to whom the book is dedicated. 
 Rosamund is scarcely a maturer work than 
 The Queen - Mother, and yet it is to be 
 hoped that the little book will, ere long, 
 be reprinted. Its principal interest, no 
 doubt, arises from the fact of its authorship, 
 but neither play affords any reason for 
 their author to be ashamed of his youthful 
 handiwork. 
 
 Four years elapsed between the publica- 
 
 Dead Love tion of these plays and of a little 
 
 1864. prose story which saw the light in 
 
 1864, called Dead Love. The story, told 
 
 in quaint English, is of a French lady 
 
1 2 Swinburne 
 
 named Madame Yolande, who fell in love 
 with the slain body of a French gentleman, 
 Messire Jacques d'Aspremont. Possibly 
 only a few copies of the tale were printed, 
 for it is now of extreme rarity. 
 
 It was in the following year, 1865, that 
 the poet produced his first masterpiece. 
 
THE POEMS 
 
THE POEMS 
 
 With the publication of Atalanta in Calydon 
 Ataianta in Swinburne wrote his name at once 
 Calydon, among the great poets of the world. 
 The book was hailed rapturously 
 and immediately as a triumph of poetry. 
 So much indeed was written of the book at 
 the time of its publication, and has been 
 written during the subsequent years, that it 
 would be difficult to find anything new to 
 say on the subject. With the possible 
 exception of the first series of Poems and 
 Ballads, this play is the best known of 
 Swinburne's many volumes. The novelty 
 of its form, the originality and dexterity of 
 its lyrical metres, the freshness and vigour 
 of the blank verse, were unmistakably the 
 work of a poet, taken apart, if such a thing 
 is possible to the imagination, from the 
 
 IS 
 
1 6 Swinburne 
 
 scholarly construction of the tragedy and 
 the verbal expression of sensation or emo- 
 tion. From the exquisite picture of a 
 springtide dawn, with which the play com- 
 mences, to the almost intolerable pity of 
 its close, there is no faltering of idea, no 
 cloudiness of purpose. 
 
 The prologue, placed in the mouth of 
 the Chief Huntsman, avoids the Euripidean 
 mistake of telling too much, and merely 
 posts the action up to the date of the 
 drama, with a hint of the purpose of the 
 fatal day to follow. 
 
 ' O fair-faced sun, killing the stars and dews 
 And dreams and desolation of the night. 
 Rise up, shine, stretch thine hand out, with thy bow 
 Touch the most dimmest height of trembling heaven. 
 And burn and break the dark about thy ways, 
 Shot through and through with arrows ; let thine hair 
 Lighten as flame above that fiameless shell 
 Which was the moon, and thine eyes fill the world 
 And thy lips kindle with swift beams ; let earth 
 Laugh and the long sea fiery from thy feet . . . 
 And all the winds about thee with their wings. 
 And fountain-heads of all the watered world ; 
 Each horn of Achelous and the green 
 Euenus, wedded with the straitening sea.' 
 
Atalanta in Calydon ij 
 
 The chorus which follows the prologue, 
 taking up in a lighter lyrical strain the 
 theme of awakening spring, has been quoted 
 so often that if it were possible to refrain 
 from quotation here it would seem wiser 
 to do so. But to refrain is impossible — at 
 least from the quotation of three of the 
 seven perfect stanzas of this chorus. 
 
 ' 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, 
 
 For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces. 
 The tongueless vigil and all the pain. . . . 
 
 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, 
 B 
 
1 8 Swinburne 
 
 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.' 
 
 The entrance of Althaea brings with it 
 the first suggestion of tragedy, breaking 
 harshly with the bitterness of maternal 
 jealousy upon the enchanting song of 
 spring, and with her narration of her dream 
 of the fire-brand, the story of the drama 
 begins to be unveiled. The love of the 
 mother for her son Meleager is so ex- 
 quisitely portrayed by Swinburne that it 
 is curious to note that his play must have 
 been written at the same time as the poems 
 of another kind of love, which aroused the 
 fierce indignation of the English press a 
 year later. Thus speaks Althaea to her 
 son : — 
 
 ' I have seen thee all thy years 
 A man in arms, strong and a joy to men 
 Seeing thy head glitter and thine hand burn its way 
 Through a heavy and iron furrow of sundering spears ; 
 But always also a flower of three suns old, 
 The small one thing that lying drew down my life 
 To lie with thee and feed thee ; a child and weak. 
 Mine, a delight to no man, sweet to me. 
 
Atalanta in Calydon 19 
 
 Who then sought to thee ? Who gat help ? Who knew 
 If thou wert goodly ? Nay, no man at all . . . 
 But fair to me thou wert, O little life, 
 Fruitless, the fruit of mine own flesh, and blind, 
 More than much gold, ungrown, a foolish flower.' 
 
 The maternal love of Althaea, the self-dedi- 
 cation of Atalanta to perpetual virginity, 
 the roughness and coarseness of Toxeus 
 and Plexippus are equally clearly delineated 
 by the dramatist. 
 
 The descriptive passage of the death of 
 the boar is a brilliant conquest of tremendous 
 difficulty. But what difficulty could there 
 be for a poet capable of such phrases as 
 these ? — 
 
 ' Seeing where the green ooze of a sun-struck marsh 
 Shook with a thousand reeds untunable. 
 And in their moist and multitudinous flower 
 Slept no soft sleep, with violent visions fed. 
 The blind bulk of the immeasurable beast 
 
 But the boar heaved half out of ooze and slime 
 
 His tense flank trembling round the barbed wound, 
 
 Hateful ; and fiery with invasive eyes 
 
 And bristhng with intolerable hair 
 
 Plunged, and the hounds clung, and green flowers and 
 
 white 
 Reddened and broke all round them where they came. 
 
20 Swinburne 
 
 Sprang straight and roaring with no lesser cry 
 Than thunder and the roar of wintering streams 
 That mix their own foam with the yellower sea ; 
 And as a tower that falls by fire in fight . . . 
 So through crushed branches and the reddening brake 
 Clamoured and clashed the fervour of his feet.' 
 
 The account of the death of the scourge 
 sent by Artemis is followed quickly by the 
 news of the slaughter of Toxeus and Plexip- 
 pus by Meleager in return for an insult to 
 Atalanta ; and Althaea goes from the stage 
 to throw into the fire the brand upon whose 
 safety depends the life of her son. Divided 
 between her love for her brethren and her 
 son, she has no hesitation and no regret. 
 
 'Girls, one thing will I say and hold my peace. 
 I that did this will weep not nor cry out. . . . 
 I know not if I live, 
 Save that I feel the fire upon my face 
 And on my cheek the burning of a brand.' 
 
 It was doubtless in self-oblivion that Swin- 
 burne, when writing of Tennyson's Rizpah, 
 spoke of ' the deep truth that great poets 
 are bi-sexual.' ' The emotion produced ' 
 on Swinburne 'by the first reading of 
 
Atalanta in Calydon 21 
 
 Tennyson's Rizpah * may seem to colder 
 readers somewhat too emotional, but the 
 words which he uses in that wonderful 
 essay are alone worthy of the great passage 
 written by himself, placed in the mouth of 
 Althaea, here, as her thoughts turn from 
 the vision of the expiring brand to the 
 picture of her son dying out of her sight. 
 
 ' Yet, O child. 
 Son, first-born, fairest — O sweet mouth, sweet eyes. 
 That drew my life out through my suckling breast. 
 That shone and clove my heart through — O soft knees 
 Clinging, O tender treadings of soft feet, 
 Cheeks warm with little kissings — O child, child. 
 What have we made each other ? Lo, I felt 
 Thy weight cleave to me, a burden of beauty, O son. 
 Thy cradled brows and loveliest loving lips. 
 The floral hair, the little lightening eyes, 
 And all thy goodly glory ; with mine hands 
 Delicately I fed thee, with my tongue 
 Tenderly spake, saying. Verily, in God's time. 
 For all the little likeness of thy limbs. 
 Son, I shall make thee a kingly man to fight, 
 A lordly leader ; and hear before I die, 
 " She bore the goodliest sword of all the world." ' 
 
 The return of the hunters, ' the feast turned 
 
 * ' Tennyson and Musset,' in Miscellanies. 
 
22 Swinburne 
 
 funeral ' is set to a grave lyrical music, like 
 a funeral march, as noble as Beethoven. 
 
 ' Let your hands meet 
 
 Round the weight of my head ; 
 Lift ye my feet 
 
 As the feet of the dead ; 
 For the flesh of my body is molten, the limbs of it molten 
 as lead.' 
 
 Henceforward to the end the drama is 
 solemn and pure pathos. The long and 
 stately farewell speech of Meleager — less 
 passionate and agonised than that of 
 Othello, but similar in its recollection of 
 past triumphs — is but spoilt by quotation, 
 and yet I cannot leave the play without 
 a transcription of a few lines, the last 
 words of the dying man to Atalanta. 
 
 ' But thou, dear, touch me with thy rose-like hands. 
 And fasten up mine eyeUds with thy mouth, 
 A bitter kiss ; and grasp me with thine arms. 
 Printing with heavy lips my light waste flesh. 
 Made light and thin by heavy-handed fate ; 
 And with thy holy maiden eyes drop dew, 
 Drop tears for dew upon me who am dead. 
 Me who have loved thee ; seeing without sin done 
 I am gone down to the empty weary house 
 
Atalanta in Calydon 23 
 
 Where no flesh is, nor beauty nor swift eyes. 
 Nor sound jof mouth nor might of hands and feet. 
 
 And now for God's sake kiss me once and twice 
 And let me go ; for the night gathers me, 
 And in the night shall no man gather fruit.' 
 
 To pour out upon the shrine of this tragedy 
 an hyperbole of praise would be but waste 
 labour. The ' very flower and crown ' of 
 the work of a great poet stands above 
 the need of praise ; and I doubt whether 
 any critic will ever dispute the supremacy 
 of Atalanta over the rest of the poems of 
 this poet, for nobility, for pathos, for com- 
 mand of language, for beauty, for all that 
 goes to the making of poetry. The de- 
 velopment of lyrical metre in the later 
 works perhaps gives to the restrained use 
 of metre in these choruses a sense of 
 immaturity — a sense wholly fictitious, be 
 it said — which otherwise they would not 
 have possessed. Yet perhaps one would 
 give all the choruses of Erectheus for 
 these. The nobility, the solemn beauty 
 of the blank verse have never been sur- 
 passed by its author. The indescribable 
 
24 Swinburne 
 
 flavour or savour which tells one at once 
 whether a piece of writing is of the highest 
 kind or not is present in Atalanta as it 
 is absent from much of his later work. 
 Such a poem as Atalanta is an admirable 
 example of the trite saying that a poet is 
 born, not made. It was published by its 
 author at the age of twenty-eight ; but 
 twenty or thirty years of study and practice 
 of literature since then have not given to 
 the poet a surer hand, a sweeter note or 
 a swifter imagination. It is a piece of 
 inspiration, above and beyond the world 
 of mere literary craftmanship. The last 
 eighteen pages are as musical as Shelley, 
 as noble as Sophocles, as pathetic as 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 Though later published, the dramatic 
 
 Chastdard, poem of Chastelard is generally 
 
 ^^^ understood to be an earlier written 
 
 work than that of Atalanta, but to have 
 
 been subjected to a subsequent revision. 
 
 This, the first of the three plays which 
 
Chastelard 2 5 
 
 Swinburne has devoted to Mary Stuart, 
 is little more than an episode in the career 
 of that exceptional woman. If the tem- 
 pestuous nature of the greater part of 
 Swinburne's work maj' ever have tempted 
 any unwise critic to regard the poet as a 
 creature of spasmodic influences, the con- 
 tinuity of purpose manifested in these three 
 plays, published over a period of sixteen 
 years, is a definite answer to so foolish a 
 complaint. To any poet not endowed with 
 a vast capacity for research, assimilation of 
 matter and patient labour, the writing of 
 such three plays as Chastelard, Both-well, 
 and Mary Stuart would have been an 
 impossibility. Even the ' gentle Shake- 
 speare' one can hardly imagine capable of 
 the long and heavy labour necessary for the 
 writing of the enormous volume of Bothwell, 
 which, nevertheless, has been endured by a 
 poet of a very much less equable tempera- 
 ment. The notes in prose which Swinburne 
 has appended to his plays in later volumes of 
 criticism,* are obvious evidence of his prac- 
 
 * Vide Miscellanies. 
 
26 Swinburne 
 
 tical devotion to the earthlier or more prosaic 
 details of his poems. It is clear from these 
 that even if such a historian as Mr Lecky 
 hsLS no conception of what poetry should be, 
 at all events in such a poet as Swinburne 
 there was lost a very brilliant and practical 
 historian. 
 
 In CJmstelard there is a foretaste of the 
 even more ' violent delights ' of the first 
 series of Poems and Ballads. Here, for 
 the first time, we hear that acknowledg- 
 ment of love as a blind, venomous, senseless 
 and overmastering insanity, which is the 
 /(SzV-wz<7/z/ of Swinburne's love poems. With 
 Swinburne, love is barely a human passion. 
 With Catullus, to whom he comes nearest — 
 if we exclude Sappho, known alas ! but in 
 fragments — love is human enough ; the de- 
 sire of body for body, the lust of exclusive 
 possession, the rut of a strong animal, 
 softened and tempered with laughter and 
 tenderness. With other poets, love tends 
 much farther towards sentiment, the more 
 usual emotions. But the desire of Swin- 
 burne's lovers is almost a disembodied flame, 
 
Chaste lard 27 
 
 a thing which the possession of neither soul 
 nor body could satisfy. In the greater part 
 of his work there is less human emotion than 
 there is in many a little poem of Browning's. 
 Such keener pity as the romance of Chastel- 
 ard might beget in us if touched by a 
 tenderer hand, Swinburne throws aside. A 
 curious note in this tragedy — the force of 
 which appears in the letter play of Mary 
 Stuart — is that, while its readers are left 
 unmoved by the death of the principal actor 
 in it, so far as he himself is concerned, their 
 pity is called on by the suffering of a minor 
 character. We sympathise not with Chastel- 
 ard — who asks for no sympathy — but with 
 Mary Beaton. The strength of Chastelard, 
 devoured as he is by a love which he 
 knows to be insane and yet cannot 
 escape from, is wholly admirable. Chastel- 
 ard, moreover, is an epicure of emotion — 
 an artist in sensation. He cultivates his 
 insanity, knowing it to be for him the only 
 thing worth life and death. It is with 
 contempt only that he thinks of Darnley, 
 who, he says, — 
 
28 Swinburne 
 
 ' Shall have 
 This fare for common days'-bread, which to me 
 Should be a touch kept always on my sense 
 To make hell soft, yea, the keen pain of hell 
 Soft as the loosening of wound arms in sleep.' 
 
 Again, in his last scene with Mary, he 
 
 says, — 
 
 ' I am right glad 
 That I must never feel a bitterer thing 
 Than your soft curled-up shoulder and amorous arras 
 From this time forth ; nothing can hap to me 
 Less good than this for all my whole life through. 
 I would not have some new pain after this 
 Come spoil the savour.' 
 
 Like the lover of Lesbia, Chastelard is not 
 blind to the faults of his mistress. ' Did I 
 not know you to the bone, my sweet?' he 
 cries, in the last scene with his mistress in 
 which after having sent him his reprieve she 
 comes to reclaim it. To Mary Beaton at an 
 earlier date he has said, — 
 
 ' I know her ways of loving, all of them : 
 A sweet soft way the first is ; afterward 
 It burns and bites like fire ; the end of that, 
 Charred dust and eyelids bitten through with smoke.' 
 
 Yet even his devotion to that 'sweet 
 
Chaste lard 29 
 
 serpent' of France and Scotland has one 
 moment of bitterness, when, after ' the most 
 sweet talk men ever heard of,' Mary an- 
 nounces to the lords who break in upon the 
 enchanted hour her intended marriage to 
 Darnley. 
 
 ' I was just thinking how such things were made 
 And were so fair as this is.' 
 
 Historical comment upon these three plays 
 must be left reluctantly to those who possess 
 a wider knowledge of the subject or have 
 leisure to acquire it. But it is clear that in 
 this play of Chastelard, Swinburne has built 
 up from the most meagre of hints an edifice 
 of imagination as imposing — relatively — ^as 
 those raised by Shakespeare on the sketchy 
 foundation of Italian novelettes. The only 
 two ' conscious violations of historical chron- 
 ology ' are confessed by the writer himself in 
 his ' Note on the Character of Mary Queen of 
 Scots ' : one only is of a little importance in 
 a poetic view of the play, the other of none. 
 
 The play is essentially the work of a 
 young man. Writing in late years, its 
 author speaks somewhat contemptuously of 
 
30 Swinburne 
 
 ' the suicidal young monomaniac ' upon 
 whom he had lavished so much care and 
 sympathy in the past. The prodigality and 
 quality of the emotion poured out upon such 
 a theme as that of Chastelard by a young 
 poet are essentially alien to the increased 
 calm of years. The theme of hopeless love 
 was then the keynote of the utterances of 
 the author of Poems and Ballads. But the 
 restraint of himself, the even greater care 
 expended upon the character of Mary than 
 on that of the lover of whom she was tired, 
 are remarkable. 
 
 Her cautious diplomacy in the attempt to 
 rid herself of her lover, her sudden jealousy 
 for the moment dispelling her weariness or 
 her prudence, her anxiety lest he might not 
 be killed before he could tarnish her reputa- 
 tion — such as it was ! — the constant changes 
 of her mood between this anxiety and her 
 passing emotional regrets, and finally her 
 utter faithlessness and callousness ; all these 
 phases in the temperament of the vicious 
 and fascinating woman are admirably de- 
 lineated by a dramatist perfectly conscious 
 
Chastelard 3 1 
 
 of his aim. With the portrayal of the char- 
 acter of Chastelard the dramatist had a 
 somewhat simpler task. The soldier-poet 
 is, however, an admirable creation. His 
 determination to die by the command of 
 his mistress, 'in royal purple fashion,' his 
 gentleness to her in spite of his knowledge 
 of her vicious selfishness, his loyalty to her 
 fame — these characteristics render him an 
 actor worthy of admiration and sympathy ; 
 while the beauty of the words placed in his 
 mouth are apt as coming from the mouth of 
 a poet. For choice of quotation the beauty 
 of his soliloquy at the beginning of the 
 prison scene is preferable. 
 
 ' So here my time shuts up ; and the last light 
 Has made the last shade in the world for me. 
 The sunbeam that was narrow like a leaf 
 Has turned a hand and the hand stretched to an arm, 
 And the arm has reached the dust on the floor, and 
 
 made 
 A maze of motes with paddling fingers. Well, 
 I knew not that a man so sure to die 
 Could care so little ; a bride-night's lustiness 
 Leaps in my veins as light fire under a wind. 
 
 Ah, in my weary dusty space of sight 
 
 Her face will float with heavy scents of hair 
 
3 2 Swinburne 
 
 And fire of subtle, amorous eyes, and lips 
 More hot than wine, full of sweet wicked words 
 Babbled against mine own lips, and long hands 
 Spread out and pale bright throat and pale bright 
 
 breasts. 
 Fit to make all men mad. I do believe 
 This fire shall never quite burn out to the ash 
 And leave no heat and flame upon my dust 
 For witness where a man's heart was burned up. 
 For all Christ's work this Venus is not quelled, 
 But reddens at the mouth with blood of men. 
 Sucking between small teeth the sap o' the veins. 
 Dabbling with death her little tender hps — 
 A bitter beauty, poisonous pearled mouth. 
 I am not fit to live but for love's sake. 
 So I were best die shortly. Ah, fair love, 
 Fair fearful Venus made of deadly foam, 
 I shall escape you somehow with my death — 
 Your splendid supple body and mouth on fire 
 And Paphian breath that bites the lips with heat . . .' 
 
 The passionate beauty of the whole scene 
 when the queen comes to reclaim the re- 
 prieve she has sent, and which he has 
 already destroyed, is superb. What love has 
 ever gone much farther than that implied in 
 these words he addresses to her, words that 
 are also the bitterest of indictments ? — 
 
 ' Why should one woman have aU goodly things ? 
 You have all beauty ; let mean women's lips 
 
Chastelard 2)'^ 
 
 Be pitiful and speak truth : they will not be 
 Such perfect things as yours. Be not ashamed 
 That hands not made like these that snare men's souls 
 Should do men good, give alms, relieve men's pain ; 
 You have the better, being more fair than they, 
 They are half foul, being rather good than fair ; 
 You are quite fair ; to be quite fair is best.' 
 
 But if any further proof were needed of 
 the dramatic genius of the author of this 
 play, it is supplied a little further on by a 
 few lines of which only a poet of the highest 
 and finest imagination could be capable. 
 They make the most tragic point in the 
 whole tragedy, and I remember nothing 
 quite like them in dramatic literature for 
 horror of premonition, for irony, for the 
 suggestion of tragedy deeper than the actual 
 one on the stage. The queen has said . — 
 
 ' I am sure 
 I shall die somehow sadly.' 
 
 He replies : — 
 
 ' . . . You, die like me ? 
 Stretch your throat out that I may kiss all round 
 Where mine shall be cut through : suppose my mouth 
 The axe-edge to bite so sweet a throat in twain 
 With bitter iron, should not it turn soft 
 As lip is soft to lip ? ' 
 
 C 
 
34 Swinburne 
 
 The final touch of tragic suggestion, after 
 the execution of Chastelard witnessed from 
 a window in Holyrood by Mary Carmichael 
 and Mary Beaton, is supplied by the last 
 two lines of the play. The infamy of Mary 
 Stuart is suggested by the words of Mary 
 Carmichael describing the scene to Mary 
 Beaton, who sits away from the window. 
 
 ' She bends and laughs a little, graciously, 
 And turns half, talking to I know not whom — 
 A big man with great shoulders ; ah, the face, 
 You get his face now — wide and duskish, yea. 
 The youth burned out of it. A goodly man, 
 Thewed mightily and sunburned to the bone.' 
 
 Then after the execution is over, the two 
 women are disturbed by an usher. 
 
 ' Make way there for the Lord of Bothwell, room — 
 Place for my Lord of Bothwell next the queen.' 
 
 And this is the end of Chastelard. 
 
 It is a common mistake of later critics 
 to underrate the value of this play. That 
 it is extremely beautiful and admirably con- 
 structed goes for nothing in the eyes of 
 such a one as he whose sketch of the poet's 
 
Chaste lard 35 
 
 work lies before me now. ' Deservedly 
 less successful ' than Atalanta is his sole 
 criticism of Chastelard. The two plays 
 cannot in strictness be compared with 
 each other. The dramatic treatment of 
 each is as different as the subject The 
 poet of Atalanta had a subject which 
 allowed him a freer scope for the display of 
 metrical power than the poet of Chastelard. 
 The brilliant notation of Mary's successive 
 changes of intention or mood is more ela- 
 borate even than Shakespeare's rendering 
 of the fleeting moods of Cleopatra. It is 
 an admirable play and a beautiful poem, and 
 as such it could have been written by no 
 man who had not at once dramatic and 
 poetic genius; as to what it is itself, it 
 could not have been written by any man but 
 Swinburne. In my own view, the place of 
 Chastelard is among the finest, not among 
 the least fine, of the poet's works. 
 
36 Swinburne 
 
 For the majority of readers of poetry 
 
 the name and fame of Swinburne are in- 
 
 . separably and eternally connected 
 
 Poems and ^ ' , . , 
 
 Ballads, with the first volume of lyrical 
 "^^see"^' poems published by him. It is 
 possible, though it is not — thank 
 Heaven ! — probable, that such a play as 
 Chastelard might have been forgotten, 
 such a poem as Atalanta lost sight of, in 
 the whirl of past and new books, if their 
 author had not been permitted to supple- 
 ment them. But it was with the publica- 
 tion of the first series of Poems and 
 Ballads that he made himself an eternal 
 place in the literature of the world. There 
 was no question thenceforward possible as 
 to the quality of the poet's capacity. Such 
 a volume was absolutely unparalleled in 
 the world's history, for originality and 
 variety of metre, for fulness of utterance, 
 for music, for volubility of erotic passion. 
 It is a volume which, of course, must shine 
 with a more brilliant light upon the years 
 of youth than in the days when the hey- 
 day in the blood of the imagination is tame 
 
Poems and Ballads 2>7 
 
 and humble. I can compare the effect of 
 the first reading of this volume upon myself, 
 a dozen years ago, to nothing but the re- 
 velation of a new world. 
 
 ' Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims into his ken.' 
 
 The effect of the miraculous novelty and 
 diversity of the metres, the astounding feats 
 of rhythm and rhyme upon a boy for the 
 first time struggling to express himself in 
 verse, the vehement and absolute expres- 
 sion of emotions and sensations half felt and 
 wholly thirsted after, has had no parallel in 
 my recollections of books or things. 
 
 But when the first charm of these poems 
 has vanished, when the delighted shock of 
 that earliest rapture has passed away, when 
 one's heart no longer aches with the mag- 
 nificent sorrow of the poem named The 
 Triumph of Time, or maddens to the 
 sanguine rhythms of Dolores, there is much 
 that remains for a perennial delight. And 
 yet it is a volume which could only be 
 applauded worthily by a writer not much 
 
38 Swinburne 
 
 over twenty, since it is to the very young 
 that it appeals most. After twenty, one 
 has other things to think of than — 
 
 ' The laurel, the palms and the pagan, the breast of the 
 
 nymphs in the brake ; 
 Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer 
 
 breath ; 
 And all the wings of the loves, and all the joy before 
 
 death.' 
 
 One has fallen from that high state of 
 Hedonism; 'the world is too much with 
 us ' ; and our enjoyment of the poems — 
 which must be known by heart for full 
 appreciation — is often an enjoyment of the 
 memory of an earlier delight. But what 
 an amazing book it is ! The volcanic 
 exuberance of its metres and rhymes is 
 not more astounding than its sustained 
 ebullience of amorous imao-ination, its 
 metrical music and beautiful verbiage 
 than its frenzied erotomania. 
 
 The book, indeed, is a product of artistic 
 mania rather than of human impulse. The 
 most violent of its poems are, as it were, 
 the visions of an opium eater, the dreams 
 
Poems and Ballads 39 
 
 of an exasperated imagination. They are 
 ' of imagination all compact ' ; spiritual rather 
 than fleshly. Their passion is for nothing 
 realisable or tangible: their loves are the 
 loves of a Faust in his study brooding over 
 fancied deliria of beauty and lust and blood. 
 Even the satiety of which some of the 
 poems speak has nothing human about it. 
 The poet has aimed not at the expression 
 of ordinary emotions, but; at the expression 
 of superhuman frenzy, inexhaustible suffer- 
 ing and delight. 
 
 The volume opens with two ballads in 
 the Italian manner, which Rossetti made 
 more familiar by his later-published transla- 
 tions. The following poem, entitled Laus 
 Veneris, is a monologue placed in the 
 mouth of Tannhauser after his return to 
 the Horselberg from his unsuccessful 
 pilgrimage. It is at this point, where 
 the story is usually made to end, that, in 
 Swinburne's eyes, the tragedy begins. In 
 Wagner's music-poem, Tannhauser dies on 
 his return from Rome : a deviation from 
 the legend. In this poem the tragedy lies 
 
40 Swinburne 
 
 in the return of the man who beHeves in 
 Christ to the diabohc goddess, ' that thing 
 transformed that was the Cytherean,' in 
 his craving for Christ and damnation to 
 Venus. The chief triumph of the poem is 
 its splendid conquest of the simple, un- 
 ideaed medieval spirit. It might have been 
 written by a superstitious monk, firmly con- 
 vinced that an evil goddess lurked in the 
 hollow mountain. 
 
 ' Inside the Horsel here the air is hot ; 
 Right little peace one bath for it, God wot ; 
 The scenty, dusted daylight burns the air. 
 And my heart chokes me till I hear it not.' 
 
 The symbolism of Wagner is absent here. 
 Venus is no abstraction, but an incarna- 
 tion. Tannhauser speaks thus : — 
 
 ' So that one dawn I rode forth sorrowing ; 
 I had no hope but of some evil thing, 
 
 And so rode slowly past the windy wheat. 
 And past the vineyard and the water-spring. 
 
 Up to the Horsel. A great elder-tree 
 Held back its heaps of flowers to let me see 
 
 The ripe tall grass, and one that walked tlierein 
 Naked, with hair shed over to the knee.' 
 
 The idea of the multitudinous devilries 
 
Poems and Ballads 41 
 
 and evil delights of the subterranean palace 
 which fills the ' Venusberg Music ' is absent 
 in this simpler conception. The weariness 
 of Tannhauser is of the hot air, the scent 
 and shadow, the insatiable lips ' curled like 
 a tiger's that curl back to feed,' the cling- 
 ing body ; and he longs for the place 
 where — 
 
 ' Blue ripples blow, 
 
 The blue curled eddies of the blowing Rhine, 
 I felt the sharp wind shaking grass and vine 
 
 Touch my blood too, and sting me with delight 
 Through all this waste and weary body of mine 
 
 That never feels clear air . . .' 
 
 He craves for a respite from over-much 
 pleasure, the beds that are ' full of perfume 
 and sad sound,' the halls that 'drip with 
 flower-like red.' 
 
 ' Ah, yet would God this flesh of mine might be 
 Where air might wash and long leaves cover me, 
 
 Where tides of grass break into foam of flowers. 
 Or where the wind's feet shine along the sea.' 
 
 The archaic style of the Laus Veneris is 
 probably due to the influence of William 
 Morris. The manner of the beautiful poem 
 
42 Swinburne 
 
 called The Triumph of Time seems to me 
 somewhat after the fashion of Browning, but 
 the writer himself, it is understood, attributes 
 its sentiment to Byron. This is, I think, 
 unjust to himself. One may despair and 
 suffer remorse without necessarily donning 
 the mantle of Childe Harold. However that 
 may be, the poem is even farther beyond the 
 capacity of Byron than of Browning. In it 
 the writer has indeed given voice, though he 
 declares it to be impossible, to — 
 
 ' The word that a man might say 
 Whose whole life's love goes down in a day.' 
 
 The poem opens with a hint of a despair 
 which is too great for utterance, but the 
 regret for all that is lost breaks soon into 
 words. 
 ' In the change of years, in the coil of things, 
 In the clamour and rumour of life to be, 
 We drinking love at the furthest springs, 
 
 Covered with love as a covering tree, 
 We had grown as gods, as the gods above, 
 Filled from the heart to the lips with love, 
 Held fast in his hands, clothed warm with his wings, 
 O love, my love, had you loved but me ! ' 
 
 The aching eyes fall on the low downs 
 
Poems and Ballads 43 
 
 leaning to the sea, where ' the strong sea- 
 daisies feast on the sun,' and in the sea the 
 speaker finds the images of his regret, in the 
 waifs washed up and left by the ebb-tide, 
 
 ' Weed from the water, grass from a grave, 
 A broken blossom, a ruined rhyme.' 
 
 Then the bitterness of thwarted possession 
 finds voice. 
 
 ' I TOsh we were dead together to-day. 
 Lost sight of, hidden away out of sight. 
 
 Clasped and clothed in the cloven clay. 
 Out of the world's way, out of the light. 
 
 Out of the ages of worldly weather. 
 
 Forgotten of all men altogether. 
 
 As to the world's first dead, taken wholly away. 
 Made one with death, filled full of the night.' 
 
 The thought of suicide, 
 
 ' I will go down to the great sweet mother. 
 Mother and lover of men, the sea,' 
 
 turns to the knowledge of the evanescence of 
 grief, and after the narration of the episode 
 of that singer ' who lived in France of old ' 
 and died as his mistress laid her lips to his — 
 ' O brother, the gods were good to you,' he 
 cries — the poem ends with the intention of 
 
44 Swinburne 
 
 resignation to life, with a closing thought of 
 eternal separation. 
 
 ' I shall never tell you on earth ; and in heaven, 
 If I cry to you then, will you hear or know ? ' 
 
 The frag-ment in imitation of a Greek 
 play dealing with the love of Phaedra for 
 Hippolytus, the poems labelled Les Noyades, 
 A Leave-Taking and Satia Te Sanguine, are 
 written on the same subject of a hopeless 
 love. The lyric of Itylus is one of the 
 poet's most perfect poems. 
 
 ' Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow, 
 
 How can thine heart be full of the spring ? 
 A thousand summers are over and dead. 
 What hast thou found in the spring to follow ? 
 What hast thou found in thy heart to sing ? 
 What wilt thou do when the summer is shed ? ' 
 
 The verses entitled Anactoria grew out 
 of an attempt to render into English the 
 words of Sappho, but the task proving in- 
 superable, the poet set himself the more 
 profitable labour of writing a poem which 
 should include the spirit of Sappho and here 
 and there her actual words. It is, of course, 
 known to most readers that one of the two 
 
Poems and Ballads 45 
 
 of Sappho's poems which have come down 
 
 to us complete is generally styled — though 
 
 not so named by the poetess herself — the 
 
 Ode to Anactoria. The strange, insatiable 
 
 cruelty of love expressed in Swinburne's 
 
 poem is, however, due to Swinburne rather 
 
 than to the Lesbian singer. The poem is 
 
 to me a little hard and cold, though as a 
 
 matter of verse-writing it ranks among the 
 
 poet's finest pieces. The triumph in the 
 
 knowledge of her immortality, placed in the 
 
 mouth of Sappho, lifts the conclusion of the 
 
 poem above the sensual savagery of its 
 
 beginning. 
 
 ' Yea, thou shall be forgotten like spilt wine. 
 Except these kisses of my lips on thine 
 Brand them with immortality ; but me . . . 
 ... 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 wave's 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 forever.' 
 
46 Swinburne 
 
 The Hymn to Proserpine, * after the pro- 
 clamation in Rome of the Christian Faith,' 
 placed in the mouth of a regretful pagan, is 
 one of the most widely known of Swinburne's 
 poems, as much for its religious antipathies 
 as its music. One of its most famous 
 passages is the comparison between the 
 mother of the Galilean and the mother of 
 Eros. 
 
 ' For thine came pale and a maiden and sister to 
 
 sorrow ; but ours, 
 Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of 
 
 flowers . . . 
 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 another : — 
 
 ' Will ye bridle the deep sea with chains, will ye chasten 
 
 the high sea with rods ? 
 Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older 
 
 than all ye gods ? 
 All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and 
 
 be past ; 
 Ye are gods and behold, ye shall die and the waves 
 
 be upon you at last. 
 
Poems and Ballads 47 
 
 In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in 
 
 the changes of things, 
 Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps and the world 
 
 shall forget you for kings.' 
 
 Pagan again is the contemplation of death 
 in the poem called Ilicet. 
 
 ' There is an end of joy and sorrow ; 
 Peace all day long, all night, all morrow. 
 
 But never a time to laugh or weep. 
 The end is come of pleasant places, 
 The end of tender words and faces. 
 
 The end of all, the poppied sleep . . . 
 
 A little sorrow, a little pleasure 
 
 Fate metes us from the dusty measure 
 
 That holds the date of aU of us ; 
 We are born with travail and strong crying. 
 And from the birth-day to the dying 
 
 The likeness of our life is thus.' 
 
 There is, it need scarcely be said, no 
 touch of impure thought in the four perfect 
 sonnets to the statue in the Louvre of the 
 Hermaphroditus, the delicate Greek concep- 
 tion of the sexless being of two sexes. 
 
 ' Love stands upon thy left hand and thy right. 
 Yet by no sunset and by no moonrise 
 Shall make thee man and ease a woman's sighs 
 Or make thee woman for a man's delight' 
 
48 Swinburne 
 
 I have no time here to touch upon many 
 a little poem exhibiting some curious feature 
 of thought or invention of metre and rhyme. 
 
 The Faustine is a singular tour de force, 
 each of its forty-one stanzas containing a 
 rhyme to Faustine. 
 
 ' You could do all things but be good 
 
 Or chaste of mien ; 
 And that you would not if you could, 
 We know, Faustine.' 
 
 The origin of this poem has been told us 
 by the writer in his ' Notes on Poems and 
 Reviews' — the sudden sight of a face in a 
 crowd which recalled the image of the 
 Roman Faustina. The Leper is a strange 
 and terrible little poem, born from an old 
 French story. For the famous poem 
 Dolores, apart from its astonishing metrical 
 achievement, I have no great love. The 
 rush and the rhythm of it are, of course, 
 superb, but there is little depth below its 
 troubled surface. The metrical ingenuity of 
 it is beyond all praise and conception. It 
 can perhaps be best appreciated by placing 
 beside it a verse of Byron's in the same 
 
Poems and Ballads 49 
 
 measure, which may be, however, con- 
 demned to small type in a footnote.* 
 
 It was such intolerable doggerel as this 
 which Swinburne found to his hand, and 
 he turned it into such verse as follows. 
 The picture is of the Roman gladiatorial 
 circus. 
 
 ' On sands by the storm never shaken 
 Nor wet from the washing of tides ; 
 Nor by foam of the waves overtaken 
 
 Nor winds that the thunder bestrides ; 
 But red from the print of thy paces, 
 
 Made smooth for the world and its lords, 
 Ringed round with a flame of fair faces 
 And splendid with swords. . . . 
 
 When with flame all around him aspirant. 
 
 Stood flushed, as a harp-player stands. 
 The implacable, beautiful tyrant, 
 
 Rose-crowned, having death in his hands ; 
 And a sound as the sound of loud water 
 
 Smote far through the flight of the fires. 
 And mixed with the lightning of slaughter 
 
 A thunder of lyres.' 
 
 * ' Though the day of my destiny's over, 
 
 And the star of my fate hath declined. 
 Thy soft heart refused to discover 
 
 The faults which so many could find ; 
 Though thy soul with my grief was acquainted, 
 
 It shrunk not to share it with me. 
 And the love which my spirit hath painted 
 It never hath found but in thee.' 
 D 
 
50 Swinburne 
 
 The meaning and images of the poem 
 are somewhat unusual to English ears, and 
 certain of its phrases no doubt went far 
 towards raising the storm which followed 
 the publication of the book. Among the 
 best known is the antithesis of the 'lilies 
 and languors of virtue ' and the ' raptures 
 and roses of vice,' an antithesis full no 
 doubt of juvenile enthusiasm, but not a 
 principle to be taken very seriously. 
 
 The riot of Dolores is followed by the 
 peace of The Garden of Proserpine and 
 the dactylic verses of Hesperia, which pos- 
 sess a gracious charm for remembrance, 
 the quiet divinity of a sunset. 
 
 ' Out of the golden, remote wild west where the sea 
 without shore is, 
 Full of the sunset, and sad, if at all, with the fulness 
 of joy, 
 As a wind sets in with the autumn that blows from the 
 region of stories. 
 Blows with a perfume of songs and of memories be- 
 loved from a boy. 
 
 From the bountiful, infinite west, from the happy 
 memorial places 
 Full of the stately repose and the lordly delight of the 
 dead 
 
Poems and Ballads 5 1 
 
 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.' 
 
 The quieter tones of the book are not 
 among its least acceptable utterances. Of 
 such are the quiet, regretful lines In 
 Memory of Walter Savage Landor, or the 
 cool fragrance of Tke Sundew, the little 
 marsh-plant of the northern moors. 
 
 ' The deep scent of the heather burns 
 About it ; breathless though it be, 
 Bow down and worship ; more than we 
 Is the least flower whose life returns, 
 Least weed renascent in the sea.' 
 
 The longer poem called Fdlise is per- 
 fectly delightful with its light, half- regretful 
 mirth, its touches of natural beauty. It 
 narrates simply the parting of two lovers, 
 the one a little tired and careless, the other 
 a little regretful. 
 
 Mais oil sont les neiges d'antan? The 
 poem bears as its mocking motto the refrain 
 of Villon's ballade. 
 
52 Swinburne 
 
 ' What shall be said between us here 
 Among the downs, between the trees, 
 In fields that knew our feet last year, 
 In sight of quiet lands and seas, 
 This year, Felise ? 
 
 Here as last year the fields begin 
 A fire of flowers and glowing grass ; 
 
 The old fields we laughed and hngered in, 
 Seeing each our souls in last year's glass, 
 Fdlise, alas !' 
 
 But last year's leaves and flowers are 
 where the snows are. 
 
 ' I had died for this last year, to know 
 
 You loved me. Who shall turn on fate ? 
 I care not if love come or go 
 Now, though your love seek mine for mate. 
 It is too late.' 
 
 Laughter and mockery, and yet a little 
 regret; weariness, and yet a little longing, 
 are all blended here, chasing each other 
 like butterflies until the very last. 
 
 ' Live and let live, as I will do. 
 
 Love and let love, and so will I. 
 But, sweet, for me no more with you : 
 Not while I live, not though I die. 
 Good-night, good-bye.' 
 
Poems and Ballads 53 
 
 The bright and joyous little poem which 
 follows, An Interlude, has the freshness of 
 boyhood captured only once before in the 
 Hero and Leander of Marlowe, while the 
 rhymed stories of St Dorothy and The Two 
 Dreams match in beauty the narrative 
 poems of Keats. 
 
 In the dedicatory verses to Burne-Jones, 
 the poet has gone back again to the metre 
 of Dolores, investing it with a fresh charm, 
 and while bidding farewell almost regret- 
 fully to his own book, with its ' daughters 
 of dreams and of stories,' he has summed 
 up in two lines the most characteristic 
 qualities of himself and the great painter. 
 
 ' In a land of clear colours and stories. 
 
 In a region of shadowless hours, 
 Where earth has a garment of glories 
 
 And a murmur of musical flowers ; 
 In woods where the spring half uncovers 
 
 The flush of her amorous face. 
 By the waters that listen for lovers, 
 
 For these is there place ? 
 
 Though the world of your hands be more gracious 
 
 And lovelier in lordship of things 
 Clothed round by sweet art with the spacious 
 
 Warm heaven of her imminent wings, 
 
54 Swinburne 
 
 Let them enter unfledged and nigh fainting 
 For the love of old loves and lost times ; 
 
 And receive in your palace of painting 
 This revel of rhymes.' 
 
 The phrase is perfect. 
 
 Of the Poems and Ballads one feels at 
 twenty only the fervour of emotion, the 
 unsurpassed achievement of metrical in- 
 genuity. A few years later, however, one 
 finds in it a certain want of actual human 
 interest. It is for this reason that the 
 book should be written of by a critic not 
 long out of his teens if it is to receive the 
 criticism of the emotional admiration it 
 begets in us in earlier years. The poet 
 has played many tunes on the theme of 
 sexual emotion save those of the more 
 usual sentiment of love of which Amestris 
 and Aholibah know nothing. The tunes 
 after a time lose some of their charm, but 
 the manner of the playing remains mar- 
 vellous to the end. No poet has ever 
 possessed such a command over lyrical 
 metres, such a power over words, as that 
 shown by Swinburne in his first volume 
 
Songs before Sunrise 55 
 
 of lyrical poems. The rapture of writing, 
 the delight of involved rhyme and metre, 
 the joy of verbal music, are visible in no 
 other book so clearly as in this. As it is 
 the most startling and strange of its author's 
 many volumes, so it will probably be to 
 the end of time the best known. 
 
 The contrast between the first series of 
 „ . , Poems and Ballads and the volume 
 
 Songs before 
 Sunrise, which followed it in order of publi- 
 1871 
 
 cation is peculiarly sharp. The 
 
 sudden transition from the hothouse atmo- 
 sphere of erotic emotions to the keen air of 
 the mountain-peaks and wild waste places of 
 the Songs before Sunrise is something more 
 than surprising. The Songs before Sunrise 
 are mystic, prophetic, ascetic, spiritual, even 
 at times arid. The same passion of soul 
 breathes through each book, but the object 
 of the passion is changed. It is no longer 
 the desire for the tangible or intangible 
 bodies of women, but the spiritual if no less 
 stormy desire for all that is denoted by the 
 word Freedom. 
 
56 Swinburne 
 
 The purport of the book is twofold. On 
 the one hand it is an accompaniment to the 
 Italian revolution which inspired it : on the 
 other it is a more universal, less ephemeral, 
 celebration of the same spirit of Liberty 
 which drew the adoration of Shelley. It is 
 a mistake to consider literally the political 
 sentiments of the volume. The book is 
 essentially visionary and mystic. The 
 thought that the voice of Italy should at 
 any time 
 
 ' Awake from her tomb 
 England, and France from her prison, 
 Sisters, a star by a star ' 
 
 would from a practical point of view be just 
 cause for a month's laughter, while in the 
 light of later suns the 'strident, anti-Gallican 
 cackle ' of Tennyson — 
 
 ' God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,' 
 
 is more acceptable than Swinburne's blan- 
 dishments when the enthusiasm of his 
 early years instructs us in the sisterhood of 
 England and France. But the political or 
 international views of the volume call for 
 
Songs before Sunrise 57 
 
 wider criticism than this, and are not based 
 upon contemporary quarrels. 
 
 The volume is dedicated to Mazzini. Its 
 prelude is an attempt to reconcile whatever 
 discrepancy there may appear to be between 
 the book and its forerunner. 
 
 ' Between the green bud and the red 
 Youth sat and sang by time, and shed 
 
 From eyes and tresses flowers and tears. 
 
 From heart and spirit hopes and fears. 
 Upon the hollow stream whose bed 
 
 Is channelled by the foamless years ; 
 And with the white the gold-haired head 
 
 Mixed running locks and in Time's ears 
 Youth's dreams hung singing, and Time's truth 
 Was half not harsh in the ears of youth.' 
 
 And, learning wisdom, youth 
 
 ' Felt the winds round him shake and shower 
 The rose-red and the blood-red leaf. 
 Delight whose germ grew never grain 
 And passion dyed in its own pain.' 
 
 And the poet himself speaks thus : — 
 
 ' We too have tracked by star-proof trees 
 The tempest of the Thyiades 
 Scare the loud night on hills that hid 
 The blood-feasts of the Bassarid, 
 
58 Sivmburne 
 
 Heard their song's iron cadences 
 
 Fright the wolf hungering from the kid, 
 
 Outroar the lion-throated seas, 
 
 Outchide the north wind if it chid, 
 
 And hush the torrent-tongued ravines 
 
 With thunders of their tambourines.' 
 
 But the flutes and drums and tongues of 
 fire that 'called on Cotys by her name 
 Edonian ' are silent, and only the ' ageless 
 rhyme ' of the stars and the light of the soul 
 remain, undefeated by passions and pleasures, 
 undestroyed by time and change. 
 
 The Eve of Revolution, which follows the 
 prelude, is a tremendous poem in the spirit of 
 the Odes to Liberty and To Naples, but in 
 the language and allegorical manner of Isaiah 
 rather than of Shelley. I transcribe one 
 stanza out of twenty-seven. 
 
 ' Light, light and light ! to break and melt in sunder 
 All clouds and chains that in one bondage bind 
 Eyes, hands and spirits, forged by fear and wonder 
 
 And sleek, fierce fraud with hidden knife behind ; 
 There goes no fire from heaven before their thunder, 
 
 Nor are the links not malleable that wind 
 Round the snared limbs and souls that ache there- 
 under ; 
 The hands are mighty, were the head not blind. 
 
Songs before Sunrise 59 
 
 Priest is the staff of king 
 
 And chains and cloud one thing, 
 And fettered flesh with devastated mind. 
 
 Open thy soul to see, 
 
 Slave, and thy feet are free ; 
 Thy bonds and thy beliefs are one in kind, 
 
 And of thy fears thine irons wrought 
 Hang weights upon thee fashioned out of thine own 
 thought.' 
 
 There seem to be several classes into 
 
 which the poems of this volume may be 
 
 divided : the mystic, such as Hertha, 
 
 Genesis and The Hymn of Man; the 
 
 imaginative or pictorial, such as Mater 
 
 Triumphalis, The Pilgrims, the Eve of 
 
 Revolution; the actual, such as The Halt 
 
 before Rome, An Appeal and Siena. The 
 
 mystic poems are written round a species 
 
 of pantheistic philosophy akin to, even if 
 
 not founded on, the doctrine of Emerson. 
 
 The poem Hertha is a vague paraphrase 
 
 of the idea of the Oversoul. 
 
 ' I am that which began ; 
 Out of me the years roU, 
 Out of me God and man ; 
 I am equal and whole ; 
 God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily; 
 I am the soul.' 
 
6o Swinburne 
 
 The Hymn of Man, a further develop- 
 ment of the same idea, traces the course of 
 the world from 'the grey beginning of years' 
 to the outburst of life on the earth, 
 
 'Was it Love brake forth flower-fashion, a bird with 
 gold on his wings?' 
 
 and to the final panegyric of a future faith, 
 
 ' Glory to Man in the highest ! for Man is the master 
 of things.' 
 
 The verses To Walt Whitman in Am.erica ■' 
 have a sonorous rush of music unequalled in 
 their way among all the poems of Swinburne. 
 
 ' Send but a song oversea for us. 
 
 Heart of their hearts who are free. 
 Heart of their singer, to be for us 
 
 More than our singing can be ; 
 Ours, in the tempest at error, 
 With no light but the twilight of terror ; 
 
 Send us a song oversea ! 
 
 Sweet smelling of pine-leaves and grasses. 
 And blown as a tree through and through 
 
 With the winds of the keen mountain-passes. 
 And tender as sun-smitten dew ; 
 
 Sharp-tongued as the winter that shakes 
 
 The wastes of your limitless lakes. 
 Wide-eyed as the sea-line's blue. . . . 
 
Songs before Sunrise 6i 
 
 Out of the sea beyond sunset, 
 
 From the evening whence morning shall be, 
 With the rollers in measureless onset, 
 
 With the van of the storming sea, 
 With the world-wide wind, with the breath 
 That breaks ships driven upon death. 
 
 With the passion of all things free, 
 
 With the sea-steeds footless and frantic. 
 White myriads for death to bestride 
 
 In the charge of the ruining Atlantic, 
 Where deaths by regiments ride. 
 
 With clouds and clamours of waters. 
 
 With a long note shriller than slaughter's 
 On the furrowless fields world-wide. . . .' 
 
 The rhythmic rush and strength and 
 exaltation of the Mater Triumphalis are 
 almost equally fine. 
 
 ' Mother of man's time-travelling generations. 
 Breath of his nostrils, heartblood of his heart, 
 God above all gods worshipped of all nations. 
 Light above light, law beyond law, thou art. 
 
 Thou art the player whose organ-keys are thunders. 
 And I beneath thy foot the pedal prest ; 
 
 Thou art the ray whereat the rent night sunders. 
 And I the cloudlet borne upon thy breast. 
 
 I shall bum up before thee, pass and perish 
 As haze in sunrise on the red sea-line ; 
 
62 Swinburne 
 
 But thou from dawn to sunsetting shalt cherish 
 The thoughts that led and souls that lighted mine. 
 
 I am thy storm thrush of the days that darken, 
 Thy petrel in the foam that bears thy bark 
 
 To port through night and tempest ; if thou hearken. 
 My voice is in thy heaven before the lark. 
 
 My song is in the mist that hides thy morning. 
 
 My cry is up before the day for thee ; 
 I have heard thee and beheld thee and give warning 
 
 Before thy wheels divide the sky and sea, . . .' 
 
 Perhaps not even do the Poems and 
 Ballads exhibit the poet's tremendous com- 
 mand over metres and rhythms as fully as 
 the Songs before Sunrise. The writer's 
 acquaintance with the literature of the Old 
 Testament appears in each volume. In the 
 poem called Super Flumina Babylonis he 
 has written a species of chant for intonation 
 round the Biblical phrase with which it 
 commences. 
 
 ' By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept. 
 
 Remembering thee. 
 That for ages of agony hast endured and slept 
 And wouldst not see.' 
 
 Another Biblical phrase, ' Watchman, what 
 
Songs before Sunrise 63 
 
 of the night?' no doubt inspired the poem 
 called A Watch in the Night. One of the 
 best known poems in the book is The 
 Pilgrims, written as it were round some 
 allegorical picture of the way-worn followers 
 of the Light. 
 
 ' Who is your lady of love, O ye that pass 
 Singing ? and it is for sorrow of that which was 
 
 That ye sing gladly or dream of what shall be ? 
 
 For gladly at once and sadly it seems ye sing. 
 — Our lady of love by you is unbeholden ; 
 For hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor lips, nor golden 
 
 Treasure of hair, nor face nor form ; but we 
 
 That love, we know her more fair than anything.' 
 
 The poem Messidor with its refrain, 
 
 ' Put in the sickles and reap,' is inspired 
 
 with the spirit of the French Revolution, 
 
 the spirit of the uprising of the ' dumb, 
 
 dread people that sat as corpses cast in 
 
 a pit,' 
 
 ' The dumb dread people that sat 
 All night without screen for the night. 
 All day without food for the day.' 
 
 Tyranny and cruelty have never found 
 anything but an enemy in Swinburne and 
 
64 Swinburne 
 
 for the accompanying evil of poverty he 
 is not without sympathy. Thus in the 
 Litany of Nations he writes : — 
 
 ' By the sightless souls and fleshless limbs that labour 
 
 For not their fruit ; 
 By the foodless mouth with foodless heart for neighbour 
 
 That, mad, is mute ; 
 By the child that famine eats as worms the blossom 
 
 — Ah, God, the child ! 
 By the milkless lips that strain the bloodless bosom 
 
 Till woe runs wild. . . . ' 
 
 The Marching Song is an exultant and 
 hopeful rendering of the Pilgrims. 
 
 ' We mix from many lands. 
 We march from very far ; 
 In hearts and lips and hands 
 Our staffs and weapons are ; 
 The light we walk in darkens sun and moon and star . . . 
 
 With us the winds and fountains 
 
 And lightnings live in tune ; 
 The morning-coloured mountains 
 That burn into the noon. 
 The mist's mild veil on valleys muffled from the 
 moon. ..." 
 
 The very ardour of the fighting re- 
 
Songs before Sunrise 65 
 
 publican — is any left ? — throbs through the 
 Halt before Rome. 
 
 ' March to the tune of the voice of her, 
 Breathing the balm of her breath, 
 
 Loving the light of her skies. 
 
 Blessed is he on whose eyes 
 
 Dawns but her light as he dies ; 
 
 Blessed are ye that make choice of her. 
 Equal to life and to death. . . . 
 
 . . . Only her bosom to die on ; 
 
 Only her heart for a home. 
 And a name with her children to be 
 From Calabrian to Adrian Sea 
 Famous in cities made free 
 That ring to the roar of the lion 
 
 Proclaiming repubUcan Rome.' 
 
 There is a quieter and sweeter beauty 
 in the poem called Siena, the town 'set 
 in the sand's red sea,' with its memories 
 of St Catherine. 
 
 ' From the war-worn wastes without 
 In twilight, in the time of doubt, 
 One sound comes of one whisper, where 
 Moved with slow motions of slow air 
 The great trees nigh the castle swing 
 In the sad-coloured evening ; 
 E 
 
66 Swuiburne 
 
 ' Ricorditi di me, che son 
 
 La Pia " — that small sweet word alone 
 
 Is not yet gone.' 
 
 Many of the poems in this book after 
 the lapse of thirty years require a his- 
 torical commentary. A few require even 
 an explanation of their purport. 
 
 The volume considered as a whole is 
 perhaps somewhat cold, and probably does 
 not add much to the world's system of 
 philosophy or ethics. One can hardly 
 imagine a revolutionary being inspired or 
 instructed by the Songs before Sunrise. 
 But for its torrent-like utterance, its enor- 
 mous command of metrical effects and the 
 peculiar distinction of each individual poem, 
 it must be ranked among its author's 
 highest achievements in the art of poetry. 
 Its sustained loftiness of thought, its cold 
 brilliance of light, not less than its writer's 
 unapproachable power over rhythms, render 
 it distinct from all other literature of the 
 kind. 
 
Botkwell 6^ 
 
 Any attempt at detailed criticism of the 
 Bothwell, tremendous historic drama of 
 ^ "^^ Botkwell would be beyond the 
 scope of this volume. Its conventional 
 five acts run to the unconventional length 
 of five hundred and thirty-two pages of 
 about thirty lines apiece, from which even a 
 critic with historical learning, uninterrupted 
 leisure and exemplary patience might be 
 justified in shrinking. By the happy reader 
 endowed with leisure and patience, perhaps 
 Darnley's narration of his dream, 
 
 ' And ever she that sat on the sea-rock 
 Sang, and about her all the rocks were white 
 With bones of men whose souls were turned to fire,' 
 
 and his passionate outcry before his death, 
 the long speech of John Knox in the fourth 
 act and the final speech of Mary will be 
 accounted the best things in the book. 
 The interest of the play is historical rather 
 than poetic. Only the historian who has 
 the details of Mary Stuart's career at his 
 fingers' ends is competent to appreciate 
 the dramatic ingenuity of condensation and 
 selection exhibited in this volume and the 
 
68 Swinburne 
 
 subsequent play of Mary Stuart, but the 
 gigantic volume has a continuous vigour of 
 style for the mere unlearned reader of poetry 
 to admire and enjoy. 
 
 The volume entitled Songs of Two Nations 
 - ,_ includes the 5"o;i!^o/" //a/)/, a hymn 
 Nations, of praise in honour of Mazzini, 
 originally published in 1867; an 
 Ode on the Proclamation of the French Re- 
 public after the fall of Napoleon III. ; and 
 a few sonnets under the name of Dirae, prin- 
 cipally relating to the Italian struggle for 
 independence from the rule of Austria. It 
 is, as it were, a supplement to the Songs 
 before Sunrise, and an acquaintance with the 
 volume is necessary to complete one's know- 
 ledge of the poet's political opinions. 
 
 Of Swinburne's second tragedy in imita- 
 
 Erectheus, tion of the Greek manner I am 
 
 '®7'^- reluctant to speak. It contains 
 
 some of his finest writing, and yet to me it 
 
Eredheus 69 
 
 seems devoid of proper poetic feeling. It 
 is full of splendid rhetoric, and yet it is 
 productive of no emotion but pain. 
 
 The story of the play runs as follows. To 
 Erectheus, King of Athens, hard pressed by 
 Thracian invaders, the Pythian oracle has 
 sent the message that Chthonia, child of 
 Erectheus and Praxithea, must die for the 
 salvation of the city. Chthonia is sacrificed 
 and the invaders are beaten back. 
 
 Perhaps to others more credulous or 
 tolerant of Greek superstition the sacrifice 
 of Chthonia for the sake of Athens may 
 seem a laudable thing. Possibly if the 
 play were represented on the stage the 
 horror of the crime woifld be diminished ; 
 but as read it is unendurable. Whether it 
 is because the subject is inherently un- 
 dramatic, or that the salt of human tears is 
 wholly absent and the writer insists over- 
 much upon the extent of the sacrifice made 
 by Chthonia of love for death — whatever the 
 reason may be, the play has never seemed 
 to me anything but ' fierce and barren ' and 
 intolerable. 
 
70 Swinburne 
 
 So far from softening the horror of the 
 barbarous murder of Chthonia, the writer 
 has even accentuated it. The chorus of 
 old men, * which begins 
 
 ' Who shall put a bridle in the mourner's lips to chasten 
 them,' 
 
 is ferocious, while the very beauty of the 
 presence of Chthonia and of her words 
 renders the central idea of the play more 
 unendurable. 
 
 ' That I may give this poor girl's blood of mine 
 Scarce yet sun-warmed with summer, this thin life 
 Still green with flowerless growth of seedling days, 
 To build again my city ; that no drop 
 Fallen of their innocent veins on the cold ground 
 But shall help knit the joints of her firm walls 
 To knead the stones together, and make sure 
 The band about her maiden girdlestead 
 Once fastened and of all men's violent hands 
 Inviolable for ever . . . 
 
 And the men. 
 Mine unknown children of unsounded years, 
 
 * It is perhaps worth while to mention here that the chorus of 
 Atalanta is a chorus of girls. 
 
Erect heus 7 1 
 
 My sons unrisen shall rise up at thine hand. 
 Sown of thy seed to bring forth seed to thee, 
 And call thee most of all most fruitful found 
 Blessed ; but me too for my barren womb 
 More than my sisters for their children born 
 Shall these give honour . . . ' 
 
 Undoubtedly it is a triumph for a 
 dramatist to make his audience feel deeply 
 the grief or joy of his puppets, but in this 
 case the dramatist succeeds only in making 
 us feel a tearless anguish and a voiceless 
 resentment. 
 
 For a Greek scholar, the construction of 
 the play and the scheme of the choral metres 
 possess an unusual interest. The tragedy 
 is more perfect in form as an imitation of 
 Greek models than Atalanta, particularly in 
 the matter of the division of the choruses 
 into strophe, antistrophe and occasionally 
 epode. A consideration of the choral metres 
 would demand a pamphlet to itself. Pos- 
 sibly the finest is that which relates the 
 rape of Oreithyia by the Thracian god — 
 
 ' Out of the north wind grief came forth, 
 
 And the shining of a sword out of the sea,' 
 
72 Swinburne 
 
 a rendering into words of the very force 
 and strength of the storm-wind. The most 
 tremendous certainly is that which describes 
 the long impending battle in action. 
 
 j^tfwv tfEffaXsura/.' 
 
 But where Aeschylus is content with a 
 few words, Swinburne puts forth all his 
 strength. 
 
 ' With a trampling of drenched red hoofs and an earth- 
 quake of men that meet, 
 Strong war sets hand to the scythe, and the furrows 
 
 take fire from his feet. 
 Earth groans from her great rent heart, and the hollows 
 
 of rocks are afraid, 
 And the mountains are moved and the valleys as waves 
 
 in a storm-wind swayed. 
 From the roots of the hills to the plain's dim verge and 
 
 the dark low shore 
 Air shudders with shrill spears crossing, and hurtling 
 
 of wheels that roar. 
 As the grinding of teeth in the jaws of a lion that foam 
 
 as they gnash 
 Is the shriek of the axles that loosen, the shock of the 
 
 poles that crash. . . . ' 
 
 The description of the battle fought in a 
 
Erect heus 73 
 
 thunderstorm, placed in the mouth of the 
 Athenian herald, is a passage of fine 
 rhetoric. 
 
 ' The word 
 Quick on his lips yet like a blast of fire 
 Blew them together, and round its lords that met 
 Paused all the reeling battle ; two main waves 
 Meeting, one hurled sheer from the sea-wall back 
 That shocks it sideways, one right in from sea 
 Charging, that full in face takes at one blow 
 That whole recoil and ruin, with less fear 
 Startle men's eyes late shipwrecked ; for a breath 
 Crest fronting crest hung, wave to wave rose poised. 
 Then clashed, breaker to breaker ; cloud with cloud 
 In heaven, chariot with chariot closed on earth. 
 One fourfold flash and thunder.' 
 
 The most dramatic point of the play has 
 been well seized by the writer, in the 
 simple words of the reply of Praxithea to 
 the messenger who brings news of the 
 death of Erectheus — 
 
 ' I praise the gods for Athens.' 
 
 That the harshness of the central motive 
 of the tragedy had occurred to the dramatist 
 would seem probable from the introduction 
 
74 Swinburne 
 
 at its close of Athena herself — dea e machina 
 — with consolatory words. But there are 
 some who refuse nevertheless to be com- 
 forted, for whom still and forever 
 
 ' A cry goes up from the ghost of an ill deed done 
 And a curse for a virgin slain.' 
 
 After the harshness oi Erectheus the sense 
 Poems and of relief is almost divine with 
 Second which one turns again to pages 
 Series, 1878. wherein the master has been con- 
 tent to be neither politican nor patriot, 
 but a poet. 
 
 The poems of the second series of Poems 
 and Ballads, though less passionate, less 
 tumultuous, than those of the first, possess 
 a finer maturity, a nobler strength, a more 
 splendid restraint. The tranquillity, the 
 statuesque dignity of some of the finest 
 poems in this book have not been matched 
 by the later utterances of their author. 
 
 The serenity of a sunset pervades the 
 
Poems and Ballads 75 
 
 noble poem In the Bay, written to the 
 memory of Marlowe, but even finer and 
 more majestic are the incomparable verses, 
 Ave atque Vale, in memory of Charles 
 Baudelaire. However little the poet of 
 Les Fleurs du Mai may seem to have in 
 common with the poet of Poems and 
 Ballads, his strange and melancholy spirit 
 appears to have possessed a strong fascina- 
 tion for the younger writer. 
 
 ' Thou sawest, in thine old singing season, brother. 
 
 Secrets and sorrows unbeheld of us : 
 
 Fierce loves and lovely leaf-buds poisonous 
 Bare to thy subtler eye, but for none other 
 
 Blowing by night in some unbreathed-in clime ; 
 
 The hidden harvest of luxurious time, 
 Sin without shape, and pleasure without speech ; 
 
 And where strange dreams in a tumultuous. sleep 
 
 Make the shut eyes of stricken spirits weep ; 
 And with each face thou sawest the shadow on each. 
 
 Seeing as men sow men reap.' 
 
 On both men the resuscitation of the 
 legend of Tannhauser by Wagner seems 
 to have produced an enduring effect, for the 
 memory of Baudelaire's pamphlet on the 
 music-poem again brings to the author of 
 
76 Swinburne 
 
 Laus Veneris the memory of the diabolic 
 goddess celebrated by him of old : — 
 
 ' . . . That obscure Venus of the hollow hill, 
 That thing transformed that was the Cytherean, 
 With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine 
 Long since, and face no more called Erycine. . . .' 
 
 The intense ennui and loathing of life 
 which inspired the greater part of the 
 poems of Baudelaire are so antagonistic 
 to the ebullient genius of Swinburne that 
 perhaps the poem ought not to be read as 
 a criticism of the Fleurs du Mai. But it 
 is a superb tribute to an unforgettable man. 
 The verses are carved as out of black 
 marble, and possess a sonorous majesty, 
 'deep-chested music,' a little unusual in 
 Swinburne. 
 
 Like its forerunner, this volume contains 
 many poems which must be passed over 
 without name in favour of a few. The 
 incommunicable magic and music of A 
 Forsaken Garden, full of the breath of 
 dying summer, the perfume of falling 
 rose-petals, the sadness of fading love, 
 make the poem linger long in the memory. 
 
Poems and Ballads J J 
 
 None who have ever taken into their 
 hearts the cadences of these divine ten 
 stanzas can hve but that now and aofain some 
 remembrance of that ghost of a garden 
 fronting the sea at the sea-down's edge 
 must rise to their Hps and eyes. 
 
 ' Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not ; 
 As the heart of a dead man the seed plots are dry ; 
 From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls 
 not 
 Could she call, there were never a rose to reply. 
 Over the meadows that blossom and wither 
 Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song ; 
 Only the sun and the rain come hither 
 All year long.' 
 
 The lovers who laughed or wept there 
 ' a hundred sleeping years ago,' whose 
 loves faded as roses or the rose-red sea- 
 weeds or remained to the end, what of 
 them ? 
 
 ' All are at one now, roses and lovers, 
 
 Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea. 
 Not a breath of the time that has been hovers 
 
 In the air now soft with a summer to be. 
 Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter 
 
 Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep, 
 When as they that are free now of weeping and laughter 
 
 We shall sleep.' 
 
y8 Swinburne 
 
 And the garden itself, earth, stones and 
 thorns, must at last come to the same end. 
 
 ' Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble. 
 
 Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink, 
 Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble 
 
 The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink, 
 Here now in his triumph where all things falter, 
 
 Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, 
 As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, 
 
 Death lies dead.' 
 
 Almost equally beautiful is A Wasted 
 Vigil with its exquisite pictures of a sea- 
 side dawn and the bitterness of its un- 
 revealed tragedy. 
 
 ' Couldst thou not watch one hour with me ? Behold, 
 Dawn skims the sea with flying feet of gold. 
 With sudden feet that graze the gradual sea ; 
 Couldst thou not watch with me ? . . . 
 
 Sunbeam by sunbeam creeps from line to line, 
 Foam by foam quickens on the brightening brine ; 
 Sail by sail passes, flower by flower gets free ; 
 Couldst thou not watch with me ? . . .' 
 
 There is a deeper note in the poem Ai a 
 Month's End, a companion piece with the 
 Fdlise of the earlier volume, but possess- 
 ing a maturer strength, a wider knowledge 
 
Poems and Ballads 79 
 
 than the former poem. It is almost a novel 
 in a few stanzas, but with the use of sugges- 
 tion in the place of the usual statement 
 of fiction. There is a curious similarity 
 between this poem and the more recent 
 novel of the Italian D'Annunzio, // Trionfo 
 della Morte. The ' sleek black pantheress ' 
 of the poem is an idealised version of the 
 Ippolita of the later novel ; more inconstant, 
 perhaps, but for all intents the same woman. 
 
 ' Strange eyes, new limbs, can no man give her ; 
 Sweet is the sweet thing as it is. 
 No soul she hath, we see, to outlive her ; 
 Hath she for that no lips to kiss ? 
 
 For a new soul let whoso please pray. 
 We are what life made us and shall be. 
 
 For you the jungle and me the sea-spray. 
 And south for you and north for me.' 
 
 The lover of the poem, however, is luckier 
 than he of the novel, for he escapes with 
 his life. 
 
 ' But I who leave my queen of panthers. 
 As a tired honey-heavy bee 
 GUt with sweet dust from gold-grained anthers 
 Leaves the rose-chalice, what for me ? 
 
8o Swinburne 
 
 From the ardours of the chaliced centre, 
 From the amorous anthers' golden grime, 
 
 That scorch and smutch all wings that enter, 
 I fly forth hot from honey-time. 
 
 But as to a bee's gilt thighs and winglets 
 
 The flower-dust with the flower smell clings ; 
 
 As a snake's mobile rampant ringlets 
 
 Leave the sand marked with print of rings ; 
 
 So to my soul in surer fashion 
 
 Your savage stamp and savour hangs ; 
 
 The print and perfume of old passion, 
 The wild-beast mark of panther's fangs.' 
 
 There is a keener sense of natural beauty 
 in this book than is shown in the earHer 
 poems — the natural beauty of earth as 
 opposed to the sea. The Vision of Spring 
 in Winter is full of the longing that the 
 weary dweller in towns has in the dreary 
 winter months of rain and mud for the 
 expected and long-delaying English spring. 
 
 ' O tender time that love thinks long to see. 
 
 Sweet foot of spring that with her footfall sows 
 Late snowlike flowery leavings of the snows, 
 
 Be not too long irresolute to be ; 
 
 O mother-month, where have they hidden thee? 
 Out of the pale time of the flowerless rose 
 
Poems and Ballads 8 1 
 
 I reach my heart out toward the springtime lands, 
 
 I stretch my spirit forth to the fair hours, 
 
 The purplest of the prime ; 
 I lean my soul down over them, with hands 
 
 Made wide to take the ghostly growths of flowers ; 
 
 I send my love back to the lovely time.' 
 
 The same pure open air of natural things 
 — as opposed to the hothouse luxuriousness 
 of his earlier love-poems — shines here in 
 such a poem as the Ex Voto and in the 
 Four Songs of Four Seasons. The first 
 of these, Winter in Northumberland, is a 
 good example of Swinburne's power of 
 adapting and making perfect music of 
 metres over which earlier writers have 
 blundered and fallen. 
 
 ' Through fell and moorland, 
 And salt-sea foreland 
 Our noisy norland 
 
 Resounds and rings ; 
 Waste waves thereunder 
 Are blown in sunder 
 And winds make thunder 
 
 And cloud-wide wings ; 
 Sea-drift makes dimmer 
 The beacon's glimmer ; 
 Nor sail nor swimmer 
 
 Can try the tides 
 F 
 
$2 Swinburne 
 
 And snow-drifts thicken 
 Where, when leaves quicken, 
 
 Under the heather the sundew hides.' 
 
 As clear and strong as the impression 
 given in this poem of the sea-beaten and 
 wind-swept Northumberland heights is the 
 vision of Spring in Tuscany, 
 
 ' Rose-red Ulies that bloom on the banner ; 
 Rose-cheeked gardens that revel in spring ; 
 
 Rose-mouthed acacias that laugh as they climb, 
 Like plumes for a queen's hand fashioned to fan her 
 With wind more soft than a wild dove's wing, 
 What do they sing in the spring of their time ? ' 
 
 and of Summer in Auvergne, 
 
 ' Dawn, as a panther springs, 
 With fierce and fire-fledged wings 
 Leaps on the land that rings 
 
 From her bright feet. 
 Through all its lava-black 
 Cones that cast answer back 
 And cliffs of footless track 
 
 Where thunders meet,' 
 
 and of the desolate Autumn in Cornwall, 
 by the steep and lonely cliffs of Tintagel, 
 which have found mention more than once 
 in the prose and poetry of Swinburne. 
 Those who have felt the inexplicable 
 
Poems and Ballads 83 
 
 charm of the melancholy north coast of 
 Cornwall, the loveliness of the more radiant 
 bays and capes of the Lizard, will be grate- 
 ful to Swinburne for his praise and love 
 of a country known little to those who can 
 find no pleasure in scenes this side of the 
 Channel. 
 
 ' Tintagel and the long Trebarwith sand, 
 Lone Camelford and Boscastle divine 
 With dower of southern blossom, bright and bland 
 Above the roar of granite-baffled brine ' * 
 
 have found an enduring place in his mind 
 and work, but to the incomparable loveliness 
 of Kynance Cove he has paid a tribute of 
 words not too enthusiastic for the utter 
 divinity and beauty of that wonderful bay 
 which has yet found no painter or poet to 
 reproduce in colour or words a hundredth 
 part of its miraculous enchantment. Not 
 even has the author of Tristram of Lyonesse 
 succeeded in conveying into speech the 
 effect of the colouring of that marvellous 
 jewel of Nature. 
 
 * Poems and Ballads. Third Series. 'In memory of John 
 William Inchbold.' 
 
84 Swinburne 
 
 A noticeable feature of this volume is to 
 be found in the English and French poems 
 written in memory of the French poet and 
 critic Th^ophile Gautier, and reprinted here 
 from the volume of memorial verses published 
 in 1873, entitled Le Tombeau de Thdophile 
 Gautier. To that volume Swinburne also 
 contributed a poem in Greek which has not 
 been reprinted. The memory of Gautier 
 has somewhat of the charm and fragrance 
 which lives in the memory of Charles Lamb. 
 He passed 'not crownless to Persephone,' 
 and of his mourning wreath no flowers are 
 fairer than these wound therein by his friend. 
 
 The translations from the French of 
 Francois Villon — ' Villon, our sad, bad, glad, 
 mad brother's name ' is the refrain of Swin- 
 burne's ballad to that unlucky and splendid 
 poet — are interesting, but the marvellous 
 achievement of Mr John Payne's translation 
 into verse of the whole of Villon, as it is a 
 completer, is even a more noticeable feat 
 than Swinburne's. 
 
Songs of ike Springtides 85 
 
 The very little information this poet has 
 Songs of the <^°"<i6scended to give his readers 
 
 Springtides, concerning- his own personal affairs 
 1880. . ,,,:,. 1 
 
 is to be traced only in this volume, 
 
 Songs of the Springtides. To unlock his 
 
 heart with a sonnet key, in the scornful 
 
 phrase of Browning, has not been a habit 
 
 of Swinburne's. The absurdity of regarding 
 
 the dramatic lyrics of the early Poems and 
 
 Ballads as the personal utterances of a lyrist 
 
 was pointed out by their author in his reply 
 
 to the assailants of his morality at the time 
 
 of their publication. So far as one might 
 
 judge from all preceding poems, their author 
 
 has been fortunately exempt from the average 
 
 sufferings of humanity. Such sympathy as 
 
 leaps from the responsive memories of the 
 
 readers of such poems as the sonnet of 
 
 Keats which begins, ' Bright star, would I 
 
 were steadfast as thou art,' or Shelley's 
 
 stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples is 
 
 a thing which Swinburne, as a poet, would, 
 
 so it appears, have scoffed at rather than 
 
 sought for. But in this volume there are a 
 
 few traces of feeling not so utterly removed 
 
86 Swinburne 
 
 from common humanity as is the greater 
 bulk of his work. 
 
 ' In fruitless years of youth dead long ago 
 And long beneath their own dead leaves and snow 
 Buried, I heard with bitter heart and sere 
 The same sea's word unchangeable nor knew 
 But that mine own life-days were changeless too 
 And cold and fierce and barren . . .' 
 
 Yet, even after the sHght confession of the 
 average tendency of ' youthful poets ' to 
 ' melancholy,' the speaker in this poem, 
 On the Cliffs, turns on himself almost in 
 anger for his former participation in mortal 
 weakness. 
 
 Of the three poems in this volume, the 
 first, called Thalassius, is in some measure 
 an idealised autobiography, a spiritual poet's 
 progress. As portion of it has been included 
 in the published ' Selections ' from Swin- 
 burne's poems, it is presumably valued 
 highly by its writer. The finest passage 
 in it is a transcription into words of the 
 famous painting of Titian — the riot of the 
 ' Maenad and the Baccharid' — but more 
 terrible than the jocund revelry of the 
 
Songs of the Springtides %•] 
 
 painted Bacchus and his train. To a 
 certain extent this poem is a lengthier 
 recapitulation of the prelude to the Songs 
 before Sunrise. 
 
 The poem called On the Cliffs is to my 
 mind a poem of considerably more value 
 and interest than Thalassius, and is, in 
 addition to its poetic worth, a sufficiently 
 luminous criticism of the Lesbian poetess 
 beloved alike of Catullus and Swinburne. 
 It was no doubt written for the purpose 
 of including a translation of a few of the 
 actual words of Sappho which have come 
 down to us. The speaker of the poem is 
 clearly the writer himself, and the scenery 
 described may well have been that of the 
 shore of the Undercliff. 
 
 ' Between the moondawn and the sundown here 
 The twiUght hangs half starless. . . . 
 But higher the steep green sterile fields, thick set 
 With flowerless hawthorn even to the upward verge 
 Whence the woods gathering watch new cliffs emerge 
 Higher than their highest of crowns that sea-winds fret. 
 Hold fast, for all that night or wind can say, 
 Some pale pure colour yet. 
 Too dim for green and luminous for grey.' 
 
88 Swinburne 
 
 It is to the watcher on such a coast at 
 twilight that the words of the immortal 
 poetess seem to storm the 'fortressed rock 
 of silence,' to 'make all the night one ear.' 
 
 ' O thou of divers-coloured mind, O thou 
 Deathless, God's daughter subtle-souled — lo, now, 
 Now too the song above all songs, in flight 
 Higher than the day-star's height, 
 And sweet as sound the moving wings of night ! 
 Thou of the divers-coloured seat — behold, 
 Her very song of old ! — 
 O deatldess, O God's daughter subtle-souled t 
 
 Child of God, close craftswoman, I beseech thee 
 
 Bid not ache nor agony break nor master. 
 
 Lady, my spirit — 
 
 O thou her mistress, might her cry not reach thee ? 
 
 Our Lady of all men's loves, could Love go past her. 
 
 Pass and not hear it ? ' 
 
 The Garden of Cymodoce which follows is 
 an ode to the island of Sark with its 
 memories of Victor Hugo. The volume 
 concludes with a lengthy Birthday Ode to 
 the same writer. 
 
Studies in Song 89 
 
 Published in the same year as Songs of 
 studies in Springtides and the Study of 
 Song, 1880. Shakespeare, the intervening vol- 
 ume called Studies in Song goes nigh to 
 founder beneath the weight of the Song 
 for the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor 
 with which its bows are laden. So far from 
 being a song, this poem is an interminable 
 species of ode comprising fifty stanzas of 
 sixteen lines each, and covering, with its 
 annotations, sixty-five weary pages of print. 
 From the author's point of view it may 
 have seemed worth writing : from the point 
 of view of an average reader not blessed 
 with much patience or leisure, the ' song ' 
 does not appear likely to repay a close 
 study of its purport. For the majority of 
 people Landor's dialogues are sufficiently 
 dull ; but this summary in verse of Landor's 
 writing is very much duller. 
 
 The following translation into English 
 of the 'anapaestic heptameters' of the 
 Grand Chorus of Birds of Aristophanes 
 in a similar metre, with the addition only 
 of rhymes and double rhymes, is ingenious 
 
90 Swinburne 
 
 enough and has no doubt an added interest 
 for a Greek scholar. 
 
 The swimming song, entitled Off Shore, 
 possesses a blithe strain of music, a clear 
 sense of the passionate charm of the sun 
 and sea, with 
 
 ' Its wild-weed forests of crimson and russet and olive 
 and gold,' 
 
 seen far below the surface of the bright 
 water, 
 
 ' \Vhen the might of the summer 
 Is most on the sea ; 
 When the days overcome her 
 With joy but to be, 
 With rapture of royal enchantment, and sorcery that 
 sets her not free.' 
 
 All dactylic forms of verse in the English 
 tongue the poet has declared to be un- 
 natural and abhorrent, yet the dactyls of 
 Evening on the Broads seem fitting enough 
 for their subject, the slow fading of the 
 ' colours and clouds of the twilight ' over 
 the 'shadowless waters' and 'the sterile 
 wastes and waves of the land.' 
 
Studies in Song 91 
 
 'Inland glimmer the shallows asleep and afar in the 
 breathless 
 Twilight r yonder the depths darken afar and asleep. 
 Slowly the semblance of death out of heaven descends 
 on the deathless 
 Waters: hardly the hght lives on the face of the 
 deep.' 
 
 The long, soft lines of the poem palpitate 
 with the palpitant, dallying breath of the 
 twilight hovering and descending over the 
 ' lapsing land ' and the dusky broads until the 
 advent of the stars and the final triumph 
 of night. This is the finest poem of the 
 book. 
 
 The three sonnets on the busts of Nero 
 in the Uffizi Galleries of Florence, called 
 The EntperoT^s Progress, are in turn devoted 
 to the three stages of the ' child of brighter 
 than the morning's birth,' the youth with 
 the weary frown, the man 'beyond all men 
 most miserable ' whom 
 
 ' The loathsome bitterness of life 
 Leaves fearful of the bitterness of death.' 
 
 Companion pieces with these verses are 
 the sonnets on The Launch of the ' Livadia,' 
 
92 Swinburne 
 
 the steam-yacht of the Czar Alexander II., 
 'gold and fair marbles and again more 
 gold,' but 'rigged with curses dark' in the 
 affixed phrase of Milton. 
 
 ' All curses be about her, and all ill 
 
 Go with her; heaven be dark above her way. 
 The gulf beneath her glad and sure of prey 
 And wheresoe'er her prow be pointed, still 
 The winds of heaven have all one evil will . - . 
 
 . . . Hope be far 
 And fear at hand for pilot oversea. 
 
 With death for compass and despair for star 
 And the white foam a shroud for the White Czar.' 
 
 The poem is dated in September 1880. 
 In March of the following year Alexander 
 expiated a few of his crimes with his own 
 life in a more startling fashion than by 
 drowning. 
 
 The series of poems entitled By the North 
 Sea, which conclude the volume, is a series 
 of impressions of the Suffolk Marshes. 
 
 ' A land that is lonelier than ruin ; 
 A sea that is stranger than death : 
 Far fields that a rose never blew in, 
 Wan waste where the winds lack breath ; 
 
Studies in Song 93 
 
 Waste endless and boundless and flowerless 
 But of marsh blossoms fruitless as free : 
 
 Where earth lies exhausted, as powerless 
 To strive with the sea.' 
 
 The spirit of those ' miles on miles on 
 miles of desolation ' rises before one as 
 one reads. Here is a clear impression 
 of a landscape in that ' pale and troubled ' 
 land. 
 
 ' Tall the plumage of the rush-flower tosses. 
 Sharp and soft in many a curve and line 
 
 Gleam and glow the sea-coloured marsh-mosses 
 Salt and splendid from the circling brine. 
 
 Streak on streak of glimmering sea-shine crosses 
 All the land sea-saturate as with wine.' 
 
 Strange too is the picture of the church- 
 yard collapsing into the sea, the tombs, 
 ' with bare white piteous bones protruded,' 
 crumbling, sliding downwards and being 
 swallowed by the waste of waves. The 
 triumphal chant to the sun which closes the 
 book is in clear, bright contrast with this 
 picture of weariness and decay. 
 
94 Swinburne 
 
 The principal interest of the concluding 
 Mary Stuart, volume of the story of the Queen 
 
 ^^^'- of Scots, like that of Bothwell, is 
 historical rather than poetic. The poet's 
 breadth of style carries him easily over a 
 considerable space of not very poetic 
 historical matter, but it is not until he 
 breaks away from the clogged back-waters 
 of history and trusts himself to the stream 
 of his own invention that the play becomes 
 actually dramatic. 
 
 The suggestion that the death of 
 Chastelard, twenty-five years before, and 
 the hand of Mary Beaton, should be the 
 things which brought Mary to the execu- 
 tioner's block is as poetic as it is just, 
 even if it be unwarranted by knowledge. 
 It completes and perfects the trilogy, like 
 the last touch of colour, the final chord or 
 rhyme. In this piece of poetic justice the 
 poet has a perfect success. The 'famous 
 and terrible letter ' which Mary, ' with many 
 gracious excuses and professions of attach- 
 ment ' wrote to Elizabeth repeating the 
 slanderous reports retailed concerning Eliza- 
 
Mary Stuart 95 
 
 beth by ' Bess of Hardwick,' otherwise the 
 Countess of Shrewsbury, and did not 
 send, is in the play retained by Mary 
 Beaton, and being forwarded by her to 
 Elizabeth in revenge for Mary's forgetful- 
 ness of Chastelard, impels the English 
 queen, then wavering between the pardon 
 or death of Mary, to the signature of 
 the death warrant. The short scene, but 
 the best in the play, in which Mary com- 
 mands Mary Beaton to sing, and she 
 sings an old song of Chastelard's, is in 
 the sweet vein of the former beautiful 
 dramatic poem. 
 
 God, says Mary Beaton, aside, 
 
 ' Prompts me, being most just. 
 To know by trial if all remembrance be 
 Dead as remorse or pity that in birth 
 Died, and were childless in her : if she quite 
 Forget that very swan-song of thy love. 
 My love that wast, my love that wouldst not be. 
 Let God forget her now at last as I 
 Remember : if she think but one soft thought. 
 Cast one poor word upon thee, God thereby 
 Shall surely bid me let her live : if none, 
 I shoot that letter home and sting her dead. 
 God strengthen me to sing but these words through 
 Though I fall dumb at end for ever. Now . . . 
 
96 Swinbtirne 
 
 ' Apres tant de jours, apres tant de pleurs 
 Soyez secourable a mon ame en peine. 
 Voyez comma Avril fait I'amour aux fleurs ; 
 Dame d'amour, dame aux belles couleurs, 
 Dieu vous a fait belle, Amour vous fait reine. 
 
 ' Rions, je t'en prie ; aimons, je le veux. 
 Le temps fuit et rit et ne revient guere 
 Pour baiser le bout de tes blonds cheveux, 
 Pour baiser tes cils, ta bouche et tes yeux ; 
 L'amour n'a qu'un jour aupres de sa mfere. 
 
 Mary Stuart. Nay, I should once have known 
 that song, thou sayest, 
 And him that sang it and should now be dead : 
 Was it — but his rang sweeter — was it not 
 Remy Belleau ? 
 
 Mary Beaton. My letter — here at heart ! {aside).' 
 
 The concluding scene of the execution, 
 like that of Chastelard, is not witnessed 
 from the stage, but is described by a 
 witness. 
 
Tristram of Lyonesse 97 
 
 The long narrative poem of Tristram of 
 _ . , , Lyonesse stands hieh in the list of 
 
 Tnstram of -^ => 
 
 Lyonesse, Swinburne's works for sustained 
 strength of expression and purpose. 
 Whatever place may be awarded to the poem 
 among the narrative poems of the world, it 
 must be said that Swinburne has in his 
 treatment of the particular subject outwritten 
 the only other two English poets, so far as 
 I remember, who have touched on the same 
 subject. The magnificent ancient legend 
 was disfigured not less by the objective 
 prejudice of Tennyson than by the stupid 
 doggerel of Matthew Arnold. 
 
 Swinburne has lifted the moral tone of his 
 poem above the divorce-court atmosphere in 
 which Tennyson attempted to place the 
 story of the love of Tristram and Iseult, and 
 he has not — need it be said ? — indulged in 
 the slipshod inanities of Arnold's tuneless 
 jingle. His triumph over such competitors 
 was easy enough in this particular matter. 
 But this elaboration and revivification of the 
 ancient legend has to undergo one other 
 comparison — namely, with the Tristan und 
 
 G 
 
98 Swinburne 
 
 Isolde of Wagner. The intense dramatic 
 interest of Wagner's music-poem, the ab- 
 sorbing and entrancing beauty and passion 
 of its multitudinous and miraculous har- 
 monies, are absent from the poem of words. 
 In each direction the poet was at a disadvan- 
 tage ; in the form of narrative verse, which 
 admits of no great dramatic interest, and in 
 the mode of human speech, which is below 
 the capacity of many instruments for the 
 expression of emotion. In some points the 
 treatment of the story by Wagner and 
 Swinburne is alike, in others it is dissimilar. 
 The story of Tristram was dealt with by 
 Wagner much as were the broken fragments 
 of Siegmund's sword by his son : he made 
 no attempt to weld the pieces together : they 
 had to be molten and reforged before the 
 perfect blade was worthy of the hand of 
 Siegfried. Swinburne, on the other hand, 
 has followed the legend more closely, though 
 he has given a more prominent place than of 
 old to the second Iseult. The Tristrams of 
 Wagner and Swinburne are akin in their 
 nobility and courtesy, but Swinburne's pro- 
 
Tristram of Lyonesse 99 
 
 tagonist is a much saner and less excitable 
 lover than Wagner's, and he has an unfortu- 
 nate tendency to prolix metaphysical mus- 
 ings. Swinburne's Iseult is to me veiled 
 and shadowy, almost colourless, beside the 
 Isolde of the music-poem, passionate in all 
 things as a storm-wind, in vengeance, in 
 love, in death, but his portrait of the second 
 Iseult, the maiden-wife, is far clearer, and 
 makes an excellent piece of character- 
 drawing. 
 
 Here are the first lines of the poem : — 
 
 ' About the middle music of the spring 
 Came from the castled shore of Ireland's king 
 A fair ship stoutly sailing, eastward bound 
 And south by Wales and all its wonders round 
 To the loud rocks and ringing reaches home 
 That take the wild wrath of the Cornish foam, 
 Past Lyonesse unswallowed of the tides 
 And high Carlion that now the deep sea hides 
 To the wind-hollowed heights and gusty bays 
 Of sheer Tintagel, fair with famous days.' 
 
 There is no hatred or love between the 
 knight and the bride he brings from Ireland 
 to his Uncle Mark at the commencement of 
 
I oo Swinburne 
 
 this story, and the love-potion is drunken 
 by them unwittingly. There are several 
 excellent fights in the poem, after the 
 manner of Sir Thomas Mallory, passages of 
 adventure and many beautiful sea-paintings. 
 The episode of the maiden marriage is grace- 
 fully and delicately handled, although the 
 necessity of a revision of the ancient story is 
 not apparent. The morality of the different 
 episodes of the poem is somewhat compli- 
 cated, and to my mind the moralitj' of the 
 whole would have been made more acceptable 
 by the complete omission of any attempt to 
 reconcile an antique fable with a modern 
 virtue. The introduction of the religious 
 question of sin in the vigil of Iseult at 
 Tintagel is discordant. There is no artistic 
 or moral error committed either by Dante or 
 Wagner, in the damnation by one of the 
 lovers, in their apotheosis by the other. 
 From a religious point of view they were 
 rightly damned, from a poetic they were 
 rightly transfigured. But if, as it appears, 
 Swinburne's Tristram is intended to be 
 conscious of ' sin,' his treatment of his wife 
 
Tristram of Lyonesse loi 
 
 does not in my humble opinion seem to be 
 of service in the mending of matters, but 
 rather to make bad worse. The chief glory 
 of the poem, however, lies in its descriptive 
 passages; as, for instance, that of the Cornish 
 coast and of Kynance Cove, 
 
 ' The very bay whence very Love 
 Most meetly might have risen, and most divine 
 Beheld and heard things round her sound and shine 
 From floors of foam and gold to waUs of serpentine,' 
 
 or of the Queen's bower, where 
 
 ' Far and fain 
 Somewhiles the soft rush of rejoicing rain 
 Solaced the darkness, and from steep to steep 
 Of heaven they saw the sweet sheet lightning leap 
 And laugh its heart out in a thousand smiles, 
 When the clear sea for miles on glimmering miles 
 Burned as though dawn were strewn abroad astray,' 
 
 or of Tristram swimming 
 
 ' 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 
 
I02 Swinburne 
 
 Like plumes in battle's blithest charge, and thence 
 To matcJi the next with yet more strenuous sense.' 
 
 The book is full of beauty and sea-air, 
 and the long, rhythmic swell of its rhymed 
 verses seems born of the sonorous, limitless 
 roll of the Cornish waves, breaking ever- 
 lastingly on the black cliffs. There is not 
 much if any pathos in Swinburne's version 
 of the story. In it Tristram is not killed 
 while he sits harping before Queen Iseult, 
 as he is in the story of Mallory followed 
 by Tennyson, but dies of his wounds before 
 the ship which brings Iseult to him arrives, 
 as in the version of Thomas of Brittany. 
 Yet the pathos of the simple words of the 
 old French chronicler is not captured by 
 Swinburne. Iseult stands 
 
 ' Above him newly dead 
 And felt his death upon her : and her head 
 Bowed, as to reach the spring that slakes all drouth ; 
 And their four lips became one silent mouth.' 
 
 The concluding lines of the poem which 
 narrate the burial of the lovers at Tintagel 
 glide into a strain of soft music. 
 
Tristram of Lyonesse 103 
 
 ' So came their hour on them that were in hfe 
 Tristram and Iseult : so from love and strife 
 The stroke of love's own hand felt last and best 
 Gave them deliverance to perpetual rest . . . 
 And these rapt forth perforce from earthly ground, 
 These twain the deep sea guards and girdles round . . . 
 
 . . . For the strong sea has swallowed wall and tower 
 And where their limbs were laid in woful hour 
 For many a fathom gleams and moves and moans 
 The tide that sweeps above their coffined bones 
 In the wrecked chancel by the shivered shrine : 
 Nor where they sleep shall moon or sunlight shine 
 Nor man look down for ever : none shall say, 
 Here once, or here, Tristram and Iseult lay. 
 But peace they have that none may gain who live. 
 And rest about them that no love can give. 
 And over them, while death and life shall be, 
 The light and sound and darkness of the sea.' 
 
 Tristram of Lyonesse is undoubtedly a 
 fine and possibly a great poem, and yet its 
 author seems barely to have done himself 
 justice in it. The strength of the lyric and 
 dramatic poet seems hampered by the neces- 
 sity of telling a story. But its multitudinous 
 beauties of detail and breadth of style render 
 it perhaps the fullest and finest fruit of his 
 maturity. 
 
I04 Sivinburne 
 
 The narrative poem is followed in this 
 book by a fine ode to Athens and a poem on 
 The Statue of Victor Hugo. 
 
 The middle space of the volume is filled 
 with sonnets for the most part on literary 
 subjects, the record of the friendship of men 
 and books. The keen interest which Swin- 
 burne has manifested in the events of the 
 day, and his ever-responsive horror and 
 loathing for the cruelties and tyrannies of 
 the world, shine here in the sonnets which 
 commemorate the assassination of the Czar 
 Alexander in 1881,* and the Russian perse- 
 cution of the Jews in 1882. To the twenty- 
 one sonnets here included on The English 
 Dramatic Poets, 1590- 1650, should be added 
 the sonnet on Cyril Tourneur which ap- 
 peared in the second series of Poems and 
 Ballads. The Adieux a Marie Stuart 
 celebrate the conclusion of the trilogy dedi- 
 
 * Although this Czar has the liberation of the serfs to his credit, 
 it should be remembered that he has the massacre and exile of tens 
 of thousands of Poles, the murder and torture of thousands of his 
 own subjects to the other side of his account. Assuredly in saying 
 that no free man might for compassion rejoice at the termination 
 of that despot's life, the poet was in error. 
 
Tristram of Lyonesse 105 
 
 cated to the fame of the Queen of Scots, in 
 lines of perfect beauty. 
 
 ' Queen, for whose house my fathers fought 
 With hopes that rose and fell. 
 Red star of boyhood's fiery thought, 
 Farewell. 
 
 They gave their lives, and I, my queen. 
 
 Have given you of my life. 
 Seeing your brave star bum high between 
 
 Men's strife. 
 
 Farewell the song says only, being 
 
 A star whose race is run ; 
 Farewell the soul says never, seeing 
 
 The sun. 
 
 Yet, well-nigh as with flash of tears, 
 
 The song must say but so 
 That took your praise up twenty years 
 
 Ago. 
 
 More bright than stars or moons that vary. 
 
 Sun kindling heaven and hell, 
 Here after all these years. Queen Mary, 
 
 Farewell.' 
 
 The exquisite verses on children which 
 make up the rest of the volume are not 
 likely to suffer from any comparison with 
 
io6 Swinburne 
 
 any poet of children dead or to be, in spite 
 of their author's self-abasement before the 
 shrines of William Blake and Victor Hugo. 
 There is nothing sweeter or more fragrant 
 in English literature than the verses of this 
 poet in praise of babies and older children. 
 The ' deep truth that great poets are bi- 
 sexual ' is not less deep than the truth that 
 whatever a woman may feel with regard 
 to children it has been left for men to 
 express all the charm and humour of baby- 
 hood and childhood. The thirty-one lyrics 
 in this volume, under the title of A Dark 
 Month, which chronicle the month's absence 
 of a child are flawlessly beautiful from be- 
 ginning to end. From the poem called A 
 Child's Battles one or two stanzas may be 
 here transcribed, the best tribute to their 
 delightful humour and sweetness being a 
 humble refraint from commentary. 
 
 ' We that would fain seem wise 
 Assume grave mouths and eyes 
 
 Whose looks reprove 
 Too much delight in battle : 
 But your great heart our prattle 
 Cannot move. 
 
Tristram of Lyonesse 107 
 
 We say, small children should 
 Be placid, mildly good 
 
 And blandly meek : 
 Whereat the broad smile rushes 
 Full on your lips and flushes 
 
 All your cheek. 
 
 If all the stars that are 
 Laughed out, and every star 
 
 Could here be heard, 
 Such peals of golden laughter 
 We should not hear, as after 
 
 Such a word.' 
 
 Swinburne has immortalised the child- 
 hood of this boy. In .^ Child! s Pity, A 
 Child's Laughter and Comparisons, and in 
 the Dark Month, he has drawn a picture 
 of childhood which will outlive the ages 
 as it must by this time have outlived the 
 boyhood of his friend. 
 
 There hangs about this volume a fragrance 
 peculiarly its own, distinct from the impres- 
 sion produced by any other of the poet's 
 books. There is an atmosphere of serenity 
 and sweetness, of literary charm, not often 
 found outside the pages of Charles Lamb. 
 How full of the essential charm of books 
 
io8 Swinburne 
 
 are the lines which tell of the dreariness 
 caused by the absence of the child who 
 drank deep 
 
 ' The golden vintage of Shakespeare, gleaming 
 In the silver vessels of Lamb. 
 
 Our Shakespeare now, as a man dumb-stricken, 
 
 Stands silent there on the shelf : 
 And my thoughts, which had song in the heart of them, 
 sicken 
 
 And relish not Shakespeare's self. 
 
 And my mood grows moodier than Hamlet's even, 
 
 And man delights not me, 
 But only the face that morn and even 
 
 My heart leapt only to see.' 
 
 The poet's prose tribute to Shakespeare 
 is dealt with hereafter, but as an example 
 of his catholicity of appreciation one may 
 select for passing mention his sonnet to 
 Dickens. 
 
 Whether the poet's tributes to the shades 
 of Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade were 
 more kindly and generous than critical is 
 a matter which need not be questioned here, 
 but the knowledge that the creator of 
 Boythorne and Skimpole is a favoured 
 
A Century of Rouiidels 109 
 
 friend of the author of Poems and' Ballads 
 is as satisfactory to the lovers of Swinburne 
 as of Dickens. One may regret, however, 
 that he has not paid a similar tribute to 
 Thackeray, who is assuredly as worthy a 
 subject for the critical pen of Swinburne 
 as Dickens, and surely worthier than Reade 
 or Collins. 
 
 The lightest and most delicate of Swin- 
 A Centu of ^^^''^^'s volumes, the Century of 
 Roundels, Roundels, exhibits his skill in the 
 art of verse no less than do his 
 more important books. Each of these 
 hundred roundels, wrought, in his own 
 phrase, 'as a ring or a star-bright sphere,' 
 is a jewel of perfect verse, * round as a pearl 
 or a tear.' The choice of one or two for a 
 quotation is difficult, for no sooner is one 
 selected than the remaining ninety-nine 
 present their rival charms for notice. It 
 is again a case of the phrase of Hugo 
 beloved by the later poet: 'J 'en passe et 
 
no Swinburne 
 
 des meilleurs.' The veiled griefs of In 
 Harbour and Recollections, the regrets of A 
 Dead Friend and Past Days, the flower-like 
 tributes thrown on the grave of Richard 
 Wagner, the baby-songs and child-songs, 
 the flower-pieces and picture -pieces, the 
 sketches of Guernsey and Sark, are all 
 almost equally delightful and are all alike 
 perfect. Here is a dexterous play on 
 words, with a hint of deeper things, called 
 Chance. 
 
 ' But now life's face beholden 
 
 Seemed bright as heaven's bare brow 
 With hope of gifts withholden 
 But now. 
 
 From time's full-flowering bough 
 
 Each bud spake bloom to embolden 
 Love's heart and seal his vow. 
 
 Joy's eyes grew deep with olden 
 
 Dreams, born he wist not how ; 
 Thought's meanest garb was golden ; 
 
 But now ! ' 
 
 The two roundels on Rossetti's transla- 
 tion of Villon's roundel to Death have a 
 personal flavour, but perhaps even more 
 
A Century of Roundels 1 1 1 
 
 personal than these is the rhyme To 
 Catullus. 
 
 ' My brother, my Valerius, dearest head 
 Of all whose crowning bay-leaves crown their mother 
 Rome, in the notes first heard of thine I read 
 My brother. 
 
 No dust that death or time can strew may smother 
 Love and the sense of kinship inly bred 
 From loves and hates at one with one another. 
 
 To thee was Caesar's self nor dear nor dread, 
 Song and the sea were sweeter each than other : 
 How should I living fear to call thee dead 
 My brother?' 
 
 The roundel naturally lends itself more 
 easily to lighter verse than to serious poetry, 
 but in the hands of Swinburne it becomes 
 capable of expressing thoughts and moods 
 of deep feeling. The book is light and 
 charming in its entirety, and as such affords 
 a pleasant contrast with some of its com- 
 panions. 
 
 For the sake of one more quotation from 
 this volume, I may be permitted to tran- 
 scribe the dedicatory roundel to the late 
 Miss Christina Rossetti. 
 
112 Swinburne 
 
 ' Ply, white butterflies, out to the sea, 
 Frail pale wings for the wind to try, 
 Small white wings that we scarce can see 
 Fly. 
 
 ' Here and there may a chance-caught eye 
 Note in a score of you twain or three 
 Lighter or darker of tinge or dye. 
 
 ' Some fly light as a laugh of glee, 
 Some fly soft as a low long sigh : 
 AH to the haven where each would be 
 Fly.' 
 
 After the roundel, the ballade. The nine 
 A Mid- beautiful poems which give the 
 ^^"^ title to this volume and other sub- 
 1884. sequent poems in it are constructed 
 on the old French form or on variations of 
 it adapted to new metres at the author's 
 will. One of the most charming of the 
 Midsummer Holiday poems is that which is 
 made to the honour of ' Our father Chaucer,' 
 radiant with the breath of summer and the 
 memory of the long dead poet. The quiet 
 sketches of this series of poems, of the sea- 
 strand, the ' low-pleached ' country lanes, the 
 
A Midsummer Holiday 1 1 % 
 
 mill-garden with its rows of sunflowers and 
 beds of sweet-william, the flower, 
 
 ' Held by love the sweeter that it blooms in Shake- 
 speare's name,' 
 
 culminate in the exultant song of swimming, 
 in the poet's best-beloved measure, 
 
 ' The sea is awake and the sound of the song of the joy 
 of her waking is rolled 
 From afar to the star that recedes, from anear to the 
 wastes of the wild wide shore.' 
 
 with its refrain, 
 
 ' Strike out from the shore as the heart in us bids and 
 beseeches, athirst for the foam.' 
 
 Following the ballades comes another lonof 
 ode to Victor Hugo. The poem called 
 Les Casquets deals with the terrible rocks 
 of that name off the coast of Jersey. The 
 poems to children, the impressions of Sark 
 or English scenes, are charming, but after 
 the actual poems of the Midsummer Holiday 
 the most noticeable things in the book are 
 the polemical or political verses of which a 
 few seem to have been due to the agitation 
 
 H 
 
1 14 Swinburne 
 
 connected with the rejection of the Franchise 
 Bill by the House of Lords. 
 
 ' Clear the way, my lords and lackeys ! you have had 
 
 your day. 
 Here you have your answer — England's yea against 
 
 your nay : 
 Long enough your house has held you : up, and clear 
 the way ! ' 
 
 . Words written in the passion of the 
 
 moment are perhaps often better left un- 
 
 reprinted, but even the service done by 
 
 the House of Lords in stemming the tide 
 
 of the oratory of a later and more vicious 
 
 Cleon does not prevent approval of such a 
 
 taunt as this : — 
 
 ' They are worthy to reign on their brothers, 
 To contemn them as clods or as carles. 
 Who are Graces by grace of such mothers 
 As brightened the bed of King Charles.' 
 
 The three ironic sonnets on the ' clumsy 
 and shallow snobbery ' of a journalist in 
 the Saturday Review of the 15th December 
 J 883 are as finely indignant as the quoted 
 piece of newspaper writing is contemptible. 
 The Word for the Nation is as applicable 
 
Marino Faliero 115 
 
 at the present day as it was at the time of 
 its writing, with its scornful note of the 
 cackle that 
 
 ' We have not, alack, an ally to befriend us, 
 And the season is ripe to extirpate and end us : 
 Let the German touch hands with the Gaul 
 And the fortress of England must fall,' 
 
 and its haughty knowledge that such cackle 
 is no more than 
 
 ' The tribute of rage and of rancour, 
 The tribute of slaves to the free. 
 To the people whose hope hath its anchor 
 Made fast in the sea.' 
 
 I have spoken above of Swinburne's 
 Marino Tristram of Lyonesse as the finest 
 FaUero,i88s. ^^^ fullest fruit of his maturity. 
 It would, no doubt, be to speak after the 
 manner of the Hibernians if one were to 
 say that the dramatic poem of Marino 
 Faliero is even finer, and yet there would 
 be much truth in the statement. As a poem 
 Tristram is perhaps a greater achievement 
 
1 1 6 Swinburne 
 
 than Faliero, but in point of human interest 
 and expression of thought the later-published 
 play stands high above the narrative poem. 
 It is the most thoughtful, the most human 
 of all the great poet's great works. He has 
 kept himself well in hand throughout. He 
 has a subject eminently suited to his 
 opinions, and he has lavished on it his best 
 workmanship. To appreciate thoroughly 
 its splendid vigour, its strength of style 
 and wealth of verbiage, one must place 
 beside it Byron's uninspired abortion of 
 dulness on the same subject Neither 
 play would in all probability have any 
 chance of success on the stage, but with 
 regard to the matter of writing and spiritual 
 interest of each a comparison of the two 
 plays is all but ridiculous. How ineffably 
 bad is the writing of Byron's play is in- 
 credible until one reads it. One falls then 
 on such lines as these : — 
 
 ' You drew me from my honourable toils 
 In distant lands — on flood, in fields, in cities — 
 You singled me out like a victim to 
 Stand crowned . . .' 
 
Marino Faliero 1 1 7 
 
 or these : — 
 
 ' The many-twinkling feet so small and sylph-like, 
 Suggesting the more secret symmetry 
 Of the fair forms which terminate so well.' 
 
 Beside the comparison of the actual writ- 
 ing of the two men, the comparison of scene 
 with scene is possible and affords an 
 interesting study, but one which cannot be 
 gone into in this place. 
 
 Swinburne's study of the old Doge 
 Marino Faliero ranks high among the 
 dramatic creations of literature. He can 
 be compared with no other or smaller crea- 
 tion than King Lear. He is perhaps more 
 sinning and less sinned against than Lear : 
 less foolish or optimistic he is as certainly 
 as he is equally tempestuous and hot-headed. 
 Like Lear too he is absolutely noble and 
 high-minded. What the actual Faliero was 
 or miofht have been had he succeeded in 
 overthrowing the state of Venice is another 
 matter. The principal moral difficulty of 
 the actual story of Faliero — the fact that 
 his sudden conspiracy against the state, 
 
1 1 8 Swinburne 
 
 his instantaneous desire for reformation, 
 was due to a public insult to himself and 
 his wife and the neglect of the Senate to 
 punish the offender in a manner adequate 
 to the Doge's anger — is cleared away by 
 the dramatist, but a certain doubt rises again 
 when the book is closed. That a power- 
 ful prince, who in a superstitious age was 
 in his early days hot-tempered enough to 
 knock down a bishop bearing the Host in 
 his hands on the score of unpunctuality, 
 should resent two public insults so far as 
 to wish to overturn the offending consti- 
 tution, and in so doing destroy a large 
 number of his enemies, is natural enough. 
 The motives of Swinburne's Faliero are 
 almost too lofty to be credible if the play 
 is transferred to actuality, but in reading 
 it one's doubts are for the time assuaged. 
 Faliero too had little time for aping a 
 Caesar. 
 
 ' 'Tis seventy years since I was called a child,' 
 
 he tells his youthful Duchess. To his 
 Lear she is almost Cordelia. Their re- 
 
Marino Faliero 119 
 
 lationship — neither altogether parental and 
 filial, nor wholly marital — is beautifully and 
 charmingly delineated. The sword of 
 vengeance is placed in Faliero's hand rather 
 than sought for by him, but at the moment 
 when his triumph seems possible he re- 
 quires more than vengeance — the resurrec- 
 tion of a fettered commonwealth. 
 
 ' If these who have wronged me, being wiped out. 
 May leave this Venice with their blood washed white. 
 Clean, splendid, sweet for sea and sun to kiss 
 Till earth adore and heaven applaud her — then 
 Shall my desire, till then insatiable. 
 Feed full and sleep for ever,' 
 
 are his words. On being offered a crown 
 as first of citizens, in the name of citizens, 
 he cries : — 
 
 ' Good, my friend. 
 The foulest reigns whence ever earth smelt foul 
 When all her wastes and cities reeked of Rome 
 Were by that poisonous plea sown, watered, fed : 
 The worst called emperors ever, kings whose names 
 Serve even for slaves to curse with, lived by vote 
 And shone by delegation.' 
 
 The remaining characters of the play 
 
1 20 Swinburne 
 
 are not given much importance. Faliero 
 fills the stage. Bertuccio is a milder edi- 
 tion of the tempestuous old noble. The 
 Duchess is an excellent young wife. The 
 rest of the characters complete the story 
 without possessing much individuality — 
 Steno, the Admiral, Lioni and others. 
 Lioni represents the better side of the 
 aristocracy of the Venice of the day as 
 Steno represents its worst, but his con- 
 servatism is ferocious enough. Speaking 
 to the traitor of Faliero's conspiracy, he 
 
 says : — 
 
 ' Ye would 
 Make ripe that harvest, fill that winepress full, 
 Which now not fifty years from this, ye know, 
 Dolcino thought to reap and tread, and bring 
 Equal and simple rule of right again 
 Among us called by Christ's name here on earth — 
 And how he died remembering, inch from inch 
 Rent living with red iron, and his bride 
 Burnt limb "from limb before his eyes.' 
 
 The first three acts have plenty of 
 dramatic movement, but the fourth and 
 fifth are practically a monologue on the 
 part of the Doge, broken by the chant of 
 the monks as he waits for the striking of 
 
Marino Faliero 121 
 
 the bell of St Mark's, which is to be the 
 signal of the uprising, by the words of the 
 Senate when his revolution has fallen into 
 dust, and again by the monks' Latin hymn 
 as he waits for the noonday of his execution. 
 Here are a few lines from the latter part of 
 that superb soliloquy : — 
 
 ' Seven years since 
 Mine old good friend Petrarca should have died. 
 He thought, for utter heartbreak, and he lives, 
 And fills men's ears and souls with sweeter song 
 Than sprang of sweeter seasons : yet is grief 
 Surely less bearable than death, which comes 
 As sure as sleep on all. We deem that man 
 Of men most miserably tormented, who 
 Being fain to sleep can sleep not : tyrants find 
 No torture in their torturous armoury 
 So merciless in masterdom as this, 
 To hold men's lids aye waking : and on mine 
 What now shall fall but slumber ? Yet once more. 
 If God or man would grant me this, which yet. 
 Perchance, is but a boy's wish, fain I would 
 Set sail and die at sea : for half an hoiw. 
 If so much length of life be left me, breathe 
 The wind that breathes the wave's breath and rejoice 
 Less even in blithe remembrance of the blast 
 That blew my sail to battle, and that sang 
 Triumph when conquest lit me home like fire — 
 Yea, less in very victory, could it shine 
 
12 2 Swinburne 
 
 Again about me — less than in the pride, 
 The freedom, and the sovereign sense of joy. 
 Given of the sea's pure presence . . . 
 
 . . . Come, 
 Bring me but toward the landing whence my soul 
 Sets sail, and bid God speed her forth to sea.' 
 
 One may doubt whether these splendid 
 hnes, which have the sentiment or inspiration 
 of the North Sea and the Atlantic rather 
 than of the tideless Adriatic drifting between 
 the Venetian houses, idling along the Lido, 
 are quite applicable, but their beauty and 
 nobility are beyond all question. The 
 violence of Faliero in the first scene of the 
 second act is somewhat harsh, but in all 
 other respects the entire poem is harmonious. 
 It is a masterpiece of literature. 
 
 The rhymed tragedy of Locrine partakes, 
 Locrine, by virtue of its complicated metres, 
 1887. rather of the nature of an amuse- 
 ment than of that of a serious piece of 
 work. Its fundamental idea seems to have 
 
Locrine 123 
 
 been that a play could be written in different 
 varieties of rhymed metre without losing all 
 significance as a work of art. The idea 
 could hardly have occurred to any other than 
 Swinburne, and assuredly it could not have 
 brought forth so good a fruit if fostered and 
 tended by any other hands. Indeed, the 
 subleties of the rhymes seem well adapted 
 to the retelling of the ancient legend of 
 Sabrina, and the whole play is graceful 
 and charming. The love of Locrine for 
 Estrild his 'Scythian concubine,' 'a 
 strange-haired woman with sad singing 
 lips,' * and for his daughter Sabrina is simply 
 and delicately told, while the jealousy of 
 Guendolen, the lawful wife, the villainy of 
 Camber and the boyish prowess of Madan, 
 are equally well delineated. 
 
 The first scene of the first act is written in 
 the ordinary heroic couplets : the rhymes of 
 the entire second scene are strung together 
 on the plan of the sonnet The system of 
 the second scene of the second act is the 
 ottava rima familiarised here by the use of it 
 
 * Chastelard, iiL i. 
 
1 24 Switiburne 
 
 by Byron in his Don Jtian. The first scene 
 of the third act is written in the metre used 
 in the poet's Laus Veneris, but with each 
 third line giving the principal rhymes for the 
 following stanza after the fashion of the 
 terza riina. The second scene of the fourth 
 act is in terza rima proper. The concluding 
 scene of the fifth act returns to the heroic 
 couplet. The nomenclature and mysteries 
 of the other scenes may be left to the curious 
 reader. 
 
 Hampered in this fashion by a deliberately 
 complicated method of writing, it is not sur- 
 prising that the play, poetic and well wrought 
 though it is, does not rise to any great height 
 of inspiration or music. The most surprising 
 thing about it is that under such trying cir- 
 cumstances it should be so well put together 
 and readable, although a further proof of the 
 poet's versatility and ability in handling 
 metrical difficulties is not in itself a matter 
 for astonishment. The play does not lend 
 itself to quotation. 
 
Poems and Ballads 125 
 
 There is a curious contrast between the 
 
 Poems and first and third series of the volumes 
 
 ■nSdSeries, labelled Poems and Ballads. After 
 
 1889. a lapse of twenty-three years, the 
 singer of abnormal loves has become the 
 lyrist of infantine charms, the republican 
 poet celebrates the success of a limited 
 monarchy, the erewhile wanderer in the 
 Horselberg and on Lesbian promontories 
 pens a Ballad of Bath, Yet the critic is 
 unwary who judges from these things that 
 the fire which inspired the earlier works is 
 extinct or dying : witness the righteously- 
 indignant lines with which the poet de- 
 nounced the infamy of Russian Government 
 once more laid bare in a recent account 
 of Siberia. 
 
 The two longest poems in this book, The 
 Commonweal and The Armada, were written 
 in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary 
 of the Queen's accession to the throne and 
 of the three-hundredth anniversary of the 
 sea-victory known best by the title of the 
 poem just mentioned. 
 
 The sanity of the Commonweal is refreshing 
 
126 Swinburne 
 
 to those who are a little Aveary of Swin- 
 burne's diatribes concerning the Third 
 Napoleon, Victor Hugo and the French 
 Republic in general. In fact, even the 
 most ardent of republicans must find the 
 French Republic of to-day a somewhat 
 irritating proUgde ; and there are signs that 
 Swinburne's constant affection for that scold- 
 ing mistress has grown thinner. The France 
 that was 'glorious and blood-red, fair with 
 dust of battle and deaths of kings ' can now 
 hardly seem from any political point of 
 view other than a withered and wrinkled 
 harridan given to screaming from toothless 
 jaws incapable of biting. ' Not wholly vile ' 
 is the only compliment he is able now to 
 pay that unfortunate land whose misfortunes 
 are of her own seeking. But even in 1887, 
 in the dark period of English internal dis- 
 sension, Swinburne celebrated the event of 
 the year in pure and stately verse. 
 
 ■ Eight hundred years and twenty-one 
 Have shone and sunken since the land 
 Whose name is freedom bore such brand 
 
Poems and Ballads 127 
 
 As marks a captive and the sun 
 Beheld her fettered hand. 
 
 But ere dark time had shed as rain 
 Or sown on sterile earth as seed 
 That bears no fruit save tare and weed 
 
 An age and half an age again, 
 She rose on Runnymede.' 
 
 It is worth remembering that it is a 
 republican, and not a royaHst, who traces 
 lightly here the record of 'earth's lordliest 
 Commonweal' during the fifty years 
 
 ' Since in a maiden's hand the sign 
 Of empire that no seas confine 
 First as a star to seaward shone.' 
 
 The hope of universal peace with .which 
 the record began ended in ' war upon war, 
 change after change ' : and yet the hope of 
 man's progress remains. 
 
 ' As from some Alpine watch-tower's portal 
 Night, living yet, looks forth for dawn, 
 So from Time's mistier mountain lawn 
 The spirit of man, in trust immortal. 
 Yearns toward a hope withdrawn.' 
 
 From what poet has England heard such 
 
128 Swinburne 
 
 divine words of praise as these ? Assuredly 
 from none of her recent doggerel rhymsters. 
 
 ' The sea divine as heaven and deathless 
 Is hers, and none but only she 
 Hath learnt the sea's word, none but we 
 Her children hear in heart the breathless 
 Bright watchword of the sea. 
 
 Each hour that sees the sunset's crest 
 Make bright thy shores ere day decline 
 Sees dawn the sun on shores of thine, 
 
 Sees west as east and east as west 
 On thee their sovereign shine. 
 
 The sea's own heart must needs wax proud 
 To have borne the world a child like thee. 
 What birth of earth might ever be 
 
 Thy sister? Time, a wandering cloud, 
 Is sunshine on thy sea.' 
 
 The long poem — magnificent in spite of 
 its defects — which in the following year ac- 
 claimed the anniversary of the Armada, 
 would, in my humble view, have been yet 
 more magnificent if Its writer had exercised 
 a little more restraint upon his religious 
 animosities. In a poem such as this, a 
 certain deference to the demands of popu- 
 larity is advantageous. A ballad on the 
 
Poems and Ballads 129 
 
 Armada which might have been learnt by 
 schoolboys and recited in public would 
 have been a priceless gift. But it is to be 
 feared that the chance of writing a poem 
 which would have supplanted Macaulay's 
 fragment in the hearts of schoolboys was 
 lost by Swinburne ; nor can it be said that 
 in this poem is the blood kindled and the 
 ears enthralled as they are by Tennyson 
 from the first to the last notes of his 
 superb ballad of The Revenge. 
 
 The atmosphere of the Elizabethan period 
 as it has been learnt by English boys from 
 Macaulay, and from Kingsley in Westward 
 Ho! and from many a less distinguished 
 romance, is curiously lacking here. To the 
 average schoolboy the Papist of such 
 stories is inevitably a traitor or a coward : 
 it is only later that he thinks — if he has 
 not given up thinking — of the possibility 
 of prejudice. But the continual references 
 to the Papist's God in this poem, in 
 voluminous sarcasm, are unlikely to amuse 
 the schoolboy, and, for myself, seem weari- 
 some and out of place. It is the sea-fight 
 
1 30 Swinburne 
 
 that we want, and not a theological diatribe. 
 A single verse would have disposed of the 
 religious side of the Armada. To a blatant 
 Protestant this voluble blasphemy of the 
 Romish Church might perchance be pleas- 
 ing : to a blatant Atheist, certainly. But to 
 a critic without a leaning toward any 
 particular religion or irreligion it appears 
 singularly unpleasant and ill-advised, and 
 does suggest the utterance of the question 
 whether the Protestant deity of Elizabethan 
 England was a much kindlier or more tolerant 
 being than that of the Spanish Church. 
 
 A far sweeter note is touched in the 
 quiet verses which follow addressed To a 
 Seamew. 
 
 ' When I had wings, my brother. 
 Such wings were mine as thine : 
 
 Such hfe my heart remembers 
 
 In all as wild Septembers 
 
 As this when life seems other, 
 
 Though sweet, than once was mine ; 
 
 When I had wings, my brother. 
 Such wings were mine as thine.' 
 
 The consideration of this poem naturally 
 induces a comparison between it and the two 
 
Poems and Ballads 131 
 
 famous odes of Shelley and Keats. The 
 buoyant, exquisite melodies of the Ode to a 
 Skylark, fresh and clear and bright as a 
 stream of water bubbling down a mountain- 
 side in the sun, the rich, undertoned har- 
 monies of the Ode to a Nightingale, are not 
 matched by the less spontaneous and less 
 ambitious music of Swinburne's rhymes. 
 Yet as Shelley has identified himself with 
 his lark, and the thought of Keats simul- 
 taneously recalls his 'light-winged Dryad,' so 
 has Swinburne joined his poetry to the flight 
 of the stronger and broader-winged bird. 
 
 ' For you the storm sounds only 
 
 More notes of more delight 
 Than earth's in sunniest weather ; 
 When heaven and sea together 
 Join strengths against the lonely 
 
 Lost bark borne down by night, 
 For you the storm sounds only 
 
 More notes of more dehght' 
 
 As Shelley sighed for the gladness which 
 inspired the overflowing rapture of the lark's 
 song, as Keats desired the forgetfulness of 
 the world's weariness and fever, so the later 
 
132 Swinburne 
 
 poet craves for the unlimited freedom of the 
 sea-bird's flight. 
 
 ' But thine and thou, my brother, 
 Keep heart and wing more high 
 
 Than aught may scare or sunder ; 
 
 The waves whose throats are thunder 
 
 Fall hurtling each on other 
 And triumph as they die ; 
 
 But thine and thou, my brother, 
 Keep heart and wing more high. 
 
 Ah, well were I for ever, 
 
 Wouldst thou change lives with me, 
 
 And take my song's wild honey, 
 
 And give me back thy sunny 
 
 Wide eyes that weary never, 
 And wings that search the sea ; 
 
 Ah, well were I for ever, 
 
 Wouldst thou change lives with me.' 
 
 The rigorous restrictions of the metre 
 chosen are obviously prejudicial to the 
 chance of the poem rivalling the spon- 
 taneous freedom of Shelley's lyric, or the 
 easier capacity of Keats's ode ; and in verses 
 not quoted here there is a frequent strain 
 to adapt the words to the rhymes. The 
 poem possesses neither the marvellous 
 
Poems and Ballads 133 
 
 melody of Shelley nor the wonderfully 
 felicitous phrasing of Keats ; but however 
 much may be found wanting in the poem 
 when compared with two such masterpieces 
 of art, undoubtedly for sincerity and sweet- 
 ness of utterance it must be held to be no 
 unworthy companion to the earlier odes. 
 
 To pass over the many delightful poems 
 in the volume — the verses to babies, sea- 
 songs and memorial verses — without more 
 mention than the title of the poem called 
 Neaptide, is necessary in order to arrive the 
 sooner at those in which the poet has 
 achieved an unusual pathos. Of the nine 
 poems in which he has gone back to the 
 style and dialect of the old Border ballads, 
 there are three which seem to me to be 
 perfect in pathos — A Jacobites Farewell, A 
 Jacobite's Exile, and The Tyneside Widow. 
 The Jacobites Farewell must be quoted in 
 its entirety, 
 
 ' There's nae mair lands to tyne, my dear, 
 And nae mair lives to gie : 
 Though a man think sair to live nae mair, 
 There's but one day to die. 
 
1 34 Swinburne 
 
 For a' things come and a' days gane 
 
 What needs ye rend your hair ? 
 But kiss me till the morn's morrow, 
 
 Then I'll kiss ye nae main 
 
 O lands are lost and life's losing 
 
 And what were they to gie ? 
 Fu' mony a man gives all he can, 
 
 But nae man else gives ye. 
 
 Our king wons over the sea's water. 
 
 And I in prison sair : 
 But I'll win out the mom's morrow, 
 
 And ye'll see me nae mair.' 
 
 It would be difficult, I should imagine, to 
 produce from any literature a poem of 
 sixteen lines of such utter perfection of 
 noble pathos. The home-sickness of Tke 
 Jacobites Exile is touched by an equally 
 sympathetic hand, and the yearning of the 
 exile as we read seems almost sadder than 
 the quieter despair of the condemned 
 prisoner. How utterly true are the touches 
 of local colour, the love of well-known names 
 that seem almost strange in a strange land ! 
 
 ' On Aikenshaw the sun bhnks braw, 
 The burn rins blithe and fain : 
 There's nought wi' me I wadna gie 
 To look thereon again. 
 
Poems and Ballads 1 3 5 
 
 On Keilder-side the wind blaws wide : 
 
 There sounds nae hunting horn 
 That rings sae sweet as the winds that beat 
 
 Round banks where Tyne is born. 
 
 But O gin I were there again, 
 
 Afar ayont the faem, 
 Cauld and dead in the sweet saft bed 
 
 That haps my sires at hame ! 
 
 AVe'U see nae mair the sea-banks fair, 
 And the sweet grey gleaming sky, 
 
 And the lordly strand of Northumberland, 
 And the goodly towers thereby. 
 
 And none shall know but the winds that blow 
 The graves wherein we lie.' 
 
 But however pathetic these poems may 
 seem, The Tyneside Widow is the only one 
 of the three, and indeed of all Swinburne's 
 poems, which could not well be read aloud 
 without bringing tears to the eyes of the 
 reader and his hearers. The desolation of 
 the widow, for whom the happiness of * a ' 
 lovers ' and the brightness of the ' sma' 
 flowers' serve but to increase her sorrow, 
 with her ' bairn down in the mools ' and ' the 
 father under the faem,' is too human and 
 
136 , Swinburne 
 
 pitiful for any other sympathy than tears. 
 The growing passion of the poem, the 
 bitterness of happy things, are lost if it be 
 not read as a whole, but it is better to tran- 
 scribe four verses than to quote not at all. 
 
 ' The bairn down in the mools, my dear, 
 O saft and saft lies she ; 
 I would the mools were ower my head, 
 And the young bairn fast wi' me, my love, 
 And the young bairn fast wi' me. 
 
 The father under the faem, my dear, 
 
 O sound and sound sleeps he ; 
 I would the faem were ower my face, 
 
 And the father lay by me, my love, 
 
 And the father lay by me. 
 
 We were weel fain of love, my dear, 
 
 fain and fain were we ; 
 
 It was weel with a' the weary world. 
 But O, sae weel wi' me, my love. 
 But O, sae weel wi' me. 
 
 We were nane ower mony to sleep, my dear, 
 
 1 wot we were but three ; 
 
 And never a bed in the weary world 
 
 For my bairn and my dear and me, my love, 
 For my bairn and my dear and me.' 
 
 If the third series of Poems and Ballads is 
 
The Sisters 137 
 
 not a match for its forerunners, the world 
 would have been the poorer for its loss — 
 and of how many books can we say the 
 same thing? The Commonweal has an 
 interest outside the circle of eternal art, 
 but the three last poems I have mentioned 
 possess as high an artistic value as any 
 of Swinburne's earlier poems and a thou- 
 sand times more pathetic charm of sorrow. 
 
 After an interval of three years the poet 
 The Sisters, Startled an unsuspecting world with 
 
 1892. ^]^g publication of The Sisters, a 
 play dealing with a love-tragedy in polite 
 society at the beginning of this century. 
 One may go far to seek for the reasons 
 which prompted the poet of Chastelard to 
 write and publish this domestic tragedy. 
 Possibly the wish to produce something in 
 a new manner, the weariness of a settled 
 style, had something to do with the matter. 
 Certainly the poet could not have written 
 in a manner much more unlike his usual 
 
138 Swinburne 
 
 manner, in a spirit less like his usual spirit. 
 At first sight the play looks like a burlesque 
 of Tennyson's early utterances, for here we 
 have two model English baronets for Tenny- 
 son's one, and two young men and two young 
 women who talk of dressing for dinner, the 
 library and the dinner-bell. But the play is 
 not a burlesque. It is a serious attempt to 
 write a tragedy in modern manners. So 
 anxious, indeed, has the writer been not 
 to exceed the limits of ordinary speech 
 that the actual tragedy of the play falls 
 flat, but much of the dialogue has a spice 
 of interest or amusement. If any judicious 
 relative in the early days of Swinburne's 
 existence ever expressed the hope con- 
 cerning the productions of a young poet 
 — ' deep in bloodshed ' — uttered by one of 
 the model baronets of this play, 
 
 ' Let us trust 
 That happiness and age may make his Muse 
 Milder,' 
 
 his faith in an almighty Providence has un- 
 doubtedly been justified. There was surely 
 
The Sisters 139 
 
 nothing in the world more improbable in 
 1865 than that the author of Poems and 
 Ballads should some thirty years later 
 write a play largely imbued with school- 
 boy slang done into five-foot lines of this 
 kind. 
 
 Anne 
 
 You stupid pair of schoolboys ! Really, Frank, 
 You should not let him. 
 
 Frank 
 
 / can't lick him, Anne ; 
 We two — or you alone — might manage. 
 
 Anne 
 
 Why, 
 The grooms must know he should not mount a horse 
 Yet. 
 
 Reginald 
 
 Would you never have me ride again 
 Because last year I got a fall ? 
 
 Anne 
 
 Appeal 
 To Mabel. 
 
 Reginald 
 
 She was always hard on me. 
 
 Mabel 
 Always. 
 
140 Swinburne 
 
 It is only fair to say that these are not 
 the best lines in the book, but they are not 
 the worst. The first love scene between 
 Reginald and Mabel is even more por- 
 tentous. Of course the Swinburne that 
 we know appears occasionally — in the de- 
 scription of a pansy-bed, in a tirade con- 
 cerning Wellington and Napoleon, in a 
 glimpse of the Northumbrian moors and 
 
 burns. 
 
 ' Bright and tawny, full of fun 
 And storm and sunlight, taking change and chance 
 With laugh on laugh of triumph — why, you know 
 How they plunge, pause, chafe, chide across the rocks 
 And chuckle along the rapids, till they breathe 
 And rest and pant and build some bright deep bath 
 For happy boys to dive in, and swim up. 
 And match the water's laughter.' 
 
 The swift, black tragedy of the interlude 
 — the play within a play like that of Hamlet 
 — rises for a moment to a more poetic style 
 than that of its setting, but the final lines 
 of the book which kill off two — if not three 
 — of the actual characters collapse into a 
 prostration of language incompatible even 
 with domestic tragedy. 
 
The Sisters 141 
 
 The play, however, considered as a whole, 
 is not unamusing. It is not perhaps easy to 
 admit the possibility of a reference in 18 16 
 to Wordsworth by the young cornet or 
 lieutenant — whatever his title may be — who 
 bears the name of Reginald, although the 
 
 point of his remark 
 
 ' Dear Anne, 
 Don't you say " Frenchmen say" — say " Frenchmen lie," 
 
 is even more obvious in 1900 than in 18 16. 
 Nor is it possible altogether to sympathise 
 with the writer in regretting — or in regret- 
 ting that one never experienced 
 
 ' Redgie's old familiar friend, the birch. 
 With all its blithe, lithe bounty of buds and sprays 
 For hapless boys to wince at, and grow red. 
 And feel a tingling memory prick their skins — 
 Sting till their burning blood seems all one blush,' 
 
 with the same pathetic wistfulness of re- 
 membrance as seems to possess these lines. 
 The Sisters cannot be regarded as any- 
 thing but the recreation of an idle hour of 
 its author, but as such it has certainly a 
 claim on the attention of his readers. 
 
142 Swinburne 
 
 To speak at the present time of patriotic 
 Astrophei, poetry is to call up a painful vision 
 1894. Qj. remembrance of various and 
 variously hideous attempts at verse much 
 acclaimed by an illiterate populace. To say 
 that any expression of Swinburne's on any 
 political subject is of considerably more 
 literary value than such stuff as fires the 
 audience of a music-hall with enthusiasm is 
 to say a totally unnecessary thing. But it 
 is undoubtedly gratifying to find the true 
 laureate of English poetry inspired with the 
 same impulse that fills even such doggerel 
 and its hearers with a proper sense of the 
 place of England among the nations. It is 
 not to Swinburne that the friends of dis- 
 union and dismemberment, the worshippers 
 of cowardice and treachery, may look for 
 help. There was not much hope, perhaps, 
 in 1894, when this book was published, of 
 the overwhelming sense of duty to England 
 which has since awakened and spread over 
 an empire. But in the title-poem of this 
 book, written 'after reading Sir Philip 
 Sidney's Arcadia,' the poet wrote thus. 
 
Astrophel and Other Poems 1 43 
 
 addressing the memory of ' Sidney, lord of 
 the stainless sword ' : — 
 
 ' But England, enmeshed and benetted 
 
 With spiritless villainies round. 
 With counsels of cowardice fretted, 
 
 With trammels of treason enwound, 
 Is yet, though the season be other 
 
 Than wept and rejoiced over thee. 
 Thine England, thy lover, thy mother. 
 
 Sublime as the sea.' 
 
 In so black a season as that which 
 followed the end of the reign of the dema- 
 gogue whose energies were devoted to the 
 internal disruption of Great Britain and to 
 the external dishonour of her name, such a 
 hope as is expressed in the verses just 
 quoted, such a faith as shines in the lines 
 below, from a poem entitled England, An 
 Ode, seem almost heroic. 
 
 ' All our past acclaims our future : Shakespeare's voice 
 and Nelson's hand, 
 Milton's faith and Wordsworth's trust in this our chosen 
 
 and chainless land, 
 Bear us witness : come the world against her, England 
 yet shall stand.' 
 
 It is not necessary to add the comment 
 
1 44 Swiiiburne 
 
 that since these lines were written the 
 witness has been borne. 
 
 I n the poem A Nympholept — one of 
 the finest of his later poems — the writer 
 has gone back to and caught the spirit of 
 paganism, weaving into his words the terror 
 of the forests under a midsummer noon 
 visited by the strange and terrible god, 
 Pan, the rapture of the ' splendour of 
 silence,' the ' delight of the perfect hour,' 
 the perfume of earth under the ' naked 
 noon,' the ' fearful charm of the strong 
 sun,' the fear that turns to delight, the 
 rapture that changes to the dread of the 
 'supreme dim godhead, perceived by the 
 soul and conceived of the sense,' the vision 
 of a form and a face, obscure and golden, 
 growing great as the waxing moon, whose 
 eyes ' embolden fear till it change to desire, 
 and desire to delight.' 
 
 For sustained music" and passion of utter- 
 ance, this poem stands among the best 
 of Swinburne's dramatic lyrics. His vision 
 of nature as shown in this poem is not 
 that of a modern, but that of an early 
 
Astrophel and Othei'- Poems 145 
 
 Greek poet. Such a poet as Wordsworth, 
 
 who seeks sermons in stones, has another 
 
 view of nature than that of the speaker 
 
 of this poem, who calls on 'the gods 
 
 hard by,' 
 
 ' The divine dim powers 
 ■Whose likeness is here at hand, in the breathless air. 
 In the pulseless peace of the fervid and silent flowers. 
 In the faint sweet speech of the waters that whisper 
 there.' 
 
 Which of the two comes nearer to the 
 great heart of nature is a matter for dis- 
 cussion elsewhere than in these pages. 
 
 There is nothing in the rest of the book 
 so fine as the Nympholept. Such poems 
 as On the South Coast or Loch Torridon, 
 records of sea-side holidays, or An Autumn 
 Vision, a tribute to Shakespeare's genius, 
 included in a description of a marvellous 
 sunset above a sullen sea, have a personal 
 interest as well as the interest evoked by 
 a study of their metrical achievements, but 
 otherwise fall only into the second or third 
 rank of Swinburne's poems. In his tribute 
 to the memory of Grace Darling the poet 
 
 K 
 
146 Swinburne 
 
 has a subject close to his heart. For the 
 rest, the book comprises a number of 
 elegiac poems to the memory of dead 
 friends such as Sir Richard Burton, Philip 
 Marston, William Bell Scott and Theodore 
 de Banville — or of dead poets such as 
 Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson. 
 
 In one of the poems to Burton there is 
 some fine word-painting of the ' wild and 
 woful land' of Auvergne. 
 
 ' The huddled churches chnging on the cliffs 
 As birds alighting for a storm's sake cling, 
 Moored to the rocks as tempest-harried skiffs 
 To perilous refuge from the loud wind's wing ; 
 
 The stairs on stairs that wind and change and climb 
 Even up to the utmost crag's edge curved and 
 curled.' 
 
 The dexterous verses To a Cat are in a 
 lighter tune than usual, recalling the gracility 
 of Hugo and the love of Gautier for his long- 
 haired friends. 
 
The Tale of Balen 147 
 
 In the Tale of Balen the poet has again 
 „. _ , , chosen a narrative subject, but in 
 
 The Tale of _ •' 
 
 Balen, treating it somewhat in the manner 
 of a lyric he has avoided the 
 opportunity afforded of falHng into the pro- 
 lixity of certain passages of his Tristram. 
 The choice of metre is a singular choice 
 for a narrative poem ; it is that of Rossetti's 
 Burden of Nineveh, but the poet has given 
 it lightness and grace by dropping a single 
 line from the second half of the stanza. 
 
 ' Along the wandering ways of Tyne, 
 By beech and birch and thorn that shine 
 And laugh when life's requickening wine 
 Makes night and noon and dawn divine 
 
 And stirs in all the veins of spring, 
 And past the brightening banks of Tees 
 He rode as one that hears and sees 
 A sun more blithe, a merrier breeze, 
 
 A life that hails him king.' 
 
 This little artifice gives to the entire 
 poem of two hundred and sixty odd stanzas 
 an easy lightness and swing of movement. 
 The poem, perhaps owing to its similarity of 
 metre, suggests The Lady of Shalott, but 
 
148 Swinburne 
 
 it possesses none of the mincing preciosity 
 of Tennyson's shorter and lighter poem. 
 
 The last volume of verse published by 
 
 Rosamund, Swinburne up to the present time 
 
 L(wS)ards^ is the dramatic poem called Rosa- 
 
 1899. mund. Queen of the Lombards, 
 
 founded on a story from Gibbon, which 
 
 is too recent to call for further comment 
 
 in this place. 
 
THE PROSE WORKS 
 
THE PROSE WORKS 
 
 To be acquainted only with the poetic 
 works of Swinburne is to be acquainted 
 with but one half of his genius. In his 
 poetry we find the singer of emotion and 
 exaltation, but in his prose we find also 
 the scholar and the critic. He has limited 
 his capacity of learning and judgment to 
 the province of poetr)^ but within that 
 province — and it is a wide one — his breadth 
 of knowledge is pre-eminent. To a com- 
 plete knowledge of Greek, Latin, French 
 and English poetry he has added a strength 
 and suppleness of style, a command over 
 language, equal to that of his verse. If 
 his poetry had never seen the light of day, 
 his critical studies would have given him 
 an enduring place among English prose- 
 
152 Swinburne 
 
 writers. His prose is as distinct from all 
 other prose as is his poetry. His style is 
 unmistakable, and has varied, with his de- 
 velopment, from the elaborate, pyrotechnic 
 word-colouring of Essays and Studies to the 
 more serviceable manner of the later Mis- 
 cellanies. His criticism is emotional, and 
 his views on men and things have in the 
 course of his literary career undergone very 
 violent changes. But in considering the 
 mass of his critical work, it may be said 
 without exaggeration that a more lucid 
 critic, one with clearer insight and stronger 
 power of expression of his opinions, has 
 never lived. If any earlier English poet 
 has been gifted with so fine a critical faculty 
 as this, he has not used it : and one may 
 doubt whether any critic of any literature 
 has possessed so wide a knowledge, so 
 strong a memory, or so keen an intuition as 
 Swinburne. 
 
Notes on Poems and Reviews 153 
 
 His first piece of prose, after the publica- 
 Noteson tion of the Httle story Dead Love 
 
 SZ^*^ (1S64)' ^^i'^h ^^s been already 
 1866. mentioned, was polemical rather 
 than critical. The production of the Poems 
 and Ballads provoked a frantic outcry on 
 the part of the virtuous English press, to 
 which the poet, at the request of his pub- 
 lisher, made a brief and scornful rejoinder 
 in a pamphlet entitled .Notes on Poems 
 and Reviews. The pamphlet, which is out 
 of print, cries for reissue. The style of it 
 is excellent, and it makes a singularly lucid 
 commentary on the methods and intentions 
 of the book of poems. To those reviewers 
 who attacked him as though for a personal 
 utterance he replied : — 
 
 ' The book is dramatic, many-faced, 
 multifarious ; and no utterance of enjoyment 
 or despair can properly be assumed as the 
 assertion of its author's personal feeling or 
 faith.' 
 
 Without relaxing the contemptuous atti- 
 tude of the artist and seer for the ephemeral 
 journalist, the writer explains the birth of 
 
1 54 Swinburne 
 
 such poems as Anactoria, Laus Veneris and 
 Dolores, adding that he did not write for the 
 young person, and asserting the right of the 
 artist to a full expression of his art. 
 
 In 1868 the critic produced a volume of 
 
 waiiara prose, which I believe is also out 
 
 Blake, of print, concerning William Blake, 
 
 the mystic poet and draughtsman. 
 
 The book contained reproductions of some 
 
 of Blake's designs. 
 
 The volume called Under the Microscope, 
 Under the "^"^ °^ great rarity, was designed 
 Microscope, 33 a reply to certain critics of 
 Swinburne and Rossetti, including 
 Mr Robert Buchanan, who had attacked his 
 betters, under the pseudonym of Thomas 
 Maitland, in an article entitled ' The Fleshly 
 School of Poetry,' and a certain Mr Austin 
 who may possibly be identifiable with the 
 present Poet Laureate. The book, which 
 
Essays and Studies 155 
 
 is of some length, contains also a note on 
 Whitman and Byron. 
 
 The poet's first volume of general literary 
 Essays and criticism, the Essays and Studies, a 
 Studies, collection of seven years' work, was 
 published in 1875. It contains some 
 of the finest and most beautiful prose in our 
 language. At times, with all due deference, 
 I cannot but think that in the expression of 
 momentary or permanent loves and dislikes 
 he has in this and subsequent volumes 
 allowed himself to be carried out of the 
 proper depths of criticism. To express an 
 admiration or hatred is one thing ; to indulge 
 excessively in such expression is another. It 
 is possible that Louis Napoleon was the 
 most criminal of Frenchmen, it is possible 
 that Victor Hugo was the greatest of French 
 poets and the sincerest of patriots, but the 
 average English reader grows somewhat 
 restless and resentful under as much expatia- 
 tion upon their virtues and crimes as the 
 
1 56 Swinburne 
 
 critic gives us. The sincerity of the critic's 
 admiration for Hugo is not questionable, nor 
 is it fitting for one with insufficient know- 
 ledge to question its foundation. For 
 myself, however, I may confess that having 
 followed from boyhood the critical lead of 
 Swinburne, I have found disappointment but 
 twice — in his judgment of Hugo and Landor. 
 In their cases he has, so it seems, been 
 compelled by his own admiration and by the 
 growing indifference of others to an undue 
 celebration of their causes. The volume of 
 Essays and Studies commences with two 
 essays on two books of Hugo — L' Homme 
 Qui Rit and L'Ann^e Terrible — and the last 
 prose book published of Swinburne's closes 
 with an account of Hugo's posthumous Toute 
 La Lyre. Landor has not intruded so much 
 into Swinburne's prose. The admiration of 
 Swinburne for Hugo and for such a book as 
 n Homme Qui Rit is perhaps less astonish- 
 ing than the splendour of words with which 
 he has clothed that admiration and which 
 render our disappointment doubly sharp as we 
 turn from his words to the thing written of. 
 
Essays and Studies 157 
 
 How disappointing it is, for instance, to 
 turn from such a piece of splendid prose 
 as includes the sentence which follows to 
 the unspeakable female who figures in the 
 book just named as La Titane ! 
 
 'We seem to hear about her the beat 
 and clash of the terrible timbrels, the music 
 that Aeschylus set to verse, the music that 
 made mad, the upper notes of the psalm 
 shrill and strong as a sea-wind, the bull- 
 voiced, bellowing under-song of those dread 
 choristers from somewhere out of sight, the 
 tempest of tambourines giving back thunder 
 to the thunder, the fury of divine lust that 
 thickened with human blood the hill-streams 
 of Cithaeron.' 
 
 However short a distance one may be 
 able to follow the admiration of Swinburne 
 for Hugo, one must be glad that the ad- 
 miration has given the critic an oppor- 
 tunity for such speech as this. 
 
 To Hugo the poet has been continuously 
 faithful, but in many things, as we find from 
 a study of his consecutive works, he has 
 found it necessary to change his views. 
 
158 Swinburne 
 
 The value of his critical opinion has in- 
 creased with years, but his judgment at 
 any time is valuable enough. The only 
 claim which he would care to put up on 
 behalf of the Essays and Studies, he writes, 
 is ' That they give frank and full expression 
 to what were, at the time of writing, -my 
 sincere and deliberate opinions. ... I 
 have desired above all things to avoid 
 narrowness and dogmatism. . . . My chief 
 aim, as my chief pleasure in all such studies 
 as these, has been rather to acknowledge 
 and applaud what I found noble and precious 
 than to scrutinise or to stigmatise what I 
 might perceive to be worthless and base.' 
 
 This laudable desire to praise has, how- 
 ever, led the critic upon ground where it 
 is difficult for many to follow him. The 
 praise of the long and beautiful essay, for 
 example, upon, the poems of Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti in Essays and Studies seems some- 
 what exalted for the subject. The writer 
 is intoxicated with his own power over 
 words, and scatters them broadcast like 
 jewels, oblivious in the delight of colour- 
 
Essays and Studies 1 59 
 
 ing sentences of his duty as a critic. Who 
 would have thought that some pages like 
 this could have been begotten by the con- 
 templation of the sonnet-sequence of the 
 House of Life ? — 
 
 ' For something of these they must have 
 to bring with them who would follow the 
 radiant track of this verse through brakes 
 of flowers and solitudes of sunlight, past 
 fountains hidden under green bloom of 
 leaves, beneath roof- work of moving boughs 
 where song and silence are one music. All 
 passion and regret and strenuous hope and 
 fiery contemplation, all beauty and glory of 
 thought and vision, are built into this golden 
 house where the life that reigns is love ; the 
 very face of sorrow is not cold or withered, 
 but has the breath of heaven between its 
 fresh live lips and the light of pure sweet 
 blood in its cheeks ; there is a glow of 
 summer on the red leaves of its regrets 
 and the starry frost-flakes of its tears . . .' 
 
 This is a prose new to English ears, even 
 though it wears a resemblance to that of 
 Jeremy Taylor in its exalted eloquence, its 
 
1 60 Swinburne 
 
 pictorial colouring. Here is a marvellous 
 sentence which could have been written 
 by no man but Swinburne: — 
 
 ' The song of Lilith has all the beauty 
 and glory and force in it of the splendid 
 creature so long worshipped of men as 
 god or dreaded as devil ; the voluptuous 
 swiftness and strength, the supreme luxury 
 of liberty in its measured grace and lithe, 
 melodious motion of rapid and revolving 
 harmony ; the subtle action and majestic 
 recoil, the mysterious charm as of sound- 
 less music that hangs about a serpent as 
 it stirs or springs.' 
 
 The sentence coils and uncoils its long 
 length as a snake may be presumed to 
 do. 
 
 The essay on Matthew Arnolds New 
 Poems (1876) includes a criticism of the 
 critical — or rather the uncritical — essays of 
 that poet which is completed in the note 
 on Wordsworth and Byron in the Mis- 
 cellanies. The perfect politeness of Swin- 
 burne's demolition of the uncritical positions 
 thrown up by the poet who was transformed 
 
Essays and Studies i6i 
 
 by the combined atmosphere of Rugby and 
 Oxford into the likeness of a perfect prig 
 is as amusing as it is subtle. But to the 
 beauty of the best , of Arnold's poems he 
 pays a tribute as just as it is picturesque. 
 
 ' His poetry is a pure temple, a white 
 flower of marble, unfretted without by in- 
 tricate and grotesque traceries, unvexed 
 within by fumes of shaken censers or 
 intoning of hoarse choristers ; large and 
 clear and cool, with many chapels in it 
 and outer courts, full of quiet and of music. 
 ... In each court or chapel there is a 
 fresh fragrance of early mountain flowers 
 which bring with them the wind and the 
 sun and a sense of space and growth, all 
 of them born in high places, washed and 
 waved by upper airs and rains. Into each 
 alike there falls on us as we turn a conscious- 
 ness of calm beauty, of cool and noble repose, 
 of majestic work under melodious and lofty 
 laws. ' 
 
 The Notes on the Text of Shelley are 
 for the most part what they purport to be, 
 but the essay includes stray fragments of 
 
1 62 Swinburne 
 
 criticism and an interesting paragraph on 
 the character of Count Cenci. 
 
 The essay on Byron in this book has 
 been followed by a practical recantation on 
 the part of its writer. The ear of Swinburne 
 could not at any time have listened patiently 
 to a Byron's ' feeble and faulty sense of 
 metre,' but his impression at the date of 
 this early essay that Byron ' rarely wrote 
 anything worthless ' and that he possessed 
 ' the excellence of sincerity and strength ' 
 was not an impression that remained long 
 in his mind. The essay, however, for all 
 its half-hearted attempt at panegyric, and 
 the unreason of the statement that the 
 'ancient name' of Byron would have been 
 an impediment to 'a less strong man,' has 
 a saner air of critical justice than the invec- 
 tive of the later article on the same subject. 
 
 The essay on John Ford is the precursor 
 of the series of studies of the Elizabethan 
 dramatists which make up a considerable 
 portion of Swinburne's work in prose. His 
 critical instinct has never been more acute 
 and true than when he has written of the 
 
Essays and Studies 163 
 
 old dramatists. He has taken up the task 
 of exposition of their work where Lamb 
 left it. He has indeed made them so much 
 his own, he has written so fully and finely 
 of their triumphs, with so wide a knowledge, 
 so perfect a critical instinct, that one might 
 be liable to forget that the very discovery 
 of the ancient worthies was due to the 
 servant of the East India Company. To 
 the ever-sweet and noble memory of Charles 
 Lamb Swinburne has paid due tribute, 
 and in amplifying the labour of love of his 
 forerunner he has acknowledged the debt 
 owed by all lovers of our literature to the 
 discoverer and first critic of the Eliza- 
 bethans. He has brought to the task not 
 a finer sense of criticism than Lamb, since 
 that were an impossibility, but he has 
 brought an ampler language and leisure, 
 and naturally the more indulgent hearing 
 which has been accorded to the critic with 
 so superb a record of poetic work than was 
 given to the unknown compiler of selec- 
 tions from the dramatic poets, has allowed 
 him greater liberty of space and freedom of 
 
1 64 Swinburne 
 
 speech. No more vivid instance of Swin- 
 burne's critical faculty could well be chosen 
 than the violent tirade in which he indulges 
 in this essay with regard to Ford's play 
 called Love's Sacrifice. The incident which 
 is also the central motive of the play and 
 here attracts the fiery anathematisation of 
 the critic, is one which would not evoke 
 from the majority of readers more than 
 an incredulous shrus: or a lausfh. But the 
 inartistic ugliness of it is to the acuter 
 critic an absolute pain and worthy of a 
 furious damnation. 
 
 The brief note on Coleridge is confined 
 to a criticism of his verse, ' fluctuant and 
 moonstruck as the sea is.' To his Kubla 
 Khan, ' perhaps the most wonderful of all 
 poems,' the critic gives his preference, 
 Christabel and the Ancient Mariner, 
 to borrow a metaphor, coming in second 
 and third among the few competitors 
 started in the race for the laurel-crown by 
 that victim of opium and philosophy. 
 
 The two essays which conclude the 
 volume — Notes on Designs of The Old 
 
George Chapman 165 
 
 Masters at Florence and Some Pictures of 
 1868 — exhibit the critic's interest in an alien 
 art. In them he has attempted no pseudo- 
 critical jargon of technical qualities : he 
 has rather attempted to transfer into words 
 the effect of designs and paintings seen in 
 Florence and London, with excellent 
 success. The verbal colouring of the 
 essays bring the pictures clearly before 
 one's eyes. 
 
 In the same year as Essays and Studies 
 George ^^ Writer also published a critical 
 Chapman, article on George Chapman, the 
 Elizabethan dramatist and trans- 
 lator of Homer who brought such delight 
 to the heart of Keats. 
 
 The Note on Charlotte Bronte (1877) is 
 self-explanatory and calls only for 
 
 Note on _ '^ -' ^ 
 
 Charlotte a brief comment here as practically 
 ron e, i 77. ^^ g^^^. gyj(jgf,(,g shown by the 
 
 poet of an interest in another field of literary 
 
1 66 Swinburne 
 
 art than his own. Since then he has given 
 other proofs of that interest in articles on 
 Emily Bronte, Charles Reade and Wilkie 
 Collins appearing in volumes referred to 
 later on. 
 
 The Study of Shakespeare (1880) is not 
 A study of °"^y '^^ ^^'^^y satisfactory study of 
 Shakespeare, the manner and style of Shake- 
 speare which has seen the light, 
 but it shows the critic at his best both as a 
 perfect scholiast and an able interpreter. 
 An easy guide to Shakespeare it assuredly 
 is not. It is probably the most difficult 
 of commentaries to follow with a proper 
 understanding. It demands for full ap- 
 preciation not only a more intimate ac- 
 quaintance with Shakespeare than is usual 
 among readers unblessed with leisure or 
 a retentive memory, but also a sound know- 
 ledge of the other dramatists of the time. 
 The design of the book, he writes, ' Is 
 to examine by internal evidence alone the 
 
A Study of Shakespeare 167 
 
 growth and the expression of spirit and of 
 speech, the ebb and flow of thought and 
 style, discernible in the successive periods 
 of Shakespeare's work.' 
 
 These periods he divides into three : the 
 Lyric and Fantastic, the Comic and Historic, 
 the Tragic and Romantic : the plays being 
 placed in a sequence not determined by 
 tradition or date of publication, but by the 
 critical judgment of their order of production, 
 after tracing and verifying ' the various 
 shades and gradations of this progress, the 
 ebb and flow of alternate influences, the 
 delicate and infinite subtleties of change 
 and growth discernible in the spirit and 
 the speech of the greatest among poets.' 
 
 The commentary which accompanies this 
 flowery path, tracing the gradual develop- 
 ment of Shakespeare from the first discover- 
 able touches of his hand in Titus Andronicus 
 and King Henry VI., Part /., through the 
 historical plays and the comedies, to the 
 tragedies and to the final romantic poems 
 of The Tempest, the Winters Tale and 
 Cymbeline, is rich in thought and scholarship. 
 
1 68 Swinburtu 
 
 Assuredly none who have read and inwardly 
 digested this volume can turn again to the 
 actual words of Shakespeare without a sense 
 of awakened appreciation, a keener insight, 
 a stronger pleasure of understanding. If 
 that is not the clearest proof of critical 
 ability, the only aim and purpose of a 
 critic, what is? 
 
 It is to be hoped that some future editor 
 of Shakespeare may follow the arrangement 
 of the plays here laid down, and include 
 in his edition not only the Arden of Fever- 
 sham, which it is ' not pardonable merely, 
 nor permissible, but simply logical and 
 reasonable to set down ... a young man's 
 work on the face of it, as the possible 
 work of no man's youthful hand but 
 Shakespeare's,' and the The Two Noble 
 Kinsmen, the joint work of Shakespeare and 
 Fletcher, which is omitted even now from 
 the majority of editions. 
 
 In his note on the character of Hamlet, 
 the critic disagrees with those who would 
 make irresolution the ' signal characteristic ' 
 of the Prince of Denmark. 
 
A Study of Shakespeare 169 
 
 ' The signal characteristic of Hamlet's 
 inmost nature is by no means irresolution, 
 or hesitation, or any. form of weakness, but 
 rather the strong conflux of contending 
 forces.* That during four whole acts 
 Hamlet cannot or does not make up his 
 mind to any direct and deliberate action 
 against his uncle is true enough ; true, 
 also, we may say, that Hamlet had some- 
 what more of mind than another man to 
 make up, and might properly want some- 
 what more time than might another man 
 to do it in ; but not, I venture to say in 
 spite of Goethe, through innate inadequacy 
 to his task and unconquerable weakness of 
 will ; not, I venture to think in spite of 
 Hugo, through immedicable scepticism of 
 the spirit and irremediable propensity to 
 nebulous intellectual refinement' 
 
 The critic disclaims any intention of in- 
 truding upon the sacred ground of ' Gigadibs 
 
 * This is a curious slip of the pen, and perhaps the only loosely- 
 constructed sentence in the whole of Swinburne. The meaning, 
 taken with the context, is clear, but surely the writer overlooked the 
 fact that a strong conflux of contending forces cannot be a character- 
 istic of anyone's nature. 
 
1 70 Swinburne 
 
 and the Germans,' of proving his perception 
 of any point in the character of Hamlet 
 'unseized by the Germans yet,' but his 
 reasoning that Hamlet's irresolution was 
 due neither to 'half heartedness or doubt' 
 or, may it be added, madness, is worthy 
 of Teutonic or any other consideration. 
 
 Of King Lear, he writes : — 
 
 'It is by far the most Aeschylean of his 
 works ; the most elemental and primaeval, 
 the most oceanic and Titanic in conception. 
 . . . We look upward and downward, and 
 in vain, into the deepest things of nature, 
 into the highest things of Providence ; to 
 the roots of life, and to the stars ; from 
 the roots that no God waters to the stars 
 which give no man light ; over a world 
 full of death and life without resting-place 
 or guidance. But in one main point it 
 differs radically from the work and the 
 spirit of Aeschylus. Its fatalism is of a 
 darker and harder nature. . . . Here is no 
 need of the Eumenides, children of night 
 everlasting; for here is very Night indeed.' 
 
 In his judgment of lago, however, that 
 
A Study of Shakespeare 1 7 1 
 
 ' most potent demi-devil,' the critic's re- 
 finement upon the phrase of Coleridge 
 concerning ' lago's motiveless malignity ' is 
 unfortunately not exempt from a suspicion 
 that its super-sublety is to a large extent 
 due to the wish to include a sneer at Carlyle. 
 
 ' Malignant as he is, the very subtlest and 
 strongest component of his complex nature 
 is not even malignity. It is the instinct of 
 what Mr Carlyle would call an inarticulate 
 poet. . . . He has within him a sense or 
 conscience of power incomparable, and the 
 power shall not be left, in Hamlet's phrase, 
 "to fust in him unused.'" 
 
 But, putting aside this momentary doubt, 
 the ' closer than common scrutiny ' which 
 the writer has given to ' this subtlest and 
 strangest work of Shakespeare's ' goes deep 
 into the abysmal darkness of lago's mind. 
 
 In choosing almost at haphazard a few 
 passages which suggest quotation, I have 
 been compelled to pass over many pages of 
 this luminous and delightful book not less 
 worthy of a complete and rapturous study. 
 To do more than point to the writer's sym- 
 
172 Swinburne 
 
 pathetic and humorous ' appreciation ' of 
 Falstaff, his splendid rescue of the fat 
 knight from the clumsy clutches of Victor 
 Hugo ; his notes on Othello and Cleopatra ; 
 his acute criticism of Tke Two Noble Kins- 
 men, dividing line by line the work of 
 Fletcher from the work of Shakespeare ; 
 his final ' salute of all my love ' to ' the play 
 of plays which is Cymbeline,' is unfortun- 
 ately impossible. 
 
 I must add, however, to this too brief 
 notice of the volume, the quotation of a few 
 of its last words, not only for their own 
 beauty, but as a warning to those who may 
 deem in their ignorance that the vision of 
 this poet is limited to the Faustines and 
 Felises of his early verses. 
 
 'The passion of Posthumus is noble and 
 potent the poison of lachimo ; Cymbeline 
 has enough for Shakespeare's present pur- 
 pose of " the king-becoming graces " ; but we 
 think first and last of her who was "truest 
 speaker" and those who "called her brother, 
 when she was but their sister; she them 
 brothers, when they were so indeed." The 
 
A Study of Victor Hugo 173 
 
 very crown and flower of all her father's 
 daughters — I do not speak here of her 
 human father, but her divine — the woman 
 above all Shakespeare's women is Imogen. 
 As in Cleopatra we found the incarnate 
 sex, the women everlasting, so in Imogen 
 we find half glorified already the immortal 
 godhead of womanhood. I would fain have 
 some honey in my words at parting — with 
 Shakespeare never, but for ever with these 
 notes on Shakespeare ; and I am therefore 
 something more than fain to close my book 
 upon the name of the woman best beloved 
 in all the world of song and all the tide of 
 time — upon the name of Shakespeare's 
 Imogen.' 
 
 In 1886 two prose volumes of Swinburne 
 
 A study of ^^^ ^^^ \\^\.: one, A Study of 
 
 Victor Victor Hugo, a comprehensive 
 
 Hugo, 1886. • - 1 1 r 1 
 
 critical study 01 the poetic 
 achievements of the French poet ; the 
 other, a large and heterogeneous collection 
 
1 74 Swinburne 
 
 of critical essays bound together under the 
 title of Miscellanies. 
 
 The latter volume contains critical work 
 Miscei- as fine as any which has been ac- 
 lanies, 1886. complished by Swinburne. There 
 is perhaps no beauty in the book like the 
 beauty of the prose in Essays and Studies, 
 no passage in it which, apart from its critical 
 interest, can be quoted for the sake of its 
 style or colour as an example of prose as 
 beautiful as verse. But it is a riper, 
 stronger, wiser book than its predecessor, 
 the Essays and Studies. From the Mis- 
 cellanies one derives the impression even 
 of a certain geniality, although such pas- 
 sages as might be selected for examples of 
 the writer's humour are on the face of them 
 filled with a savage irony. A kindly 
 humour, a tolerant appreciation of less 
 gifted or less fortunate workmen than him- 
 self, a grace of humanity, are things not 
 to be looked for in Swinburne. As 
 
Miscellanies 175 
 
 Shelley's skylark was an unbodied joy, 
 he is an unbodied intellect subject to con- 
 tinual irritation. The irritation is generally 
 shared by his reader until he has by repeated 
 reading accustomed himself to the strange 
 atmosphere. 
 
 To attempt to condense the magnificent 
 utterance of this volume would be an im- 
 possible task. The simple attempt to write 
 a few pages of exposition is as ungracious 
 a labour as would be an attempt to explain 
 from a pailful of water what is the likeness 
 of the sea. There are few names in the 
 poetic literature of the world not mentioned 
 in this volume, and so illuminated by a 
 phrase, a page or a paragraph. 
 
 The verbal violence of much of the writ- 
 ing is not infrequently jarring, but on the 
 other side of it we have to place such ap- 
 preciative kindliness of good feeling as for 
 instance pervades the Notes on Charles 
 Lamb and George Wither. It is generally 
 with astonishment that one discovers the 
 admiration of Swinburne for a man and a 
 spirit so dissimilar as Charles Lamb. And 
 
176 Swinburne 
 
 yet his phrase that, 'All men worthy to 
 know him would seem always to have loved 
 him in proportion to their worthiness,' is as 
 true regarding Lamb's posthumous lovers as 
 his actual friends. 
 
 ' For all who love him the charm of that 
 companionship is alike indefinable and in- 
 comparable. It pervades his work as with 
 an odour of sweet old-world flowers or spices 
 long laid by among fine linens and rare 
 brocades in some such old oaken or cedarn 
 cabinet as his grandmother might have 
 opened to rejoice the wondering senses of 
 her boyish visitor at " Blakesmoor."" 
 
 Of the contents of the volume — the Short 
 Notes on English Poets — Chaucer, Milton 
 and Spenser — which are shorter than one 
 might wish, the Century of English Poetry 
 which illuminates the period of Pope and 
 Dryden, the short articles on Congreve, 
 Collins, Landor and Emily Bronte, the 
 review of the novels of Charles Reade, the 
 two notes on the French minor poet, 
 Auguste Vacquerie, the historical sketch of 
 Mary Queen of Scots, the appendices con- 
 
Miscellanies 177 
 
 cerning an unknown play of Dryden and 
 the character of Mary Stuart — what can be 
 said but that every line — save perhaps those 
 of the notes on Vacquerie — -is worthy of 
 study ? Here and there one may dare to 
 disagree on a debatable point, but there is 
 surely none who would dispute the brilliance 
 of learning, of analysis, of expression shown 
 in this mighty volume of criticism. 
 
 The essays on Wordsworth and Byron 
 and on Tennyson and Mussel, as they are 
 the longest are also the most noticeable. 
 The attack on the literary and moral char- 
 acter of Byron is one of the most astonishing 
 things in the English language. Goaded 
 apparently into a state resembling frenzy 
 by the foolish laudations of Matthew Arnold, 
 the critic has set himself the task of de- 
 molishing the position of Byron both as a 
 poet and a man. Perhaps the only thing 
 one can say of this sustained onslaught is 
 that it is too overwhelming for its subject. 
 It creates a tempest when a puff of derision 
 would have been sufficient. The praise of 
 Matthew Arnold was sufficient to damn 
 
 M 
 
1 78 Swinburne 
 
 Byron to all eternity : the attack of Swin- 
 burne serves to make one wonder whether 
 there might not be something in Byron 
 after all which necessitated the extent of 
 this battle array. The demolition of Byron 
 cis a poet is complete enough, however. Of 
 Byron's really strong point, the 'province 
 outside the proper domain of absolute 
 poetry' in which he 'was supreme — a king 
 by truly divine right' — the critic has written 
 with full appreciation, if only by way of 
 emphasising Byron's failure to be suzerain 
 or anything else of importance in a more 
 artistic kingdom. But apart from its critical 
 value the article is an astounding piece of 
 invective which stands almost alone in the 
 world of criticism, and as a piece of magni- 
 ficent writing stands far above the only 
 article which approaches it as a matter of 
 critical invective — Macaulay's essay on 
 Montgomery. With the writer's attack on 
 Byron as a poet we may cordially agree, 
 but his references to Byron as a man rouse 
 a certain feeling of resentment. Whatever 
 his faults may have been, Byron who died 
 
Miscellanies 179 
 
 at Missolonghi will always remain in our 
 minds as a man by the side of the dreamer 
 Shelley, the pedant Wordsworth and the 
 sophist Coleridge. Assuredly neither Byron 
 nor Keats can be taunted with the fault of 
 unmanliness if certain phases of the life 
 of Shelley are insisted on in as hostile a 
 manner as Swinburne insists on the faults 
 of these contemporaries of the author of 
 Epipsychidion. 
 
 To return, however, to the essay. I have 
 space only for the quotation of a few 
 sentences by way of exemplifying the 
 method of the writing. 
 
 'The most remarkable point, in his 'pre- 
 tentious and restless egotism is that a man 
 capable of writing such bad verse should 
 ever have been capable of seeing, even in 
 part, how very bad it was ; . how very 
 hollow were its claims ; how very ignorant, 
 impudent and foolish, was the rabble rout 
 of its adorers. . . . On taking up a fairly 
 good version of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage 
 in French or Italian prose, a reader whose 
 eyes and ears are not hopelessly sealed 
 
1 80 Swinburne 
 
 against all distinction of good from bad in 
 rhythm or in style will infallibly be struck 
 by the vast improvement which the text 
 has undergone in the course of translation. 
 The blundering, floundering, lumbering and 
 stumbling stanzas, transmuted into prose and 
 transfigured into grammar, reveal the real 
 and latent force of rhetorical energy that is 
 in them : the gasping, ranting, broken- 
 winded verse has been transformed into 
 really effective and fluent oratory. A 
 ranter, of course, it is whose accents we 
 hear in alternate moan and bellow from 
 the trampled platform of theatrical mis- 
 anthropy : but he rants no longer out of 
 tune. ... Of Shakespeare he always wrote 
 and spoke as the author of the vilest and 
 most pretentious dramatic abortions ever 
 misbegotten by dulness upon vanity, or by 
 egotism upon envy, might naturally have 
 been expected to speak. ... His lava 
 kisses and his baby earthquakes ; his walls 
 which have scalps and pinnacle those scalps 
 (was ever such jolter-headed jargon heard 
 before, from Bedlam or Parnassus ?) in cloud 
 
Miscellanies 1 8 1 
 
 less thick than the confusion of such a chaos 
 of false images ; his stormy nights that are 
 lovely in their strength as is — of all things 
 on earth — the light of a woman's dark eye, 
 or a dark eye in woman ; his day that 
 dies like a dolphin ; his " grocer's shop kept 
 by one Nightingale," as Landor ingeniously 
 expounded the long, insoluble conundrum 
 with which the Bride of Abydos confronts 
 all comers on the threshold . . . his ramp- 
 ing renegades and clattering corsairs . . . 
 vulgar and violent resources of rant and 
 cant and glare and splash and splutter . . . 
 this is not the broken gallop of rough vigour ; 
 it is the sickly stumble of drivelling debility 
 . . . his drawling, draggle-tailed drab of a 
 muse, lynx, the screaming wry-neck . . .' 
 etc., etc. 
 
 ' Here be words,' which we are not 
 accustomed to meet in the general run of 
 critical essays. To cut out of their context, 
 as I have done, short phrases and sentences 
 is no doubt unfair to their author, but in 
 no other way can one glean a few straws 
 from this wide field of rhetorical invec- 
 
t82 Swinburne 
 
 tive by way of illustration of its entire 
 likeness. 
 
 It is noticeable that in the very midst 
 of his furious attack, the writer has time 
 to devote a page or two to the almost 
 forgotten memory of Crabbe, 'the simple 
 old provincial clergyman whose homespun 
 habit of obsolete and conventional style is 
 the covering of a rarer pathos and a riper 
 humour ' than Byron's. 
 
 The remainder of the essay is devoted 
 to a swift but searching study of Words- 
 worth, in prose as serious and fine as the 
 earlier part of the essay was volcanic. I 
 can quote but one passage, a good example 
 of the critic's illuminant powers of phrase. 
 
 ' There is nothing outside Aeschylus so 
 Aeschylean as the magnificent and daring 
 accuracy of the single epithet which brings 
 before us a whole charge of storming 
 breakers as they crowd and crash upon 
 each other. No type has ever so well 
 represented, none could possibly represent 
 so well, the furious confusion and the 
 headlong pressure of their onset, as that 
 
Miscellanies 183 
 
 one word which makes us hear and see, 
 across wind and hghtning, the very sound 
 and lilceness of the "trampHng waves."' 
 
 To Swinburne it is 'the subUmity of 
 tenderness ' which is Wordsworth's ' distinc- 
 tive and crowning quality.' One might 
 have thought rather that it was his occa- 
 sional and, as it were, almost accidental 
 capacity for making language 'fall into 
 folds of faultless verse' which would have 
 elicited the critic's highest admiration. Be 
 that as it may, here at least is a sober 
 and scholarly study of Wordsworth, not by 
 any means blind to his faults or deaf to 
 his crimes in the manner of the professed 
 Wordsworthians, but simply just and un- 
 prejudiced and full of noble praise where 
 it is due. 
 
 The article on Tennyson and Mtisset com- 
 mences with the memorable and hysterical 
 panegyric of the Rizpah of the former 
 poet. I say 'hysterical' since it can be 
 given to few if any to share the emotion 
 of this critic on the first reading of Rizpah, 
 to experience ' the actual and intolerable 
 
1 84 Swinburne 
 
 anguish, the terror that here darkens and 
 condenses into sheer physical pain and 
 horror . . . the pang of piercing and dread- 
 ful compassion which cleaves as it were 
 the very core of " the spirit of sense " 
 asunder.' 
 
 Tragic and pathetic as the poem is, it 
 can rarely produce an emotion as deep as 
 that portrayed in the words just quoted, 
 even upon a reader anxious to pluck the 
 agony of these words from the poem itself. 
 
 Of the apparent fact that there ever was 
 •a hotly-contested question of poetic pre- 
 cedence between Alfred Tennyson and 
 Alfred de Musset ' I am glad to own my- 
 self ignorant. To Swinburne's statement 
 that ' Four lines of Rizpah, placed in one 
 scale of the balance of judgment, would send 
 all the loveliest verse of Musset flying up 
 in the other, to kick the beam and vanish,' 
 might be well added the opinion that any 
 four lines of Tennyson, Gautier or Baude- 
 laire would produce the same effect. It 
 was surely some reminiscence of the early 
 influence of Musset on 'the innocent mind 
 
Miscellanies 185 
 
 of ingenuous youth ' which prompted the 
 author of this essay to his extraordinary 
 kindness towards the memory of the author 
 of Namouna. If the 'moral tone' of 
 Tennyson as regards the relationship of 
 his men and women is not over-lofty, what 
 can be said of such productions as Rolla or 
 the Confessions ? The charge of prurience 
 against the author of Mile, de Maupin 
 may be debatable : but against Musset it is 
 palpably true. His morality, artistically or 
 literally considered, is that of the valet of 
 the author of Don Juan. 
 
 But if the critic is unreasonably kind to 
 Musset, he is here somewhat ungracious to 
 Tennyson. The brief and — as he acknow- 
 ledges — inexhaustive estimate of Tennyson 
 in this essay is not among the most accept- 
 able of Swinburne's opinions. It is doubt- 
 less more difficult to appreciate one's co- 
 equals and contemporaries, even for the 
 least prejudiced of critics, than those who 
 are beyond the discords of the present. 
 But if Swinburne has not perhaps done 
 justice to the late Laureate's work taken in 
 
1 86 Swinburne 
 
 the bulk, he has given to stray portions of 
 it praise and to spare. 
 
 With a quotation of such a passage of 
 praise, I must end this inadequate note of 
 a volume which is beyond criticism and 
 beyond any praise but mute admiration of 
 its strength, its learning and its style. The 
 passage which follows recalls the earlier 
 beauty of Swinburne's prose with an added 
 power or sweep of expression. 
 
 ' Many years ago, as I have always re- 
 membered, on the appearance of the first 
 four Idylls of the King, one of the 
 greatest painters now living pointed out to 
 me, with a brief word of rapturous admira- 
 tion, the wonderful breadth of beauty and 
 the perfect force of truth in a single verse 
 of Elaine — 
 
 " And white sails flying on a yellow sea.'' 
 
 I could not but feel conscious at once of 
 its charm and of the equally certain fact 
 that I, though cradled and reared beside 
 the sea, had never seen anything like 
 that. But on the first bright day I ever 
 
A Study of Ben Jonson 187 
 
 spent on the eastern coast of England 
 I saw the truth of this touch at once. . . . 
 There on the dull, yellow, foamless floor 
 of dense, discoloured sea, so thick with 
 clotted sand that the water looked massive 
 and solid as the shore, the white sails 
 flashed whiter against it and along it as 
 they fled. . . . But he must have learned 
 the more splendid lesson of the terrors 
 and the glories of the Channel before he 
 caught the finest image ever given in his 
 verse — the likeness of a wave "green- 
 glimmering from its summit — " 
 
 '"With all ' 
 Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies." . . . ' 
 
 The volume devoted to the study of 
 
 A study of ^^^ Jonson's life-work is as just, 
 
 Ben Jonson, illuminant and thorough as the 
 
 book on Shakespeare. The critic's 
 
 estimate of Jonson is summed up in the first 
 
 three sentences of the book — excellent 
 
1 88 Swinburne 
 
 examples in themselves of the writer's 
 methods of critical comparison. 
 
 ' If poets may be divided into two ex- 
 haustive but not exclusive classes — the gods 
 of harmony and creation, the giants of 
 energy and invention- — the supremacy of 
 Shakespeare among the gods of English 
 verse is not more unquestionable than the 
 supremacy of Jonson among the giants. 
 Shakespeare himself stands no higher above 
 Milton and Shelley than Jonson above 
 Dryden and Byron. Beside the towering 
 fiofure of this Enceladus, the stature of 
 Dryden seems but that of an ordinary 
 man, the stature of Byron — who indeed 
 can only be classed among the giants by 
 a somewhat licentious or audacious use of 
 metaphor — seems little higher than a 
 dwarfs.' 
 
 Apart from the actual criticism of Jonson's 
 plays, masques, poems and essays, the book 
 has not, for a reader unacquainted with 
 its subject, that interest which is possessed 
 by the Essays and Studies or Miscellanies. 
 One might, I think, read these volumes 
 
A Study of Ben Jonson 189 
 
 with interest and some appreciation with- 
 out having a full understanding of the 
 matters involved. This would not be the 
 case with the present book. It is only 
 now and again that such a passage as 
 that quoted appears, whilst the epigram 
 that 'a worse translator than Ben Jonson 
 never committed a double outrage on two 
 languages at once ' stands alone. 
 
 To the work by which Ben Jonson is 
 best remembered the writer has done 
 ample justice, perhaps even at too great 
 a length. His comedies and his verses 
 are known to all possible readers of these 
 lines. But Jonson's Discoveries, his brief 
 essays or obiter dicta, are less known. 
 Swinburne, in an article occupying a 
 third of this volume, places them above 
 Bacon's essays 'in truth of insight, in 
 breadth of views, in vigour of reflection 
 and in concision of eloquence.' To myself 
 they appear to be the equal of Bacon's 
 in one point — dulness. That is a matter 
 which may be well put down to one's 
 own want of intelligence, and it certainly 
 
1 90 Swinburne 
 
 does seem to one such unintelligent reader 
 that Montaigne— a writer, I believe, never 
 mentioned by Swinburne — is a more read- 
 able essayist than either Bacon or Jonson. 
 But when we have a sentence or two of 
 Jonson's containing undoubtedly a worthy 
 if questionable opinion, 'that no great 
 work, or worthy of praise or memory, but 
 came out of poor cradles,' thrust upon us 
 with these words, ' There are few finer 
 passages than that in Landor ; in other 
 words there can be few passages as fine 
 in any third writer of English prose,' then 
 the most humble of readers turns at last, and 
 would suggest that in the matter of English 
 prose, neither Jonson nor Landor have been 
 at any time worthy of the pleasure of un- 
 loosing the latchet of the shoes of that 
 obscure doctor of Norwich who wrote on 
 Urn-Burial and was named Sir Thomas 
 Browne. 
 
Studies in Prose and Poetry 191 
 
 The volume entitled Studies in Prose and 
 studies in Poetry, published eight years after 
 
 PoTtnT Miscellanies, a similar volume con- 
 
 1894- taining ten short essays on general 
 
 literary subjects and eight articles on the 
 
 subject of Hugo's posthumous works, is a 
 
 slighter book than its forerunner. 
 
 There is much in the book which is, at 
 first, exasperating to a degree not attained 
 by a perusal of Radical newspapers or 
 'literary' journals. In the essay on The 
 Journal of Sir Walter Scott, for instance, 
 the critic has wish to accentuate the 
 character of Sir Walter by a reference to 
 the ' abject unmanliness ' of Keats. The 
 usual tone adopted by Swinburne in writing 
 of that great and unfortunate poet is singu- 
 larly prejudiced, and is very curious after 
 his own sonnets on the subject of the 
 publication of the love-letters of John 
 Keats.* The author of the Ode to a 
 Nightingale, unfortunate as he was in his 
 brief life, has been equally unfortunate in 
 his posthumous admirers and editors, but 
 
 * ' A Midsummer Holiday.' In Sepulcretis. 
 
192 Szvinburne 
 
 that a man of so high a literary position 
 as Swinburne can stoop so far as to moralise 
 above the grave of Keats is incomprehen- 
 sible. Assuredly there is no one from whom 
 one would have less expected such a thing. 
 One resents it less on behalf of Keats than 
 on behalf of one's admiration of Swinburne. 
 And when, per contra, we are asked to 
 admire the character of Sir Walter Scott, 
 we are sorely tempted to admit nothing in 
 Scott that might not appear in the character 
 of any blatantly prosperous bourgeois who 
 was honest enough when he got into 
 difficulties to attempt the payment of his 
 debts. But save for such moments as 
 these, the essay is pleasant, kindly and 
 sympathetic, and would almost persuade 
 one to attempt the task of reading the 
 Waverley novels. The expression of his 
 opinions is a thing the critic has always 
 allowed himself in full measure, and one 
 hesitates to accuse him of indulgence in 
 paradox, yet when we light on such a 
 sentence as this, it has at first sight almost 
 the savour of a paradox : — 
 
Studies in Prose and Poetry 193 
 
 'The more we know of Byron and Bona- 
 parte, the lower do they lie in the estimate 
 of sane and honest men ; the more we know 
 of Wellington and Scott, the higher do they 
 stand and the clearer do they shine.' 
 
 Of course it is the moral character of 
 each man that is referred to, but the point 
 of view is curiously paradoxical. 
 
 The recollections of Professor Jowett are 
 interesting, but their interest lies more in 
 the writer's reminiscences of himself than 
 in those which relate solely to the translator 
 of Plato. The fact that the ' physical 
 energy' with which Jowett would 'press 
 up a hill-side or mountain-side — ^^Malvern or 
 Schehallion — was very agreeable and admir- 
 ' able to witness,' is amusing to the fancy of 
 the portly pedagogue striving to keep pace 
 with his younger and lighter-limbed com- 
 panion. The brief references to Tintagel 
 and St Michael's Mount and ' The unique 
 and incomparable sublimity of loveliness 
 which distinguishes the serpentine rocks 
 and cliffs and slopes and platforms of 
 of Kynance Cove from any other possible 
 
 N 
 
1 94 Swinburne 
 
 presentation of an earthly paradise' are 
 charming enough, but all too brief. 
 
 The little personal confession that Swin- 
 burne once took part with Jowett in editing 
 a ' Child's Bible ' is quaintly curious, but 
 not surprising if we remember the poet's 
 evident familiarity with the 'Scriptures.' 
 
 There is much that is charming, and a 
 little that is annoying, in these two essays, 
 but their charms and irritations must be 
 left to the reader. The following notes 
 on Webster and Herrick sin only in their 
 brevity. The essay on Beaumont- and 
 Fletcher is more exhaustive. The article 
 entitled Social Verse, written round a col- 
 lection of poems of the lighter kind, is — 
 but for one ferocious passage — in the 
 critic's lighter mood and includes (in prose) 
 the only Limerick — so far as I know — 
 printed by Swinburne, which I here tran- 
 scribe into verse. 
 
 ' There was a bad poet named Clough 
 Whom his friends found it useless to pufF, 
 For the public if dull has not quite such a skull 
 As belongs to believers in Clough.' 
 
Studies in Prose and Poetry 195 
 
 The kindliness of the following note on 
 the novels of Wilkie Collins will not, it is 
 to be feared, keep alive in the minds of 
 a later generation the recollection of the 
 novelist. In passing, one may note the 
 mirthful reference to Mr W. S. Gilbert's 
 Engaged. 
 
 ' Belinda and her Belvawney, Cheviot and 
 his Minnie, rise up before the eyes of en- 
 raptured if incredulous fancy, in the light — 
 or should we say limelight ? — of inextin- 
 guishable and Inexpressible laughter.' 
 
 In his note on the American Walt 
 Whitman entitled Whitmania, the writer 
 has given perhaps too much prominence to 
 a wholly futile writer in conferring upon him 
 the honour of a few pages of antagonistic 
 criticism. 
 
 The ironic note entitled Tennyson and 
 Darwin, which establishes the fact that the 
 author of the Origin of Species was also 
 the real author of Maud in a manner as 
 satisfactory and sane as that which proves 
 Bacon to have written the plays of Shake- 
 speare, is amusing. But one cannot help 
 
196 Swinburne 
 
 feeling that the editorial hand which excised 
 from the letter of Miss Celia Hobbes a 
 passage concerning Tennyson in which her 
 language ' becomes — to put it mildly — con- 
 tumelious ' might well have exercised a 
 similar discretion over certain passages of 
 his own work other than this essay. 
 
 In Les Cenci, the chief interest lies in the 
 French prose of the writer. He elaborates 
 a little the study of the character of Count 
 Cenci portrayed in the tragedy of Shelley 
 with which we became acquainted in the 
 Essays and Studies. In the graceful and 
 charming French tongue the utterance of 
 Swinburne seems harder and harsher than 
 in English, while the distinguishing qualities 
 of his style disappear. 
 
 An inability to appreciate properly the 
 enthusiasm of Swinburne for Hugo does 
 not necessarily detract from the pleasure 
 of following his prose annotations to the 
 French poet. In one passage of the second 
 half of this volume he fills up a space left 
 blank by Hugo in words which make one 
 profoundly thankful for the omission of 
 
Studies in Prose and Poetry 1 97 
 
 Hugo to visit the Lac de Gaube above 
 Cauterets and astonished at the absurd 
 humility of the close of the following 
 sentence : — 
 
 ' The fiery exuberance of flowers among 
 which the salamanders glide like creeping 
 flames, radiant and vivid, up to the skirt 
 of the tragic little pine-wood at whose 
 heart the fathomless lake lies silent, with 
 a dark dull gleam on it as if of half-tarnished 
 steel ; the deliciously keen and exquisite 
 shock of a first plunge under its tempting 
 and threatening surface, more icy cold in 
 spring than the sea in winter ; the ineffable 
 and breathless purity of the clasping water 
 in which it seems to savour of intrusive and 
 profane daring that a swimmer should take 
 his pleasure till warned back by fear of 
 cramp when but half way across the length 
 of it, and doubtful whether his stock of 
 warmth would hold out for a return from 
 the far edge opposite, to which no favour- 
 ing magic can be expected to transport 
 the clothes left behind him on the bank 
 from which he dived ; the sport of catching 
 
198 Swinburne 
 
 and taming a salamander till it became the 
 pleasantest as well as the quaintest of dumb 
 four-footed friends ; the beauty of its purple- 
 black coat of scaled armour inlaid with 
 patches of dead-leaf gold, its shining eyes 
 and its flashing tongue — these things, of 
 which a humbler hand could write at 
 greater length than this, would require 
 such a hand as Hugo's to do them any 
 sort of justice.' 
 
 The extraordinary humility of such a 
 declaration — the writer's sincerity is never 
 a thing admitting of a moment's doubt — 
 is not less extraordinary than his marvellous 
 lapses from prose set in so fine a key to 
 phrases expressive of some patent or latent 
 personal annoyance which are not worth 
 the publicity of print. Thus, for instance, 
 even the last paragraph of the book is 
 disfigured by a startling and apparently 
 uncalled-for reference to certain ' casual 
 trespassers and transgressors who come 
 down to the seaside with a view to 
 indulgence in cockney or in puritan in- 
 decencies.' The point of it is barely 
 
Studies in Prose and Poetry 199 
 
 intelligible, and the ' trespassers ' in question 
 seem to be unidentifiable. Then — after 
 this spasmodic outburst — the book closes 
 with a fine thought, nobly expressed, sug- 
 gested by the abortive efforts of ' a Cowley, 
 a Tupper, an Emerson, a Whitman.' 
 
 ' But there is something which these 
 liberators have somehow failed to attain : 
 there is the sublime liberty of expression, 
 the supreme perfection of utterance, which 
 never has been and never will be attained 
 except by workmen in words (as by work- 
 men in any other more or less plastic 
 material) who can understand, accept, 
 embrace and rejoice in the rules and con- 
 ditions of their art : content in the recog- 
 nition and happy in the acceptance of that 
 immortal and immutable instinct whose 
 impulse is for law, whose passion is for 
 harmony, and whose service is perfect 
 freedom. ' 
 
EPILOGUE 
 
 I HAVE reached at last the limit of my 
 labour of analysis or exposition of the mass 
 of the prose and poetic works of the greatest 
 living English poet, and in looking back 
 over what I have written I feel only that 
 I have left unsaid one half of that which 
 ought to have been said. My best hope 
 in closing these pages is that I may have 
 made clearer for a few a path through the 
 flowery underwoods of the poet's many and 
 great achievements. 
 
 That Swinburne is the greatest poet or 
 the greatest dramatist England has known 
 is not a proposition I wish to put forward 
 or should care to uphold. He himself who 
 has written so well of Shakespeare would 
 be the first to condemn such an opinion. 
 But that he is the greatest artist in poetic 
 
Epilogtie 20 1 
 
 utterance who has written in the English 
 tongue is an opinion I am anxious to 
 maintain. I do not say that the music 
 of Milton's verse has not a deeper tone, 
 that Shelley has not a sweeter and keener 
 melody, that phrases of Wordsworth or 
 Keats do not go deeper to one's inmost 
 understanding; but this I do say that no 
 English writer has had a wider knowledge 
 of the involutions of literary craftsmanship 
 — a more extensive empire over the world 
 of verbal expression. He stands promin- 
 ently among the world's inventors of 
 metres for lyrical utterance. He has not 
 achieved so great a work as the unknown 
 inventor of the hexameter or as Marlowe, 
 the creator of blank verse. He has not 
 invented a form to match the sonnet in 
 popularity. But as an inventor of rhythms 
 and forms as incapable of others' use as his 
 own music is inimitable he stands alone. 
 One of his principal achievements of course 
 has been his adaptation of the anapaest 
 to the English tongue, but he has never 
 used any metre in earlier or ordinary use 
 
202 Swinburne 
 
 without developing new qualities in it, 
 without showing of what further change 
 of beauty it was capable. The melody of 
 his lyrical speech is equalled only by two 
 English poets — by Shelley and by Cole- 
 ridge. And yet not even Shelley has 
 surpassed the continuity and strength of 
 the music of the Triumph of Titne or the 
 verses to Whitman, while of Coleridge's 
 best work there are but a few pages. Of 
 the sea and the sea-wind he has written 
 as has no other poet from the beginning 
 of the world whose works have come down 
 to us, and for a book of love-poems what 
 shall one place beside the Poems and 
 Ballads? The dominant emotion of all 
 his work is a delight in existence ; in his 
 early work the delight of erotic emotion, 
 in his later work the delight of action, as 
 portrayed in Tristram or the plays, and 
 the delight of the wind and sea and 
 liberty. 
 
 At the close of the century, when it 
 seems as if the day of poetry were also 
 drawing to its end, the comparison of the 
 
Epilogue 203 
 
 one great poet who remains with those 
 who have gone before inevitably arises — 
 the comparison of Swinburne with Tenny- 
 son and Browning. The delightful and 
 exquisite talents of Rossetti and Arnold 
 can hardly be placed in the same rank as 
 these save only by a wholly unreasonable 
 partisanship and admiration. Considered 
 simply as a master of music and poetic 
 expression Swinburne is undoubtedl)' a 
 greater writer than Tennyson or Browning, 
 and yet the restrained perfection of Tenny- 
 son's style and the warmth ' and depth of 
 Browning's humanity give them again an 
 equal position with him. Each in his 
 best point excels the others : none can, I 
 think, be fairly placed on a higher level 
 than his compeers. Of the three, Tenny- 
 son has the fewest faults. He wrote 
 neither Sordello nor the Song for the 
 Centenary of Walter Savage Landor, but 
 on the other hand he wrote neither Andrea 
 del Sarto nor Atalanta. Browning's techni- 
 cal faults are as many as the stones on 
 the 'pebbled shore.' Swinburne's chief 
 
204 Swinburne 
 
 \ enemy has been his exceptional facility 
 u of utterance and impatience of restraint, 
 which have led him now and again in his 
 later years to a certain verbosity and a 
 habit of repetition of the same phrases and 
 rhymes. In Swinburne one finds never the 
 tranquillity which is found in Tennyson and 
 Browning and in a higher degree in Shake- 
 speare. He has dealt always in emotion, 
 but it is rarely the emotion remembered 
 in tranquillity of Wordsworth's famous 
 phrase. One may read the last words 
 of Othello and be tranquil, absorbed in 
 the manifold wisdom and strength of 
 Shakespeare, but there is little of Swin- 
 , /'burne's work that is not disturbing. He 
 ^ permits no repose to the mind of his reader. 
 With the possible exception of Shelley, 
 he has the most poetic temperament of 
 any English poet, the temperament tradi- 
 tion attributes to the inspired singer — the 
 exaltation of thought and imagination 
 unknown in the crowd of the uninspired. 
 He has done more for the exaltation of 
 poetry and the study of poetry than either 
 
Epilogue 205 
 
 of the other two great poets born in this 
 century, and his influence upon future 
 generations must be greater than theirs. 
 He has carried poetic expression a step 
 further than it had been carried by any 
 writer before him. In the age of Pope 
 and Dryden there was none who dreamed 
 of the possibilities of our language in the 
 hands of a Shelley, and after Shelley none 
 has done more for exploiting the further 
 capacities of metre and rhyme than Swin- 
 burne. For full appreciation one must 
 know him by heart. The subtleties of 
 his music need declamation for the perfect 
 understanding of its beauty. He is no 
 such painter in words as Tennyson. The 
 patience required for the elaboration and 
 condensation of thought and colour which 
 render the work of Tennyson so admir- 
 able is alien to his genius. The tone of 
 the greater part of Swinburne's work is 
 curiously un-English. At the very first 
 sight of his work it is difficult to follow 
 his meaning ; the style seems curiously 
 constructed and involved. The sensation 
 
2o6 Swinburne 
 
 disappears after a time, but at first his 
 language seems one which has to be 
 translated. His genius was ripened under 
 many alien influences — the Latin literature 
 of the decadence, the Greek dramatists and 
 lyrists, the Hebrew prophets, the French 
 medieval scribes and rhymers. In later 
 life, the English side of his temperament 
 is more apparent. 
 
 But here I must take my leave of this 
 book, the fruit of a long desire and of 
 many hours. To write worthily of Swin- 
 burne one needs a command of language 
 equal to his own. That this volume can 
 add one petal or one leaf to his laurel- 
 crown I cannot dare to hope, but if as 
 a 'garland of a day' it may serve to 
 express the gratitude of one recipient for 
 his many gifts, for many delighted hours 
 and days absorbed in the charm of the 
 music and glory of his verse, in the 
 strength and splendour of his prose, its 
 purpose will be served. From any praise 
 or dispraise the object of so much may 
 well turn aside. Of laudation he may 
 
Epilogue 207 
 
 indeed be satiated ; to condemnation in- 
 different. Yet surely of all men should 
 one be most happy who living hears that 
 praise which can die not until the end of 
 time for the creations of his thought and 
 his hand. Upon his finest work time can 
 have no power to destroy, but the grace 
 of strengthening years must enhance its 
 beauty, making eternal that which was 
 born to a temporal world. What new 
 gifts may be given us by a poet who at 
 an age when the most of mankind have 
 achieved their lives, retains the physical 
 and mental vigour of youth we cannot 
 tell, but assuredly no sun rose in so brilliant 
 a dawn and shone through so splendid a 
 noon but set in a yet more glorious array 
 of purple and gold. His highest fame, 
 his highest power upon the world of 
 literature, have perchance not yet been 
 attained, but haply his greatest glory will 
 come with later and unborn generations 
 of men. For surely as long as the blood 
 burns with the ardour of its spring, as 
 long as youth dreams and loves and 
 
2o8 Swinburne 
 
 sorrows and its heart leaps to the sound 
 of the music of metre, as long as the wind 
 lifts the spirit with the exaltation of liberty 
 and life, and the sea circles a land where 
 the English tongue is spoken or read, so 
 long must endure the honour and glory 
 of his fame. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 TITLES OF THE WORKS 
 
 ' The Queen-Mother and Rosamund,' 
 
 i860. 
 
 ' Dead Love,' . 
 
 1S64. 
 
 ' Atalanta in Calydon,' . 
 
 1865. 
 
 ' Chastelard,' . 
 
 1865. 
 
 ' Poems and Ballads ' (I.), 
 
 1 866. 
 
 ' Notes on Poems and Reviews,' 
 
 1866. 
 
 'WUliam Blake,' 
 
 1868. 
 
 ' Songs before Sunrise,' 
 
 1871. 
 
 'Under the Microscope,' 
 
 1872. 
 
 'Bothwell,' 
 
 1874. 
 
 ' Essays and Studies,' . 
 
 1875- 
 
 ' George Chapman,' 
 
 1875- 
 
 ' Songs of Two Nations,' 
 
 1875- 
 
 'Erectheus,' . 
 
 1876. 
 
 * A Note on Charlotte Bronte ,' . 
 
 1877. 
 
 ' A Note on the Muscovite Crusade,' 
 
 1877- 
 
 ' Poems and BaUads' (II.), 
 
 1878. 
 
 ' Songs of the Springtides,' 
 
 1880. 
 
 ' Studies in Song,' 
 
 1880. 
 
 ' A Study of Shakespeare,' 
 
 i88o. 
 
 ' Mary Stuart,' 
 
 1881. 
 
 'Tristram of Lyonesse,' 
 
 . 1882. 
 
 ' A Century of Roundels,' 
 
 1883. 
 
 o 209 
 
 
2IO 
 
 Appendix 
 
 A Midsummer Holiday,' 
 
 1884. 
 
 Marino Faliero, 
 
 1885. 
 
 A Study of Victor Hugo.' 
 
 1886. 
 
 Miscellanies,' 
 
 1886. 
 
 Locrine,' 
 
 1887. 
 
 A Study of Ben Jonson,' 
 
 1889. 
 
 Poems and Ballads ' (III.), . 
 
 1889. 
 
 The Sisters,' . 
 
 1892. 
 
 Studies in Prose and Poetry,' . 
 
 1894. 
 
 Astrophel,' . . . . 
 
 1894. 
 
 The Tale of Balen,' . 
 
 1896. 
 
 Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards,' . 
 
 1899. 
 
 The foregoing list comprises the principal 
 volumes published by Mr Swinburne. 
 Several of them are out of print and 
 difficult to obtain, but the new edition of 
 the poet's works, which is in preparation, 
 will, it is to be hoped, be complete. 
 
 A fuller account of the adventures of the 
 early books and of many stray verses and 
 pieces of prose will be found by the curious 
 bibliophile in an alas ! almost unobtainable 
 and lengthy bibliography by Mr Wise, which 
 was privately printed in 1897. 
 
 To the list above may be added the novel — 
 A Years Letters by Mrs Horace Manners, 
 which appeared in The Tatler in 1877. It 
 
Appendix 211 
 
 was understood that the poet had determined 
 not to reprint The Heptalogia or the Seven 
 against Sense, a volume of parodies which 
 was published anonymously in 1880, but 
 the supposition appears to have been based 
 on no authority, and the volume will, it is 
 gathered, be included in the forthcoming 
 collected edition. It is amusing, but is 
 somewhat savage in spirit. 
 
 The poets parodied are Tennyson, Brown- 
 ing, Whitman, Patmore, Lytton, Rossetti 
 and Swinburne. The exaggerated awk- 
 wardness of Browning's utterance is pos- 
 sibly the best. The lines are certainly 
 unreadable. 
 
 ' Ah, how can fear sit and hear as love hears it griefs 
 
 heart's cracked grate's screech ? 
 Chance lets the gate sway that opens on hate's way and 
 
 shows on shame's beach 
 Crouched like an imp sly change watch sweet love's 
 
 shrimps lie, a toothful in each.' 
 
 The writer's parody of himself, entitled 
 Nephilidia, begins thus : — 
 
 ' From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn 
 through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine, 
 
2 1 2 Appendix 
 
 Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that 
 flickers with fear of the flies as they float,' 
 
 and ends with the following line : — 
 
 ' Till the heart-beats of hell shall be hushed by a hymn 
 from the hunt that has harried the kennel of kings.' 
 
 The book was no doubt written in haste 
 for an hour's amusement, but it does not 
 possess the light and graceful humour 
 necessary for a volume of parodies, and, 
 if reprinted, must seem somewhat out of 
 keeping with the nature of the real work 
 of its author. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Colston ^ Coy. Limited^ Printers ^ Edinburgh.